MintCast: Recent Episodes
MintPress News
Welcome to MintCast, the official MintPress News podcast hosted by Mnar Muhawesh. MintCast is an interview podcast featuring dissenting voices, independent researchers and journalists the establishment would rather silence.
Saudi Arabia is pushing back against US and Israeli pressure, challenging Washington’s efforts to reshape the Middle East. From Gaza to Lebanon to the Red Sea, regional resistance is rising.
Joining host Mnar Adley is Sharmine Narwani, journalist and political analyst and editor of The Cradle. Narwani breaks down Saudi Arabia’s motivations, Israel’s escalating campaigns across the region, and Yemen’s unprecedented role in confronting Israeli expansion.
We also examine Israel’s mounting civilian toll in Gaza and Lebanon, the use of banned cluster munitions, and the economic crisis Israel faces as war debts mount.
Don’t miss this wide-angle look at shifting regional power, resistance dynamics, and why Saudi Arabia is no longer marching to Washington’s drum.
Watch the full episode here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dyRzGS1TQJI
Support the show
MintPress News is a fiercely independent. You can support us by becoming a member on Patreon, bookmarking and whitelisting us, and by subscribing to our social media channels, including Twitch, YouTube, Twitter and Instagram.
Subscribe to MintCast on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and SoundCloud.
Also, be sure to check out the new Behind the Headlines channel on YouTube and subscribe to rapper Lowkey’s new video interview/podcast series, The Watchdog.
The United States is racing toward nuclear annihilation while its empire crumbles from within. In this explosive interview, independent journalist Rachel Blevins exposes how Washington's imperial ambitions have backfired catastrophically: as the New START treaty expires in 2026, Trump threatens to resume nuclear testing while Russia deploys unstoppable weapons like the Oreshnik and Burevestnik.
Meanwhile, Zelensky begs for Tomahawk missiles that could trigger World War III, and in a shocking betrayal of reality, former Al-Qaeda leader Ahmad al-Sharaa, once with a $10 million bounty on his head, is now Syria's US-backed president, playing basketball with the very commanders who hunted him.
From rare earth mineral dominance to the Nord Stream bombing cover-up, Blevins reveals how US aggression has forged an unbreakable Russia-China-Iran alliance, accelerating the collapse of American unipolar power while ordinary Americans pay the price at grocery stores and gas pumps.
- Donate to Support Independent Journalism: https://www.MintPressNews.com/donations
- MintPress News YouTube: https://youtube.com/MintPressNews
- Follow Rachel Blevins: https://twitter.com/RachelBlevins
- Follow Mnar Adley: https://twitter.com/MnarMuh
Support the show
MintPress News is a fiercely independent. You can support us by becoming a member on Patreon, bookmarking and whitelisting us, and by subscribing to our social media channels, including Twitch, YouTube, Twitter and Instagram.
Subscribe to MintCast on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and SoundCloud.
Also, be sure to check out the new Behind the Headlines channel on YouTube and subscribe to rapper Lowkey’s new video interview/podcast series, The Watchdog.
Sudan’s collapse isn’t a natural disaster — it’s a deliberate act of imperial design.
For decades, Washington has waged economic warfare and proxy conflicts to dismantle Sudan’s sovereignty. Now, with Israel and the UAE leading the charge, Sudan is being stripped of its gold, oil, and independence under the banner of “stability.”
In this episode, Mnar Adley exposes how U.S. policy, Israeli intelligence, and Emirati financing have turned Sudan into a war laboratory — and why its destruction is central to the West’s war on the Axis of Resistance and China’s Belt and Road Initiative.
From the famine in Darfur to the blood gold flowing to Dubai, this is the architecture of U.S. imperialism at work — and a warning to every nation daring to defy it.
Guests:
- Mnar Adley — Founder and director of MintPress News, host of Behind The Headlines
- Alan MacLeod — Senior Staff Writer and producer at MintPress News
Topics Covered:
- U.S. sanctions and the deliberate destabilization of Sudan
- Israel and the UAE’s proxy war role
- The theft of Sudan’s gold and control of Red Sea ports
- Washington’s strategy against China, Russia, and Iran in Africa
- The humanitarian façade behind imperial wars
🎧 Listen now and subscribe to Behind The Headlines for more in-depth analysis on U.S. foreign policy and resistance across the Global South.
Support the show
MintPress News is a fiercely independent. You can support us by becoming a member on Patreon, bookmarking and whitelisting us, and by subscribing to our social media channels, including Twitch, YouTube, Twitter and Instagram.
Subscribe to MintCast on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and SoundCloud.
Also, be sure to check out the new Behind the Headlines channel on YouTube and subscribe to rapper Lowkey’s new video interview/podcast series, The Watchdog.
bPushback from Latin American leaders is throwing a wrench into Donald Trump’s imperial ambitions. The Summit of the Americas — a U.S.-backed conference of regional leaders — has been abruptly cancelled (officially “postponed” until 2026) after threats of a mass boycott led by Mexico and Colombia.
Joining host Mnar Adley to discuss the Trump administration’s escalating plans for Venezuela, the geopolitical rift in Latin America, and the new frontlines of resistance are Camila Escalante and Alan MacLeod.
Camila is a journalist for PressTV and editor of Kawsachun News. She’s reported extensively from across Latin America, covering Washington’s regime-change operations against Venezuela, the 2019 coup in Bolivia, and the return of President Lula da Silva in Brazil. Alan is a senior staff writer and producer at MintPress News and the author of Bad News From Venezuela: 20 Years of Fake News and Misreporting. His work has been featured in academic journals and major media outlets around the world.
Together, they unpack the Trump administration’s military buildup near Venezuela, the killing of 66 civilians in recent U.S. naval attacks, and the CIA’s newly authorized “lethal operations” inside the country. With President Petro of Colombia filing legal action against Trump for the Caribbean assaults, and Mexico’s Sheinbaum leading regional defiance, Washington faces an increasingly united Latin America unwilling to bow to empire.
As MacLeod notes, Venezuela’s well-trained military and millions of civilian militias mean that any U.S. invasion would be far from easy — potentially another Vietnam in the making.
Support the show
MintPress News is a fiercely independent. You can support us by becoming a member on Patreon, bookmarking and whitelisting us, and by subscribing to our social media channels, including Twitch, YouTube, Twitter and Instagram.
Subscribe to MintCast on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and SoundCloud.
Also, be sure to check out the new Behind the Headlines channel on YouTube and subscribe to rapper Lowkey’s new video interview/podcast series, The Watchdog.
Award-winning journalist Aaron Maté joins Mnar Adley to expose the hidden interests behind Trump’s Gaza “peace” deal — a plan rooted not in diplomacy but in real estate and natural gas profits.
As Israel’s ceasefire takes hold, Western media celebrate the return of Israeli captives while ignoring thousands of Palestinian prisoners and the empire’s economic motives beneath it all.
In this episode of Behind the Headlines and MintCast, Maté and Adley break down:
- How Trump’s Gaza plan ties into Israel’s offshore gas fields
- The Larry Ellison CBS takeover and its pro-Israel media implications
- Why the corporate press whitewashes empire’s crimes in Gaza
- The ongoing battle for narrative control in Western journalism
🎧 Watch the full video version on MintPress News’ YouTube channel: https://youtu.be/PcO2DTAqCaM
Support the show
MintPress News is a fiercely independent. You can support us by becoming a member on Patreon, bookmarking and whitelisting us, and by subscribing to our social media channels, including Twitch, YouTube, Twitter and Instagram.
Subscribe to MintCast on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and SoundCloud.
Also, be sure to check out the new Behind the Headlines channel on YouTube and subscribe to rapper Lowkey’s new video interview/podcast series, The Watchdog.
In this urgent episode of the Mint Press News podcast, host Mnar Adley speaks with Lebanese war correspondent Ghadi Francis about Israel’s relentless war on Lebanon and Washington’s renewed campaign to force Hezbollah to disarm. Ghadi, whose Instagram account with over 400,000 followers was recently suspended by Meta, returns to the show to share firsthand reporting from the frontlines of South Lebanon.
Despite a so-called ceasefire, Israel continues daily attacks—bombing civilians, kidnapping fishermen and shepherds, expanding military positions on Lebanese soil, and flying drones over villages. Meanwhile, the U.S.-backed Lebanese government is pressuring Hezbollah to surrender its weapons without any guarantee that Israel won’t invade again.
Ghadi explains why Hezbollah cannot and will not disarm while Israeli forces still occupy Lebanese land. She details the horrific aftermath of Israel’s pager and walkie-talkie attacks that blinded and maimed thousands, including children. She also reveals how Lebanon’s economic collapse is being weaponized to fracture national unity and intensify pressure on the resistance.
This conversation exposes the complicity of Western media, the hypocrisy of U.S. foreign policy, and the terrifying reality that everyday devices could become weapons—thanks to Israeli-American technological warfare.
Mint Press News is independent, fearless, and entirely reader-supported. If you believe in journalism that centers truth over power, please support our work.
https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/mintpress-keeping-truth-alive-in-a-war-of-lies#/
Follow Ghadi Francis on her new Instagram:https://www.instagram.com/ghadifranciss/
Subscribe to Mint Press News on YouTube and share this episode to keep watchdog journalism alive
Support the show
MintPress News is a fiercely independent. You can support us by becoming a member on Patreon, bookmarking and whitelisting us, and by subscribing to our social media channels, including Twitch, YouTube, Twitter and Instagram.
Subscribe to MintCast on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and SoundCloud.
Also, be sure to check out the new Behind the Headlines channel on YouTube and subscribe to rapper Lowkey’s new video interview/podcast series, The Watchdog.
Charlie Kirk’s assassination dominated global headlines. Meanwhile, Israel killed Yemen’s prime minister and bombed journalists — stories Western media buried.
Independent Yemeni journalist Abdellatif Al Washali joins MintPress to discuss the Red Sea blockade that has devastated Israel’s economy, the assassination of Prime Minister Ahmed Ghaleb Nasser al-Rahawi, and why only Yemen is paying the price for resisting genocide in Gaza.
Support MintPress News: https://www.mintpressnews.com/mintpress-news-faces-shutdown-amid-unprecedented-attacks-on-truth/290423/
Support the show
MintPress News is a fiercely independent. You can support us by becoming a member on Patreon, bookmarking and whitelisting us, and by subscribing to our social media channels, including Twitch, YouTube, Twitter and Instagram.
Subscribe to MintCast on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and SoundCloud.
Also, be sure to check out the new Behind the Headlines channel on YouTube and subscribe to rapper Lowkey’s new video interview/podcast series, The Watchdog.
Truth Under Siege: MintPress News Needs You
This is an urgent call to action. One of our main funding lines has been cut and MintPress News could be forced to shut down without your support.
Support the fundraiser
The Trump administration is beating the drums of war in Latin America. Washington has placed a $50 million bounty on Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, accusing him of running a cocaine empire called the Cartel of the Suns.
But experts say the cartel barely registers on the DEA’s radar. Instead, the U.S. is inflating it into a narco-state menace — a pretext for regime change and invasion.
MintCast hosts Mnar Adley and Alan MacLeod are joined by:
- Diego Sequera, journalist with Misión Verdad in Caracas
- Leonardo Flores, co-founder of the Venezuela Solidarity Network and former analyst at Venezuela’s embassy in Washington
Together, they expose how Washington is weaponizing myths about drug trafficking to justify intervention — and why Venezuela remains at the heart of Latin America’s anti-imperialist struggle.
👉 Watch the video version on YouTube: https://youtu.be/GWUn_rLomTs
Support the show
MintPress News is a fiercely independent. You can support us by becoming a member on Patreon, bookmarking and whitelisting us, and by subscribing to our social media channels, including Twitch, YouTube, Twitter and Instagram.
Subscribe to MintCast on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and SoundCloud.
Also, be sure to check out the new Behind the Headlines channel on YouTube and subscribe to rapper Lowkey’s new video interview/podcast series, The Watchdog.
When African Stream became one of the fastest-growing revolutionary media outlets on the planet, Washington took notice — and Silicon Valley pulled the plug. In this MintCast episode, hosts Mnar Adley and Alan MacLeod speak with Ahmed Kaballo, founder of African Stream, about the U.S.-led campaign that led to his platform being removed from the internet.
Kaballo also breaks down the rise of Burkina Faso’s young leader Ibrahim Traoré, the grassroots movement driving the Sahel’s anti-imperialist wave, and the growing push to expel Western military forces from Africa.
🎥 Watch the full interview on YouTube: https://youtu.be/EB-ydll1Kb0
📰 Read more: “Blinken Ordered the Hit. Big Tech Carried It Out. African Stream Is Dead.” on MintPress News
📰 Read more: “Why Washington is Worried About Burkina Faso’s Young Revolutionary Leader” on MintPress News
Follow MintCast for more:
📺 YouTube – MintPress News
📱 Twitter – @MintPressNews
📷 Instagram – @MintPressNews
🌐 Website – https://www.mintpressnews.com
Support the show
MintPress News is a fiercely independent. You can support us by becoming a member on Patreon, bookmarking and whitelisting us, and by subscribing to our social media channels, including Twitch, YouTube, Twitter and Instagram.
Subscribe to MintCast on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and SoundCloud.
Also, be sure to check out the new Behind the Headlines channel on YouTube and subscribe to rapper Lowkey’s new video interview/podcast series, The Watchdog.
Israel’s Hasbara machine just got a 2,000% budget boost. In this MintPress exclusive, Alan MacLeod breaks down how the Israeli Foreign Ministry is funneling $150 million into Google and YouTube ads aimed squarely at European audiences—while Unit 8200 veterans quietly staff Silicon Valley giants.
🔍 What you’ll learn:
• How YouTube served 45 million Europeans in weeks
• Why Google terms-of-service violations are ignored
• The Unit 8200–Google pipeline (99+ confirmed hires)
• Starlink’s secret role in Iran ops
• MAGA influencers on paid Israel junkets
📰 Full investigation: https://www.mintpressnews.com/israel-europe-youtube-ad-campaign/290163/
📺 Watch on YouTube: https://youtu.be/vvYbhlQQldA
✨ Support independent watchdog journalism:
https://www.patreon.com/MintPressNews
Support the show
MintPress News is a fiercely independent. You can support us by becoming a member on Patreon, bookmarking and whitelisting us, and by subscribing to our social media channels, including Twitch, YouTube, Twitter and Instagram.
Subscribe to MintCast on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and SoundCloud.
Also, be sure to check out the new Behind the Headlines channel on YouTube and subscribe to rapper Lowkey’s new video interview/podcast series, The Watchdog.
Motaz Azaiza became a global icon for his fearless photojournalism during Israel’s assault on Gaza. In this exclusive MintCast interview, host Mnar Adley speaks with Azaiza about surviving the onslaught, becoming a voice for his people, and why documenting war crimes has never been more urgent.
Since October 2023, Israel has killed more than 200 journalists. Azaiza’s powerful images cut through the fog of war, inspiring millions and showing the world the human cost of Israel’s actions. He reflects on the emotional toll, the global response, and his mission to raise funds for UNRWA as Gaza starves under siege.
Subscribe to MintCast for more frontline voices and hard-hitting interviews. Support Palestinian journalists by donating to UNRWA or sharing this episode.
Support the show
MintPress News is a fiercely independent. You can support us by becoming a member on Patreon, bookmarking and whitelisting us, and by subscribing to our social media channels, including Twitch, YouTube, Twitter and Instagram.
Subscribe to MintCast on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and SoundCloud.
Also, be sure to check out the new Behind the Headlines channel on YouTube and subscribe to rapper Lowkey’s new video interview/podcast series, The Watchdog.
Israel thought it could strike Iran and walk away unscathed. It was wrong.
In this explosive episode of MintCast, Tehran-based professor Seyed Mohammad Marandi joins Mnar Adley from the heart of a city under Israeli bombardment to deliver a stark message: Israel is not in control—and the tide is turning fast.
Marandi says Israel’s attacks have only strengthened Iranian unity, while the Trump administration’s betrayal has shattered any future for diplomacy. “There is more solidarity now than at any point since Saddam’s invasion,” he explains. As the U.S. inches closer to full-scale war, public support at home is collapsing—60% of Americans oppose getting involved.
Marandi exposes the West’s wishful thinking, the media’s imperial spin, and why Israel may be walking into the biggest strategic mistake in its history.
🔊 Hear it straight from Tehran—where the war is real, and Israel is losing.
🎧 Guest: Prof. Seyed Mohammad Marandi, University of Tehran
🎙 Host: Mnar Adley
📍 Recorded during active Israeli strikes on Iran
▶️ Watch the original video: https://youtu.be/UNrXxCqBFzo
Support the show
MintPress News is a fiercely independent. You can support us by becoming a member on Patreon, bookmarking and whitelisting us, and by subscribing to our social media channels, including Twitch, YouTube, Twitter and Instagram.
Subscribe to MintCast on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and SoundCloud.
Also, be sure to check out the new Behind the Headlines channel on YouTube and subscribe to rapper Lowkey’s new video interview/podcast series, The Watchdog.
On this week’s edition of The MintCast, host Mnar Adley speaks with British-Iraqi trauma surgeon Dr. Mohammed Tahir about his harrowing months working in Gaza’s hospitals, the trauma he witnessed, and the global awakening to Israel’s atrocities.
Dr. Tahir describes operating on a “sea of mangled people” under nonstop Israeli bombardment, and shares how his experience forged unbreakable bonds with fellow medics resisting death with every operation.
From Greta Thunberg’s “Freedom Flotilla” to Iraq’s steadfast solidarity with Palestine, Dr. Tahir explains why he believes the tide is turning against Zionist propaganda—and why Israel’s brutality has permanently changed how the world sees it.
Support the show
MintPress News is a fiercely independent. You can support us by becoming a member on Patreon, bookmarking and whitelisting us, and by subscribing to our social media channels, including Twitch, YouTube, Twitter and Instagram.
Subscribe to MintCast on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and SoundCloud.
Also, be sure to check out the new Behind the Headlines channel on YouTube and subscribe to rapper Lowkey’s new video interview/podcast series, The Watchdog.
In part two of our exclusive interview, American ICU nurse Willy Massay reveals a disturbing pattern of Israeli attacks on Gaza’s medical system and children.
He says Israeli soldiers deliberately shot boys in the penis to prevent them from having families. Massay recounts treating patients with no anesthesia, no gauze, and no electricity—forced to manually keep children alive as bombs shattered hospital walls.
With over 1,400 healthcare workers killed and nearly every hospital damaged or destroyed, his testimony is one of the clearest indictments yet of Israel’s genocidal assault.
Missed part one? Listen here: https://www.buzzsprout.com/284746/episodes/17104827
Watch the YouTube version: WAR CRIMES IN GAZA: Unfiltered Hospital Testimony from ICU Nurse Willy Massay🎙️ Truth Has Enemies. We Have You.🎙️
For over a decade, MintPress News has been at the forefront of exposing Israeli apartheid, occupation, and war crimes, when few dared to. We've been censored, smeared, and blacklisted for telling the truth. But we haven’t stopped.
Independent journalism like this isn’t just important—it’s under attack. If you believe in reporting that defends the voiceless and challenges the powerful, we need your support.
👉 Support Us on Patreon
👉 Or make a One-Time Donation
Support the show
MintPress News is a fiercely independent. You can support us by becoming a member on Patreon, bookmarking and whitelisting us, and by subscribing to our social media channels, including Twitch, YouTube, Twitter and Instagram.
Subscribe to MintCast on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and SoundCloud.
Also, be sure to check out the new Behind the Headlines channel on YouTube and subscribe to rapper Lowkey’s new video interview/podcast series, The Watchdog.
In this powerful and deeply emotional episode, MintPress News Director Mnar Adley sits down with American ICU nurse Willy Massay, who has just returned from Gaza after volunteering on the front lines of Israel’s war on the civilian population. Having worked in some of Gaza’s most devastated medical facilities—including Al-Aqsa, Nasser, and Indonesia hospitals—Massay offers a chilling firsthand account of the deliberate targeting of health workers, the systematic destruction of hospitals, and the devastating toll on Palestinian children.
Massay shares how Gaza’s hospitals function under siege: with no real shifts, medical professionals work 24/7 under the constant sound of crying children and explosions. According to Massay, the injuries he treated—many gunshot wounds to the head, chest, and groin of young boys—were too precise to be anything but intentional. “Their reproductive organs were completely dismantled and destroyed,” he tells Adley, calling it “ethnic cleansing at its worst.”
The interview also addresses the Israeli military’s targeting and imprisonment of doctors, including the death of Dr. Adnan al-Bursh under alleged torture in Israeli custody. Since October 7, 2023, over 1,150 health workers in Gaza have been killed, among them 165 doctors and 260 nurses. According to the World Health Organization, Israel has damaged or destroyed 33 out of Gaza’s 36 hospitals.
Massay’s reflections are not just professional—they’re personal. He speaks with anguish about the U.S. government’s unwavering support for Israel’s actions, including billions in aid and military assistance. "Looking into the eyes of a Palestinian child," he says, "it is a terrible feeling to know that my money and my taxes just killed you."
This exclusive interview is a rare and urgent testimony from someone who witnessed the atrocities firsthand. It challenges listeners to confront the human cost of political choices and the moral consequences of silence.
Trigger warning: This episode contains graphic descriptions of violence against civilians and children.
🎧 Don’t miss this searing account from Gaza’s medical front lines.
Support the show
MintPress News is a fiercely independent. You can support us by becoming a member on Patreon, bookmarking and whitelisting us, and by subscribing to our social media channels, including Twitch, YouTube, Twitter and Instagram.
Subscribe to MintCast on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and SoundCloud.
Also, be sure to check out the new Behind the Headlines channel on YouTube and subscribe to rapper Lowkey’s new video interview/podcast series, The Watchdog.
While the destruction in the Middle East has been fierce, the media war surrounding who controls the narrative of events has been no less intense. And MintPress News has been caught up in it. Our investigations into Israeli attempts to manipulate public understanding of the genocide in Gaza have drawn the ire of The Jerusalem Post, who recently attempted to cancel us, labeling MintPress as part of a network of Iranian, Russian and Syrian-backed extremist websites pushing antisemitism.
Alan MacLeod, senior staff writer and podcast producer at MintPress News, will join the MintCast host to discuss this. Alan’s investigations, which revealed a network of former Israeli spies and lobbyists working in newsrooms across America, went viral and were read by hundreds of thousands of people.
His report, entitled: “Revealed: The Israeli Spies Writing America’s News,” discussed how former agents from Israeli spying group Unit 8200 have found a home in some of the corporate media’s most prominent outlets, including Axios and CNN.
Unit 8200 is the centerpiece of Israel’s surveillance state and has been the source of many of the most controversial spying and hacking scandals of the last decade. Former Unit 8200 agents developed the Pegasus spyware, which was used to snoop on activists, journalists, world leaders and royals around the world.
His second investigation cataloged hundreds of ex-Israel lobbyists who went on to work in newsrooms across the country. One example of this is the NBCUniversal network. CNBC’s lead work report was, until 2011, a commander in the Israeli Defense Forces before moving back to America to work for the Friends of the IDF. This group raises money for supplies and support for Israeli soldiers, as well as encouraging Americans to enlist in the Israeli military. This pro-Israel bias goes straight to the top. MSNBC’s executive producer, Moshe Arenstein, is a former IDF intelligence commander.
The traction that these groundbreaking stories were receiving clearly put MintPress in the Jerusalem Post’s crosshairs, the Israeli newspaper publishing an attack against us.
Support the show
MintPress News is a fiercely independent. You can support us by becoming a member on Patreon, bookmarking and whitelisting us, and by subscribing to our social media channels, including Twitch, YouTube, Twitter and Instagram.
