January 21 - The EPA Whistleblower Silenced by His Boss After Warning About Flint's Toxic Water; Putin's "Approval" on Nuclear Terrorism on the Streets of London; Likely Fallout From the Assassination "Approved" by Putin

Full Program

Part 1

We begin with the role of a whistleblower at the Environmental Protection Agency Miguel Del Torel, who first revealed the toxic nature of the water in Flint, Michigan only to be silenced and gagged for doing his job by the EPA’s Region 5 Administrator Susan Hedman, a political appointee. Investigative journalist Curt Guyette, who heads the Michigan Democracy Watch Project with the ACLU of Michigan, who previously worked in Detroit with the Metro Times as an investigative reporter, columnist and new editor for 18 years, joins us for an update. He was the first to publish the EPA memo leaked by Miquel Del Torel that first recognized the extraordinarily high levels of lead in Flint’s drinking water and called for phosphate treatment for corrosion control by the MDEQ, the Michigan Department of Environmental Quality. Inexplicably Susan Hedman decided not to have the EPA compel the MDEQ  to apply the $100 a day phosphate treatment to protect the Flint water infrastructure from leaching lead but instead silenced Miguel Del Torel.  

Part 2

Then we look into the report issued today in the U.K. by Sir Robert Owen, the chairman of the public inquiry into the poisoning by radioactive Polonium of the exiled Russian spy Alexander Litvinenko in London ten years ago. First Karen Dawisha, a Professor of Political Science at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio joins us. She is the author of “Putin’s Kleptocracy: Who Owns Russia?” and we discuss the break between Litvinenko and his boss Putin who was then the head of the successor agency to the KGB, the FSB, over the Russian intelligence service’s complicity in the bombing of apartment buildings on the outskirts of Moscow in 1999 that were blamed on Chechen rebels and were used by Putin as an excuse to go to war and thus rise to power.

Part 3

Then we hear from an expert on U.S. relations with the states of the former Soviet Union, Matthew Rojansky. He is the Director of the Kennan Institute at the Wilson Center and we discuss what diplomatic fallout might follow from the report that points a finger at Putin for “probably” approving the assassination but, since the Russian leader has now made himself indispensable to solving the war in Syria, it is likely that Putin will get away with what amounts to nuclear terrorism on the streets of London.