Fearless, Adversarial Journalism – Spoken Edition

On the morning of March 14th, 2011, military forces from the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) crossed the 16-mile causeway fromSaudi Arabia toBahrain to crush a popular uprising that had arisen there againstthe Bahraini monarchy. The military intervention was the first salvo in a series ofcounterrevolutions launched againstthe Arab Spring uprisings, pittinglargely unarmed democracy activists against the repressive force of local security forces and militaries.

On a Monday morning in late March, Dina Windle sat quietly inside the Varner Unit of the Arkansas Department of Correction, some 80 miles southeast of Little Rock. A 51-year old Latina woman, Windleis just under five feet tall with a slight frame and cropped black hair. She wore a flowered skirt and a navy blue blazer, a small cross pendant hanging from her neck.

In February, after Donald Trump tweeted that the U.S. media were the “enemy of the people,” the targets of his insult exploded with indignation, devoting wall-to-wall media coverage to what they depicted as a grave assault on press freedoms more befitting of a tyranny.

On March 21, first-term Congressman Ro Khanna sent a letter asking the Pentagon’s inspector general to investigate TransDigm, an aerospace supplier he accused of cornering the market on proprietary parts for military aircraft and then jacking up the prices. The California Democrat charged that TransDigm operates as a “hidden monopolist,” to “enrich a few individual financiers who stand to benefit at the expense of our troops and weapons systems.

AUNG SAN SUU KYI IS ONE of the the most celebrated human rights icons of our age: Nobel Peace Laureate, winner of the Sakharov Prize, recipient of the Presidential Medal of Freedom, an Amnesty International-recognized prisoner of conscience for 15 long years. These days, however, she is also an apologist for genocide, ethnic cleansing and mass rape.

Anthony McDaniels was walking to his car, a Ford Taurus parked in front of his home, on November 21, 2008, when he encountered Chicago police officers Kallatt Mohammed and Douglas Nichols. He knew them, McDaniels stated in an affidavit, because over the years they and other members of a gang tactical team under Sgt. Ronald Watts had repeatedly shaken him down for money.

One day after her network joined the rest of corporate media in cheering for President Trump’s missile attack on Syria, MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow was back to regular business: seeing Russian collaboration with Trump at work.

Senator Ron Wyden rarely asks a rhetorical question. In a March 2013 hearing, the Oregon Democrat asked the Director of National Intelligence whether the National Security Agency collected “any type of data at all on millions or hundreds of millions of Americans.

In 2014, the Mexican authorValeria Luiselli, waiting for her green card application to be resolved, took her family on a road trip through the American southwest. As she and her husband and young children drove to Roswell, New Mexico, they joked about their own status as “resident aliens” and informed Border Patrol officers at checkpoints that they are “just writers and just on vacation. … We are writing a Western, sir.

On April 17, the state ofArkansas plans to killDon Davis and Bruce Earl Ward, two men who have been ondeath row since the early 1990s. Neither has applied for clemency. Bothwilldie on the same gurney, back to back, if all goes according to plan. Executioners will startby injecting themwith asedative called midazolam, never before usedby the state, but which issupposed to render themunconscious for the two lethal drugs to follow.

When China boldly seized a U.S. underwater drone in the South China Sea last December and initially refused to give it back, the incidentignited a weeklong political standoffand conjured memories of a similar event more than15 years ago. In April 2001, just months before the 9/11 attacks gripped the nation, a U.S. Navy spy plane flying a routine reconnaissance mission over the South China Sea was struck by a People’s Liberation Army fighter jet that veered aggressively close.

In every type of government, nothing unites people behind the leader more quickly,reflexively or reliablythan war. Donald Trump now sees how true thatis, as the same establishment leaders in U.S. politics and media who have spent months denouncinghim as a mentally unstable and inept authoritarian and unprecedented threat to democracy are standing and applauding him as he launches bombs at Syrian government targets.

No doubt fearing the grave risk of killing Russian military personnel on the ground in Syria, the United States military gave Russia advance notice before launching cruise missile strikes overnight on a Syrian air base that is used to store chemical weapons, according to a U.S. intelligence assessment.

IT ISN’T ONLY Republicans, it seems, who traffic in alternative facts. Since Donald Trump’s shock election victory, leading Democrats have worked hard to convince themselves, and the rest of us, that his triumph had less to do with racism and much more to do with economic anxiety — despite almost all of the available evidence suggesting otherwise. Consider Bernie Sanders, de facto leader of the #Resistance.

Rep.Jan Schakowsky, the most dogged opponent of Blackwater founder Erik Prince in the U.S. Congress, is blasting the Trump administration for using Prince as a shadow emissary for the White House. “He is the kind of un-vetted, unscrupulous person that seems to fit very nicely, especially into the kinds of operations that they want done,” Schakowsky said in an exclusive interview for the Intercepted podcast.