Aired: 05/05/13

In JEREMY SCAHILL’S new best-seller, DIRTY WARS, what begins as an investigation into a US night raid gone terribly wrong in a remote corner of Afghanistan quickly transforms into a high-stakes global investigation into the rise of Joint Special Operations Command, the most secret and elite fighting force in U.S. history. In military jargon, JSOC teams “find, fix and finish” their targets, who are selected through a secret process. No target is off limits for the “kill list,” including U.S. citizens.

It’s the unbounded, unending War on Terror: all bets are off, and almost anything goes. We have fundamentally changed the rules of the game and the rules of engagement. Today drone strikes, night raids, and U.S. government-condoned torture occur, generating unprecedented civilian casualties.

DIRTY WARS reveals covert operations unknown to the public and carried out across the globe by men who do not exist on paper and will never appear before Congress, raising questions about freedom and democracy, war and justice, morality and politics. No matter how little you know about these actions, they are being done in your name,

DIRTY WARS is also a documentary which opens in theaters June 7th.

 

 Aired: 10/06/13

 

 

Aired: 10/06/13

What do you feel when at sporting events or other public gatherings crowds join in a call to “support the troops?” If you’re like me, I always have some misgivings. On the simplest level, the gesture seems pretty meaningless. What am I or anyone else in that crowd actually doing to support the troops? And when they add some clichéd phrases about fighting for our freedoms, a voice in my head always asks, “Yeah, how? Where?” In Iraq, Afghanistan, operating a drone that’s flying over Pakistan or Yemen? 

Today’s guest ANDREW BACEVICH has thought long and hard about such things, and has written a series of fairly short, very readable books that pursue questions that too many ignore or pretend don’t matter. 

The United States has been “at war” for more than a decade. Yet as war has become normalized, a gap has widened between America’s soldiers and the society in whose name they fight. For ordinary citizens, as former secretary of defense Robert Gates has acknowledged, armed conflict has become an “abstraction” and military service “something for other people to do.” 

In his latest book, BREACH OF TRUST, Bacevich takes stock of the separation between Americans and their military, tracing its origins to the Vietnam era and exploring its implications, which include a nation with an appetite for war waged at enormous expense by a volunteer army and a huge number of privatecontractors unable to achieve victory.

 

 

DISRUPTIVE: CANCER VACCINE & HYDROGEL DRUG DELIVERY      

Dave Mooney explains how his team’s cancer vaccine can train one’s immune system to target specific cancer cells, and describes the use of novel hydrogels in drug delivery and tissue regeneration.

Chris Gemmiti, discusses translation of these hydrogels
from bench-to-bedside. 

 

Latest episode
of my podcast series with
Harvard’s Wyss Institute for
Biologically Inspired Engineering

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Free Forum Progressive Voices Network on TuneIn
Saturday 2/20 7pmPT/10pmET

TERRY TAMMINEN
CRACKING THE CARBON CODE:
Sustainable Profits in a New Economy

 

SAT 2/27
(1) CORNEL WEST, Living Out Loud

(2) LOUIS SCHWARTZBERG
Wings of Life-endangered pollinators

 

 

Featured Podcasts:
Steven Hill, Europe’s Promise
Van Jones, Rebuild the Dream
George Packer, The Unwinding 
Terrence McNally, A World That Just Might Work and The Power of Story