June 28 - What the Endless Republican Benghazi Circus Covers Up; Electoral Discontent in the UK and the US; Blowback For Erdogan's Previous Arming of ISIS

Full Program

Part 1

We begin with the 9^th investigation of Benghazi with the House Republican report issued today concluding, like the eight previous investigations, that there is no evidence of wrongdoing by then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. Melvin Goodman, the Director of the National Security Project at the Center for International Policy and a former senior analyst at the CIA whose latest book is “National Insecurity: The Cost of American Militarism”, joins us to discuss how the two-year long 800 page $7 million report misses the point of what the U.S. was involved in in Benghazi, which had everything to do with the CIA not the State Department. We discuss how the continuing media circus that the Republicans have created has prevented the public from knowing about the extent to which the consulate in Benghazi was diplomatic cover for an intelligence operation and that the CIA failed to provide adequate security instead relying on a Libyan Intelligence unit which abandoned Ambassador Stevens and ran when the first shots were fired.  

Part 2

Then with demonstrations in London today against the recent “Brexit” we speak with Thomas Ferguson who is just back from the U.K. and has an article at Jacobin ‘”Defying the Investors: How voter alienation from corporate candidates produced this year’s dizzying election results”. Emeritus Professor of Political Science at the University of Massachusetts and a Senior Fellow at the Roosevelt Institute, he joins us to discuss the electoral discontent in the U.S. and the U.K. because of the split-level reality of a dual economy which rewards the finance, technology and electronics sectors while abandoning the rest of the economy comprised mostly of low-paid service sector jobs.

Part 3

Then finally we examine the terrorist bombings at the Airport in Istanbul that appears to be a suicide attack by ISIS which is the latest addition to the many crises that Turkey’s authoritarian President Erdogan has brought upon himself having made enemies of the Syrians, the Kurds, the Russians, the E.U. and the Pope, who again condemned Erdogan’s denial of the Armenian genocide. David Phillips, the Director of the Peace-Building and Rights Program at Columbia University joins us from Greece to discuss the blowback from Erdogan’s previous arming of ISIS and the reaction in Greece to the “Brexit” vote.