Intercepted With Jeremy Scahill

Water Protectors are traveling in growing numbers to stand with the Anishinaabe-led movement to stop the construction of Line 3, a tar sands oil pipeline.This week on Intercepted: Reporter Alleen Brown takes us to northern Minnesota, a flashpoint in the fight to halt the expansion of the fossil fuel industry as the climate crisis deepens. Direct actions and other protests against Line 3 are just heating up and more than 500 people have already been arrested or issued citations. Opponents of the Line 3 pipeline are urging the Biden administration to intervene to stop construction but recently his administration moved to defend the pipeline. Water Protectors are being greeted by an intensifying police response and what scholars are calling a corporate counterinsurgency campaign led by the pipeline company, Enbridge.  See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Domestic workers — nannies, house cleaners, and care workers — are one of the fastest-growing labor groups in the U.S. They are also some of the most undervalued and least-protected workers, a factor further exacerbated by the coronavirus pandemic.This week on Intercepted: Vanessa Bee and Murtaza Hussain interview Ai-jen Poo, co-founder and executive director of the National Domestic Workers Alliance, about the impact of Covid-19 on these vulnerable yet essential workers. They also discuss how the exclusion of labor protections for domestic workers has roots in slavery and how President Joe Biden’s jobs plan could ensure historically denied rights. And we hear stories from domestic workers themselves as they organize for their rights on International Domestic Workers Day in New York City.  See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Last month, the Tk’emlúps te Secwépemc First Nation uncovered a mass grave of 215 children on the grounds of a former residential school in British Columbia, Canada. This week on Intercepted: Naomi Klein speaks with residential school survivor Doreen Manuel and her niece Kanahus Manuel about the horrors of residential schools and the relationship between stolen children and stolen land. Doreen’s father, George Manuel, was a survivor of the Kamloops Indian Residential School, where unmarked graves of children as young as 3 years old were found. Kanahus’s father, Arthur Manuel, was also a survivor of the Kamloops residential school. This intergenerational conversation goes deep on how the evils of the Kamloops school, and others like it, have reverberated through a century of Manuels, an experience shared by so many Indigenous families, and the Manuel family’s decades long fight to reclaim stolen land.Warning: This episode contains highly distressing details about the killing, rape, and torture of children. If

When a police officer shoots and kills someone — and there aren’t any witnesses — can we trust the police to investigate themselves?This week on Intercepted: Antoine and Tammy Bufford's son, Cortez, was shot and killed by a St. Louis police officer in 2019. Nearly two years later, the city is still investigating Cortez’s case. No charges have been filed. And the Bufford family is still looking for answers. The police kill more people per capita in St. Louis than in any other American city. Seventy-two percent of these people are Black, like Cortez.The Chicago-based Invisible Institute recently partnered with The Intercept to examine the circumstances of Cortez’s death. Their resulting investigation, reported by Alison Flowers and Sam Stecklow, sheds new light in the search for truth about this police killing.  See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

In the year since the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis and the mass mobilization of protest that followed — the largest collective gesture against police violence in this country’s history — there’s been a constant and energized call to defund or outright abolish policing as we know it in the U.S. This week on Intercepted: The U.S. has been grappling with this same cycle of violence for more than nearly a century: A Black person is killed by police, and protests follow. In 1968, the U.S. tried to find out why this kept happening in cities and small towns across the country with an unprecedented frequency. President Lyndon B. Johnson assembled the Kerner Commission to study the extraordinary violence and destruction of uprisings in cities like Newark, New Jersey, and Detroit the year prior. Their findings should surprise no one. Systemic and institutionalized racism was to blame. Structural white supremacy maintained two societies: “One Black, one white. Separate and unequal.”Historian

A week ago, the Biden administration announced support for waiving intellectual property protection for Covid-19 vaccines. In response, Bio, a trade association representing biotechnology companies, issued a statement saying, "The United States has unfortunately chosen to set a dangerous precedent with these actions.” This week on Intercepted: Intercept investigative journalists Sharon Lerner and Lee Fang discuss how the pharmaceutical industry has ruthlessly fought to maintain IP protection from the beginning of the pandemic despite global calls to share knowledge and know-how to end the crisis as quickly as possible. By claiming the same monopoly IP rights on Covid-19 therapeutics and vaccines as other drugs, the industry has perpetuated a market of scarcity and profiteering when a collaborative global response is needed.  See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

If you went back and looked at every foreign policy decision Joe Biden made — every single one — would you be any closer to understanding him? This week on Intercepted: Our editor-at-large and senior correspondent Jeremy Scahill and reporter Murtaza Hussain examined the past 50 years of Biden’s decisions, poring over hundreds of pages of archival copies of the congressional record and reviewing declassified CIA documents for mentions of Biden. The investigation is called “Empire Politician,” and it’s the result of this painstaking research into Biden’s historical record. Jeremy and Murtaza also analyze Biden’s recent pledge to withdraw forces from Afghanistan by September this year.  See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

