President Obama has announced he is sextupling the amount of US Special Operation forces in Syria to 300–this after repeatedly promising the US would put no boots on the ground there. We’ll go over what the escalation means. Plus: a new investigation shows the FBI and Department of Homeland security are operating hundreds of surveillance aircraft in the US, with troubling signs that they’re doing dragnet surveillance and profiling. We speak to one of the journalists who broke the story.
Guests:
- Joe Lauria, veteran foreign-affairs journalist based at the UN since 1990. He’s currently in Irbil, Iraq.
- Jennifer Lowenstein teaches Middle East Studies at Penn State University, and has a long history of doing human rights work in the Middle East.
- Peter Aldhous, science journalist and investigative reporter at Buzzfeed, and co-author of an investigation on surveillance flights inside the United States.