Mission Implausible

Former OSCE ambassador and Pentagon and NSC official Michael Carpenter argues Russia is weaker than it appears yet keeps being rescued by a West gripped by fear of escalation. And that the newly transactional, alliance-busting American foreign policy undermines the remarkable success of NATO.
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Former CIA Iran ops officer Mark Fowler joins Jerry and John to explain why Iran is one of the hardest targets on earth. From running agents and sources, Fowler has insight into the Iranian worldview: a persecuted Shia minority that sees walls behind every wall, craves American attention while calling us the Great Satan, and negotiates by treating signed contracts as opening bids. He separates the educated, reform-minded Iranian people from a regime led by men forged in the trenches of the Iran-Iraq War and traces the IRGC's rise from teenage revolutionary militia to a corrupt, self-sufficient parallel army that controls Iran's missiles, ports, and economy. On the current conflict, Trump jumped in without preparation against an adversary that has spent a generation planning for exactly this.
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In 2003, a single Iraqi refugee — codenamed Curveball — fabricated stories about Iraqi weapons. The U.S. intelligence community, desperate for sources after 9/11, laundered his claims into a National Intelligence Estimate produced in under three weeks. Bob Drogin, the award-winning journalist who broke the story and wrote the definitive book on it, joins John & Jerry to examine how political will, institutional groupthink, and bureaucratic cowardice allowed a con man’s tales to be treated as fact. But history repeats itself as now, in 2026, fuzzy claims about Iranian weapons undergirds another Middle East war.
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ENCORE EPISODE - Gabriel Gatehouse is a journalist and broadcaster and author of “The Coming Storm” that looks at Q Anon and the January 6th conspiracies. And he’s British!
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In light of this week's resignation of Tulsi Gabbard, we're re-running our recent very illuminating episode about her. Also, check out John Sipher's timely piece on her in The Bullwark on May 19.
https://www.thebulwark.com/p/tulsi-gabbard-office-shouldnt-exist-director-national-intelligence-9-11
Our current Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard was born into The Science of Identity Foundation, a secretive, authoritarian religious group led by guru Chris Butler. What are the beliefs of The SIF and how did they influence Gabbard's political career? Some believe that she's still under their direction, if not outright control. If so, the international criminal investigations of the organization, along with the local Hawaiian suspicions of it, raises serious national security questions for someone in that role. Then why does it appear that even a standard FBI background check of Gabbard was skipped? The reporting on Gabbard's origins had been sparse... until now.
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