May 10 - A Former CIA Interrogator on the Haspel Nomination; Are Pompeo and Bolton Heading for a Showdown?; Caught Between Putin and Trump, Will American Democracy Be Saved by Robert Mueller?

Full Program

Part 1

We begin with Senator McCain urging his colleagues to vote against the confirmation of Gina Haspel to head up the CIA because of her equivocation over renouncing torture as immoral and speak with a former member of the CIA’s clandestine Service who tried to stop the torture program from the inside the agency while Dick Cheney was ordering them to double down on a practice that was both immoral and ineffective. Glenn Carle, who retired from the CIA in 2007 as deputy national intelligence officer for transnational threats and is the author of “The Interrogator: An Education”, joins us from Tokyo. We will discuss the local reaction to the summit between Trump and Kim Jong-un now scheduled for June 12 in Singapore, and whether McCain’s thumbs down on Haspel could sway other Republican senators and wavering Democrats to reject her nomination to head up the CIA as well as the failure of senators to question Haspel during the public confirmation hearings on the fact that, in spite of Trump’s claim to the contrary, the CIA has found no evidence that Iran has cheated on its commitments to the JCPOA deal which Trump just pulled the U.S. out of.

Part 2

Then we speak with Thomas Wright, a fellow and director of the Project on International Order and Strategy, as well as a fellow in the Center on the United States and Europe at the Brookings Institution. The author of “All Measures Short of War: The Contest For the 21^st Century and the Future of American Power”, he joins us to discuss his article at Politico “John Bolton and Mike Pompeo Are Headed for a Clash” and how the pragmatic and ambitious Pompeo has his eyes on the presidency while the ideological Bolton, has no sense of strategy beyond nationalism and a hatred of multilateralism.  

Part 3

Then finally we get an insightful briefing on the tenuous state of American democracy as we find ourselves caught between two kleptocratic and autocratic criminals. One, Vladimir Putin, has used fascist tactics to neutralize democracy in Russia and justify rule by wealthy oligarchs. And the other is a wannabe billionaire whose business was rescued by Russian dirty money, Donald Trump, who owes his election to the Russian intelligence services and is attacking the very foundation of American democracy, the rule of law, as the special counsel Robert Mueller closes in on him. Timothy Snyder, Professor of History at Yale and author of “On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century” joins us to discuss his latest book just out, “The Road to Unfreedom: Russia, Europe, America”.