DeProgram: “Israel’s Gaza Slaughter & a Detroit Lawyer’s Fight”

Streaming 2:30 PM LIVE and Replaying On Demand Afterward:

DeProgram with John Kiriakou and Ted Rall dives into two explosive stories that will leave you questioning everything.

First, the shocking massacre of first responders in Gaza by Israel—brave heroes gunned down in cold blood while saving lives, followed by a chilling coverup that’s been buried too long. What really happened, and why won’t the world look?

Then, a jaw-dropping tale from Detroit: a fearless lawyer targeted by BCE, caught in a web of intrigue and retaliation that screams corruption at the highest levels. Why is this advocate being silenced, and who’s pulling the strings?

Hosted by ex-CIA whistleblower John Kiriakou, who exposed torture and paid the price, and fearless cartoonist Ted Rall, no stranger to controversy, this episode rips the lid off hidden truths the powerful want kept quiet.

Will the Gaza atrocities ever see daylight? Can the Detroit lawyer fight back against BCE’s shadowy grip? Tune in to DeProgram for a rollercoaster of revelations that’ll make your blood boil and your mind race. Don’t miss this—click now to uncover the stories they don’t want you to hear!

Let’s Go Steady Until I Kill You

The overthrow of President Bashar al-Assad by Islamist rebels in Syria has outside factions scrambling for influence with the new rulers, HTS, who are former members of Al Qaeda and ISIS. The United States is among the suitors, offering to work with the Islamists. But these love affairs tend to have an expiration date.q

The Final Countdown – 8/9/24 – U.S., Qatar, Egypt Push for Ceasefire Summit 

On this episode of The Final Countdown, hosts Ted Rall and Steve Gill discuss the latest news from around the globe, including rising tensions out of the Middle East. 
 
The show begins with cartoonist for The Chicago Tribune Scott Stantis discussing the latest out of the presidential campaign, including Trump’s upcoming Montana rally, Kamala Harris’s response to protesters, and the two candidates agreeing to debate. 
 
Then, human rights lawyer, activist, and author Dan Kovalik shares his perspective on the latest tensions out of the Middle East, including an anticipated attack on Israel. 
 
The second hour starts with international relations and security analyst Mark Sleboda sharing his perspective on Ukraine’s attempted incursion into Russia. 
 
The show closes with former CIA officer host of Political Misfits John Kiriakou joining the show to discuss the government hiding its report on CIA torture. 
 
 
 
 

The Final Countdown – 2/15/24 – ICE Pressures Congress with Threat of Releasing Detained Migrants After Border Bill Fails

On this episode of The Final Countdown, hosts Angie Wong and Ted Rall discuss top news from around the world, including ICE blackmailing Congress over the failed border bill. 
Ajay Pallegar – Criminal and Civil Attorney
Andrew Arthur – Resident Fellow in Law and Policy for the Center for Immigration Studies 
Dan Lazare – Independent Journalist 
Kevin Kamps Radioactive Waste Specialist, 
 
The first hour begins with Ajay Pallegar, a criminal and civil attorney, sharing his perspective on Fulton County DA Fani Willis’ hearing, which would determine if she would be disqualified from the election interference case against Trump. 
 
Then, Andrew Arthur, a Resident Fellow in Law and Policy for the Center for Immigration Studies gives his analysis on ICE threatening to release detained migrants in response to Congress’s failure to ensure funding. 
 
The second hour starts with independent journalist Dan Lazare, who shares his insights on the CIA and other foreign intelligence agencies targeting 26 Trump associates in 2016.    
 
The show closes with Radioactive Waste Specialist at Beyond Nuclear, Kevin Kamps, who shares his expertise on U.S. intelligence claiming that Russia might have the capabilities to launch nuclear weapons into space. 
 
 

The Final Countdown – 11/11/23 – Google Paid $26 Billion to Become Your Phone’s Main Search Engine

On this episode of Final Countdown, hosts Ted Rall and Angie Wong discussed a multitude of topics from around the world, including a new revelation about Google’s attempt to maintain its hold over the search engine industry. 

