July 27 - Putin is Afraid of Liberal Democracy, Not NATO; Ex-CIA Head Sanitizes Report on His Role in Torture; Libya Falls Apart

Full Program

Part 1

We begin with Vladimir Putin doubling down in his support for his proxies in Eastern Ukraine to checkmate gains made by the Ukrainian military. Cathy Young, a contributing editor to Reason magazine and author of “Growing Up in Moscow: Memories of a Soviet Girlhood” joins us to analyze the real cause of Putin’s exaggerated fear of NATO, which is fear of encirclement by more liberal and modernized societies which would then exert pressure on Moscow to follow the same path, an argument made in her latest article at Reason.com “Vladimir Putin’s Circle of Fear”, that we also discuss.

Part 2

Then we examine efforts by the former head of the CIA George Tenet, to sanitize the long-held up and scathingly critical report compiled by the Senate Intelligence Committee on the CIA’s detention and interrogation program. Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson, the former Chief of Staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell, joins us to discuss the extent to which the agency is being allowed to vet the report due out next month, that is very critical of them, and the apparent hundreds of pages that Tenet and other officials have managed to get redacted along with slow-walking the declassification process, which has prompted Senator Ron Wyden to complain that “this report should have been public yesterday, and attempts to disrupt and delay it are unacceptable.”

Part 3

Then finally we speak with a leading expert on Libya, Dirk Vandewalle, a professor of Government at Dartmouth College and author of “Libya Since Independence: Oil and State Building”. We look into the chaos enveloping the country that was freed from the Qadaffi dictatorship by a NATO bombing campaign only to descend into factionalism in which it is difficult to determine where ideology ends and criminality begins as various militias, ranging from radical Islamists to former generals, battle over oil exports, the parliament building and the airport in Tripoli.