Three days of Air Cascadia...from The NSA to the TPP to the ISIS

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Produced by: 
KBOO
Program:: 
Air date: 
Tue, 06/09/2015 - 10:00am to 10:15am
Interviews: William Binney, Dahlia Wasfi, Margaret Flowers

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0608 Air Cascadia
Today’s guest is William Binney.    Binney is an NSA whistleblower. He said today: "While this is a step in the right direction, it doesn't go nearly far enough in ending bulk acquisition of data. It doesn't stop activity under [executive order] 12333, that does acquisition right off the fibers -- it's an automatic flow to the NSA. It's both content and meta data." Edward Snowden has said: "Without Bill Binney, there would be no Edward Snowden," See: "The executive order that led to mass spying, as told by NSA alumni."
 
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0609 Air Cascadia
   Today’s guest, Dahlia  Wasfi is an Iraqi-American justice activist who has written and spoken extensively on U.S. policy in the region. She recently wrote the piece "Battling ISIS: Iran-Iraq war redux" and said today: "President Obama continues to hear criticism for his failure to swiftly defeat ISIS. But while crushing ISIS may be the official stated goal, the actual agenda may be a long, drawn-out war to weaken regional powers. We have seen this policy before -- with many of the same players -- in the Iran-Iraq War of the 1980s."In February 1979, the Iranian Revolution overthrew Shah Reza Pahlavi, the ruler of Iran since 1953, when a CIA-orchestrated coup brought him to power. Once the Shah’s U.S.-friendly regime in Iran was deposed, American administrators sought a new ally in the region and began to warm relations with Iraq. As tensions escalated between Iraq’s secular government and the new theocracy in Iran, both the U.S. and Saudi Arabia assured Saddam Hussein that he had their backing in any armed conflict with Iran. In September 1980, with U.S. encouragement, Saddam Hussein launched the Iran-Iraq War.    "U.S. President Ronald Reagan officially allied with Iraq during the conflict. In secret, however, government officials sold arms to Iran. The eight-year war, sustained by the U.S. backing both sides, yielded over a million casualties. The extended conflict also left two of the strongest nations in the region bleeding and weakened, which benefited U.S. and Israeli hegemony.  "Today, comparably, the U.S. is arming both sides of the 'war on ISIS,' which was born out of the illegal 2003 invasion of Iraq. After the fall of Baghdad, U.S. administrators imposed a repressive theocratic Shia regime on Iraq. The brutality of its rule inevitably spawned a counter movement: a sectarian Sunni opposition faction which in the last several years has morphed into ISIS. Western powers supported its creation (via funding and arms to extremist 'rebel groups' in Syria) to serve as a check on Shia power in the region -- power that expanded as a result of U.S. policy in Iraq in the first place. ...
  "Just as with Iran and Iraq in the 1980s, the people in the battlefields of Syria and Iraq pay the highest price. And just as was the case in the 1980s, the devastation of these countries serves U.S. and Israeli hegemony."
 
 
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0609 Air Cascadia
  Today’s guest is Dr. Margaret Flowers, An activist with PopularResistance.org and FlushtheTPP.org, Flowers, who has written and spoken extensively about the Trans–Pacific Partnership and "Fast Track," is with other activists outside the Capitol engaging members of Congress. She noted a recent New York Timespoll that found that 30 percent of the public says they know "not much" about the TPP -- and 48 percent say they know "nothing at all." Flowers said: "What we see in this agreement is that it’s not really about trade; it’s about creating a backdoor for corporations to get some of the changes that they want. So deregulation of the financial industry, longer patent protections for the pharmaceutical industries, Internet privacy restrictions, these are the things that these corporations have wanted to get but they haven’t been able to so far, and this is a vehicle for doing that."
 

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