March 5 - A Report from Crimea on the Volatile Standoff Between Russian and Ukrainian Forces; Has the CIA Been Spying on the Senate?; An Analysis of Obama's 2015 Budget

Full Program

Part 1

We begin and go to Crimea in Ukraine and speak withSimon Shuster who is Time magazine’s correspondent covering Europe and the former Soviet Union. He has just witnessed the volatile and potentially explosive standoff between Ukrainian solders under siege in their bases and Russian Special Forces surrounding them, and the massing of Russian forces on the Crimean border with Ukraine, with Ukrainian forces mobilizing on the other side in a tense confrontation where one shot could spark a war.

Part 2

Then we examine the possibility the CIA has been spying on the Senate Intelligence Committee following the CIA Inspector General’s Office’s request to the Justice Department to investigate malfeasance by the agency which is holding up the release of a 6,300 page report on the CIA’s secret detention and interrogation program. Someone with firsthand knowledge of the shameful Bush/Cheney torture regime, Glenn Carle, who was a member of the CIA’s clandestine Service for 23 years, retiring in 2007 as Deputy National Intelligence Officer for transnational threats and is the author of “The Interrogator: An Education”, joins us to discuss why the CIA does not want this report released.

Part 3

Then finally we look into Obama’s 2015 budget with Joel Friedman, the Vice President for Federal Fiscal Policy at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. We will discuss the extent to which the budget is a wish list, given predictable Republican opposition to closing tax loopholes for the wealthy, and where there might be some common ground between the White House and House Republicans, as well as examining the real numbers involved in the defense budget that appears not to be undergoing any meaningful reduction.