Boobytraps, Bombs & Blowback

Ralph Nader Radio Hour

Ralph welcomes Middle East expert and executive VP of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, Trita Parsi, to fill us in on the consequences of Israel boobytrapping pagers and walkie-talkies in Lebanon and how those tactics have the potential to blow back on us in the United States. Then we welcome back surgeon and humanitarian, Dr. Feroze Sidhwa, who has worked in Gaza during the Israeli assault, to update us on his efforts to get the Biden Administration to convince Israel to stop the killing.

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Trita Parsi is the executive vice president of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, and the co-founder and former President of the National Iranian American Council. He is an expert on US-Iranian relations, Iranian foreign policy, and the geopolitics of the Middle East, and has worked for the Swedish Permanent Mission to the UN, where he served in the Security Council, handling the affairs of Afghanistan, Iraq, Tajikistan, and Western Sahara, and in the General Assembly’s Third Committee, addressing human rights in Iran, Afghanistan, Myanmar, and Iraq. He has authored three books on US foreign policy in the Middle East, with a particular focus on Iran and Israel— Treacherous Alliance: The Secret Dealings of Iran, Israel and the United States, A Single Roll of the Dice – Obama’s Diplomacy with Iran, and Losing an Enemy: Obama, Iran and the Triumph of Diplomacy.

We're in a very sad situation in which we have a president who has been sitting on the front lines of American foreign policy for one-fifth of America's history, who thinks that he knows everything best, and clearly doesn't seem to be listening to anyone. And there's plenty of discontent inside the Biden administration itself—and people appear to have just given up and are waiting for the elections—but there's no clear signs yet that there won't necessarily be much of a change even after that.

Trita Parsi

Let's first remember that if any other entity had done this to Israel—or to us—we would not have hesitated for a second. We would have called it an act of terrorism, and we would have called it an act of war.

Trita Parsi

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Dr. Feroze Sidhwa is a trauma and critical care surgeon as well as a Northern California Veterans Affairs general surgeon, and he is Associate Professor of Surgery at the California Northstate University College of Medicine. Dr. Sidhwa served at the European Hospital in Khan Younis in March and April of this year, and he has done prior humanitarian work in Haiti, the West Bank, Ukraine, and Zimbabwe. Dr. Sidhwa and 45 other American doctors and nurses who have served in Gaza recently sent a letter exhorting President Biden, VP Harris, and First Lady Dr. Jill Biden to effect an immediate ceasefire.

It's hard to appreciate, but really literally everything in Gaza that makes a place a society has been destroyed. I think of it in three levels— at the very base is agriculture, food production, and housing, at the level above that is healthcare, and at the level above that is things that are for a higher level of society, education, arts, industry, whatever. That top level is gone. Literally every university in Gaza has been obliterated, physically destroyed…The hospital system is almost completely useless right now…the functionality of the hospitals is very little more than a four walled space in which people can walk into and ask for a doctor to put bandages on them. And then even the lowest level…something like 85 or 90 % of the water sanitation and hygiene infrastructure in Gaza has been destroyed.

Dr. Feroze Sidhwa

This is just outrageous. I mean, why are we doing this even to ourselves? Is it worth corrupting the entire executive department of the United States so that we can murder more children? Is that what Americans want? I don't think so.

Dr. Feroze Sidhwa

Let's talk about Lebanon itself, not just Hezbollah. This is war on Lebanon—that has a dysfunctional government, to be sure— but it is a state that the U.S. is allied with in a way, supplying modest weapons to the Lebanese army, and France has had long relations with Lebanon going back to the mandate period. In the U.S., this is a whole new constituency where they're losing relatives and friends.

Ralph Nader

More links to the letter sent by Dr. Sidhwa and his colleagues:

To Prime Minister Justin Trudeau in Canada

To Prime Minister Keir Starmer in the UK

How to email the President

How to call the President

Write or Call the White House

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In Case You Didn’t Hear with Francesco DeSantis

News 9/25/24

1. On September 11^th, Senator Patty Murray and Progressive Caucus Chair Pramila Jayapal sent a letter to the Biden administration demanding “an immediate, transparent, credible, and thorough independent U.S. investigation…into the killing of [Ayşenur] Eygi,” the American citizen murdered by Israeli forces during a protest in the West Bank. Senator Murray and Representative Jayapal both represent Washington state, where Ms. Eygi attended university. In this letter, Murray and Jayapal also list the numerous American citizens killed by Israeli soldiers even before the current explosion of tensions in the region, ranging from Rachel Corrie in 2003 to Shireen Abu Akleh in 2022. Senator Bernie Sanders echoed this call in his own statement on September 13^th. Despite this pressure, the administration has not launched an investigation. The government of Turkey however – where Ms. Eygi was born, though she moved the United States when she was less than a year old – will pursue charges against Israel in the International Criminal Court and International Court of Justice, Reuters reports.

2. The Intercept reports that the Uncommitted Movement will not endorse Vice President Kamala Harris’ presidential campaign. In their official statement, the Movement leaders write “Vice President Harris’s unwillingness to shift on unconditional weapons policy or to even make a clear campaign statement in support of upholding existing U.S. and international human rights law has made it impossible for us to endorse her.” Harris proved unwilling to even meet with the Uncommitted leaders. This cold shoulder could have disastrous consequences, particularly in Michigan where Uncommitted garnered over 100,000 votes in the Democratic primaries.

