January 21 - Industrial Scale Killing of Detainees by the Assad Regime; Hired Thugs as Provocateurs in Ukraine's Protests; Is Snowden a Russian Asset

Full Program

Part 1

We begin with a report just released on the eve of the Geneva 11 peace talks by three leading war crimes and human rights prosecutors documenting industrial scale killing of prisoners by Syria’s Assad regime. The former medical director for the American Refugee Committee, Steven Miles, a professor of Medicine and Bioethics at the University of Minnesota where he is on the faculty of the Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies, joins us. We discuss the 55,000 photographs provided by a Syrian military police photographer whose job was to document the deaths by torture of 11,000 detainees for the Assads to show them that their orders had been executed.

Part 2

Then we examine the latest riots in Ukraine that have prompted Russia’s Foreign Minister to accuse European governments of meddling in Ukraine’s political crisis. A specialist on Ukraine, Russia and the USSR, Alexander Motyl, a professor of political science at Rutgers University joins us to discuss the Yanukovitch regime’s use of paid thugs “titushki” to beat up peaceful demonstrators and provoke violence that allows the regime’s and Russia’s state television to broadcast images of burning buses and shops being looted to make the case for tough legislation and police action to stop the violence.

Part 3

Then finally, we do an update on an interview I did in October of last year with ex-CIA officer Robert Baer that first raised the question of whether or not Edward Snowden is a Russian Intelligence asset who has been working for them all along. On Sunday’s “Meet the Press” the head of the House Intelligence Committee made a similar charge that Snowden stole a trove of secrets that had nothing to do with privacy and that it’s no coincidence that Snowden “ended up in the hands, the loving arms of an FSB agent in Moscow.” Robert Baer, a veteran CIA operations officer joins us to analyze the evidence that might support these charges.