Subscribe to MintCast on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and SoundCloud.
Also, be sure to check out the new Behind the Headlines channel on YouTube and subscribe to rapper Lowkey’s new video interview/podcast series, The Watchdog.
2025 is promising to be a crucial year in the history of West Asia. Just weeks have passed since the ouster of Syria’s Bashar al-Assad and his replacement with pro-Western leader Abu Mohammed al-Jolani.
Syria was a key member of the so-called “Axis of Resistance” – a coalition of actors opposing Israel and its actions. What will Assad’s departure mean for the resistance against Israel, especially given Jolani’s overt friendliness with Tel Aviv? Given their new government, what is in store for Lebanon and Hezbollah now? And how about Iraq and Yemen?
To discuss all of this and more is returning guest, Ghadi Francis. Ghadi is an author, journalist, and war correspondent who has covered the situations in Syria and Palestine in great detail. Born in Lebanon, she is the author of the book “My pen and pain: One hundred days in Syria” (2012).
Last month, Ghadi joined The MintCast to discuss the fallout of Israel’s attack on its neighbors. During the interview, she set her sights on the Erdoğan administration in Ankara, stating that “Türkiye is as expansionist as Israel – and it is not new!”
We lived in a nation that was called ‘Greater Syria’ that was occupied by the Ottomans for around 300 years. And it stretched from Lebanon to Syria to Iraq. Nineveh, Aleppo, all of that was occupied by the Ottomans. We were part of the Ottoman Empire. We were ruled by them in a dictatorship and in an occupation.”
Francis recently returned from a trip to Iraq, where she was impressed by the rebirth of the country after decades of occupation. Unlike Yemen, she assessed, Iraq is not in a position to face down the might of either the U.S. or Israel. “If the Iraqis continue to resist on their own and they get attacked by the Israelis, nobody is going to protect them,” she said. “So if they refrain for a while from being in active resistance operations and, rather, being a good and strong community…this itself is a great achievement.”
Support the show
MintPress News is a fiercely independent. You can support us by becoming a member on Patreon, bookmarking and whitelisting us, and by subscribing to our social media channels, including Twitch, YouTube, Twitter and Instagram.
Subscribe to MintCast on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and SoundCloud.
Also, be sure to check out the new Behind the Headlines channel on YouTube and subscribe to rapper Lowkey’s new video interview/podcast series, The Watchdog.
It is the album the Israel lobby tried – and failed – to kill. “Soundtrack to the Struggle 3” by MintPress News’ Lowkey is released today.
It is the rapper’s first album in five years and is already receiving critical acclaim. Today on “The MintCast,” Mnar Adley sits down with Lowkey to discuss his new offering, the attempts to shut him down, and why good music is often political.
A tireless fighter for justice, Lowkey’s tracks have become anthems in the anti-war movement, particularly in the struggle for Palestine liberation. “Soundtrack to the Struggle 3” is no different and provides a political snapshot in time, taking on issues such as the genocide in Gaza, the persecution of WikiLeaks’ Julian Assange, and the pervasive surveillance power of our smartphones.
If the Israel lobby had its way, this album would never have seen the light of day. Last year, the pressure group, We Believe in Israel petitioned music giant Spotify to remove his songs from their platform, citing non-existent anti-Semitism concerns. We Believe in Israel works hand-in-hand with the Israeli government, which has been monitoring Lowkey closely for over a decade. The Jewish Chronicle newspaper once noted that the rapper’s skill and worldwide fan base constituted a “nightmare” for the government in Tel Aviv.
“Pro-Israel groups had me no-platformed at different shows; I’ve been canceled in at least four countries so far, thanks to their maneuvers,” Lowkey told MintPress, adding: “They have recorded meetings I have been at, taken pictures of me in public, and I am sure there is a lot more we do not know about…I’m sure this album will make them very angry and unhappy… They certainly won’t want people to listen to this album.”
“Soundtrack to the Struggle 3” is available to stream for free on major music platforms such as Spotify. You can also watch official music videos on YouTube. Lowkey is currently on tour in the United Kingdom and will be playing live shows in London, Birmingham and Manchester this November. The album is available in hard copy for purchase at his shows.
Support the show
MintPress News is a fiercely independent. You can support us by becoming a member on Patreon, bookmarking and whitelisting us, and by subscribing to our social media channels, including Twitch, YouTube, Twitter and Instagram.
Subscribe to MintCast on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and SoundCloud.
Also, be sure to check out the new Behind the Headlines channel on YouTube and subscribe to rapper Lowkey’s new video interview/podcast series, The Watchdog.
The United States is socially, politically and economically in crisis. As an increasingly large number of people are priced out of the economy, fewer and fewer buy into the sham of electoral politics. On the world stage, too, the U.S. is suffering. Countries everywhere are beginning to drop the dollar as the standard unit of exchange, and Washington’s prestige has been severely shaken due to its relentless, unequivocal support for Israel’s genocide in Gaza.
Ben Norton joins MintCast host Mnar Adley to discuss all this and more. Norton is an investigative journalist and founder of Geopolitical Economy Report, a news source dedicated to looking at the world and seeing the big picture. He is currently pursuing a PhD in Beijing, China.
“The dollar is – even more than the military – the strongest weapon the United States has,” Norton told Adley, explaining that, because of the exorbitant privilege it enjoys in printing the world’s reserve currency, the U.S. can simply export many of its economic problems. It also means that Washington can print more money to pay for its military misadventures around the world. Thus, the dollar system has allowed the U.S. to preserve its global empire and avoid inflation despite running a massive global trade deficit for decades.
“I hate when countries go off the dollar,” Donald Trump said recently, adding: “I would not allow countries to go off the dollar because when we lose that standard, that will be like losing a Revolutionary war. That would be a hit to our country, just like losing a war. And we can’t let that happen.”
And yet that is precisely what is coming to pass, as even U.S. allies in the Middle East, such as Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, have taken steps in that direction. Previously, if any country defied Washington’s orders, it would be sanctioned into oblivion. Indeed, U.S. sanctions are powerful enough to destroy the economies of relatively small countries, such as the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, Cuba, or Venezuela. However, as Norton noted, Russia, and especially China, are simply “too big to sanction.”
Join us for a fantastic conversation where Ben Norton stitches together the fabric of the world’s top political news stories, allowing us to see the big picture.
Support the show
MintPress News is a fiercely independent. You can support us by becoming a member on Patreon, bookmarking and whitelisting us, and by subscribing to our social media channels, including Twitch, YouTube, Twitter and Instagram.
Subscribe to MintCast on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and SoundCloud.
Also, be sure to check out the new Behind the Headlines channel on YouTube and subscribe to rapper Lowkey’s new video interview/podcast series, The Watchdog.
It sometimes feels like the world is on the brink of war. Israel has just escalated the conflict in the Middle East with a massive attack on Lebanon, implanting bombs in hundreds of pagers and other electronic devices, killing many and injuring thousands.
Around the world, the action has been condemned as an act of terror.
Today’s guest, Scott Ritter, unequivocally denounced the move. “This is something that is unjustifiable under any circumstances. There is no element of the law of war that would allow this kind of indiscriminate attack,” he said. Ritter is a former United States Corps Intelligence Officer and UN Weapons Inspector in Iraq. He is an author and a geopolitical analyst, whose work you can find at ScottRitter.com. He has closely followed the wars in Ukraine and the Middle East.
The attack, he said, will have widespread implications, not least for Western corporations, who were caught unaware. “This is going to create a crisis of confidence among consumers that could end up costing Western companies billions of dollars,” he explained, adding:
Anybody with any shred of common sense will immediately throw away their Western-made electronic device and source one from a country such as China, where Israel is not going to be able to infiltrate and corrupt the integrity of the electronic device to achieve either intelligence collection goals or assassination [goals].”
While the Israeli military is vastly better armed and funded than Hamas, Ritter claimed that it was actually the Palestinian force that has come out on top after 12 months of fighting, stating:
Hamas right now, in my opinion, is winning this conflict. They are winning it strategically. They are paying a horrible price for it. But on October 6, nobody was talking about the creation of a Palestinian state. Today, it is on the tip of the tongue of so many people around the world. Why? Because the world has seen the truth about Israel.”
Not only that, but Israel is eating itself from within. Its military is seriously depleted; its economy has been shattered by rocket attacks, and by 12 months of war economy; and its society is beginning to fragment.
Whatever happens, it is clear that October 7 fundamentally changed the situation for Israel and Palestine forever.
Support the show
MintPress News is a fiercely independent. You can support us by becoming a member on Patreon, bookmarking and whitelisting us, and by subscribing to our social media channels, including Twitch, YouTube, Twitter and Instagram.
Subscribe to MintCast on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and SoundCloud.
Also, be sure to check out the new Behind the Headlines channel on YouTube and subscribe to rapper Lowkey’s new video interview/podcast series, The Watchdog.
No matter how bad the attack on Palestine gets, Israel seems to find a way to make it worse.
With a series of high-profile assassinations that threaten to spark a regional war, Israel has raised the stakes once again. On July 30, it targeted Hezbollah leader Fuad Shukr in Beirut. One day later, it killed Ismail Haniyeh, Hamas’ lead ceasefire negotiator, while he was in Tehran.
The killings sent shockwaves throughout the world, and both Hezbollah and Iran have vowed to respond, the former declaring that the war had entered a “new phase.” Could we be hurtling towards a wider, regional conflict?
To discuss this, MintCast host Mnar Adley is joined by Sharmine Narwani. Narwani is a Beirut-based journalist and political commentator. She is a columnist at The Cradle, a publication covering West Asia that seeks to represent millions of voices not heard in corporate Western media. Before joining The Cradle, she was a senior associate at St. Anthony’s College, Oxford.
Quoting Hezbollah Secretary-General Hassan Nasrallah, Narwani told Adley today that “Israel is crossing all kinds of red lines now,” and is acting in an increasingly “unhinged” manner, actions which fundamentally come from weakness and vulnerability. “Israel very clearly cannot fight its wars by itself. Facing just one adversary on one front, Israel required the active assistance of three Western nuclear powers and one regional Arab state (Jordan), to thwart the [recent] Iranian attack,” she said.
If Israel is indeed reliant on foreign powers, then that raises the worrying question of increased Western involvement in the region and the war. Already, NATO nations launched Operation Prosperity Guardian – an attempt to secure Red Sea shipping lines from Ansar Allah attacks.
This has largely failed, as Ansar Allah has held firm and managed to overcome incredible odds. “Yemen is the surprise of the Resistance Axis, and their unity of fronts,” Narwani said, adding:
Who would have thought that war-torn Yemen, severely depleted, with shortages of food, energy, medicines and basic supplies, without access to their ports…that they would rise up and become the star of the Axis, by just having the absolute nerve to hit the Americans, the British, the Saudis, the Emiratis, the Israelis.”
Narwani said that they have managed to do this because Yemenis do not read Western media and have, therefore, not been tamed into displaying “good behavior” toward the United States. Instead, they display an entirely different attitude.
Support the Show.
MintPress News is a fiercely independent. You can support us by becoming a member on Patreon, bookmarking and whitelisting us, and by subscribing to our social media channels, including Twitch, YouTube, Twitter and Instagram.
Subscribe to MintCast on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and SoundCloud.
Also, be sure to check out the new Behind the Headlines channel on YouTube and subscribe to rapper Lowkey’s new video interview/podcast series, The Watchdog.
It is election season once again, and that means that the world’s eyes are drawn to our corrupt two-party duopoly. With a rapidly aging Biden decaying in front of us, Donald Trump is now a heavy favorite to become Commander-in-Chief of the US empire once more.
Trump has chosen JD Vance as his running mate, a character made and financed by Silicon Valley and surveillance state billionaire Peter Thiel. It seems no matter whom you vote for, our national security state – and that of Israel – will be the winner.
Peter Thiel’s CIA-tech empire “Palantir” helped Israel develop the AI lavender system, which has been used by the Israeli military to target civilian homes and children and completely decimate the world’s largest concentration camp with precision.
However, this is not Peter Thiel's first ride in the Trump campaign as he helped bankroll Trump himself in the 2016 election and even worked in his cabinet to advance the surveillance state by collecting our data during COVID.
Despite Trump campaigning as a populist anti-establishment draining the swamp, he is the swamp, and he’s planning on overfilling his swamp with figures like Peter Thiel, who will take our technocratic surveillance state and war machine to the next level – far worse than what we say during COVID.
And who better to help us learn more about this than one of the most influential journalists of our time – Whitney Webb. She’s the contributing editor of Unlimited Hangout and the author of “One Nation Under Blackmail.” Whitney is also a former MintPress investigative journalist.
Support the Show.
MintPress News is a fiercely independent. You can support us by becoming a member on Patreon, bookmarking and whitelisting us, and by subscribing to our social media channels, including Twitch, YouTube, Twitter and Instagram.
Subscribe to MintCast on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and SoundCloud.
Also, be sure to check out the new Behind the Headlines channel on YouTube and subscribe to rapper Lowkey’s new video interview/podcast series, The Watchdog.
It is clear to at least half the world, some four billion people, that the United States is not the power that it once was… Our reputation is in tatters in the world.” That is what retired U.S. Army Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson told MintCast host Mnar Adley today.
“When you talk about history and the history of empire in particular, what you find are examples of precisely what is happening to us today,” Wilkerson added, noting, in particular, the fall of the Western Roman and Persian empires and how, after they began to teeter, their leadership started to reinforce failures in military operations, in diplomacy and foreign policy in general.
“Look at Ukraine. We are reinforcing what is clearly a defeat for NATO, Washington and London (Washington’s poodle). And yet, we are reinforcing. We are sending billions more dollars,” he said, noting that U.S. policy in Gaza and Afghanistan were similar stories.
Lawrence Wilkerson served in the Army for 31 years before joining the State Department, where he was Chief of Staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell. Yet, in recent years, he has become one of the most vocal critics of American foreign policy. Today, he is a member of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity.
The military is facing a severe recruitment crisis. Public confidence in the armed forces is at a modern low. According to a November poll, one-third of Americans would actively discourage their friends and family from military service. In 2023, the Army, Navy and Air Force all fell well short of the recruitment goals—a common occurrence in recent years. It appears Generation Z simply does not want to fight.
Wilkerson says this has led to a serious dilemma for war planners in Washington. “If the United States were to go to war with China or Russia today, we would lose badly,” he told Adley, stressing that America has neither the mobilization capacity nor the defense industrial base to defeat their largest foes, and certainly not both of them together.
In today’s interview, Adley and Wilkerson touch on many of the key geopolitical hotspots of the day, including the Israeli assault on Gaza. Wilkerson is horrified by what he has seen there and suggests that U.S. support for Israel is costing Washington dearly on the world stage.
Support the Show.
MintPress News is a fiercely independent. You can support us by becoming a member on Patreon, bookmarking and whitelisting us, and by subscribing to our social media channels, including Twitch, YouTube, Twitter and Instagram.
Subscribe to MintCast on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and SoundCloud.
Also, be sure to check out the new Behind the Headlines channel on YouTube and subscribe to rapper Lowkey’s new video interview/podcast series, The Watchdog.
Since 9/11, the United States has launched a series of attacks on sovereign nations, from Afghanistan and Iraq to Libya, Syria and beyond. These wars have left the region beleaguered and broken. But recently, as American power wanes, a new set of forces has emerged. An axis led by Iran, Syria and Yemen has emerged to counter U.S.-Israeli dominance and global giants, such as China and Russia, are increasingly being drawn into the region.
Could this lead to a new and even brighter future for West Asia?
Tim Anderson joins the show to discuss all things West Asia. Tim is a writer, academic, and director of the Center for Counter Hegemonic Studies. His latest book, “West Asia After Washington: Dismantling the Colonized Middle East,” explores this topic.
“It is quite obvious that the U.S.’ influence in this region [West Asia] is in decline,” Anderson told MintCast host Alan MacLeod, laying out several factors in said decline, including the embarrassing American withdrawal from Afghanistan, the unanimous demands from Iraq that the U.S. leave the country, the growing importance of Russia and China in the region the increasing importance of the BRICS economic bloc, the successful Russian operation to keep Assad in power in Syria; the Yemeni blockade of the Red Sea; the failure of the U.S. in Syria and the nosedive in global public opinion of the United States.
Anderson joined the show from Damascus, Syria – something that would have been nearly impossible until recently. He noted the tremendous destruction that the civil war had wrought upon the country, much of which is still occupied by the United States, Israel, and other actors. Nevertheless, despite American unilateral coercive measures (i.e., sanctions), life in the major cities is approaching normality again.
Anderson identifies Iran as a critical player in the formation of a counter-hegemonic axis. It has found allies in Syria, Lebanon, Palestine, and, crucially, China and Russia. This grand alliance of powers opposing U.S. policy in the region was something that American planners in the 1990s considered their greatest fear.
Nevertheless, a wounded animal is a dangerous one, and the U.S. is far from a spent force. And so, while American power wanes, the people of West Asia should still be on high alert.
Support the Show.
MintPress News is a fiercely independent. You can support us by becoming a member on Patreon, bookmarking and whitelisting us, and by subscribing to our social media channels, including Twitch, YouTube, Twitter and Instagram.
Subscribe to MintCast on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and SoundCloud.
Also, be sure to check out the new Behind the Headlines channel on YouTube and subscribe to rapper Lowkey’s new video interview/podcast series, The Watchdog.
In the wake of escalating tensions between Israel and Iran, MintCast brings you an exclusive interview with Seyed Mohammad Marandi, Professor of English Literature and Orientalism at the University of Tehran. Join MintPress as we delve into the unfolding events and gain insights into Iran's perspective.
As the world's attention remains fixated on the ongoing conflict in Gaza and the subsequent global student protests, focus has shifted to the broader implications of Israel's actions, particularly concerning Iran. Recently, Israel's bombing of the Iranian Embassy in Syria, followed by retaliatory drone attacks from Iran, sparked fears of further escalation. However, despite hawkish rhetoric from certain quarters, both sides seemed inclined to avoid further confrontation.
Against this backdrop, we sit down with Dr. Marandi to explore the mood in Iran amidst these turbulent times. Furthermore, we delve into the motivations behind Iran's missile strikes on Israel, shedding light on the strategic rationale behind these actions.
Moreover, Dr. Marandi addresses Iran's support for various groups across the region, including Ansar Allah in Yemen and Hezbollah in Lebanon. We examine the extent of Iran's involvement and the underlying rationale guiding its foreign policy decisions.
We revisit Dr. Marandi's recent debate with TV host Piers Morgan, highlighting the nuances of language and the implications of demonizing terminology such as "regime," offering valuable insights into the power dynamics shaping media discourse on Iran and its adversaries.
In this episode, we also explore the complexities of Iran's nuclear program and the implications of its enrichment activities in the aftermath of the United States' withdrawal from the JCPOA. Dr. Marandi also analyzes Iran's economic strategies, including its burgeoning partnerships with Russia, China, and other BRICS nations, and the potential impact on its resilience against American sanctions.
Support the Show.
MintPress News is a fiercely independent. You can support us by becoming a member on Patreon, bookmarking and whitelisting us, and by subscribing to our social media channels, including Twitch, YouTube, Twitter and Instagram.
Subscribe to MintCast on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and SoundCloud.
Also, be sure to check out the new Behind the Headlines channel on YouTube and subscribe to rapper Lowkey’s new video interview/podcast series, The Watchdog.
Gaza is the “key issue of our era,” Green Party presidential hopeful Jill Stein told the MintCast today. “Every international law in the books is being broken,” she said, “This is not something that began on October 7. This is the continuation of ethnic cleansing and displacement that began in 1947 and 1948 with the displacement of 750,000 people.”
While Stein condemned Israel for its actions, she placed ultimate responsibility for much of the violence on Washington, telling MintCast host Mnar Adley that:
Quite simply, Joe Biden needs to pick up the phone and tell Israel to cease and desist from this war being conducted on Gaza, the blockade, the use of starvation as a weapon, the total violation of international law and the conduct of a genocide, which is going on. There is enormous agency that the United States has here: we are paying for this. We are supplying 80% of the weapons [to Israel]!”A physician by trade, Stein has been involved in the Green movement for decades. She first ran for office in 2002, attempting to become the governor of her native Massachusetts. In 2012 and 2016, she was selected as the Green Party’s presidential candidate. Running against Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton in 2016, she received over 1% of the national vote. She is currently the overwhelming favorite to represent the Green Party in the 2024 presidential election.
Congress, Stein noted, has just approved $3.8 billion in aid to Israel, with another $17 billion pending for the purpose of “not only continu[ing] its genocide but to expand its wars in the Middle East.”
Global public opinion is increasingly turning against the U.S., Stein warned, turning both Washington and Israel into “pariahs.” Even inside the United States, recent polling shows that a majority of Democratic voters consider Israeli actions to constitute genocide. And President Biden continues to offer unconditional support.
This, it seems, is pushing millions of voters to consider the Green Party as an alternative. Stein described the Democratic establishment as in a state of “panic” over the “widespread revolt” among its voter base, which could see the party’s chances of winning elections destroyed. For that reason, she said, they are fielding “an army of corporate lawyers to try to dirty trick us, to find little technicalities to throw us off the ballot.”
This is not a new phenomenon, as the Green Party has long dealt with the Democrats’ attempts to suppress them. However, what has changed, Stein said, is the party’s willingness to announce their intentions to limit democracy open
Support the show
MintPress News is a fiercely independent. You can support us by becoming a member on Patreon, bookmarking and whitelisting us, and by subscribing to our social media channels, including Twitch, YouTube, Twitter and Instagram.
Subscribe to MintCast on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and SoundCloud.
Also, be sure to check out the new Behind the Headlines channel on YouTube and subscribe to rapper Lowkey’s new video interview/podcast series, The Watchdog.
Haiti is in crisis. As armed groups come together and storm the island nation’s institutions, leading to mass prison breaks, U.S.-backed Prime Minister Ariel Henry – who was abroad at the time, desperately trying to negotiate some kind of foreign intervention – has resigned.
Henry’s departure has left a power vacuum on the island. Will an alliance of armed groups seize power in a revolution? Will factions of the old government hang on? Or will the United States intervene to reassert control over the Caribbean nation?
On today’s MintCast, Jake Johnston joins Alan MacLeod to discuss the turbulent situation in Haiti. Johnston is Senior Research Associate at the Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR) in Washington, D.C. He is the lead author for CEPR’s Haiti: Relief and Reconstruction Watch blog and author of the book, “Aid State: Elite Panic, Disaster Capitalism, and the Battle to Control Haiti.”
Henry, Johnston said, has faced a “legitimacy crisis from day one.” Firstly, he was named prime minister in July 2021, just two days before the assassination of dictatorial president Jovenel Moïse. Secondly, many Haitians have never accepted the way he came to rule, either.
Many in the West are now openly calling for another U.S.-led intervention on the Caribbean island nation. “This time, Haiti really is on the brink. The US and UN must act to restore order,” wrote the influential think tank Chatham House. Meanwhile, The Washington Post called for a more “robust” and “broader” intervention than the one the UN has suggested, which could see American boots on the ground for the third time in 30 years.
But far from paying debts to Haitians, the current government in Washington D.C. is concentrating on stopping Haitian immigration and is reportedly even considering using its notorious detention center at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, to lock up Haitian migrants and refugees.
The United States has an extremely long history of torturing Haiti. From refusing to recognize its independence for decades to invading and occupying it for two decades in the early twentieth century to supporting dictators and organizing coups on the island, Haiti’s current predicament is, in no small part, down to Washington.
