March 20 - Were Chemical Weapons Used in Syria?; Assessing Obama's First Day in Israel; Student Loan Debt Passes a Trillion Dollars

Full Program

Part 1

We begin with conflicting accounts of whether or not chemical weapons have been used in Syria, crossing a red line that the Obama Administration has declared would invite a response. We speak with an expert on chemical weapons and a former U.N. weapons inspector in Iraq, Raymond Zilinskas, who directs the Chemical and Biological Weapons Nonproliferation Program at the Monterrey Institute for International Studies.

Part 2

Then we speak about Obama’s state visit in Israel today with Dan Raviv, a national correspondent for CBS News and a veteran CBS Middle East correspondent who has written a number of books on Israel’s intelligence community and blogs about it at israelspy.com. His latest, co-authored with Israeli journalist Yossi Melman, is “Spies Against Armageddon: Inside Israel’s Secret Wars” and we discuss why Israelis are mounting protests during the President’s visit demanding that Obama free the American who spied for Israel, Jonathan Pollard.

Part 3

Then finally we look into the second largest debt in the U.S. after mortgage debt, and that is student debt, that has tripled since 2004 and last week passed the trillion dollar mark. David Halperin, who was the founding director of Campus Progress joins us to discuss the role of the for-profit college racket in indenturing students with worthless diplomas, and the impact of this growing burden on the millennial generation’s future as their prospects of saving for retirement or owning a house or car, grow increasingly dim.