Nebojsa Malic – Journalist and Geopolitical Analyst
Professor Francis Boyle – International Law Professor
Ray McGovern – Activist and Lecturer 
 
In the first half hour, Final Countdown spoke to journalist Nebojsa Malic about the antitrust case against Google and the new revelation about its $26 billion payments to become the default search engine for the top cellular phone companies. 
 
In the latter part of the hour, Ted and Angie discussed the discovery of high-end brothels in northern Virginia and Boston that were frequented by politicians, tech leaders and military officials. 
 
In the last hour, Final Countdown spoke to professor Francis Boyle about the latest from the Israel-Hamas conflict, as the Israeli Defense Forces continue their military operation inside of Gaza. 
 
To conclude the show, the hosts spoke to activist Ray McGovern about the CIA Director visiting Qatar to meet with his Mossad counterpart and the Emir of Qatar. 
 
 

The Final Countdown – 7/24/23 – Israeli Parliament Ratifies Controversial Law Limiting Supreme Court’s Powers

On this episode of The Final Countdown, host Ted Rall and Manila Chan discuss hot topics, including the controversial law ratified by the Israeli parliament. 
John Kiriakou: Former CIA Whistleblower, Co-host of Political Misfits 
Esteban Carrillo: Ecuadorian journalist, Editor for The Cradle 
Mindia Gavasheli: Editor-in-Chief of Sputnik News US 
Mark Sleboda: International Relations & Security Analyst 
 
The show kicks off with Former CIA Whistleblower, Co-host of Political Misfits discussing Bill Burn’s new position in the Biden cabinet. 
 
In the second half of the first hour, Ecuadorian journalist and Editor for The Cradle Esteban Carrillo joins to discuss the Israeli protests over a controversial law. 
 
The second hour begins with the Editor-in-Chief of Sputnik News US Mindia Gavasheli reporting from Spain on the latest elections. 
 
The show closes with Mark Sleboda, International Relations & Security Analyst to discuss Poland mulling over sending troops to Ukraine. 

Burn After Reading: Why Classified Documents Don’t Matter

            The strange story at the top of the headlines—the current president and the most recent former president are both the subject of special-counsel investigations for taking home classified documents when they left the White House—rests upon two premises. One is patently false. The other is brazenly silly.

            Americans believe their nation exists in a terrifying state of endless peril. Propagandized by popular culture and the media, we imagine that we’re constantly teetering at the precipice of collapse or subjugation, surrounded by clever and ruthless fiendish enemies hellbent on undermining, attacking and ultimately destroying the United States and turning us into their slaves.

The era of great invading armies and empire-building is over. In our world, borders are largely settled so empires are built via economic influence rather than territorial gains. Bigger countries bump up against each other at the edges in search of incremental advantage.

Fewer nations in history have ever been less at risk than the U.S. in 2023. Buffered by vast oceans and bordered by vassal states, enjoying total command of the world’s oceans, the U.S. is uniquely impervious to invasion. No nation-state has launched a military attack on the mainland U.S. since the War of 1812—and we started that one. (In an attempt to buy time, warn us away from the western Pacific and to convince us to drop our oil embargo, Imperial Japan picked Pearl Harbor as a target because it was located on a remote American colony that was not yet a state. The Japanese didn’t think we would care as much as we did.) The danger to the U.S. is from within: right-wing counterrevolution, secession,  disintegration, environmental or economic collapse.

None of the “threats” we worry about—Russia, China, Iran, North Korea—want a war with the U.S., much less to invade. When U.S. adversaries saber-rattle, their motivation is to dissuade us from attacking them. To paraphrase Walter White in “Breaking Bad,” we are not the one who gets attacked. We are the one who attacks.