Today, MacLeod and Johnston discuss the history, present and future of American imperialism in Haiti and what Haiti’s future
Support the show
MintPress News is a fiercely independent. You can support us by becoming a member on Patreon, bookmarking and whitelisting us, and by subscribing to our social media channels, including Twitch, YouTube, Twitter and Instagram.
Subscribe to MintCast on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and SoundCloud.
Also, be sure to check out the new Behind the Headlines channel on YouTube and subscribe to rapper Lowkey’s new video interview/podcast series, The Watchdog.
One week after Aaron Bushnell set himself on fire in an extreme act of Protest for Palestine – the world has been awe-struck by his galvanizing act of courage, with his last words being Free Palestine. Across the world, including in Yemen and Gaza, Bushnell is being memorialized as a martyr for Palestine as Israel continues its genocide in Gaza that has left over 30,000 people dead.
His protest was not only moving but stood in stark contrast to the empty rhetoric given by so-called liberal politicians who've done very little to stop Israel from continuing its war on civilians. Bushnell was horrified not only by Israel’s actions but also by his own air force. It was recently revealed that Bushnell had classified information about the U.S. Air Force aiding Israel in bombing Gaza.
Yet media searches of Bushnell’s name produce headlines and articles framing his protest as a mental health issue, inferring that he may have been suicidal. YouTube even includes “suicide hotline” messages under videos discussing Bushnell.
So, who was Aaron Bushnell, and how was his extreme act of protest actually in line with a long history of active military servicemembers who had a conscious awakening during their service, including in the Vietnam War era? To talk more about this, we are joined by Mike Prysner, a former Iraq war veteran turned antiwar activist and organizer. Prysner is also a producer and journalist with the Empire Files. He openly calls on military members to refuse to serve in the U.S. military and draws attention to the global class war.
Support the show
MintPress News is a fiercely independent. You can support us by becoming a member on Patreon, bookmarking and whitelisting us, and by subscribing to our social media channels, including Twitch, YouTube, Twitter and Instagram.
Subscribe to MintCast on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and SoundCloud.
Also, be sure to check out the new Behind the Headlines channel on YouTube and subscribe to rapper Lowkey’s new video interview/podcast series, The Watchdog.
Even as Israel turns Gaza into dust, few Western celebrities have dared to raise their voices against the genocide – and many have even supported it. One notable exception to this are the Hadids. The family of Palestinian-American fashion designers, influencers and models have been using their considerable platforms to bring attention to the slaughter and to call on the world to act to save innocent civilians. Today, Alana Hadid joins MintCast host Mnar Adley for a frank and insightful discussion about Israel, Palestine, and the world of entertainment.
The family has hundreds of millions of followers on social media and can reach vast sections of the public, particularly young people. This is precisely why Israel fears them so much and has constantly lashed out at them. Israeli soldiers have dedicated missiles they are dropping on Palestine to the Hadids. Images show one that reads, "to [the] Hadid family Mohamed, Bella & Gigi from Israel."
In the wake of the October 7 Hamas attack, the official Instagram account for the state of Israel attacked Gigi Hadid, claiming that she was "just fine with turning a blind eye to Jewish babies being butchered" – likely a reference to the now debunked "40 beheaded babies" story that was circulating at the time. And Israeli national security minister Itamar Ben-Gvir denounced Bella Hadid as an "Israel hater." That senior Israeli officials feel the need to go out of their way to go after a family of fashionistas says a great deal about how insecure they feel their position is.
Alana Hadid is a celebrated fashion designer and influencer who has collaborated with many of the world's most well-known models and brands. Last year, she followed in her younger siblings' footsteps by debuting as a model at Copenhagen Fashion Week.
Today, she joins Mnar Adley to discuss the ongoing attacks against Palestine, her own family's history with displacement from their homes, and what it is like to speak out for justice when so many are staying silent.
Don't miss this episode of the MintCast, and remember to subscribe on whichever platform you view us on.
Support the show
MintPress News is a fiercely independent. You can support us by becoming a member on Patreon, bookmarking and whitelisting us, and by subscribing to our social media channels, including Twitch, YouTube, Twitter and Instagram.
Subscribe to MintCast on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and SoundCloud.
Also, be sure to check out the new Behind the Headlines channel on YouTube and subscribe to rapper Lowkey’s new video interview/podcast series, The Watchdog.
For all of his power and prestige, Bill Gates is rarely scrutinized in our media. The Seattle native has been careful to cultivate an image of a well-meaning nerd who uses his wealth for good. Our guest today on the “MintCast” is an exception to that rule, being one of the few investigative journalists to critically examine Gates’ power and influence. Tim Schwab is an award-winning investigative journalist based in Washington, D.C. His reporting has been published in outlets such as The Nation, The Columbia Journalism Review, The Baffler and Jacobin magazine. His latest book, “The Bill Gates Problem: Reckoning with the Myth of the Good Billionaire,” was published in November.
Today, Schwab joins “MintCast” co-host Alan MacLeod to discuss Gates’ origin story, how he uses his enormous wealth to negatively influence public health and education policy, his connections to disgraced child trafficker Jeffrey Epstein, and to ponder whether there is ever such a thing as a good billionaire.
Gates’ influence on health policy became evident during the COVID-19 pandemic, when he used his funding connections to Oxford University to pressure the institution into their groundbreaking vaccine, telling them that only by partnering with a private corporation could they achieve their goals. Almost as soon as Oxford partnered with AstraZeneca, the latter announced that they would fall dramatically short of the vaccine production figures they had promised, leading to a massive dearth of vaccines for people worldwide, causing untold suffering.
Few know about Gates’ negative influence on global health, however, partially because the media rarely report on it. This is down in no small part to the hundreds of millions of dollars he and his foundation have lavished upon newsrooms across the United States and around the world. Gates is a major funder of many of the most well-known and influential outlets globally, including The New York Times, CNN, NBC, The Atlantic, NPR, PBS, the BBC, Al-Jazeera, El País and Le Monde.
Support the show
MintPress News is a fiercely independent. You can support us by becoming a member on Patreon, bookmarking and whitelisting us, and by subscribing to our social media channels, including Twitch, YouTube, Twitter and Instagram.
Subscribe to MintCast on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and SoundCloud.
Also, be sure to check out the new Behind the Headlines channel on YouTube and subscribe to rapper Lowkey’s new video interview/podcast series, The Watchdog.
The United States and the United Kingdom recently carried out their eighth round of strikes against targets in Yemen that they claim are being used by Yemen’s Ansar Allah – known in the West as the Houthis – to threaten maritime navigation in the Red Sea.
Since Israel began its deadly incursion into Gaza on October 7 of last year, Ansar Allah has carried out a de facto campaign of targeted sanctions against Israeli economic interests, attacking ships traveling through the Red Sea that it says are tied to Israel. The operation stands out in the region, as neighboring Arab countries have largely stayed out of the fray, if not directly supported Israel’s bloody campaign.
While Ansar Allah has been much discussed (or, more accurately, denounced) in Western media, they have rarely been allowed to talk for themselves. Joining the MintCast today to discuss the blockade and Yemen’s escalating tensions with the United States is Mohammed al-Bukhaiti, a senior political official and spokesperson for Ansar Allah. Bukhaiti has held his position since 2014, when the failed U.S.-backed Saudi campaign to dislodge Ansar Allah from power began.
The human cost of the U.S.-Saudi campaign has been enormous. More than 400,000 people are thought to have been killed, and tens of millions of people lost their access to food, shelter and medical treatment in what the United Nations consistently called “the world’s worst humanitarian crisis.” A 2021 MintPress investigation found that the United States had supplied Saudi Arabia with at least $28.4 billion worth of weapons and provided diplomatic support for the onslaught.
Ansar Allah officials have repeatedly stated that the goal of their blockade is to pressure Israel into halting its assault on the besieged Gaza Strip, a deadly campaign that has claimed the lives of well over 25,000 people and has left over 63,000 injured, most of them women and children.
Ansar Allah says that their blockade against Israeli interests is working, and indeed, major ocean carriers have suspended Red Sea and Suez Canal transport, instead sailing around Africa, creating significant delays and supply bottlenecks and costing the Israeli economy billions.
When asked by reporters if U.S. strikes on Yemen were effective, President Biden responded by stating: “When you say ‘working,’ are they stopping the Houthis? No. Are they going to continue? Yes.”
Support the show
MintPress News is a fiercely independent. You can support us by becoming a member on Patreon, bookmarking and whitelisting us, and by subscribing to our social media channels, including Twitch, YouTube, Twitter and Instagram.
Subscribe to MintCast on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and SoundCloud.
Also, be sure to check out the new Behind the Headlines channel on YouTube and subscribe to rapper Lowkey’s new video interview/podcast series, The Watchdog.
As China continues rising and the U.S. attempts to dominate the world, Northeast Asia becomes an increasingly crucial battleground. The United States is trying to encircle China with a network of hundreds of military bases while building a trilateral military alliance with South Korea and Japan. But many in those countries want to be free of U.S. domination.
Our guest today is Tim Shorrock, a writer and commentator who has covered the region since the 1970s. Growing up in Japan, Tim has covered Korea for The Nation magazine since 1983. His writing can also be found on his personal website, TimShorrock.com.
While Japan is often presented as a model democracy and a stable society with low rates of crime and inequality, beneath the surface, a different story can also be told. The U.S. has occupied the island nation since the end of the Second World War, with more than 54,000 troops stationed across 120 military bases. Washington also heavily interfered in Japanese politics, funding and supporting the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), which has remained in power almost uninterrupted since the 1950s. In turn, the LDP allows the U.S. military to do what it likes in Japan.
“It is difficult to call a country sovereign when another country’s military has control over its airspace,” he added.
Likewise, South Korea is often presented as a modern, efficient, “good” nation instead of an authoritarian “bad” North Korea. But here again, the reality is considerably murkier. For much of its history, the South was ruled by a brutal military dictatorship that massacred its progressive opponents, ushering in a climate of fear across the country.
While the dictatorship has gone, many of its anti-democratic laws remain. One is the National Security Law, which effectively allows the government to prosecute any left-wing political opponents (including human rights activists or unionists) under the premise that they are in league with the Communist North.
And like Japan, South Korea was occupied by the United States, which maintains tens of thousands of troops there to this day. The U.S. presence is a major factor hindering the possibility of Korean unification. As Shorrock told MintCast host Alan MacLeod:
The U.S. has always been against unification. They wanted the southern part of Korea to be part of their empire and linked up with Japan. That is what this trilateral alliance is all about maintaining U.S. forces there, basically forever.”
Support the show
MintPress News is a fiercely independent. You can support us by becoming a member on Patreon, bookmarking and whitelisting us, and by subscribing to our social media channels, including Twitch, YouTube, Twitter and Instagram.
Subscribe to MintCast on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and SoundCloud.
Also, be sure to check out the new Behind the Headlines channel on YouTube and subscribe to rapper Lowkey’s new video interview/podcast series, The Watchdog.
In the wake of the October 7 assault, more than 700 celebrities signed an open letter pledging support to the government of Israel. On the other hand, the hip-hop community has displayed solidarity with Gaza, with over 600 artists joining the Musicians for Palestine movement.
Joining MintCast host Alan MacLeod today to talk about Gaza and the music industry is Immortal Technique. Immortal Technique is an independent rapper and activist widely regarded as one of his generation's most respected and gifted artists. He has used his platforms on social media to constantly speak out about the situation and educate his huge audience about colonialism, capitalism and imperialism. You can follow him on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and YouTube.
Immortal Technique was keen to see the violence in Gaza as part of a bigger picture. “It is a continuation of the political aspirations of not just the United States, but [also] NATO,” he said. Israel has, for many decades, served as the United States’ local cop on the beat, an extension of the U.S. empire, hence the unwavering support in Washington D.C.
“There are some beliefs among revolutionaries and the left that need to be challenged,” the Peruvian-born MC told MacLeod today. One of them is the anti-Semitic trope that Israel pulls the strings in the U.S. “In reality,” he said, “it is the United States of America that is pulling all the strings for Israel. The United States uses the government of Israel to do the types of things that it cannot do.”
Ultimately, though, Immortal Technique argued that Washington is not making ordinary Israelis safer. “The United States cannot really protect Israel; it can only sell them weapons to brutalize their neighbors,” he said.
The pair discussed the huge pressures on artists in the entertainment industry to toe the line on Israel and the penalties that occur if they speak out.
Luckily for Immortal Technique, his status as an independent musician with no corporate bosses means he can speak freely. As he explained:
If you take the stairs and you fall down, you only fall down a flight. But if you take the elevator and the cable snaps, you are going to the bottom, motherfucker. You hear me? And that’s the difference between independence and being in the mainstream.”
Support the show
MintPress News is a fiercely independent. You can support us by becoming a member on Patreon, bookmarking and whitelisting us, and by subscribing to our social media channels, including Twitch, YouTube, Twitter and Instagram.
Subscribe to MintCast on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and SoundCloud.
Also, be sure to check out the new Behind the Headlines channel on YouTube and subscribe to rapper Lowkey’s new video interview/podcast series, The Watchdog.
There is no doubt about it: China is rising. Whether it sparks hope and interest or fear and worry, it is impossible to ignore the country’s rapid economic and social transformation. Just a few decades ago, the words “made in China” were a synonym for bad quality junk. But today, China leads the world in all manner of high-tech industries, including photovoltaic cells, semiconductors, 5G communications technologies, and electric vehicles.
Joining “MintCast” host today is someone who knows China extremely well. John Ross is an economist and a senior fellow at the Chongyang Institute for Financial Studies of the Renmin University of China. As far back as 1992, he accurately predicted the failure of economic reform in Russia and Eastern Europe and its success in China. He is the author of the book, “China’s Great Road: Lessons for Marxist Theory and Socialist Practices.” He writes on Chinese politics and economics on his website, “Learning From China.”
While many in the West take a very dim view of China, Ross is far more positive, telling MacLeod that China has seen the highest sustained economic growth of any country in world history. “People don’t understand the scale of China’s success, and they still don’t understand what it means, therefore, in the transformation of the lives of ordinary Chinese people,” he said.
Few in the Western media landscape would agree with Ross’ position. Some might acknowledge China’s rapid and remarkable transformation, but many are predicting that it is now entering a permanent slump or even an economic meltdown due to a property crash.
Ross brushed off these concerns. “These articles are a farce,” he said, suggesting that a good course of action for understanding the truth about China is to “Read ‘The Economist’ and assume that the opposite is going to take place.” He also noted that the current trade war with China has nothing to do with human rights, the rules-based international order, or any other buzzword the United States wishes to use. In fact, he argued, the United States is attempting to throttle China’s economy because it cannot effectively boost or speed up its economy.
From there, MacLeod and Ross also talked about Chinese rivalry with the United States, the high-tech trade war going on, the situation in Taiwan and the threat of a potential nuclear conflict between the superpowers.
Support the show
MintPress News is a fiercely independent. You can support us by becoming a member on Patreon, bookmarking and whitelisting us, and by subscribing to our social media channels, including Twitch, YouTube, Twitter and Instagram.
Subscribe to MintCast on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and SoundCloud.
Also, be sure to check out the new Behind the Headlines channel on YouTube and subscribe to rapper Lowkey’s new video interview/podcast series, The Watchdog.
America is addicted to war. But its citizens rarely see the brutal realities of the U.S. military-industrial complex up close. That is because our pliant media hides the carnage from the public, refusing to report on the victims of the war machine, and uses euphemisms like “surgical strikes” and “enhanced interrogation techniques” to mask the barbarity meted out by Washington around the world.
A recent study from the Costs of War Project at Brown University found that the post-9/11 wars have been responsible for some 4.5 million deaths worldwide, with at least 38 million also displaced from their homes.
Our guest today has literally written the book on how the harsh realities of America’s global empire are blocked from our views. Norman Solomon is a journalist, activist and media critic who co-founded activism website RootsAction.Org. He is the author of the new book, “War Made Invisible: How America Hides the Human Toll of Its Military Machine,” which has been endorsed by a wide range of academics and public figures, from Daniel Ellsberg, Noam Chomsky and Medea Benjamin to Naomi Klein and Amy Goodman.
Solomon contended that, while the United States has suffered serious military setbacks and embarrassments in the 21st century, the military-industrial complex driving the war machine has gone from strength to strength, telling “MintCast” host Alan MacLeod that:
“Raytheon, Boeing and other military contractors never lose a war. It is always extremely profitable [for them]. But in terms of geopolitical positioning, it is very difficult to maintain an empire in decline, which is not a bad description of the United States in the last decades.”While the U.S.’ “forever wars” in West Asia might finally be dying down, tensions with Russia and China are being consciously ramped up in Washington, leading to an extremely dangerous standoff against two nuclear-armed nations. Russia and China have, between them, thousands of nuclear warheads, and a conflict with either, Solomon told MacLeod, could end the world. As he said:
“The U.S. is on a collision course with sanity around the survival of humanity in the nuclear age, ginning up [passions] rather than engaging in diplomacy over the conflict in Ukraine, and the consequences, to put it mildly, are not only horrific in the present, but potentially omnicidal.”
Support the show
MintPress News is a fiercely independent. You can support us by becoming a member on Patreon, bookmarking and whitelisting us, and by subscribing to our social media channels, including Twitch, YouTube, Twitter and Instagram.
Subscribe to MintCast on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and SoundCloud.
Also, be sure to check out the new Behind the Headlines channel on YouTube and subscribe to rapper Lowkey’s new video interview/podcast series, The Watchdog.
South of the border, an entire region is rising, electing radical governments and moving towards integration and genuine independence.
Today, “MintPress News” speaks to Ollie Vargas about Latin America and just what is going on in the region President Joe Biden called the U.S.’ “front yard.” Ollie Vargas is an award-winning journalist based in Bolivia. He is the co-founder of “Kawsachun News,” an outlet reporting in the English language on Bolivia and Latin America. He has also contributed to “MintPress.”
Key to the latest drive towards Latin America has been the role of Brazil and, in particular, President Lula da Silva, who has taken it upon himself to lead the Global South to take a more active role in world politics.
Brazil is currently the only Latin American member of the BRICS economic bloc. However, Mexico, Venezuela, Argentina, Cuba, Nicaragua and a host of other countries in the region have expressed interest in joining, which could turn the tables and provide balance to the U.S. “rules-based international order.”
Another key figure providing pushback to American dominance of Latin America is Mexican president Andrés Manuel López Obrador. AMLO, as he is known, has refused to kowtow to Washington. Indeed, at President Biden’s Summit for Democracy in March, he described the U.S. as nothing more than an “oligarch with a façade of democracy.”
AMLO has proven very popular in Mexico, thanks to his pro-people policies. These include massively raising the minimum wage and state pensions, allowing tens of millions to live in dignity. All the while, he has kept inflation low. He holds a televised press conference every morning, in which he talks directly with the people. As Vargas put it, “While previous leaders stood above the population, AMLO stands with the people.”
AMLO stands, in Vargas’ opinion, in contrast to Chilean President Gabriel Boric. Heralded as a new kind of progressive at the time of his election, Boric has failed to maintain his popularity. Vargas explained that, while Boric has some superficially radical positions, he has changed little about the day-to-day existence of the ordinary people.
Vargas also talks about the impact of the Russia-Ukraine war on Latin America, about the upcoming elections in Ecuador, and what it was like reporting under the dictatorshSupport the showMintPress News is a fiercely independent. You can support us by becoming a member on Patreon, bookmarking and whitelisting us, and by subscribing to our social media channels, including Twitch, YouTube, Twitter and Instagram.
Subscribe to MintCast on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and SoundCloud.
Also, be sure to check out the new Behind the Headlines channel on YouTube and subscribe to rapper Lowkey’s new video interview/podcast series, The Watchdog.
Have you ever wondered just how much of your hard-earned tax dollars go to funding our bloated war machine? On today’s episode of “The MintCast,” Lindsay Koshgarian lays out the staggering expense that American taxpayers fork out each year to keep the U.S. empire going.
“The average person is paying over $2300 per year for our military, plus another $700 for veterans’ [benefits]. So that’s over $3000. To put that in some other perspective, that’s more than twice what the median rent is for a two-bedroom apartment is in this country... It’s a really significant expense for individual taxpayers,” she told “Mintcast” co-host Alan MacLeod.
Lindsay Koshgarian is the Program Director of the National Priorities Project at the Institute for Policy Studies. Her work and commentary have been featured in “NPR,” the “BBC,” “CNN” and “The Nation,” among others.
Not only does the United States spend vastly more than any other country in the world on its military, the federal budget continues to become increasingly militarized. For the financial year 2023, $1.1 trillion of the $1.8 trillion total went to purchasing weapons or on militarizing the police or prison systems.
If you include veterans’ benefits, then the government spends more on war than anything else, even healthcare. More than $1000 of the average American’s taxes go to Pentagon contractors – four times as much as is spent on K-12 education.
Koshgarian’s report, “Tax Day 2023: Where Your 2022 Tax Dollars Went,” even notes that weapons giant Lockheed Martin received $106 per American taxpayer this year. This is compared to just $11 on anti-homeless projects or around $6 to develop renewable energy.
The National Priorities Project has proposed a modest spending cut to the military, bringing the budget down to 2018 levels. With that $100 billion saving, they calculate that the U.S. could:
- Provide free tuition for 2 out of 3 public college students in the U.S.
- Send every household in the U.S. a $700 check to help offset the effects of inflation
- Hire 890,000 Registered Nurses to address shortages
- Cover medical care for 7 million veterans, or:
- Triple current enrollment in Head Start, from 1 million children and families to 3 million.
Support the showMintPress News is a fiercely independent. You can support us by becoming a member on Patreon, bookmarking and whitelisting us, and by subscribing to our social media channels, including Twitch, YouTube, Twitter and Instagram.
Subscribe to MintCast on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and SoundCloud.
Also, be sure to check out the new Behind the Headlines channel on YouTube and subscribe to rapper Lowkey’s new video interview/podcast series, The Watchdog.
Americans want change. A December poll found that only 38% of the country is satisfied with the way the political system is working, with nearly two-thirds expressing their discontent. Despite this, it appears that very little change is on the horizon; the 2024 election is looking increasingly likely that the two parties will select aging relics in Joe Biden and Donald Trump as their candidates. In this situation, half of Americans say they would consider voting for a third party, despite the clear drawbacks to this in the U.S.’ two-party duopoly.
One candidate who could shake up this cozy system is activist and public intellectual Dr. Cornel West. West’s decades of activism and his natural charisma and speaking abilities could draw large numbers to his message, leaving many in Washington – especially Democrats – worried.
West has declared his intention to be the Green Party’s presidential candidate for 2024. Here to speak with us today about Dr. West, the Green Party, and the state of U.S. politics is West’s campaign manager, Dr. Jill Stein.
A physician by trade, Stein has been involved in the Green movement for decades. She first ran for office in 2002, attempting to become the governor of her native Massachusetts. In 2012 and 2016, she was selected as the Green Party’s presidential candidate.
Democrat-aligned media are already decrying West’s run as a sideshow and as something that will ensure a Republican will be elected in 2024. “The Democrats absolutely do fear [West]. And they should!” Stein told MacLeod, noting that support for the Democratic Party is waning and that there are now as many independent voters as Republicans and Democrats put together:
There’s a huge block that doesn’t vote. It’s almost 40%. And who is it? It is communities of color, young people, low-income people, and communities who have basically been thrown under the bus. And that is exactly who Dr. West speaks to. And those are the demographics who are wildly excited about his race. So we could see voting really change.”
Support the showMintPress News is a fiercely independent. You can support us by becoming a member on Patreon, bookmarking and whitelisting us, and by subscribing to our social media channels, including Twitch, YouTube, Twitter and Instagram.
Subscribe to MintCast on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and SoundCloud.
