November 17 - The Site for the Latest TV Beheadings;Maziar Bahari, the Subject of the New Film by Jon Stewart, "Rosewater"; How Much Went Missing of the $200 Billion for Military Contracting in Iraq & Afghanistan;The National Disgrace of Homeless Children

We begin with the latest TV beheadings and get an analysis of why Dabiq, the small Syrian town near the Turkish border, was chosen by the Islamic State as the location for the atrocity. Nicholas Heras, a Middle East researcher at the Center for a New American Security who has extensive field experience in all regions of Syria, Lebanon and Jordan, joins us to discuss the jihadist’s use of Dabiq as the site of Islamic apocalyptic prophesies for an end-of-times showdown between Muslims and their enemies.

Part 2

Then we get an ironic insight into the minds of killers and torturers who are sanctioned by religious fundamentalism and operate as political instruments of extremist theocrats. Maziar Behari, a Canadian/Iranian journalist who was arrested and imprisoned in Iran in 2009 while covering the presidential elections for Newsweek between the hardline incumbent Ahmadinejad and the reformer Mousavi, joins us to discuss his detention and torture which was a result in part of his appearance on The Daily Show. His imprisonment without trial and torture is the subject of the new film by Jon Stewart, “Rosewater.”

Part 3

Then, as military contractors salivate at the prospect that a third Iraq war will be another blank check for them, we examine the difficulty that U.S. government prosecutors are having getting their hands around the massive fraud from the earlier Iraq war and Afghanistan from which the Commission on Wartime Contracting estimates, private contractors have received $200 billion of U.S. taxpayer money, out of which up to $60 billion has been lost to waste and fraud. Laura Dickinson, a Future of War Fellow at the New America Foundation and author of a recent report “Outsourcing War and Peace”, joins us.

Part 4

Then finally we speak with Carmela DeCandia, the Director of the National Center on Family Homelessness at the American Research Institute’s Health and Social Development Program, about her new study “America’s Youngest Outcasts” that finds 2.5 million American children were homeless in 2013.