While much of the public’s attention has been focused on the thousands of unaccompanied minors currently in U.S. custody, U.S. Customs and Border Protection has quietly begun a policy of dropping off asylum-seekers in remote border towns along the deadliest stretches of the U.S.-Mexico divide.This week on Intercepted: Intercept reporter Ryan Devereaux travels to the Arizona cities of Ajo and Tucson, speaking to migrants and local volunteers about the dangers and uncertainty people are facing. Devereaux investigates how the Biden administration’s continuation of Trump-era policies like Title 42, which has been used to expel more than half a million migrants in the past year, jeopardizes the safety of asylum-seekers and exacerbates the humanitarian crisis at the border.  See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

The Environmental Protection Agency under the Trump administration invited companies to retroactively amend emissions records of a deadly carcinogenic chemical. This week on Intercepted: Investigative reporter Sharon Lerner explains how 270,000 pounds of the chemical ethylene oxide vanished from the public record right after the EPA determined that it was more toxic than previously known. Ethylene oxide is a colorless and odorless gas used to produce many consumer goods and used extensively as an agent in the sterilization of medical equipment.Despite the EPA’s transition to new leadership under the Biden administration, regulatory capture is a persistent obstacle in the agency’s ability to protect public health and the environment. And as Lerner reports, a disproportionate number of poor communities and communities of color have yet to be alerted to the fact that elevated levels of cancer-causing ethylene oxide permeate the air they breathe. We also hear from a gr

Jury selection for the murder trial of Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin continues after the city announced a $27 million settlement with George Floyd’s family. This week on Intercepted: Organizer and educator Mariame Kaba talks to lead producer Jack D’Isidoro about the case, efforts born out of the uprisings of this past summer, and the role hope plays in building a long-term abolitionist movement. Whether she’s breaking down the historical foundations of the carceral state or laying out a framework for mutual aid, Kaba works tirelessly to reimagine and create a system not rooted in punishment and oppression. They also discuss her new book “We Do This ’Til We Free Us: Abolitionist Organizing and Transforming Justice.”  See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Few anti-fascists were as influential on Portland’s recent protest scene as Sean Kealiher. He rarely missed a protest, and he would have been front and center last summer when the insurrectionary activism he had long advocated for became a staple on Portland streets. But he wasn’t. In October 2019, at 23, he was killed in front of the state Democratic Party building, which protesters vandalized on Inauguration Day this year. Kealiher’s death, which was ruled a homicide, shocked Portland’s activist community. But no arrests were ever made, and no persons of interest were ever named. Those in Kealiher’s circle saw his unsolved murder as further confirmation of the police’s double standards and antagonism toward the left.This week on Intercepted: While it was largely former President Donald Trump who elevated antifa, short for anti-fascists, to a household name, generations of Portland anti-fascists have for decades opposed far-right, racist extremists as well as police. Reporter Alice Speri dives

As Joe Biden took the oath of office this January, Guatemalan security forces at the Honduran border thwarted thousands of U.S.-bound migrants. While decades-long American imperialism has facilitated displacement throughout the region, the U.S. is increasingly outsourcing its deadly immigration policy. This week on Intercepted: The Biden administration announced it will begin to process the 25,000 asylum seekers stuck in squalid border town camps as part of Trump’s “Remain in Mexico” policy. But immigration advocates fear President Biden will not reverse the bipartisan trend of his predecessors to further militarize the southern border and expand the reaches of immigration enforcement — policies that have led to more migrant deaths and detention in recent decades. Despite Biden’s executive actions to reverse the Muslim ban, initiate migrant family reunification, and fortify DACA, his administration has indicated that it will continue to support Mexican and Guatemalan armed enforc

A massive police database obtained by The Intercept provides groundbreaking insight into the pervasive surveillance state operated by the Chinese government to repress Uyghurs and other ethnic minorities. This week on Intercepted: A new report from The Intercept provides a raw glimpse into the persecution and sweeping internment of Muslims in the city of Ürümqi, the largest city in northwest China’s Xinjiang region.The report also confirms many of the anti-democratic systems already in place: child separation and carceral re-education, installation of surveillance cameras inside private homes and mosques, immense detention centers, constant police checkpoints, widespread collection of electronic and biometric data, demolition of Uyghur cemeteries, and the forced abortion and sterilization of women.Although the United States has surveilled, abused, rendered, and imprisoned Muslims for decades, former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo declared that China is committing “ongoing” genocide. His successor, A