Also, be sure to check out the new Behind the Headlines channel on YouTube and subscribe to rapper Lowkey’s new video interview/podcast series, The Watchdog.
Somebody blew up the Nord Stream II pipeline – that much is certain. Yet, since September last year, when the incident occurred, no one has come forward to take responsibility, and the attack has become the subject of intense international debate.
Our guest on “MintCast” is Bryce Greene, a writer, journalist, activist and media critic who has covered the issue extensively in outlets such as “Fairness And Accuracy in Reporting.” Earlier this month, Bryce was invited to speak at the United Nations Security Council to shed light on who is likeliest to have been behind the attack. His full remarks can be read and seen here.
Greene was highly critical of the press coverage of the event, telling “MintCast” host Alan MacLeod that the media seem “almost completely incapable of examining the facts in an objective and dispassionate manner.” While the press is happy to denounce Russia for the attack, despite the lack of concrete evidence, Greene said they have, in effect, enforced an “intellectual no-fly zone around entertaining the other obvious suspects” – i.e., the United States.
Certainly, the U.S. had a lot to gain from ending Nord Stream. The attack has pushed Europe into the arms of the United States, forcing them to buy expensive American liquified natural gas rather than cheap Russian energy. Before the attack, Undersecretary of State Victoria Nuland told the press: “If Russia invades, one way or another, Nord Stream 2 Will. Not. Move. Forward.” President Biden made similar remarks. And after the incident, Secretary of State Anthony Blinken seemed delighted, calling it a “tremendous opportunity” for the U.S.
Therefore, it came as little surprise to many when legendary investigative journalist Seymour Hersh released an article claiming that U.S. Navy divers were behind the attack and that President Biden himself had ordered the pipeline be destroyed. Hersh’s claims have largely been ignored in the mainstream press, however. A MintPress study of the 20 largest and most influential U.S. news outlets found only four mentions of Hersh’s claims in the week after his report made worldwide headlines.
Support the showMintPress News is a fiercely independent. You can support us by becoming a member on Patreon, bookmarking and whitelisting us, and by subscribing to our social media channels, including Twitch, YouTube, Twitter and Instagram.
Subscribe to MintCast on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and SoundCloud.
Also, be sure to check out the new Behind the Headlines channel on YouTube and subscribe to rapper Lowkey’s new video interview/podcast series, The Watchdog.
As the war in Ukraine continues to take lives, many people worldwide question its legitimacy and demand an end to the violence. Yet even as calls to cease the conflict grow, the Biden administration has announced that it will up the ante by sending cluster munitions to Ukraine – a weapon banned by more than 100 countries worldwide.
Today’s guest, Medea Benjamin, an anti-war activist and co-founder of the peace group CODEPINK, was shocked by the decision. “The world came together in 2008 to ban cluster munitions for a real reason,” she told “MintCast” host Alan MacLeod. “And that is because of all the unsuspecting children and farmers who step on these bombs and whose limbs are blown off,” she added, noting that wherever these weapons have been used, the consequences and the destruction last for decades.“This is just an example of the desperation of the Biden administration to want to see some success in the Ukraine counteroffensive, which isn’t going anywhere,” she concluded.
Benjamin recently returned from a trip to Ukraine, where she survived a Russian air raid attack on Lviv. Yet arguably more concerning than the destruction was the mentality of many she met. As she told MacLeod:
“The impression I got talking to a number of people in Ukraine is that they are being fed a daily diet – both from the media and from their own politicians – that this war is going in their favor, that this war is winnable (meaning they can get back Crimea and every inch of the Donbas, and they should.) So, I feel that, for many of them, they were really divorced from the reality of the fighting and Russia’s ability to keep this battle going.”
From there, the pair also talked about the U.S. buildup of troops around China, sanctions on Cuba, and why recent Biden-appointee Elliott Abrams is the neocon par excellence. According to Benjamin, Abrams should be tried for war crimes rather than serve in positions affecting U.S. government policy.
MintPress has launched its annual funding drive. Faced with algorithmic censorship, arrests, financial sanctions and more, it is crucial that our readers and viewers support us.
Support the showMintPress News is a fiercely independent. You can support us by becoming a member on Patreon, bookmarking and whitelisting us, and by subscribing to our social media channels, including Twitch, YouTube, Twitter and Instagram.
Subscribe to MintCast on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and SoundCloud.
Also, be sure to check out the new Behind the Headlines channel on YouTube and subscribe to rapper Lowkey’s new video interview/podcast series, The Watchdog.
MintPress speaks to James Rehwald. Thanks to his innovative comedy and razor-sharp wit, James has amassed hundreds of thousands of followers across social media platforms, his viral, darkly satirical videos having been seen by tens of millions of people worldwide.
James constantly takes aim at the entire power structure to produce explicitly anti-imperialist, radical shorts that cut deep. A frequent target of his is the CIA. "The CIA are basically gangsters for American capitalism,” he told Alan MacLeod, referencing their history of gunrunning and drug smuggling. “I love the new CIA ads. They really lean into identity politics. It feels like satire is dead when I watch their videos. It’s like ‘you too can join the imperialist project, toppling governments!’’ he added.
James also spoke about how he got into comedy. Growing up in a conservative household, “The Colbert Report” was a favorite of his. “Just seeing somebody do a satirical mock of the right-wing pundits that I grew up around was genius. But then, of course, it is sad when you see a lot of these guys who don’t point the target at Democrats. There’s no criticism from the left, except from the very obvious ones,” he said.
Liberals and liberalism is another primary target of James’ content. But, he said, he treads a fine line, not wishing to be seen as a partisan hack and wanting to explicitly note that both parties are part of the same war machine.
“I always feel this pressure when I am making fun of liberals or Democrats in my videos that I gotta, in the same sentence, make fun of Republicans, just to let them know that you are [also] part of this problem!” he said. Referencing the handful of conglomerates that control mainstream media, James notes that, “These are big corporations that have their own interests, as well as advertisers that they need to make sure they’re creating a media environment that is conducive to their profits.”
Their whole model is built on ad revenue. They have to maintain relationships, as broadcasters, with advertisers. And the ones that can spend the most are the biggest companies. And you have everybody from fossil fuels, to insurance companies to whatever. The largest corporations keep these channels afloat, and they gotta play a delicate balance and not ruffle their feathers.”Still, that only leaves the lane even more free for comedians like James to make a name for themselves on social media.
Support the showMintPress News is a fiercely independent. You can support us by becoming a member on Patreon, bookmarking and whitelisting us, and by subscribing to our social media channels, including Twitch, YouTube, Twitter and Instagram.
Subscribe to MintCast on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and SoundCloud.
Also, be sure to check out the new Behind the Headlines channel on YouTube and subscribe to rapper Lowkey’s new video interview/podcast series, The Watchdog.
It ain’t easy being a YouTuber—at least, not a political one. The platform is a giant, Byzantine organization filled with secret rules and algorithms that content creators constantly fall afoul of. This is especially true for radical voices, who are incessantly shadowbanned and suppressed by the Google-owned platform.
One person who has broken through the algorithmic barriers better than almost anyone is JT Chapman, host of the Second Thought channel. Chapman makes engaging video essays about some of the most pressing issues of the day, and the quality of his work has drawn 1.6 million subscribers to his main channel. He is also the founder of the YouTube news show First Thought and the co-host of The Deprogram podcast. Today, he discusses his tips for YouTube success, climate change, the economy, and what radicals could learn from Walmart.
Having one of the world’s largest corporations (Google) own the global town square poses huge problems for freedom of speech, not least because of the company’s intimate links to the Central Intelligence Agency. Chapman has to tread a careful line on YouTube because of demonetization, age restriction, and other tactics the platform uses to suppress radical voices. All this, he says, “really disincentivizes people like me to produce radical content.” This leads many well-meaning YouTubers to just start chasing the algorithm and become “toxic little clout goblins,” he told “MintCast” host Alan MacLeod.
When asked how useful YouTube is for inspiring people and producing societal change, Chapman said,
I think investigative journalism that exposes corruption is useful in moving the needle…but on the other hand, I’d say that a large percentage of people doing what I do on platforms like YouTube really aren’t all that useful, unless we are actively driving people to get engaged in organizations and on the ground movements.”
On this episode, MacLeod and Chapman also chatted about how we could stop economic recessions entirely if we wanted to, how economies could be planned, and his tips for others wishing to make an impact online.
Support the showMintPress News is a fiercely independent. You can support us by becoming a member on Patreon, bookmarking and whitelisting us, and by subscribing to our social media channels, including Twitch, YouTube, Twitter and Instagram.
Subscribe to MintCast on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and SoundCloud.
Also, be sure to check out the new Behind the Headlines channel on YouTube and subscribe to rapper Lowkey’s new video interview/podcast series, The Watchdog.
The United States is an empire, even if its citizens don’t all realize it. That is the conclusion from historian and political scientist Aaron Good, who joins Alan MacLeod on this week’s edition of “MintCast.” Today, Good walks us through the history of how the United States came to dominate the world and the organizations it uses – especially the CIA and NATO – in order to enforce its control over the planet.
He notes that as Europe and Asia were destroying themselves in conflict, the U.S. gave the powerful business think tank, the Council on Foreign Relations, the task of planning America’s entry into World War II.
Enter the war, win it, and establish dominion over global capitalism. They are going to essentially take control of Western imperialism. It’s not stated that way, but that’s what ends up being the consensus of people at the top of the U.S. And that consensus of the U.S. as the global hegemon of capitalism worldwide is the story of our time.”
In this, the U.S. has been very effective dominating the planet for the past 75 years, although Good does later note that China’s growing role is loosening the American grip on the world. Good describes the U.S. as a “paper tiger,” explaining that:
In a sense, the U.S. is musclebound to the military, meaning that we may have all these bases and all these billions. But there are two things that the U.S. does not have the ability to do. One is actually using its nuclear arsenal because it would kill everybody. It is a non-starter.”“The other…is fielding a military. When they talk about the U.S. potentially entering a war in Ukraine. Good luck with that!... Who in the world is going to fight in some World War One-style battle?! In Iraq, the U.S. lost fewer than 10,000, and that was very unpopular. By some estimates, 400,000 have died in Ukraine. How could you possibly expect Americans or Europeans to want to die in that way?”
Today, Good and MacLeod also chat about the power and purpose of the CIA, how the United States laid the groundwork for Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and the use and misuse of the term “the deep state.”
Aaron Good is a historian and former political organizer. His book, “American Exception: Empire and the Deep State,” was published in 2022. He is also the host of the American Exception podcast, which can be found on most major podcast platforms.
Support the showMintPress News is a fiercely independent. You can support us by becoming a member on Patreon, bookmarking and whitelisting us, and by subscribing to our social media channels, including Twitch, YouTube, Twitter and Instagram.
Subscribe to MintCast on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and SoundCloud.
Also, be sure to check out the new Behind the Headlines channel on YouTube and subscribe to rapper Lowkey’s new video interview/podcast series, The Watchdog.
Last month, on his way back to Great Britain, MintPress contributor Kit Klarenberg was detained and interrogated. The investigative journalist was met at the airport by six anonymous plainclothes counter-terror officers, who seized his electronic devices, and memory cards and took his fingerprints and DNA.
Under Schedule Three, Section Four of the U.K. 2019 Counter-Terrorism and Border Act, they grilled him for over five hours, asking probing questions on everything from his opinions on the current British leadership to Vladimir Putin to 9/11.
For Klarenberg, the real reason he was being targeted had nothing to do with terrorism and everything to do with his investigative reporting that has exposed the machinations of the British state. In recent months, this has included revealing that British spies plotted to bomb the Kerch Bridge in Crimea, how the U.K. government is constructing a “secret terror army” in Ukraine, and how British intelligence seemingly worked with state broadcaster, the BBC to smear anti-war academics.
While the United Kingdom continues to enjoy a reputation for being an island of relative freedom, prosperity and democracy, Klarenberg challenged this idea, pointing to several Draconian laws passed under the guise of keeping the public safe. As he told Adley:
Britain has, for a very long time, had the most sweeping counter-terror laws in the Western world and arguably in the world. They have overturned centuries-old and hard-fought-for rights, protections and freedoms that average citizens enjoy, and have granted police sweeping and disturbingly vague powers.”
Klarenberg’s reporting has also uncovered many connections between established corporate media and the U.K. national security state, to the point where it is sometimes hard to ascertain where one ends and the other begins. As he said:
For many, the Klarenberg case seems eerily reminiscent of the treatment of another journalist forgotten by his mainstream colleagues: of Julian Assange. Assange remains confined in Belmarsh high-security prison in London while British authorities negotiate with their American counterparts on whether to send him stateside.
What is clear is that critical investigative journalism is under attack and that those who value a free press must stand together to fight against it.
Support the showMintPress News is a fiercely independent. You can support us by becoming a member on Patreon, bookmarking and whitelisting us, and by subscribing to our social media channels, including Twitch, YouTube, Twitter and Instagram.
Subscribe to MintCast on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and SoundCloud.
Also, be sure to check out the new Behind the Headlines channel on YouTube and subscribe to rapper Lowkey’s new video interview/podcast series, The Watchdog.
Amid an ongoing crisis in recruitment, the military has found a novel way of enticing teens to enlist: thirst traps. “MintCast” co-host Alan MacLeod joins Mnar Adley for an in-house edition of the podcast to describe how the military is using young teens’ horniness against them, utilizing an army of attractive women posting sexually suggestive content on social media – in effect, turning a generation of young men from simps into soldiers.
Alan MacLeod is senior staff writer and podcast producer for MintPress News. He has worked at the company since 2019. Before joining MintPress, he was an academic and freelance journalist specializing in Latin America and in analyzing media and propaganda. In recent months, he has specialized in analyzing U.S. military propaganda and exploring the national security state’s ties to big social media organizations. His latest investigation, “From Simp to Soldier: How the Military is Using E-Girls To Recruit Gen Z Into Service,” can be read exclusively at MintPress News.
Chief amongst these new Army e-girls pushing their followers to join up is 21-year-old Hailey Lujan. In recent months, Lujan’s social media profile has exploded, with the young star now boasting nearly three-quarters of a million followers on TikTok alone. In between posting highly sexually suggestive content and zany memes, however, are subtle and not-so-subtle commands to her army of loyal followers to join up. “Don’t go to college; become a farmer or a soldier instead,” she says in one recent video.
The plot thickens, however, when we look into Lujan’s background. She is a member of the Army’s psychological operations division, whose job it is to carry out online propaganda and influence operations. Despite constantly hinting that she is a “psyop” herself, Lujan strenuously denies that the Army controls her content.
MacLeod told Adley that it is almost a moot point whether the Army is actively directing Lujan, stating:
I think if you were [psychology expert and father of modern propaganda] Edward Bernays, you might say that it doesn’t really matter whether she is or isn’t being supported by the military, because, ultimately, what this is doing is getting people who look at this content – and there are millions of people watching this stuff – to associate lustfulness and horniness with joining the military. It’s literally making them horny for war.”
Support the showMintPress News is a fiercely independent. You can support us by becoming a member on Patreon, bookmarking and whitelisting us, and by subscribing to our social media channels, including Twitch, YouTube, Twitter and Instagram.
Subscribe to MintCast on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and SoundCloud.
Also, be sure to check out the new Behind the Headlines channel on YouTube and subscribe to rapper Lowkey’s new video interview/podcast series, The Watchdog.
On today's episode of the MintCast from MintPress News, Senior Staff Writer Alan MacLeod is joined by Professor Alfred de Zayas to discuss all things international law, human rights, and building a better world.
De Zayas condemns Russia's actions in Ukraine but warns that Moscow's actions were provoked by NATO. He then goes on to discuss the (il)legality of American unilateral coercive measures (i.e., sanctions), how the United States has bullied the UN for decades, calls for the UN to move its headquarters out of the U.S., and outlines what a better world order would look like.
Alfred de Zayas is a Swiss-American lawyer, academic and former high United Nations official with over 50 years experience in the field of human rights. He is the author of "Building a Just World Order," "Countering Mainstream Narratives," and his brand-new book "The Human Rights Industry."
Support the showMintPress News is a fiercely independent. You can support us by becoming a member on Patreon, bookmarking and whitelisting us, and by subscribing to our social media channels, including Twitch, YouTube, Twitter and Instagram.
Subscribe to MintCast on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and SoundCloud.
Also, be sure to check out the new Behind the Headlines channel on YouTube and subscribe to rapper Lowkey’s new video interview/podcast series, The Watchdog.
The war in Ukraine is well into its second year, and the United States is insistent on pumping billions more into the quagmire that has already seen thousands of lives lost and millions displaced.
The U.S. has already approved more than $113 billion in aid to Ukraine, most of which is weaponry. This year, President Biden has earmarked a record-breaking $842 billion on the military. Yet much of this is not even directed towards Europe but at China. Seemingly not content with turning Europe into a war zone, Washington now has its sights set on Asia.
Joining MintCast hosts Mnar Adley and Alan MacLeod to discuss Washington’s permanent drive to war is author and Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter Chris Hedges.
“[War with China] is a serious threat given the mindset of the warmongers who dominate the Washington establishment,” Hedges says before naming and shaming many of the most callous hawks in the nation. “They never go away; it doesn’t matter how wrong they are. They were, of course, all cheerleaders for the war in Iraq. But they represent those interests, and they are creations of the Washington establishment. They don’t actually know war or geopolitics,” he added.
Hedges spent nearly two decades as a foreign correspondent across the world, including in Central America, Eastern Europe and the Middle East. In 2002, he was part of a New York Times team that won a Pulitzer Prize for their coverage of the global war on terror. After publicly denouncing the Iraq War, however, he was forced out of his job. Since then, he has worked in independent media. A prolific and best-selling author, his latest book, “The Greatest Evil is War” was published last year. You can find his work at ChrisHedges.substack.com/.
America is “clearly on the decline,” Hedges told Adley and MacLeod, suggesting that:
Anyone who drives through large swathes of the United States will tell you, it is one decayed city after another. All the mechanisms of repression that were tested largely on people of color (the way the Israelis do on Gaza) have migrated back to the homeland. Militarized drones, wholesale surveillance, militarized police, we have the largest prison system in the world; [the U.S. has almost] 25% of the world’s prisoners even though we are less than 5% of the world’s population. So we are dying the same way any empire dies.”
Support the showMintPress News is a fiercely independent. You can support us by becoming a member on Patreon, bookmarking and whitelisting us, and by subscribing to our social media channels, including Twitch, YouTube, Twitter and Instagram.
Subscribe to MintCast on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and SoundCloud.
Also, be sure to check out the new Behind the Headlines channel on YouTube and subscribe to rapper Lowkey’s new video interview/podcast series, The Watchdog.
Congress recently voted against pulling American troops out of Somalia. Officially, U.S. forces number 900 and are there in an advisory role to help the government of Hassan Sheikh Mohamud combat terrorist forces such as Al-Shabab.
Yet our guest today states that U.S. boots on the ground in Somalia are doing nothing but serving as a recruiting tool for jihadists, their presence provoking widespread resentment among the people of the resource-rich but war-torn African nation.
Ann Garrison is a journalist and a contributing editor to The Black Agenda Report. You can also find her at The Grayzone and on Pacifica Radio. Her latest article, “Ilhan Omar Voted to Withdraw from Somalia, but She’s No Anti-Imperialist,” assesses the Minnesota Congresswoman’s record on opposing U.S. actions in the Horn of Africa.
Garrison notes that Washington has little interest in genuinely opposing radical jihadist groups in the region and is instead focused on maintaining control of a strategically important part of the world. Somalia sits on the Red Sea, across a narrow strait from Saudi Arabia and Yemen. Around 40% of world seaborne trade passes by its waters on the way to or from the Suez Canal. Moreover, the nation is believed to possess over 100 billion barrels of untapped offshore oil reserves. “Securing African resources is an existential imperative” for the U.S., Garrison said.
The United States has spent the past decade bullying and intimidating countries in North East Africa. From the bombing of Libya and the overthrow of Muammar Gaddafi in 2011 to its attempts to isolate Eritrea economically and politically to bombing Somalia and supporting the insurgency of the Tigrayan People’s Liberation Front against Ethiopia, Washington’s actions have led many in the region to sour on the United States altogether.
While Garrison welcomed the campaign led by Florida Republican Matt Gaetz to get everyone in Congress on record as to whether they support or oppose ending the seemingly endless war in Somalia, she cautioned that Gaetz is not a committed anti-imperialist, but a strong China hawk, and sees U.S. conflicts like the one in Somalia as a sideshow to the real showdown against Beijing.
Support the showMintPress News is a fiercely independent. You can support us by becoming a member on Patreon, bookmarking and whitelisting us, and by subscribing to our social media channels, including Twitch, YouTube, Twitter and Instagram.
Subscribe to MintCast on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and SoundCloud.
Also, be sure to check out the new Behind the Headlines channel on YouTube and subscribe to rapper Lowkey’s new video interview/podcast series, The Watchdog.
In 1999, South African anti-apartheid activist and revolutionary leader Nelson Mandela visited Gaza and said, "We know too well our freedom is not complete without the freedom of the Palestinians."
Since his death in 2013, Mandela’s unifying message of decolonization reverberated across the globe. The anti-colonial, anti-apartheid struggle that he led to end racial segregation and transform South Africa into a democratic nation has been lauded by Palestinians, who have drawn parallels between Israeli occupation and apartheid to the situation that Black South Africans faced.
Joining Mnar Adley for this week’s MintCast interview to discuss the struggle against Apartheid and the continued struggle against colonialism is Nkosi "Mandla" Mandela, who, since 2009, has been a member of the South African parliament for the African National Congress Party. He is also the grandson of Nelson Mandela.
On Wednesday, South African Minister of International Relations and Cooperation Naledi Pandor called on the International Criminal Court to issue arrest warrants for Israeli leaders responsible for Operation Shield and Arrow, last weekend’s series of airstrikes against the Gaza Strip.
Over 20 Palestinians have been killed so far since Israel began bombing the world’s largest open air prison. Entire families were killed in their sleep, including children, and several neighborhoods flattened to rubble, leaving many communities homeless.
As the world witnesses yet another massacre committed by the apartheid state, South Africa and other African nations are rising in the fight against Israel’s occupation of Palestine.
Earlier this year, the African Union asked its member states to cut scientific, cultural and even some economic ties with Israel until it reverses its colonial practices against Palestine.
Nkosi Mandela has been one of the world’s most outspoken voices against Israeli apartheid and in support of Palestinian liberation. Join us today for this informative discussion.
Support the showMintPress News is a fiercely independent. You can support us by becoming a member on Patreon, bookmarking and whitelisting us, and by subscribing to our social media channels, including Twitch, YouTube, Twitter and Instagram.
Subscribe to MintCast on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and SoundCloud.
Also, be sure to check out the new Behind the Headlines channel on YouTube and subscribe to rapper Lowkey’s new video interview/podcast series, The Watchdog.
Although corporate media inundate us with stories of Russian aggression, far fewer people are aware that the Ukrainian government itself has been using the fog of war to move against certain sectors of its own population, settle scores, and attempt to revolutionize society.
These attempts have been led by President Volodymyr Zelensky himself, who, in recent months, has banned more than ten political parties (including the main opposition bloc), made trade unions illegal, outlawed Russian language, music and culture, and proclaimed his country open for business to Western investors.
On the latest edition of the MintCast, host Mnar Adley is joined by journalist Max Blumenthal, editor-in-chief of The Grayzone, to discuss Zelensky, the war, and the consequences for Europe.
While Zelensky has been presented as a heroic figure in the West, he has also cracked down on all forms of dissent within Ukraine, even moving against religious groups he feels are not sufficiently loyal to his administration.
