damascus learned the two lessons tonight the hard way weapons of mass destruction won't create a military advantage once the united states is done with you and russia cannot protect its clients from the united states or be wrestling over him others were not so pleased like senator lindsey graham who feels that short term death and destruction just doesn't send the right kind of message i fear that when the dust settles this strike will be seen as a weak military response and assad will have paid a small price for using chemical weapons yet again and senator graham is not alone many of the neo liberal cons and their news media parents were very disappointed that president trump didn't use the recent incredibly convenient alleged chemical weapon attack and doma to as they call it broaden the united states' syrian strategy which is the polite capitol hill way of saying hey let's go spend spend the summer dropping bombs on poor brown people so we can appease our allies make up

for our own shortcomings here at home and hand over billions to the merchants of death like rape and lockheed martin. do you see politics as usual when you're watching the hawks. as. you know that i got. this. week so. what were you watching the hearts. and on top of this and joining us today to discuss. the war and everything in between is celebrated journalist and author of a new book on the death of eric garner entitled i can't breathe let us welcome mat

a welcome mat. how you doing. so matt since the strikes last week and the political reaction here in the halls of capitol hill has ranged from love the bombings we need more bombings to next time let us vote for the bombing so we can join in on the fun i'm confused matt i thought according to mainstream you know democrats in the washington elite and media that we couldn't trust trump with running the country and forming coherent sentences but now we're supposed to trust his abilities of the forty chests that is syria with a potential world war on the lie. it's really an unbelievable set of circumstances because you know having watched trump on the campaign trail having covered him when he got elected and it was you know a huge surprise to me the first thing that went through my mind is that the though the one thing that we have cannot countenance with donald trump as president is a military confrontation with

a serious nuclear enemy. and that should have been be the number one priority of all thinking people in and around washington and instead exactly the opposite has happened the only time the dollar trump has gotten any praise from people in the sort of washington consensus has been when he is dropped bombs on syria and again this is a highly fraught situation where you have russian mercenaries right across the river the euphrates river and there are visors over there and it's a client state of russia and so inevitably there are going to be high level decisions that are going to have to be made about her responses and on one side of that decision making paradigm is going to be donald trump and john bolton i just can't believe that anybody would be in favor of this well that brings up i have another important thing in a really in a recent rolling stone article you you laid the blame of this this you know the

brink of world war three not on donald trump or the war hawks like john bolton but really essentially on all of us why why did they are many purposely blind or just naive to the dangers and reality of what an actual world war is. it's odd i don't know it's some of it must be a generational thing i mean i obviously my generation grew up with the day after a ninety nine love loons you know the whole idea of in the you know whether it's fake an extra real lens we all grew up with this idea of you know nuclear war could end and humanity at any second and i think in the sort of the posts. you know end of history the nine eleven era most people in the next generation grew up without a real fear of nuclear war so it's really not in everybody's minds but it should be on the minds of people who are old enough to be u.s.

senators to be members of congress and again idly enough the one thing about donald trump as a candidate that was not entirely negative and terrifying was the fact that he was he had a relatively ambivalent idea about interventionism and war i mean he would have been perfectly fine with withdrawing from syria and it was planning on doing so as it was recently as two weeks ago and yet he was encouraged in exactly the opposite direction by members of both parties which again makes absolutely no sense to me on any level it really doesn't it just blows my mind seeing like these people who tell us that we have to be so afraid of this man that he's going to do you know run us off the edge of the cliff and that he's evil incarnate but yet oh no it's ok when he bombs people you know and one of the interesting things too is is. is our good buddy james komi recently you covered him you know you talked about wrote about his his new book a former f.b.i.

director james going to book a higher loyalty truth lies and leadership so let me ask you matt just where does james komi as higher loyalties lie i'm afraid i didn't read the book and i don't know if i'm going to read it over the summer i'm on the fence well i'm going to have to i mean not not not to be crude about it but i'm going to. this is first loyalty is probably to the two million dollars advance that he got for the book. but that's probably not fair but honestly it's a very strange book. it is. it is not a book that feels. open and it feels like it is the intent was to disclose a lot about either the sort of pre-election controversies that he was involved with or the trump white house in his interactions with the he mostly stuck to information that had already been disclosed that was already out there in the press with a few minor and glaring exceptions in the book feel very calculated in that respect