Now that Donald Trump is gone from office, what’s next? This week on Intercepted: There are a slew of unanswered questions about the siege of the Capitol. Americans are being asked to believe that the national security apparatus — the same one that charged nearly 200 people en masse, including journalists and observers, with felony rioting when Trump was inaugurated in 2017, and has leveled federal charges including terrorism charges on Black Lives Matter protesters — failed to see the threat to the U.S. Congress posed by right-wing extremists, even as people organized across social media platforms in plain sight.In response to the Capitol siege, Joe Biden and some members of Congress are looking to expand new domestic terrorism laws. They are using the exact same playbook deployed by the Bush-Cheney White House after 9/11 and embraced across the aisles in Congress. This is a dangerous moment where policies with very serious implications could be rushed through in the heat of the moment.The Intercept’s Ryan D

In this special bonus episode of Intercepted, we take an in-depth look at one of the most consequential eras of modern history, the late 1980s and early 1990s. The Berlin Wall fell in 1989, as the Soviet Union crumbled. The Russian occupation of Afghanistan came to an end, thanks in no small part to the covert and overt involvement of the United States. Bill Clinton brought an end to 12 years of Republican rule, defeating the former CIA director George HW Bush. And with Clinton’s two terms in office came a new spin on US militarism across the world, the notion of liberal so-called humanitarian intervention. The propaganda pitch was that the United States would use its military force as a sort of global police officer whose violent actions were wrapped in the justification that US missiles and bombs and troop deployments were serving a greater good. Nowhere was this more boldly asserted than in the wars in Yugoslavia, which stretched from the early 1990s all the way through 2008 when the US officially recogniz

A U.S.-backed militia that kills children may be America’s exit strategy from its longest war reported by journalist Andrew Quilty.  See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

President-elect Joe Biden’s Cabinet is being constructed in significant part from corporate Democrats and Obama-era national security hawks with a small side order of more progressive figures. This week on Intercepted: As Nancy Pelosi runs unopposed in her party for another term as speaker of the House, Congress has failed for many months to deliver meaningful aid to millions of Americans suffering through the Covid-19 pandemic. But lawmakers moved swiftly to approve the National Defense Authorization Act, an overwhelmingly bipartisan military and war spending bill. New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was one of just 37 Democrats to vote against the NDAA, and she is increasingly vocal in her criticism of her party’s leadership. In a wide-ranging interview with Intercepted, Ocasio-Cortez discusses the fight for Medicare for All, the battle for the future of the Democratic Party, red-baiting and the 2020 election, Biden’s emerging Cabinet, disaster profiteering in Puerto Rico, the weaponizing

Donald Trump is now in the dying days of his presidency and is spending those days promoting the myth that he actually won the November election in a landslide. This week on Intercepted: As the clock ticks toward Joe Biden’s inauguration, Trump and Attorney General William Barr have been on a grotesque killing spree, green-lighting executions of federal prisoners at breakneck pace. The Intercept’s Senior Reporter Liliana Segura reports on how Trump is on pace to authorize more federal executions than in the past 67 years combined. She discusses several specific cases, including that of Brandon Bernard who is scheduled to die on Thursday.As Biden builds his Cabinet, his national security team is looking a lot like a replay of the Obama-Biden militarist coterie. Biden’s nominees include notorious hawks who were central to the genocidal war in Yemen, the weapons sales to Saudi Arabia, the regime-change war in Libya, the war in Syria, the assassination and drone programs, and the use of economic sanctions as

The Intercept’s Senior Correspondent Naomi Klein argues why Democrats should forcefully defend the integrity of votes and condemn coup-plotting for what it is, and stop from blowing a mandate they’ve won Associate Producer Elise Swain follows the sentencing hearings for peace activists, known as Kings Bay Plowshares 7, who face federal prison for nonviolent protest. Associate Producer Elise Swain follows the sentencing hearings for three of the Kings Bay Plowshares Seven peace activists. Despite a lethal pandemic ravaging prison populations, Carmen Trotta and Martha Hennessy are among those due to report to prison within the next few months for their nonviolent protest against nuclear weapons.  See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

In his denial of science, Donald Trump has guided the U.S. far past the tipping point of mitigating the unfolding existential threat of the climate crisis. Under both Democratic and Republican administrations over decades, U.S. climate policy has fallen far short of the urgent action scientists have demanded. In crucial ways, Donald Trump has been far more dangerous than his deeply-flawed predecessors. Trump seems to actually revel in his dangerous denial of fundamental and scientifically indisputable realities. In part seven of “American Mythology,” we examine how the Trump administration has catapulted the corporate-fueled deregulation crusade dramatically forward. In the past four years, Trump has undone or weakened up to 70 rules and regulations aimed at protecting the environment, while another 30 policy changes are still underway. The majority of these 100 changes are being done at the Environmental Protection Agency, which is currently headed by a former lobbyist for the coal industry who fou