“They are rounding up priests in Kherson as we speak, along with members of the Jewish ultra-orthodox sect, Chabad, to stayed behind in Kherson to tend to their people, when it was Russian territory, before the Russian retreat,” Blumenthal told Adley.
While Ukrainian men in their millions are subject to being drafted into the military, others wait in fear of being targeted by the administration. Kill lists circulate online, while news of the latest politicians to be arrested spreads on social media.
Blumenthal denounced what he described as “Pinochet-style regime of disappearances, assassinations, torture, arrests of all of Zelensky’s opposition, including his most popular and prominent opponent, the leader of the Ukrainian Patriots Party, Viktor Medvedchuk.”
Chile’s General Pinochet, of course, used overwhelming violence as a tactic to force through economic measures to enrich his Western backers – measures that the population would not have accepted otherwise.
Zelensky, too, it seems, is attempting to force through waves of privatization to revolutionize the Ukrainian economy. At the same time as jetting off to the New York Stock Exchange and proclaiming that Ukraine offers the best investment opportunity since World War Two, unions have effectively been banned across the country, and communists and labor rights activists have been jailed.
Support the showMintPress News is a fiercely independent. You can support us by becoming a member on Patreon, bookmarking and whitelisting us, and by subscribing to our social media channels, including Twitch, YouTube, Twitter and Instagram.
Subscribe to MintCast on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and SoundCloud.
Also, be sure to check out the new Behind the Headlines channel on YouTube and subscribe to rapper Lowkey’s new video interview/podcast series, The Watchdog.
After witnessing the ongoing attack from a coordinated campaign to silence him, tens of thousands of people from around the world have come out in support of hip hop artist, campaigner and host of the MintPress podcast “The Watchdog,” Lowkey. An online petition addressed to music giant Spotify, demanding it refuse to buckle to pressure from the Israel lobby to remove his music from its platform, has garnered over 40,000 signatures from members of the public.
Joining the wave of support have been many of Hollywood’s biggest stars. Actors such as Mark Ruffalo, Michael Malarkey and Liam Cunningham have put their names to it, as have legendary musicians like Pink Floyd’s Roger Waters, Genesis’ Peter Gabriel and rock band Primal Scream.
Prominent political figures have also stood behind Lowkey, including HRH Princess Dana Firas of Jordan, former Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein and South African MP Nkosi Zwelivelile Mandela, the grandson of the anti-Apartheid hero Nelson Mandela. Support for Lowkey was perhaps strongest in the hip hop world, with figures such as DJ Charlie Sloth and rappers like Immortal Technique, Wretch 32 and Akala signing the petition.
MintCast host Mnar Adley speaks to Lowkey about the extraordinary outpouring of global support he has received, why his activism and relentless campaigning for a free Palestine made him a target, and the growing success of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement worldwide.
MintPress News is a fiercely independent, reader-supported outlet, with no billionaire owners or backers. You can support us by becoming a member on Patreon, bookmarking and whitelisting us, and by subscribing to our social media channels, including Twitch, YouTube, Twitter and Instagram.
Subscribe to MintCast on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and SoundCloud.
Also, be sure to check out the new Behind the Headlines channel on YouTube and subscribe to rapper Lowkey’s new video interview/podcast series, The Watchdog.
Support the show (https://www.mintpressnews.com/donations/)
In just a few short weeks, Russia’s war on Ukraine has precipitated a massive exodus of refugees. According to the United Nations, more than 4.3 million people have fled the country since February 24, the majority of them – 2.5 million – traveling west to Poland. Media across the world have closely covered the story, and shown a great deal more sympathy for the Ukrainian refugees than for others fleeing from U.S. wars in the Middle East or North Africa.
But fewer people are aware of another group that is also flooding into Poland: American soldiers. Officially, the U.S. presence has already more than doubled to 9,000 troops, most of whom are stationed near or on the Polish-Ukrainian border. The majority of these units have arrived in the last few weeks.
What is going on there? Why is the U.S. deploying thousands of troops to the edge of a warzone? And what are these units doing once they arrive? To answer these questions, the MintCast is joined by Michael Tracey, who recently returned from the Polish-Ukrainian border.
MintPress News is a fiercely independent, reader-supported outlet, with no billionaire owners or backers. You can support us by becoming a member on Patreon, bookmarking and whitelisting us, and by subscribing to our social media channels, including Twitch, YouTube, Twitter and Instagram.
Subscribe to MintCast on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and SoundCloud.
Also, be sure to check out the new Behind the Headlines channel on YouTube and subscribe to rapper Lowkey’s new video interview/podcast series, The Watchdog.
Support the show (https://www.mintpressnews.com/donations/)
It is becoming increasingly hard, it seems, to have civil conversations. Amid an increasingly polarized political climate, families and friendships are being ruined by intense disagreements. According to a CBS News/YouGov poll, the majority of Americans now believe that their political adversaries pose the greatest threat to democracy and way of life. Many now dread family occasions like Thanksgiving and Christmas because of the awkward or heated political topics that will be discussed at the dinner table.
To discuss the importance of debate, disagreement and critical thinking skills, MintPress News’ Mnar Adley and Alan MacLeod are joined today by Nolan Higdon and Mickey Huff. Nolan is a lecturer at Merrill College and the Education Department at the University of California, Santa Cruz. He is a regulator contributor to outlets such as Truthout and Counterpunch. In 2020, he published the first history of fake news, entitled “The Anatomy of Fake News: A Critical News Literacy Education.”
Support MintPress work by becoming a Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/MintPressNews
Follow MintPress News: https://twitter.com/MintPressNews
Support the show (https://www.mintpressnews.com/donations/)
Ethiopia is not a country that is on many Americans’ radar. Yet, since 2020, a brutal civil war has raged, displacing an estimated 4 million people. As the conflict continues, hawks in Washington are beginning to circle, demanding the U.S. intervene militarily.
When it comes to Ethiopia – said head of USAID Samantha Power, one of the architects of the U.S. intervention in Libya – “every option is on the table,” using a phrase that has long been understood to be a threat of war. Secretary of State Antony Blinken also refused, when directly asked, to rule out sending troops into Ethiopia.
Joining MintCast host Mnar Adley today to discuss what is going on in Ethiopia is Eugene Puryear. Eugene is a founder of and host at BreakThrough News, for which he recently traveled to Ethiopia to report from the ground. In the 2008 and 2016 U.S. elections, he was the vice-presidential candidate for the Party for Socialism and Liberation. He is also author of the book “Shackled and Chained: Mass Incarceration in Capitalist America.”
Ethiopia’s war is a conflict between the Tigrayan People’s Liberation Front (TPLF), a group that held power across the country between 1991 and 2018, and the government of Abiy Ahmed in Addis Ababa.
Between 1991 and 2018, the United States had a loyal partner in Ethiopia. However, in recent years, the country has begun to forge a more independent path. To this end, China has helped, and has quickly become Ethiopia’s major economic partner, much to the chagrin of Washington.
Ethiopians have taken to social media, popularizing the anti-intervention hashtag “#NoMore” to signal their opposition to Western involvement. Yet their voices, they claim, are being systematically silenced by big-tech giants, leaving critical voices harder to find. Could Ethiopia soon turn into another Libya?
MintPress News is a fiercely independent, reader-supported outlet, with no billionaire owners or backers. You can support us by becoming a member on Patreon, bookmarking and whitelisting us, and by subscribing to our social media channels, including Twitch, YouTube, Twitter and Instagram.
Subscribe to MintCast on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and SoundCloud.
Support the show (https://www.mintpressnews.com/donations/)
World leaders have descended upon Austrian capital Vienna to participate in the ongoing nuclear deal being negotiated primarily between the United States and Iran. Today, MintPress spoke to Dr. Seyed Mohammad Marandi, Professor of English Literature and Orientalism at the University of Tehran. Dr. Marandi is currently in Vienna as part of the Iranian delegation.
While corporate media often portray Iran as a recalcitrant pariah and the United States as a long-suffering broker in the situation, Dr. Marandi notes that it was actually the Trump administration that unilaterally walked away from the agreement. Furthermore, President Barack Obama refused to live up to his promise to remove financial sanctions against Iran. “Obama, from the very beginning, was violating the deal, the most important element of the deal, because the banking sector sanctions are the most important part of the deal,” Marandi told Mnar Adley today.
Relations between the two countries fell to a new low two years ago this month, after the Trump administration carried out a successful drone strike against General and statesman Qassem Soleimani. While then-Secretary of State Mike Pompeo insisted that Soleimani was on the verge of carrying out an attack on Americans, the Iranian leader was, in fact, in Iraq on the invitation of Prime Minister Adil Abdul-Mahdi. Abdul-Mahdi specifically asked Trump for permission to invite Soleimani to his country. Trump acquiesced, then used the opportunity to kill him via a drone strike.
In response, the Iraqi parliament passed a unanimous resolution on January 5 (with many abstentions), calling for the expulsion of all U.S. troops. Instead, the U.S. announced it would build a number of new bases on the Iranian border, ramping up the tensions. Since then, Washington has continued to pile on the pressure, increasing its deadly sanctions regime against the country.
Soleimani was best known and celebrated outside of Iran for leading the fight against ISIS in Iraq and Syria, successfully crippling their forces. The Financial Times described him as the “hero” who saved the region from Jihadists. Yet Western media largely sided with the U.S. after Trump’s decision to kill him. Suddenly, Soleimani was no longer a hero, but “the world’s no. 1 bad guy,” as CNBCput it.
The discussion also encompassed the sanctions placed on Iran by the United States and how Iran has partnered with Venezuela and other countries to help them neutralize the worst effects of economic warfare.
MintPress News is a fiercely independent, reader-supported outlet, with no billionaire owners or backers. You can support us by becoming a member on Patreon, bookmarking and whitelisting us, and by subscribing to our social media channels, including Twitch, YouTube, Twitter and Instagram.
Subscribe to MintCast on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and SoundCloud.
Support the show (https://www.mintpressnews.com/donations/)
As world leaders, celebrities, business moguls and activists alike descended on Scotland for the COP26 climate summit, behind the scenes powerful financial groups were and are attempting to rewrite the rules of international trade and to privatize nature under the guise of sustainability.
While there has been a great deal of finger pointing, the enormous and tangible changes necessary to steer the planet away from devastation are yet to appear. The world is still on course to warm 2.4°C above pre-industrial levels by the end of the century, according to a report from Climate Action Tracker. Anything above 2°C is generally considered to be catastrophic and could lead to societal collapse across the globe.
While high politics has understandably made the headlines, a cartel of international bankers is attempting to use the crisis to rewrite international capitalism for their own benefit.
Our guest today, Whitney Webb, has been monitoring these developments carefully. In an article published earlier this month, she wrote:
The most powerful private financial interests in the world, under the cover of COP26, have developed a plan to transform the global financial system by fusing with institutions like the World Bank and using them to further erode national sovereignty in the developing world."
Webb is a writer, researcher and journalist who, between 2017 and 2020, was a staff writer and senior investigative reporter for MintPress News. She currently writes at The Last American Vagabond and Unlimited Hangout. Today, she also discussed a recent article she wrote entitled “Wall Street’s Takeover of Nature Advances with Launch of New Asset Class.” Under the guise of promoting sustainability, the global financial elite are attempting to force through more privatizations of the natural world, to the point where nature itself -- the system that sustains human life -- will have a value assigned to it (and will therefore be able to be bought and sold).
Describing this as “a new way to loot,” Webb outlines how businesses could attempt to extract rents from us for the water we drink and air we breathe; a very visceral form of late-stage capitalism.
Join us today for a free-flowing conversation on these important and worrying topics.
MintPress News is a fiercely independent, reader-supported outlet, with no billionaire owners or backers. You can support us by becoming a member on Patreon, bookmarking and whitelisting us, and by subscribing to our social media channels, including Twitch, YouTube, Twitter and Instagram.
Subscribe to MintCast on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and SoundCloud.
Support the show (https://www.mintpressnews.com/donations/)
Welcome to MintCast, the official MintPress News podcast featuring dissenting voices the establishment would rather silence. Today MintCast host Mnar Adley is joined by Vanessa Beeley, an independent investigative journalist and war correspondent based in Damascus, Syria.
While the U.S. military occupies a third of Syria -- mostly in the northeast, controlling Syria's vast oil reserves and water supplies -- Syria continues to rebuild after nearly a decade of destabilization efforts by the U.S. and its proxies, who have armed rebel groups with the intention of stoking a civil war and toppling President Bashar al-Assad.
Today, the city of Daraa, which has been referred to as the cradle of the Syrian revolution, has been liberated by the Syrian Army. But, as MintPress reported nearly a decade ago, Daraa was the touchpaper lit by hardline Libyan mercenaries imported into Syria prior to 2011. These mercenaries were trained by the CIA and MI6, alongside Saudi intelligence, to hijack a small movement for economic reforms and turn it into an armed rebellion to fulfill foreign interests in the region.
In this segment of MintCast, Beeley joins us to help get us up to speed with the war that was once the focus of mainstream coverage pushing a humanitarian interventionist narrative.
MintPress News is a fiercely independent, reader-supported outlet, with no billionaire owners or backers. You can support us by becoming a member on Patreon, bookmarking and whitelisting us, and by subscribing to our social media channels, including Twitch, YouTube, Twitter and Instagram.
Subscribe to MintCast on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and SoundCloud.
Also, be sure to check out the new Behind the Headlines channel on YouTube and subscribe to rapper Lowkey’s new video interview/podcast series, The Watchdog.
Support the show (https://www.mintpressnews.com/donations/)
Virtually nobody trusts what they read any more. The United States ranks dead last among 46 nations surveyed in confidence in the press. Only 29% of Americans say they broadly believe what they read, see or hear in mainstream media. And more than three quarters of the public think that big outlets knowingly publish fake news.
The term “fake news” first came into common usage around the 2016 election, where Clinton claimed that Trump was being buoyed by false information shared on sites like Facebook, while Trump claimed the likes of CNN and MSNBC were themselves fake news.
Joining MintPress Senior Staff Writer Alan MacLeod are two guests who know the long history of fake news in America. Dr. Nolan Higdon is an author and university lecturer of history and media studies at California State University East Bay. Meanwhile, Mickey Huff is professor of social science, history and journalism at Diablo Valley College in California and the director of the critical media literacy organization Project Censored.
Together, the pair have written two books: “United States of Distraction: Media Manipulation in Post-Truth America (And What We Can Do About It)” and a forthcoming work, “Let’s Agree to Disagree: A Critical Thinking Guide to Communication, Conflict Management, and Critical Media Literacy.”
The divisiveness of social media has been in the news recently, with former Facebook product manager Frances Haugen having claimed that the social media giant had promoted inflammatory content to its users in order to generate more revenue, despite the consequences it has on society.
Huff and Higdon agreed that disinformation is a major problem, but that the most pernicious examples of it come from the most established news outlets, many of whom were integral in selling America’s wars to the public.
MintPress News is a fiercely independent, reader-supported outlet, with no billionaire owners or backers. You can support us by becoming a member on Patreon, bookmarking and whitelisting us, and by subscribing to our social media channels, including Twitch, YouTube, Twitter and Instagram.
Subscribe to MintCast on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and SoundCloud.
Also, be sure to check out the new Behind the Headlines channel on YouTube and subscribe to rapper Lowkey’s new video interview/podcast series, The Watchdog.
Support the show (https://www.mintpressnews.com/donations/)
Despite a number of embarrassing political events over the past number of years, Great Britain still likes to regard itself as a forward-thinking, world-leading country and a force for good. Surveys show that the United Kingdom retains a great deal of positive sentiment around the world.
One historian whose work has done a great deal to shatter the myths of empire is Mark Curtis, who joins Alan MacLeod on the Mintcast today. Mark Curtis is a historian and journalist, the co-founder of Declassified UK, an investigative news website dedicated to scrutinizing the powerful.
Described by veteran journalist and filmmaker John Pilger as Britain’s greatest modern historian, Curtis has published a number of groundbreaking books. Among them are “Web of Deceit: Britain's Real Role in the World,” which exposes the fallacy that Britain is a force for democracy and human rights; “Unpeople: Britain's Secret Human Rights Abuses,” which catalogs the country’s imperial crimes up to the present; and “Secret Affairs: Britain's Collusion with Radical Islam,” which explores how the United Kingdom has supported radical and jihadist forces in the Middle East in order to topple secular, independent-minded governments.
Today Curtis lays out how Britain is playing a major role in the devastation in Yemen, funnelling weapons to Saudi Arabia, reloading its jets, and generally doing everything short of pulling the trigger itself. Britain is a major arms dealer around the world, and Saudi Arabia is by far its best customer, responsible for 49% of worldwide sales. The U.K. also plays a key role in propping up other Middle Eastern monarchies such as Qatar, which now operates two joint squadrons with the British Royal Air Force, making it an ever closer ally of London.
Curtis also strongly condemned the imprisonment of Australian publisher Julian Assange, who continues to be held under lock and key in London. Describing the case as a prime example of “imperial arrogance,” he claimed that Assange’s case should concern every member of the British public.
MintPress News is a fiercely independent, reader-supported outlet, with no billionaire owners or backers. You can support us by becoming a member on Patreon, bookmarking and whitelisting us, and by subscribing to our social media channels, including Twitch, YouTube, Twitter and Instagram.
Subscribe to MintCast on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and SoundCloud.
Also, be sure to check out the new Behind the Headlines channel on YouTube and subscribe to rapper Lowkey’s new video interview/podcast series, The Watchdog.
Support the show (https://www.mintpressnews.com/donations/)
Brazil, the world’s fifth-largest country, is at a political crossroads. Heading into next year’s presidential elections, the country’s 211 million people are faced with choosing between social democrat and anti-imperialist Lula Da Silva (president between 2003 and 2010) and far-right populist incumbent Jair Bolsonaro.
But many are worried they will not even be allowed to elect anyone. Whispers are turning into shouts about a military-backed coup before next year, as the ailing Bolsonaro -- trailing Lula by 15-20 points in the polls -- seeks to hang on to power. The 66-year-old former military officer recently stated that there are only three potential futures for him: arrested and jailed, killed, or staying on as president, only adding fuel to the fire of speculation.
Bolsonaro came to power in 2018 in a deeply flawed election that saw Lula imprisoned on phony corruption charges. Still ahead in the polls, judges ordered Lula be stripped of the right to stand for office, even from his jail cell. The judge leading the “anti-corruption” crusade (known as Operation Car Wash) was quietly co-ordinating with the prosecution the whole time, and later accepted a position as Justice Minister in Bolsonaro’s cabinet.
Here today to talk about Brazil’s past, present and uncertain future is Brian Mier. Brian is co-editor at Brasil Wire and Brazil correspondent for TeleSUR English. Unlike most U.S. journalists who cover the country, Brian has lived and worked in Brazil for over 25 years and speaks Portuguese. He also co-edited the book, “Year of Lead. Washington, Wall Street and the New Imperialism in Brazil.”
MintPress News is a fiercely independent, reader-supported outlet, with no billionaire owners or backers. You can support us by becoming a member on Patreon, bookmarking and whitelisting us, and by subscribing to our social media channels, including Twitch, YouTube, Twitter and Instagram.
Subscribe to MintCast on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and SoundCloud.
Also, be sure to check out the new Behind the Headlines channel on YouTube and subscribe to rapper Lowkey’s new video interview/podcast series, The Watchdog.
Support the show (https://www.mintpressnews.com/donations/)
Shocking almost everybody in positions of power, life-long socialist and anti-war activist Jeremy Corbyn was elected leader of the British Labour Party in 2015. There was no honeymoon period for the Londoner, however, as right away the media, the government and even senior members of his own party began attempting to oust him.
Defying the critics, Corbyn held on and took Labour to arguably its greatest-ever electoral success in 2017. However, his poor handling of Brexit and an unprecedented phoney anti-Semitism smear campaign sank his chances of becoming prime minister of the United Kingdom.
Our guest today on Mintcast saw the entire situation unfold from up close. Asa Winstanley is a London-based investigative journalist at The Electronic Intifada. A former member of the Labour Party, like Corbyn, he was suspended from the party, in his case after he called the Jewish Labour Movement an "Israel embassy proxy."
Corbyn -- a veteran anti-imperialist who opposed nuclear weapons, proposed the United Kingdom leave NATO and supported a targeted boycott of Israel over their annexation of much of Palestine -- was immediately attacked by sources of entrenched power. U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo even stated that his government was “doing its best” to prevent Corbyn from being elected.
Despite a near-hysterical campaign against him, Corbyn’s popularity grew and grew. His 2017 manifesto -- which included making college free for all and proposed a huge expansion of social housing, an end to government austerity measures, nationalizing key industries like railways, and providing everyone in the country with free high-speed internet access -- was immensely popular.
However, by the 2019 general election, years of attacks from the media, the military and even most of the elected officials within his own party had taken their toll, and Labour lost the contest to Boris Johnson’s Conservative Party. In the three months prior to the vote, there were 1,450 articles in national British newspapers linking Corbyn to anti-Semitism.
Asa Winstanley joined Mintcast host Mnar Adley today to discuss his work covering this case, and also talks about the wider implications of the affair. Originally from South Wales, Winstanley focuses his work primarily on the Middle East and British politics. Apart from being an associate editor at The Electronic Intifada, he also writes at Substack and The Middle East Monitor.
Subscribe to MintCast on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and SoundCloud.
Also, be sure to check out the new Behind the Headlines channel on YouTube and subscribe to rapper Lowkey’s new video interview/podcast series, The Watchdog.
Support the show (https://www.mintpressnews.com/donations/)
After organizing coups, overthrowing democratically-elected heads of state, and arming death squads all around the world in the 1960s and 1970s, it was clear that the CIA had an image problem. The Reagan administration, therefore, began constructing a network of outsourced private organizations that would do the dirty work of the U.S. empire, shielding the U.S. government from the prying eyes of investigators and journalists.
“A lot of what we do today was done covertly 25 years ago by the CIA,” Allen Weinstein, co-founder of the National Endowment for Democracy, told The Washington Post.
One of these groups is Creative Associates International, the subject of an in-depth MintPress News investigation by Senior Staff Writer Alan MacLeod. Alan joins MintCast host Mnar Muhawesh Adley today to discuss his findings.
Creative Associates International (CAI) was founded by Bolivian ex-pat M. Charito Kruvant in 1979. Visiting the organization’s website, viewers are met with images of smiling African children being taught how to read and write, happy Latino farmers, and pictures of Asian women going to school. The image CAI projects of itself is that it is a progressive charity helping many of the world’s poorest and most vulnerable groups. And it does indeed do education work in dozens of countries. But it also has a long history of being the shock troops for the U.S.’ regime-change agenda throughout the world.
CAI was involved in the 1991 Haitian coup d’etat that removed populist priest Jean Bertrand Aristide from power; it has worked with Contra death squads in Nicaragua, helping to defeat the Sandinista revolution there; and it has also spearheaded a number of attempts to sow discord in Cuba, with the ultimate goal of removing the Communists from power.
CAI was hired to create a Twitter-like app for Cubans called ZunZuneo. The app would, at first, provide a great service and take over the market. Slowly, however, the plan was to drip-feed Cubans anti-Communist propaganda until the time came to organize a color revolution on the island through bombarding users with messages to take to the streets. CAI also recruited rappers to serve as anti-government figureheads who would push divisions and spread discord throughout the island.
With virtually all of its budget coming from the U.S. government and six of the seven members of its board former or current high U.S. officials, MacLeod describes Creative Associates as a government organization posing as a non-governmental organization.
MintPress News is a fiercely independent, reader-supported outlet, with no billionaire owners or backers. You can support us by becoming a member on Patreon, bookmarking and whitelisting us, and by subscribing to our social media channels, including Twitch, YouTube, Twitter and Instagram.
