Primary Sources - The Drone Whistleblowers feat. Lisa Ling, Cian Westmoreland, Keagan Miller & Christopher Aaron

The Drone Whistleblowers feat. Lisa Ling, Cian Westmoreland, Keagan Miller & Christopher Aaron

10/27/21 • 83 min

Those in the drone program have witnessed first hand the serious human costs of the US's global assassinations program. For years, veterans of the drone program have worked to alert the public to the realities of the drone warfare.
The Kabul Strike, which killed 10 civilians, including 7 children, shocks the conscience of all thinking people. But as drone whistleblowers, have tried to warn, it was hardly an unusual event.
Host Chip Gibbons is joined by drone whistleblowers Lisa Ling, Keagan Miller, Cian Westmoreland, and Christopher Aaron for a timely and troubling conversation.

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Empire of Lies feat. Matthew Hoh

"There's been one systemic process of lying throughout the Afghan War. From the Bush Administration to the Obama Administration to the Trump Administration it has just been systemic lying from the American government about the war."
This is what Matthew Hoh says about the US war in Afghanistan during this episode of Primary Sources. Hoh would know. After already completing two assignments in Iraq, Hoh joined the US State Department in Afghanistan. In 2009, he made headlines when he resigned in protest of President Obama's plans to escalate the Afghan War. Hoh joins host Chip Gibbons to discuss the four decade history of US intervention in Afghanistan, his own journey as a whistleblower, and how the Pentagon hired a PR firm to discredit him when he spoke out against the war.

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Wikileaks & The Guantanamo Files feat. Andy Worthington & Clive Stafford Smith

The prosecution of Julian Assange marks the first time a publisher of truthful information has been indicted under the Espionage Act. In the first of a series of episodes exploring what WikiLeaks exposed and the lengths the US government went to silence them, Primary Sources looks at WikiLeaks' role in exposing human rights abuses at the notorious US prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. Nearly 1⁄3 of the charges against WikiLeaks publisher Assange pertain to Guantanamo Bay Detainee Assessment files released by WikiLeaks. Yet these files remain under discussed by the media.

To help understand what they are and why they matter, host Chip Gibbons is joined by Andy Worthington, a leading expert on Guantanamo Bay who worked with Wikileaks on the release of the Guantanamo Files, and Clive Stafford Smith, a pioneering human rights attorney who, in the aftermath of 9/11, was one of the first lawyers willing to represent detainees at Guantanamo Bay. Both men testified on behalf of Assange at his extradition hearing.

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