December 23 – Rumors of Peace in Syria; An Examination of Seymour Hersh’s Charges; Spain’s Indecisive Election Results

Full Program

Part 1

We begin with the rumors of peace emerging from the otherwise hideous and protracted slaughter going on in Syria as the country is destroyed, its people killed and one third of the population displaced, with desperate refugees risking their lives taking to the rough Mediterranean waters because they surely die on the land. An expert on Syria, Nicholas Heras, a Middle East researcher at the Center for a New American Security, joins us to discuss Russia’s increasingly central role in peace talks while its Air Force indiscriminately bombs civilian targets adding to the already widespread devastation of this country ravaged by years of civil war.

Part 2

Then we speak with Graham Fuller, the former Vice Chairman of the National Intelligence Council at the CIA and author of “Turkey and the Arab Spring: Leadership in the Middle East”. He joins us to assess the charges made by veteran investigative reporter Seymour Hersh in The London Review of Books that top Pentagon leaders deliberately subverted Obama’s policy towards Syria by conducting a secret alliance with Assad and Putin. We  also examine earlier widely criticized charges by Seymour Hersh that the Syrian rebels were behind the Sarin attacks blamed on Assad. Charges that now are being supported by leaked intelligence from Turkey’s MIT that Turkish parliamentarians are now making public.

Part 3

Then finally we look into the results of the elections in Spain that indicate no clear winner and a difficult road ahead to form a coalition government.  The author of “A Singular Nation: Fantasies of Democratic Normalcy in Spain”, Dr. Luisa-Elena Delgado, a Professor of Spanish, Criticism and Interpretive Theory and Gender with the European Union Center at the University of Illinois joins us. We discuss the emergence of Podemos (“We Can”) and its pony-tailed charismatic leader as Spain’s largely unemployed youth reject the conservatives and the socialists with equal disdain.