Also, be sure to check out the new Behind the Headlines channel on YouTube and subscribe to rapper Lowkey’s new video interview/podcast series, The Watchdog.
Support the show (https://www.mintpressnews.com/donations/)
After 20 years of war and occupation that have caused the deaths of almost a quarter of a million people and displaced 5.9 million more, the United States appears to have finally (tacitly) admitted defeat in Afghanistan, pulling its forces and representatives out of the country.
The U.S.-installed government fell within days, with President Ashraf Ghani escaping to the United Arab Emirates, reportedly with $169 million in cash stuffed in his suitcases. Ghani’s departure is illustrative of the extraordinary grift of the entire operation. Overall, the U.S. spent well over $2 trillion on the Afghanistan War, making weapons contractors and construction agencies in the Washington, D.C. suburbs extremely wealthy.
Today, Mintcast host Mnar Adley is joined by an individual with first-hand knowledge of U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East. Lawrence Wilkerson is a retired U.S. Army colonel who was Chief of Staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell between 2003 and 2005. In this role, he observed the rapid expansion of the Bush administration’s War on Terror. A military veteran of 31 years, he has since become a vocal critic of American militarism and endless wars.
After leaving the Bush administration, Wilkerson became an academic, teaching on public policy and security issues at the College of William & Mary and at George Washington University. Since 2020, he is also a non-resident fellow at the Quincy Institute, a Washington-based think tank urging restraint in U.S. foreign policy.
MintPress News is a fiercely independent, reader-supported outlet, with no billionaire owners or backers. You can support us by becoming a member on Patreon, bookmarking and whitelisting us, and by subscribing to our social media channels, including Twitch, YouTube, Twitter and Instagram.
Subscribe to MintCast on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and SoundCloud.
Also, be sure to check out the new Behind the Headlines channel on YouTube and subscribe to rapper Lowkey’s new video interview/podcast series, The Watchdog.
Support the show (https://www.mintpressnews.com/donations/)
It’s a story that has captivated many for over three decades. In 1987, locals in Tallahassee, Florida alerted police to a strange incident in a local park. Six dirty, hungry and poorly clothed kids — almost resembling feral children — were in the custody of two extremely sharply dressed men.
Both men were questioned but later released by police, although when it transpired that the men and the children were members of an obscure cult, situated in Washington, D.C. and called “The Finders,” the story went viral, causing nationwide hysteria. The incident occurred in the middle of the “Satanic Panic:” the fear that devil-worshipping gangs across the U.S. were kidnapping or even sacrificing children.
The trail would ultimately lead to allegations of a cult involved in ritual abuse, an international child-trafficking ring, evidence of child abuse confirmed and later denied, and ties with the CIA, which was alleged to have interfered in the case.
Investigative journalist Elizabeth Vos has been following the story and recent updates to it closely. Based in Arkansas, Elizabeth was the editor-in-chief of Disobedient Media and also hosts the CNLive webcast on Consortium News. Today, she joined Mintcast host Mnar Muhawesh Adley to discuss her latest trilogy of articles about the case, which can be found here: part 1, part 2, part 3.
Elizabeth’s series focuses on the Finders’ close connections to the CIA, which suggest they may have been more than just an obscure group of people living an alternative, communal lifestyle: Isabelle Pettie, the wife of Finders’ head Marion Pettie, was employed at the agency between 1952 and 1961, while members of The Finders also trained CIA staff in computing. And, as Vos shows in the series, there is ample official evidence of an attempted CIA coverup, emanating from police and other federal agencies.
In 2019, the FBI released hundreds of documents from their investigation of The Finders into the public domain. Although many are heavily redacted, they do appear to legitimize many of the claims regarding CIA involvement made by agents.
The case and the subsequent alleged CIA coverup has led to all manner of wild speculations about who and what The Finders were. But there is good reason to believe that the official story that they were merely a harmless — if odd — cult is likely not the whole truth.
In a free-flowing discussion, Elizabeth shares insights into her new research on the group, discusses the media silence on the case, and fills us in on what we need to know about this mysterious, captivating story.
MintPress News is a fiercely independent, reader-supported outlet, with no billionaire owners or backers. You can support us by becoming a member on Patreon, bookmarking and whitelisting us, and by subscribing to our social media channels, including Twitch, YouTube, Twitter and Instagram.
Subscribe to MintCast on Spotify,
Support the show (https://www.mintpressnews.com/donations/)
Around one quarter of the world lives in countries under unilateral United States sanctions. While American government officials insist that sanctions are targeted at officials committing human rights abuses in foreign countries, the United Nations notes that they always “disproportionately affect the poor and most vulnerable.”
In Cuba, U.S. sanctions are causing shortages that led to widespread protests earlier this summer and are slowing the worldwide rollout of Cuba’s domestically produced coronavirus vaccine. U.S. government documents explicitly state that the goal of the blockade of the island is to “decrease monetary and real wages, to bring about hunger, desperation and [the] overthrow of [the] government.”
U.S. sanctions on Venezuela, too, have been widely condemned, and are estimated to have caused the deaths of over 100,000 people.
It is in the Middle East, however, where U.S. economic measures have arguably had the most impact. Our guest today has first-hand experience of this. Rania Khalek is a Lebanese-American journalist based in the Middle East. In addition to being a presenter on Breakthrough News, she is co-host of the Unauthorized Disclosure podcast. You may also have seen her work in The Grayzone, The Intercept, Truthout, Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting, Al-Jazeera, The Nation, Salon, AlterNet or Vice.
Today, Khalek speaks about the impact of sanctions across the Middle East and the current political situation in Lebanon, Syria and beyond.
In Iraq in the 1990s, U.S. sanctions are thought to have cost the lives of around 1 million people, including half a million children under five years old. Successive United Nations diplomats tasked with overseeing the sanctions regime resigned in protest, citing a breach of the Genocide Convention. "I've been using the word 'genocide' because this is a deliberate policy to destroy the people of Iraq. I'm afraid I have no other view,'' said former U.N. Humanitarian Coordinator for Iraq Dennis Halliday. When pressed on the issue, then-Secretary of State Madeline Albright did not dispute the numbers, merely assuring “60 Minutes” that “the price is worth it.”
Today, much of the region -- including Syria, Iran and Lebanon -- is under similar, crushing American sanctions. At the height of the pandemic, Iran was unable to import personal protective equipment, medicine and other medical goods, as no country wanted to risk Washington’s ire by trading with Tehran. In the end, the World Health Organization itself stepped in, directly trading with the Islamic Republic, one key factor in the Trump administration’s withdrawal from the body last year.
Meanwhile in Lebanon, the country is struggling to recover from an enormous explosion that wiped out much of central Beirut last year. Food and electricity remain in short supply.
Support the show (https://www.mintpressnews.com/donations/)
Edward Snowden has called it “the story of the year.” An Israeli spying company has been caught selling software to authoritarian regimes that have used it to surveil more than 50,000 people worldwide.
That company is NSO, founded in 2010 by former members of Unit 8200, the Israeli military’s notorious intelligence squad. Their product is called Pegasus, and it was sold to military, law enforcement, and intelligence agencies in 40 countries, among them some of the world’s worst human rights abusing governments.
On this “MintCast,” investigative journalist Whitney Webb joins Mnar Adley today to discuss Pegasus, Toka, and the global Israeli cyberspying network. Whitney Webb is a writer and researcher for the outlets Unlimited Hangout and The Last American Vagabond. She principally covers intelligence, technology, surveillance, and civil liberties. Between 2017 and 2020, she was also a senior investigative reporter for MintPress. Her latest article, “Meet Toka, the Most Dangerous Israeli Spyware Firm You’ve Never Heard Of,” was published by MintPress earlier this week.
Pegasus is able to attack the cellphones of targeted individuals without them realizing it, monitoring and recording their calls, texts and accessing other information stored on their devices. Dozens of human rights activists, nearly 200 journalists, several Arab royals, and more than 600 politicians are known to have had their communications spied on and compromised. Among those include French President Emmanuel Macron, Pakistani prime minister Imran Khan and president of Iraq, Barham Salih.
Yet a new MintPress News investigation asserts that Pegasus is merely the tip of the Israeli cyber spying iceberg and that another piece of software, Toka, is far more dangerous and outrageous. Toka markets itself as “a one-stop hacking shop for governments that require extra capability to fight terrorists and other threats to national security in the digital domain.” The company’s software is designed to infiltrate any device connected to the internet, not just smartphones.
Toka is a product of the Israeli national security state, having been co-founded by former prime minister, Ehud Barak, and was also designed by members of Unit 8200, leading Webb to suggest that it is a front for the Israeli government.
MintPress News is a fiercely independent, reader-supported outlet, with no billionaire owners or backers. You can support us by becoming a member on Patreon, bookmarking and whitelisting us, and by subscribing to our social media channels, including Twitch, YouTube, Twitter and Instagram.
Support the show (https://www.mintpressnews.com/donations/)
Welcome to the MintCast Podcast — an interview series featuring dissenting voices the establishment would rather silence. I’m your host Mnar Adley.
A string of spontaneous protests in Cuba became the unlikely focus of worldwide media attention earlier this week, the story dominating headlines for two straight days. Political and media figures across the spectrum weighed in, including the President of the United States.
Joining me to discuss the protests, their causes, and the relationship between Cuba and the United States are Ben Norton and Alan MacLeod.
Ben Norton is a Nicaragua-based journalist, writer, and filmmaker. He is the assistant editor of investigative news outlet The Grayzone and the producer of the Moderate Rebels podcast, which he co-hosts with editor Max Blumenthal.
Alan MacLeod is Senior Staff Writer at MintPress News. An expert in the media and Latin America, his first book, entitled “Bad News From Venezuela: 20 Years of Fake News and Misreporting,” was published in 2018. Alan has lectured on Latin American politics at a number of universities.
Support the show (https://www.mintpressnews.com/donations/)
Despite the official ceasefire, Sheikh Jarrah in Jerusalem continues to be a flashpoint of violence. Last week, Israeli forces fired stun grenades and sprayed skunk water on worshippers and protesters gathering near the Al-Aqsa Mosque, the third holiest site in Islam. Evidently, new Prime Minister Naftali Bennett is willing to be as aggressive and provocative as his predecessor, Benjamin Netanyahu.
While the attacks on the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood are new, the tactics and the violence against Palestinians is not. Upon Israel’s creation in 1948, between 750,000 and 1 million Arabs were ethnically cleansed off their land, with Israeli forces razing 500 towns and villages in order to make way for the construction of a Jewish state on top of an existing one. Year on year, Israel has progressively annexed more Palestinian land, leaving the indigenous population trapped in increasingly small pockets, often without the ability to leave.
Much has been made about the unshakeable U.S. support for Israel; the world’s only superpower plying the Apartheid State with aid and arms, as well as defending it from diplomatic censure. Yet Israel also has powerful backers in Europe. Chief among those is Great Britain. The British military has designated Israel as a “strategic partner” and has sold it over half a billion dollars worth of arms since 2015. U.K. forces also help train the IDF, with a small number of British soldiers stationed inside the country as well.
After the latest round of violence, which left more than 250 dead, Netanyahu personally thanked Prime Minister Boris Johnson for his “unwavering” support for his state’s actions.
Yet even as the Conservative government supports Israeli atrocities, a growing movement inside the U.K. is challenging their policies. Chief among these is the group Palestine Action. Still not even one year old, Palestine Action has made headlines for its forceful commitment to shutting down the arms trade between the two countries, trying to do with direct action what anti-war organizations have long been calling for. Last summer, the group defaced the London headquarters of Israeli arms company Elbit Systems. Since then, they have occupied and temporarily shut down a wide range of weapons factories across the country, including in Bristol, Runcorn, and Leicester.
To talk about this today, MintPress News is joined by Huda Ammori and Richard Barnard, the co-founders of Palestine Action. With Mnar Muhawesh and Alan MacLeod, Ammori and Barnard discuss direct action, Israeli crimes, and British complicity.
Support the show (https://www.mintpressnews.com/donations/)
In recent years, the big networks have hired a wide range of “former” agency veterans and officers, supposedly to give independent and expert commentary and analysis on all matters national security. These have included former CIA Directors John Brennan (NBC, MSNBC) and Michael Hayden (CNN), ex-Director of National Intelligence James Clapper (CNN), and former Homeland Security Advisor Frances Townsend (CBS).
News for so many Americans comes delivered through ex-CIA interns like Anderson Cooper (CNN), CIA applicants like Tucker Carlson (Fox), or by the daughter of a powerful national security advisor, Mika Brzezinski (MSNBC).
Forty-four years ago, acclaimed journalist Carl Bernstein exposed how the CIA had planted more than 400 operatives into newsrooms across America, where they posed as journalists but were actually laundering national security state talking points. Today, there are increasing signs that the so-called “deep state” is attempting to do the same thing to social media.
In 2017, popular social media site Reddit made a particularly eyebrow-raising decision to hire Jessica Ashooh, a hawkish foreign-policy expert from the Atlantic Council, NATO’s semi-official think tank, as its director of policy, though Ashooh had no relevant experience running a social media company. Yet the hire was completely ignored by corporate media. Also ignored was the unmasking of a senior Twitter executive as an active duty member of the British Army’s 77th Brigade, its unit dedicated to online warfare and psychological operations.
Our guest today has been cataloging these worrying connections in a series of articles for MintPress.
Today we discuss Ashooh’s past and why it should trouble anyone who uses social media, as well as exploring the notorious intelligence service-linked and military-funded university department that is pumping out many of the world’s top journalists.
MintPress News is a fiercely independent, reader-supported outlet, with no billionaire owners or backers. You can support us by becoming a member on Patreon, bookmarking and whitelisting us, and by subscribing to our social media channels, including Twitch, YouTube, Twitter and Instagram.
Subscribe to MintCast on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and SoundCloud.
Also, be sure to check out the new Behind the Headlines channel on YouTube.
Support the show (https://www.mintpressnews.com/donations/)
Colombia is regularly described as the Israel of Latin America. Although on opposite sides of the world from each other, the two countries share many similarities. They are both key outposts of U.S. power in their regions, helping make their neighborhood safe for American businesses and American profits. Both governments are carrying out wars against indigenous populations. Both talk of a “peace process” with their enemies but neither seems to get any closer to a lasting agreement. And both smear those enemies as terrorists.
Violence in both nations has made worldwide headlines of late. In Colombia, President Ivan Duque’s attempts to push through an economic shock therapy package consisting of privatizing the country’s pension and healthcare systems, reducing the minimum wage, and increasing taxes on basic necessities sent millions into the streets in a nationwide general strike.
Duque has responded with an iron fist, sending first armed police and then the military into the streets to quell the protests. According to local human rights group Indepaz, 71 people have been killed, as armored cars fill the streets and drones and helicopters terrorize strikers from above.
Meanwhile, in Israel, security forces attacked the Al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem as worshippers were celebrating Ramadan at the third holiest site in Islam. The attack drew a response from Hamas, which began firing rockets into Israel, which, in turn, led to a massive Israeli reaction, with the IDF pounding much of Gaza into rubble. Hundreds of people were killed, thousands injured, and tens of thousands fled their homes. Among the buildings targeted were schools, a COVID-19 test center, and the headquarters of international media organizations.
Unusually, Israeli actions drew criticism from the centers of power in the United States, with senior politicians and media figures alike condemning the attack and using words like “apartheid” and “ethnic cleansing” — a signal that perhaps a change in attitude is beginning to take place and real change could be around the corner.
Last week, MintPress also revealed how Israel is helping Colombia repress its citizens, providing arms and training to security services.
Yet a new investigation from our guest today has highlighted how the links between Israel and Colombia go far deeper and how Israeli officials were the masterminds of political massacres carried out by the Colombian government.
Dan Cohen’s new work shows how the Colombian government’s genocidal policy of massacring its political opponents — over 4,000 members of the Patriotic Union Party, including two presidential candidates, 14 parliamentarians, 15 mayors, nine mayoral candidates, three members of the House of Representatives and three senators — was done on the suggestion of an Israeli official, Rafael ‘Rafi’ Eitan. Eitan was employed by the government to advise it on counterinsurgency strategies.
Another Israeli, Yair Klein, provided the training for many of the most notorious far-right paramilitary groups, including the AUC, thought to have been responsible for around 80% of the killings during the civil war. The leader of the AUC, Carlos Castaño, was educated in Israel and credited the apartheid state for teaching him all he knew about terrorism. “I learned an infinity of themes in Israel,” he wrote in his autobiography.
Support the show (https://www.mintpressnews.com/donations/)
Support the show (https://www.mintpressnews.com/donations/)
It is often said that a picture paints a thousand words; images have the ability to move people in ways that words alone cannot.
Iconic pictures from war zones, such as those of a dead Syrian child on the beach, of Vietnamese girls covered in Napalm or American soldiers planting their flag at Iwo Jima, become anchors around which people understand conflicts, and the world more generally. Cartoons as well have the power to challenge and change people’s minds, satirizing the powerful and revealing hypocrisies in humorous ways that often push through people’s ideological barriers.
The powerful understand the potential of the image, so all over the world political cartoonists are censored and repressed. In 2015, Malaysian satirist Zulkiflee SM Anwar Haque — better known as Zunar — was charged with sedition and faced 43 years in jail before a change in government led to the case being dropped. Four years later, Turkey jailed artist Musa Kart after he was accused of aiding the banned Kurdistan Workers’ Party. And after pushback over a cartoon critiquing the Israeli government’s relationship with the Trump administration, The New York Times decided to shut down its entire political cartoon operation, announcing that it would no longer print them.
In the days of social media supremacy, many cartoonists are completely reliant on big tech companies like Facebook and Instagram for both their audience and their income, putting them in serious danger of being both silenced and impoverished if Silicon Valley decides it does not like their message.
Today’s guest is Carlos Latuff, a Brazillian political cartoonist who has built up a following all over the world. Often compared to street artist Banksy for his style and his cutting political commentary, his art graces the pages of a host of independent media outlets, including MintPress News.
Carlos was born in Rio de Janeiro in Brazil and describes himself as a “visual chronicler of barbarism.” Highly politically charged, his cartoons have won him both followers and enemies. He has been arrested multiple times due to his criticisms of the government and the police in his home country, while he is regularly tarred as anti-Semitic by defenders of the Israeli state, a charge he laughs off as “a joke worthy of a Woody Allen movie.”
Carlos became particularly well known during the Arab Spring when his cartoons helped fuel revolutions across the region. Reuters called him a “hero” of the movement while The Guardian described him as the “unlikely star” of the revolt.
Always political and edgy, Carlos frequently takes aim at major centers of world power, including governments like those of the United States, Israel and his native Brazil, as well as at a mainstream corporate media that distort reality and allow injustices to continue on unnoticed by the general public.
Support the show (https://www.mintpressnews.com/donations/)
Amidst a decade-long war that has devastated the country, Syrians went to the polls last week in an election that gave another seven-year term to current leader Bashar al-Assad. With a turnout of over 78%, Assad achieved an overwhelming victory against his nearest opponent, Mahmoud Ahmad Marei.
Supporters of the president took to the streets in the hundreds of thousands as the results were publicized, celebrating what they saw as a repudiation of violence and a step forward for the beleaguered nation.
The results were endorsed by many nations friendly towards the government, such as China, Iran and Cuba. "A decisive victory was won by the incumbent head of state," wrote the foreign ministry of Russia in a statement. "We view the elections as a sovereign affair of the Syrian Arab Republic and an important step towards strengthening its internal stability," they added.
However, opponents of the Assad administration described the contest as a sham and hopelessly rigged, claiming that his opponents were controlled stooges, that people inside Syria were forced to vote for him, while refugees were blocked from voting. “The Assad regime’s so-called presidential election is neither free nor fair. The U.S. joins France, Germany, Italy, and the U.K. in calling for the rejection of the regime’s attempts to regain legitimacy without respecting the Syrian people's human rights and freedoms,” said Secretary of State Anthony Blinken. Many of the countries Blinken mentioned, including the United States, blocked Syrians from voting at diplomatic missions in their countries.
Despite the Western reaction, Assad, in power since 2000, looks set to govern for seven more years. His major task will be attempting to break armed opposition groups in Idlib and to repair a nation destroyed by 10 years of war and crippling sanctions. The United Nations Refugee Agency estimates that over 13 million Syrians, including 6.7 million internally displaced people, require humanitarian assistance. A further 6.6 million people have left the country since fighting began in 2011.
Joining MintPress to discuss the elections, the humanitarian situation and the future of the Syrian Arab Republic is Dan Kovalik.
Dan is a human rights lawyer and adjunct professor of law at the University of Pittsburgh. A prolific author, Dan’s work and activism has taken him around the world, including to Colombia and Venezuela. He spent a week in Syria, where he observed the elections first-hand.
Subscribe to MintCast on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and SoundCloud.
Also, be sure to check out the new Behind the Headlines channel on YouTube
Support the show (https://www.mintpressnews.com/donations/)
The Israeli state, too, has many deep connections with the social media giants. Israeli Justice Minister Ayelet Shaked boasted that she worked closely with Facebook to censor Palestinian voices, with the Silicon Valley corporation agreeing to take down around 95% of the content she asked them to. Today, former Director General of the Ministry of Justice Emi Palmor sits on Facebook’s advisory council, the board ultimately responsible for content moderation on the world’s largest news and social media platform. In her previous role in the Israeli government, Palmor directly oversaw the systematic ethnic cleansing of Palestine and the stripping of the Palestinians’ legal rights.
Discussing the big-tech censorship of Palestinian voices and the collusion between Israel and Silicon Valley are Mickey Huff, Suhair Nafal and Jessica Buxbaum.
Mickey Huff is Professor of Social Science and History at Diablo Valley College, California and is director of the media freedom foundation Project Censored. He hosts the Project Censored Radio Show. His latest book is “Project Censored 2021: State of the Free Press.”
Suhair Nafal is a Palestinian-American activist living in California. Earlier this year, she was taken to court by an IDF soldier who sought $6 million in damages after Nafal called her “evil” in a Facebook post. Bizarrely, the prosecution attempted to get the California judge to apply Israeli law to the post.
Jessica Buxbaum is an Israeli-American journalist based in Jerusalem and a contributor to MintPress News. Her latest article is “Facebook, Social Media Giants Admit to Silencing Palestinian Voices Online.”
MintPress News is a fiercely independent, reader-supported outlet, with no billionaire owners or backers. You can support us by becoming a member on Patreon, bookmarking and whitelisting us, and by subscribing to our social media channels, including Twitch, YouTube, Twitter and Instagram.
Subscribe to MintCast on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and SoundCloud.
Also, be sure to check out the new Behind the Headlines channel on YouTube.
Support the show (https://www.mintpressnews.com/donations/)
Images from the Israeli onslaught against Palestine have dominated both news broadcasts and social media as the world expresses its outrage over the bombing of civilian targets.
Much of the strongest support for the creation of Israel comes from the Evangelical Christian community in the West, who see the construction of a Jewish state in the Holy Land as the fulfillment of an ancient Biblical prophecy bringing the world one step closer to the end times where the righteous will ascend to heaven, and non-believers (including Jews) will be cast into hell.
While Democrats increasingly condemn Israel’s actions, the most vociferous support comes from right-wing pastors and religious leaders. Texas televangelist Pastor John Hagee, for instance, whitewashed the Israeli massacre, stating this week that:
It’s not Israel’s rockets that are killing the people in Gaza, it is the terrorists who are killing their own people because they don’t know how to fire these rockets. So the fake news will certainly not tell you that."
For years, the religious right has been undermining faith in domestic media and building information systems of their own to create tightly controlled echo chambers across the United States. Likewise, Israel is prosecuting a campaign against journalists, albeit with far more deadly consequences.