The hysterical reaction to the classified-documents idiocy rests on a cartoonish worldview derived from watching too many Bourne movies. In the fevered imagination of political-thriller scriptwriters, we would be totally screwed if the wrong Super Duper Important Document were to fall into the clutches of an Evil Enemy of America.

There is no such document.

When, if ever, has a classified document ever been so explosive that it represented a serious threat to national security? Almost certainly never. The exposure of classified material can lead to the theft of technology or the capture or murder of intelligence agents. And when such breaches have occurred, they have been inconveniences that required cleanups and workarounds. They were not existential dangers to the American nation-state. Nuclear launch codes are changed daily, so it wouldn’t even matter if a nefarious foreigner were to nick yesterday’s “gold codes” off the president’s desk.

The problem with classified documents is not the possibility that Donald Trump might, in the ridiculously overheated speculation by mainstream media outlets that ought to know better, sell them to the highest bidder. The problem is that there are too many of them.

Overclassification is wildly out of control. Publicly-available news articles are marked “top secret,” Should we impeach President Biden over keeping some of these next to his car? Description of foreign cultural practices, like wedding ceremonies, are marked “confidential,” so you can be prosecuted as a felon under the Espionage Act for mishandling one. The U.S. government has kept documents classified for a full century; in 2011 the CIA finally declassified World War I-era memos explaining how to expose invisible ink.

“Everything’s secret,” former CIA/NSA director Michael Hayden, remarked “I mean, I got an email saying, ‘Merry Christmas.’ It carried a Top Secret NSA classification marking.”

Get a grip, people!

There would be no effect whatsoever if 99.99999% of classified documents were to be posted to the Internet. Since that’s almost certainly the case about all the documents found in Biden’s garage and at Mar-a-Lago, it would be nice if both major political parties were to drop the posturing over the presidents’ sloppy record management and focus on real problems that affect real Americans every single day: climate change, healthcare for profit, high college tuition, the prison industrial complex, brutal and racist police, unemployment, homelessness, unaffordable housing.

Where would the money come from? We could start by abolishing the unnecessary agencies that churn out those zillions of useless classified documents.

(Ted Rall (Twitter: @tedrall), the political cartoonist, columnist and graphic novelist, co-hosts the left-vs-right DMZ America podcast with fellow cartoonist Scott Stantis. You can support Ted’s hard-hitting political cartoons and columns and see his work first by sponsoring his work on Patreon.)

No, Virginia, It’s Not Too Early to Criticize Joe Biden

Torture Used by U.S. Military at Guantanamo Bay Despite Being Banned, UN  Says
Joe Biden approves of this message.

            Censorship in mainstream corporate American media outlets is subtle. It’s not so much that they spin the truth. It’s that they omit pertinent facts and exclude relevant points of view.

            So it is with politics. Among the tools available to messaging and framing experts is “flooding the field” — dominating the news with a blizzard of headlines in order to obscure actions they ought to be undertaking but are instead ignoring. That’s what we are seeing, or not seeing, from the new Biden Administration.

            Donald Trump and his predecessors left behind a hell of a mess. But much of what you and I consider unfinished disasters to be reversed or cleaned up is to this centrist Democrat’s cronies and top administrators just business as usual, perfectly desirable neoliberal policy that, as far as they are concerned, can and should continue. Only one thing to get in the way of the continuationists: voters noticing what they are up to.

            A lot of important items are missing from Biden’s executive orders and his early legislative proposals. He and his allies are hiding behind the usual fig leaf of “give the guy time, he just got in, he has a lot of stuff to fix.” But that’s malarkey. There is only one reason that issues near and dear to progressives couldn’t have been prioritized for early action alongside the over three dozen presidential executive orders that have already been signed: the White House’s agenda isn’t the same as ours.

            Take the concentration camp at Guantánamo Bay. It’s an international embarrassment that turns everything the United States preaches about human rights into a joke. It should have been closed years ago. The inmates are all innocent as a matter of law (none has been charged in a real court) and should be released, to the United States if their home countries won’t take them or are too dangerous, and all prisoners past and present should be generously financially compensated and offered physical and psychological health treatment for the remainder of their lives.

