December 4 - A Videotaped Homicide Disregarded by a Grand Jury?; A Deficit in Leadership and Strategic Thinking in the Obama Administration; Behind the On-Going Tragedy of the Syrian Civil War

Full Program

Part 1

We begin with the continuing fallout from the failure to indict a white NYPD policeman who chocked a black man to death in an incident that was recorded on video by a bystander. Ekow Yankah, a Professor of Law at the Cardoza School of Law at Yeshiva University, joins us to discuss how it is possible that the grand jurors who saw the video of the killing of Eric Garner could come to the conclusion that is was not homicide, which was the ruling of the New York City medical examiner.

Part 2

Then we speak with Mel Goodman, a senior fellow at the Center for International Policy who served in the CIA, State Department, Defense Department and the U.S. Army. He is the author of “National Insecurity: The Cost of American Militarism” and we will discuss the deficit in leadership and strategic thinking in the Obama Administration with the fourth Secretary of Defense in the past six years just announced at the Pentagon and Mel Goodman’s article at Counterpunch “The Dumbing Down of National Security Policy”.

Part 3

Then finally, veteran foreign correspondent Reese Erlich joins us in studio to discuss his new book “Inside Syria: The Backstory of Their Civil War and What the World Can Expect”. We examine the dire plight of the Syrian people caught in the crossfire between a brutal Mafia regime and patchwork of rebel factions, most of which adhere to increasingly extreme Islamist ideology, and the genesis of this almost four year-long on-going tragedy that has cost over 200,000 Syrian lives, displaced a fifth of Syria’s population and destroyed much of the country.