Yet even as Israel attacks the press, those very same outlets run cover for the Jewish state, sanitizing Israeli attacks on peaceful protestors as “clashes,” or both sidesing the conflict and presenting Hamas as aggressors and Israel as merely “responding” to provocations.
Here today to talk about the conflict and its origins are Chris Hedges and Alan MacLeod. Hedges is a writer and a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter who spent nearly two decades as a foreign correspondent. He was Middle East Bureau Chief for the New York Times until the newspaper forced him out due to his stance against the Iraq War.
Alan MacLeod is Senior Staff Writer at MintPress News. After completing his PhD in sociology and journalism studies in 2018, he published two books about the media: “Bad News From Venezuela: 20 Years of Fake News and Misreporting,” and “Propaganda in the Information Age: Still Manufacturing Consent.” He is an expert in global media.
MintPress News is a fiercely independent, reader-supported outlet, with no billionaire owners or backers. You can support us by becoming a member on Patreon, bookmarking and whitelisting us, and by subscribing to our social media channels, including Twitch, YouTube, Twitter and Instagram.
Support the show (https://www.mintpressnews.com/donations/)
Despite publicly urging caution, restraint and calling for a ceasefire, the United States government continues to aid Israel, this week approving $375 million worth of arms sales to the Jewish state, even as it uses U.S.-made weaponry to attack civilian buildings and other infrastructure in the Gaza Strip. Hospitals, health clinics and homes have been destroyed, with reports confirming the deaths of at least 63 children in Gaza alone. Three pregnant women have also been killed. As of Wednesday morning, the death toll stands at 276.
Also destroyed was the largest bookshop and publishing house in Gaza. “They not only want to shut down our voices, but our access to other works. This is an attack on knowledge, education, literature, and the exchange of narratives,” wrote Palestinian writer Mariam Barghouti.
After more than one week of bombing, a reported 38,000 people have been displaced within Gaza alone, with thousands taking shelter in United Nations buildings and schools.
The Biden administration has stood firm in its support for Israel, blocking three times this week United Nations statements that condemned the Jewish state for its offensive. As the bombs rained down, President Joe Biden reiterated his belief that “Israel has a right to defend itself,” a statement that has drawn criticism from a growing number on the left. Senator Bernie Sanders, for instance, characterized the U.S. as an apologist for the far-right Netanyahu government. In response, Trump lawyer and Israel advocate Alan Dershowitz labeled Sanders a “self-hating Jew” and accused media outlets like The New York Times of supporting Hamas.
Global opinion, however, is distinctly more hostile towards Israel’s actions. Both Amnesty International and Reporters Without Borders have accused Israel of “war crimes” in targeting residential buildings and media outlets. The Israeli government has also been condemned by the Arab League and a number of Asian nations.
Joining MintPress to talk about the situation in Palestine is journalist, activist and filmmaker Abby Martin. Abby began her journalistic career in 2009, founding her own citizen journalism outlet, Media Roots. She later hosted Breaking the Set on RT America and is now an independent filmmaker for Empire Files. She recently made the 2019 feature-length documentary movie Gaza Fights for Freedom, free to watch on the Empire Files YouTube channel.
Support the show (https://www.mintpressnews.com/donations/)
Welcome to MintCast, the official MintPress News podcast featuring dissenting voices the establishment would rather silence. I’m your host, Mnar Adley.
Even as the Biden administration calls for calm to be restored across Israel, Gaza and the West Bank, on Monday it approved $735 million in new arms sales to Israel. U.S. weapons continue to be used in the onslaught against a civilian population. The death toll continues to rise and is now well above 200.
Joining MintPress to discuss the latest developments is British-Iraqi rapper and political activist Kareem Dennis, better known as Lowkey. In a career spanning nearly two decades, and one that has taken him across the globe, Lowkey has established himself as an underground favorite of hip-hop junkies and music connoisseurs alike. Despite his acclaim, his music is rarely played on mainstream radio, precisely because of its political message, which covers war, imperialism and injustice. His track “Long Live Palestine” was released in 2009.
Lowkey has long been involved with activism in the Middle East and is a patron of the Palestine Solidarity Campaign. A fierce critic of the Israeli government, he recently stated that “Zionism is not about your feelings; it is about the material reality of ethnic cleansing that has continued...till this day.”
MintPress News is a fiercely independent, reader-supported outlet, with no billionaire owners or backers. You can support us by becoming a member on Patreon, bookmarking and whitelisting us, and by subscribing to our social media channels, including Twitch, YouTube, Twitter and Instagram*.
Subscribe to MintCast on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and SoundCloud*.
Also, be sure to check out the new Behind the Headlines channel on YouTube.
Support the show (https://www.mintpressnews.com/donations/)
Welcome to MintCast, the official MintPress podcast featuring dissenting voices the establishment would rather silence. I’m your host, Mnar Adley.
Israel’s latest attack on Palestine has captured the world’s attention. On Saturday, the Israeli military attacked the Shati Refugee Camp in Gaza, killing 10 people, including eight children. The same day, Israeli missiles hit a highrise building housing the headquarters of Al-Jazeera and the Associated Press. On Sunday, Israeli strikes killed at least 42 people, bringing the death toll to over 200, including 50 children. All of these actions account to war crimes.
Here to discuss what is going on is a star panel of guests.
Malak Mattar is an artist from the Gaza Strip known worldwide for expressionist paintings and abstract designs and her work has been displayed across the world.
Dan Cohen is a Jewish-American journalist. He produced and released the documentary “Killing Gaza,” about the 2014 Israeli attack on the densely populated strip.
Miko Peled is an author, journalist, and human rights activist from Jerusalem. His latest article, “Israel’s Pogroms in Jerusalem Could Spark the Destruction of al-Aqsa,” can be found at MintPress News.
Support the show (https://www.mintpressnews.com/donations/)
Welcome to MintCast -- an interview series featuring dissenting voices the establishment would rather silence. I’m your host Mnar Muhawesh Adley.
Within just three months in office amid a global pandemic, the Joe Biden administration recently ordered an airstrike that dropped 1.75 tons of explosives on a town in Syria near the Iraq border. The move is re-inflaming tensions between Washington and Damascus as the war enters its 10th year.
Joining me today to discuss the latest on the ground in Syria is Vanessa Beeley.
Vanessa is an independent British journalist based in Damascus and specializing in Middle Eastern affairs. She is perhaps best known for her coverage of the Syrian Civil War and the Western media propaganda machine drawing up support for a so-called humanitarian war against Syria.
This program is 100 percent listener supported! You can join the hundreds of financial sponsors who make this show possible by becoming a member on our Patreon page.
Subscribe to this podcast on iTunes, Spotify and SoundCloud. Please leave us a review and share this segment.
Support the show (https://www.mintpressnews.com/donations/)
Welcome to MintCast -- an interview series featuring dissenting voices the establishment would rather silence -- I’m your host, Mnar Adley.
Today we’re joined by Raul Diego, a MintPress staff writer, filmmaker and photojournalist who will discuss the anti-Chinese lockdown propaganda and how the COVID economic disaster is paving the way for surveillance, digital currency and human capital markets based on a series of articles he wrote for MintPress News.
A recent letter addressed to the FBI, entitled “The Chinese Communist Party’s Global Lockdown Fraud,” has been gaining considerable traction. The letter -- signed by a number of prominent individuals, including military commanders and government advisers -- essentially suggests that China, and Xi Jinping in particular, tricked the world into pursuing authoritarian responses to the pandemic.
However, the anti-Chinese lockdown narrative is obscuring a much broader effort by the financial and tech sector to create state-backed digital currency that will turn humanity into data assets. The world’s most powerful hedge funds and transnational corporations can use this data to create more profits for themselves and their clients, while rendering the poor poorer.
This program is 100 percent listener supported! You can join the hundreds of financial sponsors who make this show possible by becoming a member on our Patreon page.
Subscribe to this podcast on iTunes, Spotify and SoundCloud. Please leave us a review and share this segment.
Support the show (https://www.mintpressnews.com/donations/)
Welcome to MintCast -- an interview series featuring dissenting voices the establishment would rather silence -- with host Mnar Muhawesh Adley.
Joe Biden may have won the presidential election, but his victory masks a deeper rot within the American political system, one where both parties have become servants to increasingly powerful corporations, Wall Street, and the military industrial complex. The Democratic Party, in particular, presents itself to the public as a symbol of social justice and peace, yet is increasingly beholden to powerful interests.
Our guest today, Chris Hedges -- has for years argued that the Democratic Party sold its soul long ago and turned its back on the American people and that we Americans have been living through what he calls a “corporate coup d’etat in slow motion.”
Hedges is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist who spent nearly two decades as a foreign correspondent in Central America, the Balkans, and the Middle East, where he saw the bloody realities of the U.S. empire first hand. He hosts the show “On Contact” on RT and is the author of over a dozen books, the latest of which is “America: The Farewell Tour,” about the terminal decline of the United States.
This program is 100 percent listener supported! You can join the hundreds of financial sponsors who make this show possible by becoming a member on our Patreon page.
Subscribe to this podcast on iTunes, Spotify and SoundCloud. Please leave us a review and share this segment.
Support the show (https://www.mintpressnews.com/donations/)
Welcome to MintCast -- an interview series featuring dissenting voices the establishment would rather silence-- I’m your host Mnar Muhawesh Adley.
President Nicolas Maduro is celebrating this week after a clear victory in the National Assembly elections that took place on December 6. Boosted by a partial opposition boycott, the ruling socialist coalition led by Maduro received over 69% of the votes cast and won a massive 253 of the 277 seats in the National Assembly, the only branch of government not under its control.
While the government is celebrating, the low turnout of 31% has many worried its support is decreasing, although the vote was held in the middle of a pandemic. The U.S. government, who has long considered Venezuela an official enemy, decried the process as fraudulent before it began, instructing opposition parties to boycott it and sanctioning those that disobeyed their orders.
Secretary of State Mike Pompeo took to Twitter to call Venezuela’s elections illegitimate, describing Maduro as a dictator and strongman, despite the fact that it was overseen by 1,500 election observers and 300 representatives from 34 countries.
Joining MintCast are four guests who know the country well, Max Blumenthal, Anya Parampil, Adrienne Pine, and Alan MacLeod.
Blumenthal is an award-winning journalist and author and editor of The Grayzone. He has been reporting from Venezuela this week and observed the elections himself. His latest book is “The Management of Savagery: How America's National Security State Fueled the Rise of Al Qaeda, ISIS, and Donald Trump.” He is also the co-host of the Moderate Rebels podcast.
Parampil is a former producer and host at RT America’s “In Question.” She now hosts her own show, Red Lines, which you can find at The Grayzone and on YouTube.
Pine is an associate professor of anthropology at the American University in Washington DC. In 2019, she occupied the Venezuelan embassy in DC to prevent it from falling into the hands of U.S.-backed self-declared president Juan Guaidó. Along with Blumenthal and Parampil, Pine observed the recent elections close up, traveling to Venezuela to serve as an election observer.
Our third guest is MintPress’s own senior Staff Writer, Alan Macleod. Macleod is an expert on Western media coverage of South America. After completing his Ph.D. on the topic in 2017, he published five peer-reviewed articles on how media distorts the image of Venezuela. He is also the author of the book “Bad News from Venezuela: 20 years of fake news and misreporting.”
This program is 100 percent listener supported! You can join the hundreds of financial sponsors who make this show possible by becoming a member on our Patreon page.
Subscribe to this podcast on iTunes, Spotify and SoundCloud. Please leave us a review and share this segment.
Support the show (https://www.mintpressnews.com/donations/)
Welcome to MintCast -- an interview series featuring dissenting voices the establishment would rather silence-- I’m your host Mnar Muhawesh Adley.
Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, one of Iran’s most senior nuclear scientists, was assassinated in his car last week on the outskirts of Tehran. State sources in the Islamic Republic are claiming he was killed with a remote-controlled machine gun.
While no party has taken responsibility, the Iranian government has already pointed the finger at a number of suspects, chiefly Israel, the United States, and the People’s Mujahedin of Iran (commonly known as the MEK) a Washington-funded organization with the goal of overthrowing the Iranian government. Yet no party has claimed responsibility for the attack. At Fakhrizadeh’s funeral, Defense Minister Amir Hatami vowed that no crime as great as this would go unpunished and that the killing would not hinder Iran’s nuclear program.
Joining us today to discuss the assassination, its geopolitical context, and consequences, and what it means going forward for the U.S. and Iran, is Seyed Mohammad Marandi, an Iranian-American academic and political analyst. Seyed is a Professor of English Literature and Orientalism at the University of Tehran and a frequent guest on a wide range of news and political channels.
Dr. Marandi argues that not only was this assassination an act of war, but a direct attack against Iran’s COVID-19 vaccine program. Fakhrezadeh was not only Iran’s top nuclear scientist, he was also leading the research program for the Islamic Republic’s COVID vaccine. Because of crippling U.S. sanctions, Iran has been barred from importing masks, ventilators, and medical supplies to support the country in its fight against the virus.
COVID-19, Marandi argues, has been weaponized against Iran’s nearly 90 million citizens to destabilize the country to a degree that no other sanctions could have accomplished.
Both the US and Israel have a history of interfering in Iranian affairs. Ten months ago, Donald Trump personally gave the order to assassinate Iranian military leader and statesman, Qassem Soleimani while he was in Iraq for regional peace talks. Trump has also increased and expanded existing sanctions against the Islamic Republic and pulled the United States out of Obama’s nuclear deal with Iran.
With only weeks until Joe Biden is set to take up office in the White House, analysts are predicting that the assassination of Fakhrezadeh put the nail in the coffin for any worthwhile agreement between the two nations.
Fakhrizadeh’s death may have shocked Iranians, but it is unlikely to have surprised them, as his killing is the latest in a long line of political assassinations of high-ranking atomic scientists, at least five of whom have been murdered in the previous ten years. Some of them, like Masoud Ali Mohammadi and Majid Shahriar - both killed in separate car bombings in 2010- were Fakhrizadeh’s peers and coworkers.
This program is 100 percent listener supported! You can join the hundreds of financial sponsors who make this show possible by becoming a member on our Patreon page.
Support the show (https://www.mintpressnews.com/donations/)
Welcome to MintCast -- an interview series featuring dissenting voices the establishment would rather silence-- I’m your host Mnar Muhawesh Adley.
Lebanon is reeling from a blast that destroyed much of the capital Beirut on Tuesday, August 4. 2,700 tons of ammonium nitrate in the city’s port is thought to have caught fire and exploded, killing at least 157 people and injuring thousands more. The blast, believed to be one of the largest non-nuclear explosions in history, destroyed much of the city and has left an estimated 300,000 people homeless.
Exploiting this tragedy are the usual suspects within Western media and government including the United States and Israel who are beating the drums of war as they try to blame Lebanon’s resistance movement Hezbollah for the massive explosion.
Joining us today to discuss this and what this means for the region and world are two independent journalists and analysts who lived through the blast, Laith Marouf, and Marwa Osman.
Laith Marouf is a journalist, geopolitical analyst, and activist who has served as Canadian National Chair of the group, Solidarity for Palestinian Human Rights. He was the Executive Director of Concordia University Television in Montreal and currently lives in Beirut where he saw first hand the devastation caused by the August 4 explosion.
Marwa Osman is a lecturer at the Lebanese International University and Maaref University. She’s also the host of the MidEaStream broadcasted on Al-Etejah English Channel. Her writing focuses primarily on Middle Eastern issues and can be found in a wide range of outlets, including Press TV. Like Marouf, Osman is a resident of Beirut.
The explosion could barely have come at a worse time for Lebanon, which is suffering through an economic meltdown, with a collapsing currency, rampant inflation, employment difficult to come by, and food becoming increasingly scarce. Worse still, the country’s Economy Minister Raoul Nehme confirmed that grain silos at the port, containing around 15,000 tons of wheat, were destroyed. As a result, the country has barely a few weeks of food in reserve.
Hospitals, already feeling the strain due to the worsening coronavirus outbreak, have been overwhelmed, and have been forced to turn away many arriving for urgently needed medical care. With the city destroyed, roads closed and vehicles upended, most of Beirut’s residents have had little option other than to stay where they are, begin to clean up, even as clouds of toxic fumes engulf the area.
The blast occurred in a context of rapid economic decline, increasing public outrage over corruption -- including from Washington -- and Western economic sanctions that have squeezed the country dry.
This program is 100 percent listener supported! You can join the hundreds of financial sponsors who make this show possible by becoming a member on our Patreon page.
Subscribe to this podcast on iTunes, Spotify, and SoundCloud. Please leave us a review and
Support the show (https://www.mintpressnews.com/donations/)
Welcome to MintCast -- an interview series hosted by Mnar Muhawesh Adley featuring dissenting voices the establishment would rather silence.
In this episode, we are joined by activist, journalist and documentary filmmaker Eleanor Goldfield whose new documentary, “Hard Road of Hope,” shares the stories of people in West Virginia and their struggle against the corporate state.
West Virginia. It’s been dubbed as a throwaway state with throw away people.
It’s a region in America often brushed under the rug in mainstream corporate media but its significance is major: this state and its story are a microcosm of U.S. exploitation of working class Americans at the hands of the corporate state, most notably the oil, gas and coal industry.
Journalist Chris Hedges describes its coal-rich mountains as an economic and ecological sacrifice zone to capitalism, one of the areas richest in resources in all of America, yet filled with some of the poorest and most powerless people in the country. West Virginia is home to the opioid crisis, theft of indigenous land, environmental disaster, water and soil contamination, oil pipelines and extraction, coal mining, fracking, and slavery.
“Hard Road of Hope,” tells the story of the poorest state in the union by per median household income, the ecological damage done by extractivist corporations plundering the region’s mineral resources, and how communities are coming together to fight back. Goldfield’s debut feature-length documentary is a sad, angering, and inspiring account.
Of the film, Paul Corbit, President of the ecological group Keeper of the Mountains said:
So many have come to West Virginia to tell our story- some have done so better than others. But Eleanor's film is one of the very few that told our story in our own words; succinctly, and with a clarity and dignity that can’t be ignored. Our story is yet another in a long line of wake up calls happening around the world. Eleanor's film sounds that alarm in a way that can’t be denied."
Today, we discuss the reasons Goldfield chose to make a documentary about West Virginia, the environmental devastation that huge energy companies have caused, and the community’s fight back against the corporate state.
This program is 100 percent listener supported! You can join the hundreds of financial sponsors who make this show possible by becoming a member on our Patreon page.
Subscribe to this podcast on iTunes, Spotify and SoundCloud. Please leave us a review and share this segment.
Support the show (https://www.mintpressnews.com/donations/)
Welcome to MintCast, the official MintPress News podcast hosted by Mnar Muhawesh. MintCast is an interview podcast featuring dissenting voices, independent researchers and journalists the establishment would rather silence.
In this episode, we are joined by Dr. Ramzy Baroud, Robert Inkalesh and Miko Peled to discuss the so-called “Deal of the Century,'' a plan promoted by U.S. President Donald Trump together with his son-in-law Jared Kushner and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, as Israel's annexation plans for the Jordan Valley located in the Palestinian West Bank, and the implications of the so-called deal for Palestine and the broader region.
The Netanyahu-led Israeli government was expected to initiate its plan to annex as much as 35 percent of the West Bank in the Jordan Valley earlier this week, formally declaring it part of Israel along guidelines laid out in President Trump and his son in law Jared Kushner’s so-called “Deal of the Century.” After international criticism and even caution from some members of the U.S. Congress, a delay in the plan has been announced. Nonetheless, critics fear that Israel will begin annexing Palestinian land soon.
Israel’s annexation of the region would put the over 70,000 Palestinians under full Israeli authority, giving the Israeli military control over all movement, agriculture, water, and all imports and exports, forcing residents to endure apartheid-like conditions experienced by those living in Gaza.
The plan would also cut out a part of the West Bank, allowing Israel to encircle the region militarily and control all Palestinian access to the outside world similar to the apartheid-like policies it carries out in Gaza. Not only does Trump’s so-called Deal of the Century hand de facto control to the Israeli military over all Palestinian movement, but it also opens up the doors to over 100,000 illegal Jewish only colonies on indigenous Palestinian land and prevents the two million Palestinian refugees who have the legal grounds to return to their land from ever doing so.
The move is nothing short of territorial conquest and military occupation as defined by the United Nations Charter and the annexation is illegal under International Law. Indeed, the United Nations’ High Commissioner on Human Rights, Michelle Bachelet, has declared Israel’s annexation plans both “illegal” and “disastrous.” This will, without a doubt, create another preventable man-made humanitarian disaster at the hands of Western powers that will fuel the military-industrial complex and stimulate profits off of the theft of indigenous land and blood of indigenous people. If the plan is not stopped, the West Bank could very well become a sprawling open-air prison and ghetto similar to Gaza.
Despite the international opposition, Israel enjoys full support from the United States, the world’s only superpower, and plans to complete the annexation before Trump’s reelection run in November.
This program is 100 percent listener supported! You can join the hundreds of financial sponsors who make this show possible by becoming a member on our Patreon page.
Subscribe to this podcast on iTunes, Spotify and SoundCloud. Please leave us a review and share this segment.
Support the show (https://www.mintpressnews.com/donations/)
Welcome to MintCast, the official MintPress News podcast hosted by Mnar Muhawesh. MintCast is an interview podcast featuring dissenting voices, independent researchers and journalists the establishment would rather silence.
In this episode, we are joined by Margaret Kimberly and Monique Cullars Doty.
Kimberly is a New York-based writer and activist for peace and justice. You can find her work at the Black Agenda Report where she is a senior columnist. Her book, “Prejudential: Black America and the Presidents,” was published in February.
Cullars Doty is a local organizer for the Black Lives Matter Twin Cities Metro and greater Minnesota region and the Twin Cities Coalition for Jamar Clark.
While some are calling it a “revolution” and others an “American intifada,” one thing is clear, that millions of people have taken to the streets to demand justice for George Floyd and an end to police brutality. This after a viral video showed Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin kneeling on Floyd’s neck, slowly suffocating the life out him while he begged for his mother. Floyd struggled for air for over eight minutes. His dying words “I can’t breathe” were heard around the globe, igniting a mass uprising and calls to defund the police, place law enforcement under community control, and even to dismantle law enforcement institutions altogether.
The state, under the Trump administration, has met their calls with brutality, beating and shooting protesters and journalists with rubber bullets, tear gas, and so-called less than lethal weapons. The National Guard has been deployed in over 30 states as the government struggles to keep a lid on the public’s anger.
Philando Castile, Eric Garner, Walter Scott, Breonna Taylor. The list of victims of racist police violence goes on and on. Police, on average, kill over 1,000 Americans every year, vastly more than the rest of the developed world combined, yet officers are largely protected from any consequences.
Margaret Kimberly and Monique Cullars Doty join MintCast to unpack the decades of racial injustice and police brutality unleashed on communities of color by the Democratic Party, how Democrats attempt to save face by co-opting justice movements, and the party’s roots in White supremacy.
This program is 100 percent listener supported! You can join the hundreds of financial sponsors who make this show possible by becoming a member on our Patreon page.
Subscribe to this podcast on iTunes, Spotify and SoundCloud. Please leave us a review and share this segment.
Support the show (https://www.mintpressnews.com/donations/)
Welcome to MintCast, the official MintPress News podcast hosted by Mnar Muhawesh. MintCast is an interview podcast featuring dissenting voices, independent researchers and journalists the establishment would rather silence.
In this episode, we are joined by Aaron Mate -- investigative journalist, contributor to The Nation and host of “Pushback” on The Grayzone. Mate has spent the last four years covering the mainstream media and U.S. intelligence claim that Russia hacked the U.S. elections in 2016.