            Biden doesn’t care about Gitmo and we should hold him to account for his immorality. He has had almost nothing to say about this boil on the ass of America since he began running for president. He blames Congress for a 2014 law forbidding the military from transferring prisoners to the U.S., shrugs his shoulders and talks about other things.

            Nothing prevents the President from closing the facility. He could do it with a stroke of a pen. Actually, the entire naval base should be returned to Cuba, from which it was stolen as a spoil of the based-on-lies Spanish-American War. Let Congress figure out what to do with its torture victims.

            Considering how easy it would be for him to take bold and decisive action on an issue that would earn him widespread claim from human rights organizations and the international community, it is more than fair to criticize Biden for ignoring this huge issue in favor of the relatively trivial question of whether transgender women should be allowed to compete in high school athletics.

            Another blight on our country’s international reputation is the ongoing drone war. International polls are clear; everyone on earth except citizens of the United States despises us for invading foreign airspace with assassination robots and murdering people who almost always turn out to be completely innocent. Like his predecessors, Biden is responsible for personally signing off on blowing up people on the other side of the planet for no good reason. And he could stop it with a stroke of a pen. It’s not like he’s too busy.

            As with Guantánamo, however, Biden has been silent on drones. Biden’s new Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines was an Obama lawyer who signed off on Obama’s drone “kill list” between 2010 and 2015. She also helped cover up CIA torture. “We know that in almost all cases that she said it was legal to put these names on the kill list, and people were subsequently killed by drone, including American citizens,” says CIA whistleblower John Kiriakou. (Disclosure: I have been interviewed by Kiriakou and consider him a friend.) But the media doesn’t much talk about that. They’re super excited that this miserable turd of a human being is female.

            On January 29, Biden ordered a mass killing by drone strike against Somalia. If he is “too busy” cleaning up Trump’s mess, how did he have time to do that?

            The talking point that a new president is busy and should be allowed time to do what’s right is an effective but ridiculous argument. The President of the United States has a huge staff reporting directly to him; he can walk and chew gum and stand on a foot and bark like a dog at the same time. And if he’s too busy to do the right thing, he should certainly be too busy to do the wrong thing.

            Progressives and other critics of the administration shouldn’t grant Joe Biden a honeymoon that he doesn’t seem interested in taking for himself.

(Ted Rall (Twitter: @tedrall), the political cartoonist, columnist and graphic novelist, is the author of “Political Suicide: The Fight for the Soul of the Democratic Party.” You can support Ted’s hard-hitting political cartoons and columns and see his work first by sponsoring his work on Patreon.)

Congress Votes to Arm Violent Mobs That Storm through Capitols around the World

Kyrgyzstan's second tulip revolution | Kyrgyzstan | The Guardian

            Terrified political leaders watched the police who were assigned to protect them melt away. They fled as an angry mob of hooligans, riled up by sketchy allegations of rigged elections, stormed up the stairs of the government building that hosted the debates and deliberations of their venerable democracy. The rioters, reactionary right-wingers from the nation’s rural hinterlands, rampaged through the corridors of power, smashing windows, vandalizing offices and looting files and furniture.

            Political elites deplored the physical appearance and comportment of the protesters. “I’d like to believe and hope that the actions of a mob high on narcotic substances will not totally destabilize this republic,” remarked a top official of a neighboring country.

            This scene didn’t take place at the Capitol. It occurred at the “White House,” the seat of parliament and the presidential staff in Bishkek, the capital of Kyrgyzstan.

In March 2005, the mob got its way. President Askar Akayev, the only leader of a former Soviet republic in Central Asia to have been democratically elected, fled into exile. The Tulip Revolution, as Western news media approvingly dubbed the coup, prompted the all-but-total collapse of the country’s economy and politics into chaos so intense that parts of the country have become a failed state where currency has stopped circulating. When I entered via Tajikistan in 2009, the illiterate border guards didn’t even have a stamp in order to mark my passport.

