Friday is Loud & Clear's weekly hour-long segment The Week in Review, about the week in politics, policy, and international affairs. Today they focus on Chelsea Manning being taken back into custody, the smears against Representative Omar all week, and the Venezuelan power outage.
18 of Venezuela's 23 states were hit yesterday with a massive power outage, which the Maduro Administration blamed on anti-government saboteurs. Senator Marco Rubio, a Florida Republican who has been the Senate's leading voice against the Maduro government, earlier in the day had called for widespread unrest, and he celebrated the blackout as the beginning of the end of the Venezuelan government. Chuck Kaufman, he is the National Co-Coordinator of the Alliance for Global Justice, joins the show.
Our friends and frequent guests Ann Wright and Medea Benjamin over the past two weeks led a peace delegation to Iran, where they met with government officials, peace activists, and regular Iranians. They were public about the trip. They gave interviews and posted their progress on Facebook. But when they returned to Washington last night, they were detained and questioned by the FBI. The hosts also talk about the recent travails of Chelsea Manning in the notorious federal district court for the Eastern District of Virginia. Brian and John speak with Ann Wright, a retired United States Army colonel and former U.S. State Department official in Afghanistan, who resigned in protest of the invasion of Iraq and became a prominent anti-war activist.
Yesterday the hosts talked about the five different federal agencies that had created a database to illegally track and harass journalists, activists, and attorneys reporting on or involved with the migrant caravan that made its way to the United States late last year. Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador said when the story broke that the Mexican government would not cooperate in the scheme with US officials. But, it turns out, that was not true. Juan José Gutiérrez, the executive director of the Full Rights for Immigrants Coalition, joins the show.
Former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort yesterday was sentenced to 47 months in prison for charges of corruption and tax evasion. Federal prosecutors had asked for 17½ to 24 years. Judge T. S. Ellis said that Manafort had committed serious crimes, but not serious enough for him to spend the rest of his life in prison. The public and media outcry was swift, with many commenting that the decision showed that there is one kind of justice for wealthy white men and another kind of justice for people of color. Manafort will be sentenced in a separate case in Washington next week. Daniel Lazare, a journalist and author of three books-"The Frozen Republic," "The Velvet Coup," and "America's Undeclared War," joins Brian and John.
It's Friday! So it's time for the week's worst and most misleading headlines. Brian and John speak with Steve Patt, an independent journalist whose critiques of the mainstream media have been a feature of his site Left I on the News and on twitter @leftiblog, and Sputnik producer Nicole Roussell.
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