Most recently, Mate revealed a bombshell that Crowdstrike, the firm behind the accusation that Russia hacked and stole DNC emails, admitted to Congress that it had no direct evidence that Russia actually stole the emails or infiltrated DNC servers.
Thanks in part to the global pandemic that has been dominating headlines, the revelation was not picked up by corporate media, the same corporate media, that for the past four years, worked diligently to convince the American public that Russia interfered in the 2016 elections to help Donald Trump.
The mass hysteria caused by Russiagate since 2016 caused so much paranoia that the American public became convinced that Russia was corrupting and manipulating the American political system. However, very little evidence was presented to the back that claim. In fact, the most famous claim published by the New York Times and the Associated Press in 2017 was that “all intelligence agencies agree Russia hacked our elections.” These same news organizations would later retract that claim yet they still continued to peddle that narrative.
For another two years, U.S. political and media voices continued to promote the narrative that President Donald Trump conspired with the Kremlin and that Special Counsel Robert Mueller would prove it through his probe which was released last year.
Most recently, however, previously sealed FBI documents “indicate close contacts between Israel and the Trump campaign and that the Mueller investigation found evidence of Israeli involvement, but largely redacted it.” This was largely ignored by the same outlets peddling Russiagate.
Mate argues, “the real Russiagate scandal is the damage it has done to our democratic system and media.”
This program is 100 percent listener supported! You can join the hundreds of financial sponsors who make this show possible by becoming a member on our Patreon page.
Subscribe to this podcast on iTunes, Spotify and SoundCloud. Please leave us a review and share this segment.
Support the show (https://www.mintpressnews.com/donations/)
Welcome to MintCast, the official MintPress News podcast hosted by Mnar Muhawesh. MintCast is an interview podcast featuring dissenting voices, independent researchers and journalists the establishment would rather silence.
In this episode, we are joined by independent journalist Whitney Webb. Many of our readers and listeners are familiar with Webb from her extraordinary work at MintPress as a staff writer and investigative reporter. She is now a contributor and is working on her first book about Jeffery Epstein and his ties to the Deep State.
Webb recently published a series of reports on the Last American Vagabond entitled "Engineering Contagion: Amerithrax, Coronavirus and the Rise of the Biotech-Industrial Complex." In them, she exposes the agendas of the national security state, Silicon Valley tech giants, billionaires, Big Pharma, the U.S. government’s years-long preparation for a flu-like pandemic similar to COVID-19 and how they planned to capitalize on that crisis to fulfill a vision worthy of George Orwell's "1984."
As Webb explains:
"For decades the U.S. ‘biodefense’ programs and pandemic preparedness efforts are now rearing its ugly head as pandemic panic distracts the American and global public from the fundamentally untrustworthy, and frankly dangerous, individuals who are in control of the US government and corporate America’s response.”
While the American public is riddled with panic and fear over the spread of the coronavirus, a mass surveillance system far worse than that introduced to the nation after 9/11 is being built under the guise of protecting public health -- all with public consent. The effort to normalize this plan for the greater good will expand a surveillance system that will make authoritarianism the new normal and further reduce American civil liberties.
From Jared Kushner to Bill Gates to the corruption-riddled vaccine companies tied to the opioid epidemic to Silicon Valley tech giants and their role in martial law, rolling back civil liberties and authoritarianism -- Whitney Webb unpacks the many conflicts of interests at play in the government and corporate response to COVID-19. She also discusses how the search for a cure ties into a larger agenda to use public fear over the pandemic to build a techno-tyrannical state worthy of George Orwell’s "1984."
This program is 100 percent listener supported! You can join the hundreds of financial sponsors who make this show possible by becoming a member on our Patreon page.
Subscribe to this podcast on iTunes, Spotify and SoundCloud. Please leave us a review and share this segment.
Support the show (https://www.mintpressnews.com/donations/)
Welcome to MintCast, the official weekly MintPress News podcast hosted by Mnar Muhawesh and Whitney Webb. MintCast is an interview podcast featuring dissenting voices, independent researchers and journalists who the establishment would rather silence.
In this episode, we are joined by journalist Vanessa Beeley, who is covering the conflict in Syria from Damascus for MintPress News. Beeley is well-known in independent media for her expertise on the Syrian conflict and particularly the covert involvement of Western powers in the crisis through humanitarian front groups. More recently, she has been covering the conflict in Syria’s Idlib province, where groups directly linked to al Qaeda are fighting to maintain control of the province with the direct backing of Turkey while the Syrian military seeks to reclaim its territory.
Recent developments in the conflict have seen Russia and Turkey negotiate a ceasefire of sorts after Syria and Turkey nearly went to war over Turkey’s backing of militants in Idlib as the Syrian military, backed by Russia, pushed forward. Despite the ceasefire, Turkey continues to lobby NATO, the EU, and the U.S. to support their efforts to halt the Syrian advance into Idlib, with limited success.
Turkish President Recep Erdogan is so desperate for EU support for his military incursion in northern Syria that the Turkish state is effectively weaponizing refugees as leverage to induce European states to adopt Turkey’s position in Syria. This has resulted in millions of Syrian and Afghan refugees flooding Europe after Turkey opened its border with the EU.
It was in 2011 that Turkey initially opened its borders to Idlib, where the current crisis was born. This set the stage for the rise of al Qaeda and ISIS in Syria. The terror groups viciously took control of this northern region which became ground zero in the fight for the geopolitical interests of Turkey, Western-backed armed groups linked to al Qaeda, and the Syrian military, which was trying to retake control of Syria’s most resource-rich region. That fight for oil, gas and major water reservoirs has left civilians scrambling for survival.
The crisis has led to the creation of a parallel state with the support of Turkey, Gulf Arab states like Saudi Arabia and Qatar, and Western nations including France, Britain and the United States, who poured millions of dollars and countless weapons into the hands of these terror groups in a desperate bid to overthrow the Syrian government.
In what was being described for years in Western media as a bastion of democracy and revolution to justify support for these so-called “moderates,”Idlib became the largest safe haven for al Qaeda.
Vanessa Beeley joins MintCast to help us unpack the crisis in Idlib, the geopolitical agendas at play and how civilians are scrambling for survival amid a fight over Syria’s resources.
This program is 100 percent listener supported! You can join the hundreds of financial sponsors who make this show possible by b
Support the show (https://www.mintpressnews.com/donations/)
Welcome to MintCast, the official weekly MintPress News podcast hosted by Mnar Muhawesh and Whitney Webb that re-launched in February 2020. MintCast is an interview podcast featuring dissenting voices, independent researchers and journalists who the establishment would rather silence.
One such voice is independent journalist and editor of ShadowProof, Kevin Gosztola. He joins MintCast to discuss his exclusive on the ground coverage of the Julian Assange extradition hearings taking place in London this past week.
Assange, who was forced to sit in a glass cage far from his defense team during last week’s hearings, faces extradition to the United States for alleged violations of the Espionage Act. The next hearing in the case is set to resume on May 18. He stands accused of 17 counts of violating the Espionage Act, an archaic law that dates back to World War I and has increasingly been used to target whistleblowers in the United States. He also faces one count of violating a computer crime law that the U.S. government asserts is also a charge of espionage. If convicted on all counts if extradited, Assange would face 175 years in a U.S. prison.
For the past decade, Wikileaks has helped expose a litany of crimes and corruption by the political class supported by both the Republican and Democratic Parties making Assange a target of the deep state and war-profiteering establishment. This includes publishing the Vault 7 leaks, exposing the CIA’s surveillance and intelligence capabilities worldwide, State Department cables -- highlighting the war agendas under Hillary Clinton to benefit Israel, DNC emails -- revealing how the Hillary Clinton campaign colluded with the DNC to smear and undercut Bernie Sanders and his supporters in the 2016 election and much more.
And in 2007, Wikileaks published documents leaked by Army Private Chelsea Manning that detailed evidence of American war crimes that took place during the war in Iraq. After previously being sentenced to 35 years in prison and spending months in solitary confinement, Manning was resentenced to 18 months in prison last year for refusing to testify against Assange.
In targeting the publisher of journalistic information that acts as a watchdog to those in power and works in the interest of the public, rather than those who committed the crimes, human rights organizations like Amnesty International have warned that this is a grave attack on press freedoms and the charges against Assange should be dropped.
Kevin joins us from London to discuss the recent hearings and the intricacies of Assange’s situation, the case against him and the precedent this case sets for journalism a
Support the show (https://www.mintpressnews.com/donations/)
Welcome to the re-launch of MintCast, the official weekly MintPress News podcast hosted by Mnar Muhawesh and Whitney Webb. MintCast is an interview podcast featuring dissenting voices, independent researchers and journalists who the establishment would rather silence.
One such voice is independent Bolivian-British journalist Oliver Vargas. He joins MintCast to discuss his exclusive on the ground coverage of the post-coup crisis in Bolivia, including the country's upcoming elections scheduled to take place on May 3.
Last November, the democratically-elected government of former Bolivian President Evo Morales was removed in a U.S.-backed coup that forced him to flee to Mexico and then to Argentina. Morales and his party MAS have since faced persecution, with several political allies and former Morales ministers now imprisoned. Other former ministers and officials have been forced to seek refuge in the Mexican embassy in the Bolivian capital of La Paz in order to avoid arrest.
In addition to the threats faced by Morales' political allies, his supporters have also faced aggression from the far-right post-coup government that has killed scores of unarmed protesters and wounded even more, especially in the early days that followed the coup.
Despite this, Morales’ successor, Luis Arce, has emerged as the election frontrunner according to recent polls. Bolivia’s so-called “interim” president Jeanine Áñe, however, has vowed to “fight” to stay in power, a move that has fragmented Bolivia’s pro-coup right, which has failed thus far in uniting in their effort to prevent Morales’ MAS party from retaking power. This backdrop has led many to worry that Bolivia’s upcoming election could be marred by fraud and manipulation.
Earlier this year, Morales himself -- despite being in exile in Argentina -- announced his plans to run for Bolivia’s Senate. Following the announcement of his candidacy, Morales said he received numerous threats from the United States and was recently barred by a Bolivian court from running, a decision that Morales and his allies argue was orchestrated by the Trump administration. Morales has said he plans to appeal the court’s decision.
Oliver Vargas joins us to discuss the latest election news from post-coup Bolivia.
This program is 100 percent listener supported! You can join the hundreds of financial sponsors who make this show possible by becoming a member on our Patreon page.
Subscribe to this podcast on iTunes, Spotify and SoundCloud. Please leave us a review and share this segment.
Support the show (https://www.mintpressnews.com/donations/)
Welcome to the re-launch of MintCast, the official weekly MintPress News podcast hosted by Mnar Muhawesh and Whitney Webb. MintCast is an interview podcast featuring dissenting voices, independent researchers and journalists who the establishment would rather silence.
One such voice is journalist and filmmaker Abby Martin. She joins MintCast to discuss her free speech lawsuit against the state of Georgia after she was banned from giving a keynote address at Georgia Southern University last month for refusing to sign a loyalty oath to the apartheid state of Israel as part of Georgia’s newly passed anti-BDS law. Ironically, she was scheduled to give a presentation about critical media literacy and free speech.
Over the past six years, 28 states including Georgia, have adopted anti-boycott laws. The majority of states have already mandated loyalty pledges to Israel as a means of outlawing dissent.
The non-violent Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement is the latest target of the pro-Israeli lobby, which is now trying to make support for the movement illegal. It’s no wonder since BDS is possibly the most powerful non-violent tool that places economic pressure on Israel to follow international law and end its apartheid system and military occupation of Palestine.
In their joint lawsuit, CAIR Legal Defense Fund Senior Litigation Attorney Gadeir Abbas said: “There is no place where free speech is more important than on campus. And this attempt to suppress Abby’s views–denying students, academics, and others from hearing her lecture–is as brazen as it is illegal.”
Mara Verheyden-Hilliard, Executive Director of the Partnership for Civil Justice Fund, added: “In 1956, Martin Luther King, Jr. was criminalized for leading a boycott against Jim Crow apartheid in Alabama. Southern states enforced anti-boycott laws to punish and derail civil rights organizing. The Supreme Court eventually made clear that peaceful boycotts are a protected form of political speech and expression.
Abby Martin is an outspoken critic of Israeli apartheid and it’s colonialism and occupation of Palestine. She recently highlighted Israel’s ongoing aggression and human rights abuses against Palestinians in Gaza in her documentary “Gaza Fights For Freedom”.
This program is 100 percent listener supported! You can join the hundreds of financial sponsors who make this show possible by becoming a member on our Patreon page.
Subscribe to this podcast on iTunes, Spotify and SoundCloud. Please leave us a review and share this segment.
Support the show (https://www.mintpressnews.com/donations/)
MintCast co-host Whitney Webb interviews author, investigative journalist and poet Doug Valentine about his extensive work on exposing the dark underbelly of the CIA and some of the agency’s most notorious covert programs.
Webb and Valentine begin the interview discussing how Valentine’s journalistic work on the CIA led him to be spied on and even threatened by the agency and how being a dissident journalist in the 1990s compares to being one in the present. Valentine argues that, in the present, efforts to illegalize criticism of the state of Israel are like a gateway that will soon lead to the prohibition of criticism against the U.S. government and its intelligence agencies, the CIA among them.
Valentine then touches on some of the themes covered in his book, The CIA as Organized Crime: How Illegal Operations Corrupt America and the World, including his assertion that the CIA operates as “the organized crime branch of the U.S. government” and how its activities have been influenced by its decades-long relationships with organized crime networks in the United States and throughout the world.
Lastly, Webb and Valentine discuss the CIA’s long-standing interest in manipulating the media and how those efforts also extend to alternative media, not just mainstream media outlets. Valentine discusses the methods the CIA uses to target alternative, independent media and how we are seeing their efforts take place in real time.
Follow Doug Valentine on Twitter or visit his website to learn more about his work.
MintPress donors and patrons: Stay tuned later this week for a patron-exclusive extension of this podcast with Doug Valentine, which will discuss his work on the War on Drugs and the Drug Enforcement Agency and how both are key to unconstitutional, covert CIA programs. You can become a patron via Patreon or through our website.
Support the show (https://www.mintpressnews.com/donations/)
MintCast hosts Whitney Webb and Alan MacLeod recently interviewed investigative journalist Yasha Levine about his most recent book Surveillance Valley: The Secret Military History of the Internet and his most recent articles on the xenophobia that lies beneath Russiagate and how this new anti-Russia fervor has impacted the Russian-American immigrant community at the national level.
In discussing his exhaustively researched book Surveillance Valley, Levine details how the growing nexus between Silicon Valley monopolies like Google and Facebook and the U.S. government as well as today’s scandals over internet surveillance and warrantless spying are actually the logical consequence of the Internet's origins as a U.S. military project aimed at predicting future insurgent behavior by means of covert spying.
Also, discussed is Levine’s controversial but invaluable work on the hidden face of the Tor Project, which is included in Surveillance Valley. Levine summarizes his research on the Tor Project, noting that -- far from being the browser that is the ultimate tool against government surveillance -- it has long been funded and continues to receive most of its funding from the U.S. government. In addition, leaders and top advocates of the Tor Project have been caught colluding with the U.S. government, particularly the government agencies funding the project, on more than one occasion, greatly undermining its carefully crafted public image as an anti-government surveillance-busting tool.
Lastly, Levine describes his most recent work on the Russiagate scandal, highlighting the often overlooked impact of the media-driven hysteria on Russian-Americans and Russian immigrants to the United States. As Levine notes, much of this rhetoric in recent years has implied that ethnic Russians have undesirable “genetic” traits or are all secretly connected to Russia’s current leader, Vladimir Putin, who is often portrayed by some mainstream media outlets as a supervillain. As a result, Levin argues that many Russian-Americans have become alienated from the Democratic Party and have either embraced Trump or complete disillusionment with both parties.
Follow Yasha Levine on Twitter and check out his latest work on his website.
Support the show (https://www.mintpressnews.com/donations/)
MintCast hosts Alan MacLeod and Whitney Webb discuss the latest current events including how U.S. political reactions to Trump’s Iran policy reveal the true motivations behind the Russiagate scandal and how big tech firms are teaming up with government players to suppress and intimidate journalists around the world.
Also discussed is the U.S.’ secretive military base in the Chagos Islands. Attention is given to how the native islanders have fought for decades for the right to return to their lands, how the U.S. and the UK colluded to expel the Islanders and why the military base on the Chagos Islands, known as Diego Garcias, is so important to U.S. empire and the dangers it poses to international law.
In the concluding segment, MacLeod and Webb add John Bolton to the MintCast’s Hall of Shame and Bolton’s long and storied history of hawkishness and dishonesty is discussed at length.
Support the show (https://www.mintpressnews.com/donations/)
MintCast co-hosts Alan MacLeod and Whitney Webb recently spoke to Robbie Martin (@FluorescentGrey), a filmmaker whose recent documentary series A Very Heavy Agenda explores how prominent Bush-era neo-conservatives have continued to dominate the Washington foreign policy debate and have been instrumental in creating and fomenting Russiagate and Cold War 2.0.
Neoconservatives, or Neocons, have been a key force in Washington for decades and seem to maintain their influence regardless of what political party controls the presidency or Congress. MintCast’s discussion with Martin first focuses on the origins of the term and the movement and follows its trajectory to the present. Martin makes the case that the ultimate goal of the neoconservative movement is to gain favor from both the establishment left and establishment right in order to indefinitely dominate U.S. foreign policy, and that the neocons are closer to that goal now more than ever.
MacLeod, Webb and Martin then discussed the role of the neocons in creating what is now known as “Russiagate” years before Trump was even a presidential candidate and how a top neoconservative donor in the Republican party was largely responsible for the controversial “Steele dossier” despite the fact that the president and other prominent Republicans have since accused Democrats of having been exclusively responsible for promoting the Russiagate narrative.
The discussion concludes with a focus on neoconservatism in the Trump era, with a special focus on National Security Advisor John Bolton and the push for war in Iran and Venezuela. Here, Martin asserts that Trump and Bolton are playing “good cop” and “bad cop”, respectively, with Trump casting himself as a dove compared to Bolton’s hawkishness as a foreign policy negotiating tactic and as a means of placating his base domestically.
If you enjoyed this episode of the MintCast, please consider supporting future episode by donating to MintPress News at Patreon.
Support the show (https://www.mintpressnews.com/donations/)
MinCast hosts Alan MacLeod and Whitney Webb discuss the week’s top stories, including U.S. attempt to escalate the situation in Iran, the unjust re-imprisonment of Chelsea Manning, Microsoft’s new ElectionGuard product and get a first-hand account of the Venezuelan Embassy Protection Collective from Alex Rubenstein.
Segment 1: Is a War with Iran Looming?
With the failed Venezuela coup, the US turns its attention to war with Iran. John Bolton reportedly ordered the military to prepare an invasion force of 120,000 troops. Could an accident or a false flag send us to war in the Middle East again!?
Segment 2: Chelsea Manning back in Jail, Monsanto vs. Venezuela and Elections controlled by Microsoft and DARPA
Hosts Alan MacLeod and Whitney Webb discuss a judge ordering whistleblower Chelsea Manning back to jail, agrochemical giant Monsanto’s shady role in driving US policy towards Venezuela and Microsoft’s new product, ElectionGuard, developed in conjunction with the US military to supposedly safeguard us from foreign interference.
Segment 3: MintPressNews journalist Alex Rubenstein joins us to discuss his time covering the Venezuelan Embassy Protection Collective in Washington DC, the efforts by authorities to force them out the building, and the strange collaboration between pro-coup protestors and the police.
Support the show (https://www.mintpressnews.com/donations/)
MintCast co-hosts Alan MacLeod and Whitney Webb were recently joined by Matt Kennard, a journalist at the Latin American Bureau in London who was previously a reporter for the Financial Times and has written for the Guardian, the New York Times and Mother Jones. The discussion focused first on Kennard’s 2015 book The Racket: A Rogue Reporter vs the Masters of the Universe, which recounts Kennard’s experiences as a reporter with the Financial Times and how the media is a key part of the “racket” that aids and abets the global elite.
Kennard, MacLeod and Webb then discussed the current situation of Julian Assange and Chelsea Manning and what it heralds for the future of journalism, truth-telling and the public’s right to know. The interview was recorded prior to Manning’s release from prison late Thursday evening.
Finally, Kennard -- who has traveled and reported from across Latin America -- discusses the situation in Venezuela as well as Ecuador and the current crises facing other Latin American countries that are often left untouched by mainstream media, especially if those countries maintain positive relations with the United States.
Support the show (https://www.mintpressnews.com/donations/)
In this installment of MintCast, Alan MacLeod and Whitney Webb discuss recent MintPress headlines such as efforts to exploit the Sri Lankan Easter bombings, next steps for the Yellow Vest movement in France, and the tightening nexus between social media companies and the U.S. government. Special attention is given to the recent failed coup attempt in Venezuela and its implications for Venezuela, U.S. foreign policy, and Latin America as a whole.
After reviewing the latest in current events, MacLeod and Webb discuss the U.S. atrocities committed during the Korean War, sometimes called the “forgotten war.” These include the devastating bombing campaign that resulted in the U.S. committing a litany of war crimes, and Washington’s’ decades-long efforts to cover up the evidence that the U.S. used biological weapons that killed thousands of Korean civilians as well as American soldiers during the conflict.
In the last segment, former Vice President and recently announced presidential candidate Joe Biden is added to MintCast’s “Hall of Shame.” MacLeod and Webb examine Biden’s history of whitewashing notorious racists like Strom Thurmond and Jesse Helms, as well as his history of opposing racial integration and helping create the current racial disparities in the U.S. criminal justice system.
Support the show (https://www.mintpressnews.com/donations/)
MintCast recently interviewed Lisa Pease, a researcher, former UN expert witness, and author of the recently released book A Lie Too Big To Fail, which has been hailed as the “Magnum Opus of Robert F., Kennedy assassination research.” She spent 25 years researching this book and her research skills and exhaustively documented findings have even been praised by members of RFK’s family such as by his son Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and, more recently, the Washington Post.
In the first part of this interview, MintCast co-hosts Alan MacLeod and Whitney Webb spoke to Lisa about the compelling evidence of Sirhan Sirhan’s innocence, how Robert F. Kennedy’s son, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., also maintains Sirhan’s innocence, and how the assassination’s investigation was covered up by powerful forces in the Los Angeles Police Department and elsewhere.
In the second part of the interview, the discussion turned toward the role of the mainstream media and the long-standing connections of many media outlets to the CIA as well as the role of Israel in the Robert F. Kennedy assassination and how the senator’s death was exploited to push the left to support unfettered U.S. military aid to the Israeli state and demonize Palestinians -- as Israeli media and pro-Israel pundits have since labeled Sirhan Sirhan the “first Palestinian terrorist.”
The interview concludes with a discussion of why the Boycott, Divest and Sanctions (BDS) movement should consider taking a look at the compelling evidence of Sirhan’s innocence in order to right a historical wrong that has been used to demonize Palestinians to the American public for decades, as well as the importance of revisiting the high-profile assassinations of the 1960s in order to better understand how those murders have so greatly shaped our world and current political reality.
Lisa Pease can be followed on Twitter and her new book is available at Amazon.
Support the show (https://www.mintpressnews.com/donations/)
Whitney Webb and Alan MacLeod discuss this week’s headlines, including Venezuela leaving the OAS, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s re-election in Israel on the anniversary of the Deir Yassin Massacre and Lenin Moreno’s move towards authoritarianism in Ecuador.
Support the show (https://www.mintpressnews.com/donations/)