that he only wanted to have a few big talking points and everything else was going to sort of remain secret very very strange sort of offhandedly mentions that the f.b.i. received classified material suggesting that there was an improper relationship between. turning general loretta lynch and the clinton campaign during during the campaign which seemed like a big bombshell revelation that is sort of skins over but it's very oddly written the whole the whole book is very strange yeah it was almost as strange as donna brazile as buck and i want her to have komi is going to end up the same place that donna brazil sort of ended up which is does anyone know where donna brazil is now i think as we're probably going to end up which leads me to all these people sort of writing books and everybody gets a big you know million dollar advances but your sort of doing something that a little bit different direction on april twenty fourth you began publishing on

what's called substract dot com a new serialized novel titled the business secrets of drug dealing adventures of the identified black now tell us a little about the book and why you chose to publish it on in this way. so some time ago i. ran into someone. i had known for a long time who sort of came out in the. he had a double life. and had been a high level drug dealer in his past and he wanted to sort of tell the story of what it's like to live on the other side of the law and it was a fascinating story and my anonymous co-author who is still anonymous has a really distinct and interesting voice. and we sort of came up with a fictionalized version of a lot of the adventures that he'd experienced. and it's

a fascinating story about sort of the inanity of our drug laws the racism that he went through and the extraordinary measures that we would that we our government goes to to keep people from trading in a drug that is now illegal in a lot of states so it was a it's a really fun bizarre interesting suspense filled story that i couldn't figure out how to tell except this fiction which is sort of a new thing for me yeah it is that i would see them before and so that ever got higher loyalty yeah. definitely yeah yeah you know who does it should be really interesting on subs that mean the sort of serialized novel is something that i you know i grew up reading books by people like dashiell hammett and raymond chandler who published and magazines like black mask and i kind of wanted to revive the traditional little bit ok i'm looking forward to it you know it's interesting especially to when you look at you know our country like we have this idea that like oh you know what drug dealers are bad like all of this but yet we fail to

realize and if you touch on this is that whole idea that like that kind of you know dark economy that you know other side of the economy that we don't want to talk about that's what keeps a lot of communities alive and thriving you talked about there like the watkins out of baltimore you know there's a lot of people that depend on the drug business just to be able to eat oh absolutely. and that's a persistent theme of the book is that you know when my character especially you know recounting what people go through in their younger years you'll find people in the service industry people who work as waiters or is in the retail business or as bartenders and then they find themselves asking each other like how do normal people live on these salaries like you can actually make ends meet and so there is this whole sort of gravitational pull towards the second economy that goes on all across the country because people really can't support themselves you know the legitimate legal salaries that are offered in a lot of cases and that that's one of the reasons why

a lot of people end up in this life but you know hey we got plenty of money for more bombs to drop on this year yeah and we've got millions of dollars and billions of dollars for that and course you know it's unbelievable isn't it yeah it really is there but always a pleasure having you matt thank you so much for coming on the day and talk and i thank you ty really good radio stuff it's always a pleasure sir thank you take care now as we go to break card watchers don't forget to let us know what you think of the topics we've covered on facebook and twitter see our poll shows in our team dot com coming up we bring you the second half of my wrist interview with former cia officer and whistleblower john kiriakou to discuss torture and cia director nominee that has spoken in the state to.

britain is going all out because it's a world leading country will make trade deals not tonight because i got a dramatic fashion about we've all got a factory every week because we're a great britain. the place to go was on the up postman then. plowed through sands and over the full story of the european soldier the dog. in his new month in the play is a go pass by stealth budget. deal being pretty good as a c.f.l. all powerful. want to stop jumping to the cia slush to. be told by media sound to so females of ballet

speech and falsely says she wants to. play matchmaker that a modern take on the various mistakes. since the end of world war two the washington d.c. establishment has figured no single term to describe our nation more than the world's policeman and ultimate guarantor of human rights an optimistic cheerleader for democracy and i'm stoppable force for the promotion of liberal values and world

peace that's why we needed to stop the so-called evil empire from potentially spreading the socialist economic model that was the justification for interventions and invasions spanning the entire globe from southeast asia to central america and out through the us of a in the one nine hundred ninety s. became the world's the last remaining superpower it pretty much became america's entire job description on the world stage but alas what it says on your linked in page may not always correlate to reality and the fluff we put on our resumes doesn't always reflect what we're after or what we've been up to and the good folks over at the cia and the pentagon are no different in some cases rewarding human rights abusers and wrong doers at home while the nuns say that meant un security council meetings to decipher how donald trump's latest nominee to lead the cia and other recent headlines tie in with this long standing tradition of a progress say we're joined her lawyer by former intelligence officer and was whistleblower john kerry aco. do you know how sport oh boy this is the president