3. Boeing is again in crisis. On September 20^th, the New York Post reported that the chief of the company’s space unit, Ted Colbert, had been ousted after Boeing’s Starliner capsule left astronauts Suni Williams and Butch Wilmore stranded on the International Space Station. This comes amid a massive strike by Boeing machinists, 96% of whom voted in favor of the strike per Ryan Simms of KOMO News. The New York Post adds that Boeing’s shares have lost over 40% of their value so far this year.

4. In more union related news, on September 18^th, the Congressional Workers Union announced that “staff in the Office of Congressman Mark Pocan and Congresswoman Val Hoyle secured the first-ever Memorandums of Understanding…between congressional staff and their members.” These MOUs include salary increases, back pay, and immediate cost-of-living adjustments. The union will continue to press for the first ever Congressional office collective bargaining agreement.

5. On September 12^th, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau “filed a proposed order against student loan servicer Navient for its years of failures and lawbreaking.” If approved by the court, this order would permanently “remove Navient from a market where it, among other illegal actions, steered numerous student loan borrowers into costly repayment options…illegally deprived student borrowers of opportunities to enroll in more affordable income-driven repayment plans and forced them to pay much more than they should have.” Additionally, Navient would be forced to pay out $100 million to harmed borrowers, on top of a $20 million penalty. CFPB Director Rohit Chopra is quoted saying “For years, Navient’s top executives profited handsomely by exploiting students and taxpayers…By banning the notorious student loan giant from federal student loan servicing and ensuring the winddown of these operations, the CFPB will finally put an end to the years of abuse.” Navient, formerly Sallie Mae, is described as “a repeat offender with a long history of regulatory violations,” and when the CFPB first took legal action against the company in 2017, it was the largest student loan servicer in the country.

6. More Perfect Union’s Jordan Zakarin reports the National Labor Relations Board has ruled that Starbucks illegally closed all three of its Ithaca, New York locations and that the NLRB “ordered that those stores be re-opened, with the unionized staff re-hired and given 16 months of backpay.” Yet, Zakarin notes that because this was decided by an administrative law judge, Starbucks can and more than likely will appeal this decision. This case starkly exemplifies why the capitalist class feels so threatened by the newly reinvigorated NLRB.

7. A deeply disturbing story sheds light on sexual assault by CIA officers in postings around the world. The AP reports Brian Jeffrey Raymond, a longtime CIA agent, was sentenced to 30 years in federal prison for drugging, photographing, and sexually assaulting more than two dozen women in postings around the globe. Yet Raymond’s case is just the tip of the iceberg. “[A]nother veteran CIA officer faces…charges in Virginia for allegedly reaching up a co-worker’s skirt and forcibly kissing her during a drunken party in the office…Still another former CIA employee…is scheduled to face a jury trial next month on charges he assaulted a woman…at the agency’s Langley, Virginia, headquarters. That case emboldened some two dozen women to come forward to authorities and Congress with accounts of their own of sexual assaults, unwanted touching and what they contend are the CIA’s efforts to silence them.” Tellingly, even Raymond’s own attorneys contended that his “quasi-military” work at the CIA in the years following 9/11 contributed to his “emotional callousness [and] objectification of other people,” that led to his preying upon women. It is well worth remembering that, once set in motion, dehumanization is not easily stopped.

8. Amid an expansive corruption probe in New York City, Gothamist reports just how much the NYPD is receiving in overtime pay in the subway; whereas last year, this slice of overtime pay totaled $4 million in taxpayer money, this year it has ballooned to $155 million, a nearly 4,000% increase. Meanwhile the Mayor continues to slash budgets for essential city services, such as libraries.

9. Rolling Stone reports the Crypto lobby is spending gargantuan sums of money to take out Ohio Democratic Senator Sherrod Brown – reportedly $32 million by the end of September, or $800,000 per day. Aware that their cause is unpopular, they are not running pro-Crypto ads, but instead spots that say his opponent will stop “illegal immigrants from taking Ohio’s tax dollars.” As Luke Goldstein of the American Prospect puts it “Dems are getting played like a fiddle by crypto; Schumer caved to their demands to stop the bleeding and then crypto PACs said thanks we’re still dropping $32 mil in OH to knock out your senate majority.”

10. Finally, in a story featuring a dizzying array of the worst things imaginable, Bloomberg reports “The owner of the shuttered Three Mile Island nuclear plant in Pennsylvania will invest $1.6 billion to revive it, agreeing to sell all the output to Microsoft…as the tech titan seeks…electricity for data centers to power [AI].” This story notes that “one of the site’s two units permanently closed almost a half-century ago after the worst…nuclear accident” in American history, but Constellation Energy is “planning to reopen the other reactor, which shut in 2019 because it couldn’t compete economically.” In other words, Microsoft is dumping money into a defunct nuclear power plant that has proven to be unsafe for the sole purpose of powering AI that has no proven benefits. Corporate greed caused a catastrophe at Three Mile Island before. Corporate hubris could easily cause another.

This has been Francesco DeSantis, with In Case You Haven’t Heard.