May 18 – Curbing The Pentagon’s Military Weaponry to Police Forces; Chasing Ghosts in the War on Terror; The Fall of Ramadi and Historical Amnesia Over Iraq

Full Program

Part 1

We begin with President Obama’s actions on Monday to limit military-style equipment for police forces, banning some types of heavy weaponry and restricting the availability of other equipment supplied under a Pentagon program. Elizabeth Beavers, the Legislative Associate for Militarism and Civil Liberties at the Friends Committee on National Legislation, who lobbies Congress to end the Pentagon giveaway of military weaponry to America’s police forces, joins us. We discuss the significance of Obama’s executive order and what pushback it is likely to meet.

Part 2

Then we speak with Dr. John Mueller, the Woody Hayes Chair of National Security at Ohio State University and the author of “Terror, Security and Money: Balancing the Risks, Benefits, and Costs of Homeland Security”. He joins us to discuss the millions of false terrorist leads the FBI has tracked down since 9/11 in a futile activity known as “chasing ghosts”, and why in the most recent so-called terrorist attack attributed to ISIS in Garland, Texas, the tip-off by the “hacktivist” group Anonymous to the Garland police two days earlier, was ignored.  

Part 3

Then finally we examine the latest setback by the Iraqi army and Shia militias with the loss of Ramadi to the self-declared Islamic State. Iraq expert Juan Cole, a Professor of Modern Middle Eastern and South Asian History at the University of Michigan and author “The New Arabs: How the Millennial Generation is Changing the Middle East” joins us to discuss why the fall of Ramadi is significant in spite of protestations by the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs to the contrary.