A quick fyi: Pulitzer Prize-win­ning jour­nal­ist Sey­mour Her­sch has a new piece in The New York­er detail­ing “a major esca­la­tion of covert oper­a­tions against Iran.” The plans draft­ed by the Bush admin­is­tra­tion and fund­ed by Con­gress brings the US anoth­er step clos­er to a mil­i­tary strike against Iran’s nuclear pro­gram, and such a strike becomes all the more like­ly, Hirsch believes, if Oba­ma wins the Novem­ber elec­tion. (Why? Because Oba­ma favors hav­ing direct talks rather than using pre­emp­tive force.) You can find an accom­pa­ny­ing audio inter­view with Her­sch here. He also appeared yes­ter­day on NPR’s Fresh Air and elab­o­rat­ed on all of this. You can lis­ten here: Stream — iTunes — Feed.

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The con­tro­ver­sy sur­round­ing the Bush admin­is­tra­tion’s adven­tures with war­rant­less wire­tap­ping first began in Decem­ber 2005, when the New York Times broke the sto­ry. Dur­ing the months that fol­lowed, the whole debate remained fair­ly abstract. We talked about indi­vid­ual rights and the pow­er of the exec­u­tive. We nev­er thought about the indi­vid­u­als who were actu­al­ly mon­i­tored by the pro­gram. And that’s because we did­n’t know who was on the gov­ern­men­t’s list, and because we assumed that the gov­ern­ment was tar­get­ing ter­ror­ists, or those close­ly con­nect­ed to them … which isn’t exact­ly how things turned out.

The lat­est edi­tion of This Amer­i­can Life (enti­tled “The Truth Will Out”) fea­tures an inter­view with an appar­ent tar­get of the wire­tap­ping pro­gram. It’s none oth­er than Lawrence Wright, a staff writer for The New York­er mag­a­zine (see his lat­est piece here) who cov­ers the Mid­dle East and won the Pulitzer Prize (2007) for his book: The Loom­ing Tow­er: Al Qae­da and the Road to 9/11. Dur­ing the seg­ment (which starts at minute 26 of the hour-long pro­gram), Wright recounts how he dis­cov­ered the tap­ping, and how Mike McConnell, the Direc­tor of Nation­al Intel­li­gence, react­ed when Wright con­front­ed him with this knowl­edge. You can down­load the pro­gram here: MP3 — iTunes — Feed.

By the way, This Amer­i­can Life, per­haps the most pop­u­lar pod­cast out there, is look­ing to raise mon­ey to keep the pod­cast going. You can donate mon­ey here and sup­port pub­lic radio at its best.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Ira Glass on Why Cre­ative Excel­lence Takes Time

This Amer­i­can Life Demys­ti­fies the Housing/Credit Cri­sis

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Speak­ing at the TED Con­fer­ence, Alisa Miller (CEO of Pub­lic Radio Inter­na­tion­al) explains why Amer­i­cans know less and less about the rest of the world. Along the way, she uses some eye-pop­ping graphs to put things in per­spec­tive. Watch the video below or find it on our YouTube playlist …

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As a quick fol­low up to our post ear­li­er today, I want­ed to high­light the Smith­son­ian Chan­nel’s first broad­cast on BlogTalkRa­dio, which aired tonight. Right in time for Memo­r­i­al Day, the pro­gram fea­tures an involved con­ver­sa­tion with Jan Scrug­gs, the founder and pres­i­dent of the Viet­nam Vet­er­ans Memo­r­i­al Fund, who con­ceived the idea of build­ing the memo­r­i­al in Wash­ing­ton. It also com­ple­ments a Smith­son­ian Chan­nel doc­u­men­tary ‘Remem­ber­ing Viet­nam: The Wall at 25′ (click link to see trail­er). You can lis­ten in on the con­ver­sa­tion right below.

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There’s noth­ing like a good debate to reveal the issues that mat­ter most to a soci­ety. And that’s what The Doha Debates have to offer — a good, nuanced look at the hottest issues in the Arab and Islam­ic worlds. The debates, which have been held in Qatar over the past three years, fol­low the for­mat used in the famous Oxford Union debates. And they’ve been aired over the BBC and have picked up a siz­able inter­na­tion­al fol­low­ing. (You can down­load the debates in video or via pod­cast from this page.) The speak­ers gen­er­al­ly include “aca­d­e­mics, politi­cians, reli­gious fig­ures, gov­ern­ment offi­cials, pol­i­cy experts and jour­nal­ists” and some of the recent top­ics debat­ed include the fol­low­ing (thanks Kirsten for the heads up on this):

• Is the Sun­ni-Shia con­flict dam­ag­ing Islam’s rep­u­ta­tion as a reli­gion of peace?
• Do the Pales­tini­ans risk becom­ing their own worst ene­my?
• Is the face veil a bar­ri­er to inte­gra­tion in the West?
• Should the Pales­tini­ans give up their full right of return?

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