October 22 - The Shootout in the Canadian Parliament; The Passing of an Australian Prime Minister Who Believed He was the Victim of a CIA Coup; The Conviction of Four Blackwater Mercenaries

Full Program

Part 1

We begin and go to Ottawa, Canada’s capitol where there was a violent shootout inside the parliament with an assailant who had shot and killed a Canadian soldier guarding the National War Memorial, then entered the parliament building with guns blazing. David Harris, a former Director of Strategic Plans at the Canadian Security Intelligence Service joins us to discuss the apparent cause and effect of the attacks on Canadian soldiers which followed the Canadian parliament’s vote to join the anti-Islamic State alliance.

Part 2

Then we go to Sydney, Australia to speak with Frank Stilwell, Professor Emeritus in the Department of Political Economy at the University of Sydney about the passing of the popular and progressive former Australian Prime Minister Gough Whitlam who was removed from power in a “constitutional coup” in 1975 that Whitlam suggested the CIA had a hand in encouraging, a charge the U.S. government has repeatedly denied. We discuss the sweeping foreign policy changes Whitlam made; recognizing China, Cuba and Hanoi, getting out of the Vietnam war and publically criticizing Nixon’s Christmas bombing of Hanoi, while establishing universal healthcare, banning racial discrimination, making education free for all Australians, lowering the voting age and abolishing military conscription.

Part 3

Then finally, following the convictions of four former Blackwater security guards for shooting more than 30 unarmed Iraqi civilians in 2007, we speak with Robert Young Pelton, the author of “Licensed to Kill: Hired Guns in the War on Terror”. He is currently suing the founder of Blackwater, Erik Prince, who is now working for the Chinese government with a new mercenary company Frontier Services Group. We look into the irony of the U.S. government putting military contractors on trial for carrying out orders issued by the U.S. government.