travels pick for the new cia director. i understand you might have a few issues with the decision and the choice yes i do and let me let me preface this by saying you know when you hear cia officers and former cia officer saying she was professional she was smart she was accomplished she was fun and highly educated all these accolades all true and all irrelevant what is relevant is that she. committed crimes against humanity and for that she should not be rewarded i said in an op ed in the washington post a few weeks ago what kind of a message does this send to the cia workforce the message is you can commit crimes with impunity war crimes crimes against humanity you can specifically disregard the instructions of the oversight committees again with impunity and you can still get

promoted and indeed you can even be promoted to director well that is exactly the opposite of what the message should be what kind of message does this send to our allies you know the german federal prosecutor has charges pending against her for war crimes so here's the cia director who is not going to be able to travel anywhere in the european union because there's an international arrest warrant out for her and what kind of message does it send to our enemies you know the torture program the secret prison program guantanamo the drone program these are the biggest recruitment tools that our enemies have and when they see that we take a torture someone who admittedly has done the things that she's being accused of doing and promoter to director well that just makes them want to fight us all the more all the more and if you talk about it you get blamed and go to jail your battery what do i do i can't tell you will get your some ideas goes to jail for

talking about oh yeah i'm telling the american people that this happened i wrote this op ed in the washington post they came to me and asked me if i would write it and i did it was i and i put it all out there write my own history i went to prison for a whistle blowing it said it's that or you can't believe the death threats that i got after that one of them actually shook me where the f.b.i. called and said you know there's all this noise but this one might be credible we're going to work on it and get back to you and. they did they went and spoke to the person i suppose these threats coming from just the kind of support the political kind of support that blind thing a word of yes there's this is a blind support for the torture program because we're the good guys and they're the bad guys and if she did this she did it because she's a patriot and we need to back off that's i'm going to hear that all the time one last point on this is is that i'm deeply disturbed by public

opinion polls that have consistently shown that here we are all these years after the nine eleven attacks and a clear majority of americans support the torture program and part of the reason that they support a torture program is because for every person i think that argues as i well remember waterboarding we do it troops right we do it and you actually do and that's what i was just about to bring over there because i saw a recent article in huff post this week right they were very old that the military has finally officially acknowledged that they have not been waterboarding as a purpose of training since two thousand and seven that's right and why because it's torture because it's torture because quote provided no instructional or training benefit to the student in other words it's just basically torturing our students for no actual good cause that's right that is incredible and that i think destroys every argument now there's nothing left ion just there's anything and we want to hurt somebody sure and if that's your position ok that's your position that

doesn't justify anything you know you know after part of your job as an analyst and working in the cia is you got to read the tea leaves i'm sure and you can you kind of have to see where things are going collect information in them and you know report that back and i think a lot of people may look around at the world they get nervous you know we see issues with north korea we see you know issues with syria ok we pull out whatever we see you know palestine israel is happening you know yemen all these things. are we. we knocking on the door with a few bad decisions and suddenly we're in a world of another world war situation i think we're moving in that direction i used to complain a lot during the bush administration that i had never seen it in ministration that worked so hard to not speak to other countries right we don't talk to the north koreans we don't talk to the cubans we don't talk to the iranians well then we started talking to them during the obama administration and things got

incrementally better i think they didn't get a lot better because we were still making some serious policy mistakes like the drone program for example or like our blind support for saudi arabia and the war that they're waging in yemen which in and of itself is a war crime and a crime against humanity another thing too now that we're in the bush i'm sorry in the trump administration there's either. a lack of policy or a policy that's not well thought out and i'm thinking specifically of syria you know in order for the deployment of u.s. troops or anybody's troops to be legal in another country one of two things has to take place you have to be invited in by that government or you have to have the approval of the united nations security council well bashar al assad whether we like his politics or not is the internationally recognized leader of syria he did

not invite us to go into his country and to fight isis or to do anything else similarly we did not go to the u.n. security council and ask for permission through or authority to go into his country now the russians have been invited in. but the u.s. presence there is illegal the turkish presence is illegal and we're not even having that debate in this country no more no more no. barely whispered fact the moment the you know trumps all i'm like right get us out of syria right once you saw a multiple of people both you know in the public and official positions like no no no that's why we need to be there oh yes we got that pushback from the pentagon and you know it was my experience at the cia that usually it was the generals of the pentagon who were the least likely to want to use force usually it was the state department that was pushing for a use of force i think we're seeing that having changed now do you think that's because the trumpet ministration has kind of stacked a lot of the key positions with i do generals i do because you know generals