Stability remains elusive. Mobs similarly toppled Akayev’s successor Kurmanbek Bakiyev in 2010 and, in a barely noticed bit of international drama eclipsed by the U.S. election, Bakiyev’s replacement in October 2020.

Those Kyrgyz mobs of Muslim young men from the conservative Ferghana Valley didn’t materialize by chance in 2005. They were trained and funded by you and me.

Scores of CIA agents permanently stationed in southern Kyrgyzstan trained a bunch of hicks to overthrow a northern-based secular government that had annoyed the Bush Administration. The Akayev regime’s real sin? Not fixing an election. It was their demand for higher rent payments from the U.S. to use Bishkek’s airport as a base for bombing runs into Afghanistan.

“It would have been absolutely impossible for [the overthrow of Akayev] to have happened without that help [from the U.S.],” said Edil Baisolov, who led an NGO financed by the U.S. government. Freedom House, a CIA cover operation masquerading as an NGO, published anti-Akayev newspapers. The U.S. Congress allocated $12 million a year under the Freedom Support Act toward undermining Central Asia’s sole democracy.

“Hundreds of thousands more filter into pro-democracy programs in the country from other United States government-financed institutions like the National Endowment for Democracy. That does not include the money for the Freedom House printing press or Kyrgyz-language service of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, a pro-democracy broadcaster,” reported The New York Times. Bakiyev, the president who took over after the coup forced Akayev to flee, was himself trained in the U.S.

American media outlets loved the Kyrgyz insurrection. They grouped it with other CIA-backed “color revolutions” against the governments of Ukraine and Georgia, spinning the overthrow of Akayev, an intellectual physicist, as the liberation of the people from an authoritarian despot.

So please excuse me if I don’t shed geysers of tears over the traumas endured by the pampered lobbyist-fattened members of the House of Representatives and the U.S. Senate while idiots wearing horned Viking masks desecrated the hallowed hallways of the Capitol.

What happened on January 6th is infinitely less than chickens coming home to roost. A few hours of mayhem is but a tiny taste of the far greater violence and misery those 535 men and women vote to inflict on countries around the world. According to one study, the United States interfered overtly or covertly in the free elections of 81 foreign countries between 1946 and 2000. The U.S. tried to overthrow the president of Venezuela in 2002, invaded Afghanistan and Iraq where it replaced the local governments with puppet regimes, set off a war within the Palestinian Authority by trying to get rid of Hamas in 2006, and is currently trying to destroy Yemen, Syria, Iran and Libya, which thanks to the U.S. has become a failed state. This is by necessity a truncated list.

Here is true American exceptionalism. Our Congress throws billions of dollars a year at regime change operations around the globe but, with the exception of events like the 9/11 attacks, nothing happens here. Blowback is infrequent, relatively small-scale and never directly impacts the people who are responsible, i.e. the political class. Given that one of the few things Democrats and Republicans still agree upon is to finance the cash-bloated military, I don’t see that changing.

It would be nice, however, for the members of Congress who finance and arm the rampaging mobs that illegally overthrow the sovereign governments of other countries to take it on the chin when the same thing kind of, sort of, almost happens to them.

(Ted Rall (Twitter: @tedrall), the political cartoonist, columnist and graphic novelist, is the author of “Political Suicide: The Fight for the Soul of the Democratic Party.” You can support Ted’s hard-hitting political cartoons and columns and see his work first by sponsoring his work on Patreon.)

 

Whatever Happened to Basic Standards at Newspapers?

It’s just like the Ukraine story that failed to impeach Donald Trump. Anonymous sources tell major newspapers that second hand or thirdhand source is based in the intelligence community, which is tasked with lying, that Russia may be paying bounties to the Taliban in order to kill United States troops in occupied Afghanistan. Maybe it’s true, maybe it’s not, but why pay attention to a story that has no evidence or sourcing?

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