generally don't make policy they carry out policy just like the intelligence community in the intelligence community you're a policy support organization not a policy making one but when you have generals making the policy and implementing the policy you really have a conflict of interest there oh i could i couldn't agree more it's interesting too because we see a lot of a retard deep state deep state deep state but there's that element to where they want to call that kind of number changes whether the president or congress or whatever happens there there's a better element of government u.s. government at least the kind of as one direction moving forward that's why you don't see much policy change at least that's the thing is that you don't see much policy change on certain aspects yes do you see that you see that in your career is there that kind of level of manipulation oh yes yes it's very rare for a policy to change especially a foreign policy there either has to be some cataclysmic event that really changes the scope of things or policies are generally carried on from one administration to

the other at the end of the obama administration we saw a couple of differences relations with cuba which was entirely completely positive the other one was the iran deal where the iranians agreed to the same kind of monitoring. that the u.n. had implemented in iraq in the previous decade the iranians have agreed and it's actually working so that's a good thing you know most of last year we talked a lot of pretty heavy depressing things here so i ask you this lastly when you look at the world today what's the good news you see out of you know what do you see in everything going on this is a that's a bit of good news that we can hold on to there are two things that immediately leap to mind as crazy as it sounds. you know as nixon could would be the only one to go to china maybe donald trump is the only one who go to north korea and so we have not had direct talks with the north koreans for over a decade and certainly even when we were having direct talks nothing was coming of those talks maybe now as crazy as it sounds donald trump of all people can bring

peace to the korean peninsula that would be incredible the other thing that gives me hope is the recent treatment of refugees and immigrants in europe you know when things were especially bad just before the u.s. presidential election and we saw terrible footage coming from hungary and from bug area that's actually changed and we see refugees now coming. initially to greece or to italy and then making their way into western europe and now being more readily accepted the physical plant to accept them is better now they're not being held in these squalid conditions they're not living under bridges anymore they actually have hope for refugees in europe right now. positive little drug drug or always a pleasure of pleasure is a little more thank you. gentleman is an artist who works with structural an aeronautical engineers computer scientists and what they do is they create art with

data their relationship to the world is in eco man's work shown by using the data related to the effects of human action and nature on the environment around us the materials she uses for these large scale art pieces was originally designed for nasa making it extremely durable and engineered to a stand up to one hundred fifty mile per hour winds in some locations the pieces combine everything from ancient weaving techniques and state of the art materials and the skills of architects live designers and landscape architect architects and fabricators to create what she calls a symbol that speaks to each city's spirit they ask the viewer to stop and meditate on the interdependence of earth's natural systems and how we as a global community exist with them. around the world and across the united states these pieces prove that public art can elevate our love of public spaces and the science that helps us understand how we fit into this grand universe we call home

and this very sweet science in art come together a couple that are really beautiful and so you see them they move and they shape but if peace is designed to represent a part of the city which is being dramatic as you see in the back writing dramatically displayed right so some things were on like tsunamis so they looked at the the waves of the tsunami or how the science of it the data of it represented itself and that's where it became the it's interesting you know you know we got challenge was hard watchers to us don't send us what you think best represents your city should it over to our facebook page. or send us images we love them all right that ladies and gentlemen is our show for you today remember everybody in this world we are not told we are loved enough so i tell you all i love you i am tyrone been told and on top of them all and keep on watching those hawks and them be a great day and night everybody.

when lawmakers manufactured him sentenced him to public wells. when the ruling classes and project themselves. with the financial merry go round of lives only the one percent told. to ignore middle of the room signal. to leave the room the real news is really the a. child's

seemed wrong when all rolls just don't call. me old yet to shape out these names become educated and in gains from an equals betrayal. when so many find themselves worlds apart we choose to look for common ground. well of course it. is so. i'm not. like. i don't know the full. told about the threat of global fight.

the u.n. security mission enters the syrian town of duma a day before chemical weapons experts start their probe into an alleged attack. members of the european parliament voiced their anger over the bombing of syria as french president emanuel mark crawley gives a speech while the u.k.'s government is also facing a backlash over its role in the u.s. led strikes but members of this house seem top last second foreign policy of this country the president. and his doubts grow over the alleged chemical attack in syria that led to the strikes british media outlets rounded academics to question the government's claims.