Episodes
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The unexpected toppling this weekend of the Assad regime by rebel forces brought a swift end to Syria's 13-year uprising-cum-civil war and over half a century of authoritarian rule. Syrians around the world have celebrated the development, with thousands walking free from the regime's hellish prisons.
But in the aftermath, the situation remains volatile. Israel has struck targets inside Syria and moved troops deeper into the occupied Golan Heights, while international powers jockey for influence. Mohammed al-Bashir, who led the rebels’ de facto government in northwest Syria, has been named interim prime minister.
Syrian journalist Rami Jarrah was among those celebrating Bashar al-Assad’s fall, but he’s worried about what happens in his country now. He reported from Syria during the early uprisings in 2011 and throughout the civil war, including Aleppo in 2016 during the intense bombardment. On this week’s episode of The Intercept Briefing, he says his own experience being detained and tortured by the Syrian government informs his concerns. “For a long time I had a serious grudge. I wanted revenge. Revenge that looked very ugly. And it’s why I understand how a situation like Syria, where there is this change of power, and how dangerous that can be because the things I was thinking about after what happened to me and what happened to loved ones of mine. I could not have been trusted to have authority in my hands if we’d gotten a hold of the perpetrators or even people that maybe just corresponded to the perpetrators. I don’t think I would have made sensible decisions. I think the last 4 or 5 years, I’ve been able to reflect,” he recounts.
He says Assad and his family fleeing to Russia gives Syria a chance to move forward in a productive way. Had Assad stayed and fought, “we could have fallen into a civil war very quickly. … I think him fleeing sends a crippling message to those that supported him,” Jarrah says. “It made it much more likely that there could be a reconciliation process between those that supported Assad and those that were victims of Assad’s system.”
To hear more of the conversation, listen to this week’s episode of The Intercept Briefing.
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For years, Donald Trump has vowed to go after his critics and journalists. As he prepares to reenter the White House, he’s nominating loyalists, like incoming FBI director Kash Patel, who have pledged to do the same.
The Trump administration may soon have a new weapon to target perceived enemies. On this week’s episode of The Intercept Briefing, we discuss the Stop Terror-Financing and Tax Penalties on American Hostages Act, or H.R. 9495.
Last month, the House passed H.R. 9495, which would give the Treasury Department secretary the authority to label any nonprofit — like The Intercept — a terrorist-supporting organization and take away its tax-exempt status, likely forcing them to shut down.
Noah Hurowitz, who has been covering the bill, says, “One thing that has come up a lot in my reporting on this, in talking to civil liberties experts and talking to nonprofits, is that the vagaries of the bill and the broad powers that it allows will likely have a chilling effect on free speech.”
Shawn Musgrave, The Intercept’s senior counsel and correspondent, points out the legal implications: “One of the things that I think is important to think about for a bill like H.R. 9495, which is framed around terrorism, [it] really reduces the level of due process and takes a lot of the guardrails off of the current system.”
Though it’s not likely that Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., will bring it up for a vote this session, the legislation could resurface in January when Republicans control both houses of Congress. To learn more about the implications, listen to this week’s episode of The Intercept Briefing.
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Episodes manquant?
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Continued campus protests against the Gaza war have sparked heated debates around free speech, academic freedom, and the role of universities in addressing global issues.
This spring saw an outpouring of students demanding that their institutions divest from Israel. Since then, universities have taken sometimes draconian measures to stop protests before they even begin.
On this week’s episode of The Intercept Briefing, Intercept reporters Akela Lacy and Jonah Valdez, who have been following the protest movements for months, discuss the latest developments and how college administrators are responding.
Lacy followed one such case at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, where students were hit with severe charges for vandalism. “The school is trying to make an example of student leaders in the movement for Palestine to chill further speech,” Lacy says. “I want to emphasize the fact that these are felony charges for undergraduate students for a nonviolent offense that is putting paint on a building.”
Students and organizers who spoke with Valdez anticipate even greater hostility for protesters of every kind once Donald Trump takes office again in January. “This is what a lot of organizers were telling me leading up to Election Day was that there’s going to be so many other attacks on the rights of many other people," he says, "whether it’s reproductive rights, rights of trans people, LGBTQ community at large, rights of immigrants, all on top of the ongoing genocide and occupation of Palestine.”
To hear more about the chilling effects on free speech and protest, listen to this week’s episode of The Intercept Briefing.
The Intercept: "Class Struggle"
The Intercept: "No Room for Emergency"
The Intercept: "100 Days in Appalachia"
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As the clock winds down on the Biden presidency, Democrats have a limited window to act. Come January 20, Republicans will control the executive branch and both houses of Congress.
On this week's episode of The Intercept Briefing, Rep. Summer Lee, D-Pa., acknowledges the need for swift action, particularly on the war in Gaza, prison pardons, and immigration. “I’ve been on calls with advocacy groups around immigration,” she says. President-elect Donald Trump's promises to conduct mass deportation are “an imminent threat.”
One tactic she’s employing to drive home the urgency is bringing Dreamers and their stories to meetings. “The people closest to the pain should be closest to the power, closest to the policy solutions. That is not just a cute saying," Lee says. "It is, I would say, a very lifesaving way of thinking about the policies and the solutions that we have for the very real problems that we face. We can't keep icing out the people who live it.”
But she is also planning beyond the next eight weeks and is determined to fight the Trump administration. “When you're playing, it's Friday night football, it's raining out, you should not leave that field and your jerseys white. You gotta get dirty,” she says. “Not a single voter wants to see us looking pristine when we're in the fight for our life right now.”
To hear more about how Lee and her colleagues on the left are planning to handle the next four years, listen to this week’s episode of The Intercept Briefing.
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In the wake of President-elect Donald Trump’s victory, Democrats and those on the left are grappling with what comes next.
On The Intercept Briefing podcast this week, columnist Natasha Lennard critiques the Democratic Party. “You can’t be both at once: You can’t be the party of Wall Street, and you can’t be the party of the working class,” Lennard says. By acquiescing to Silicon Valley and Wall Street, the Democrats failed again “to offer a robust politics that serves the working class."
Facing a second Trump term, Lennard says the way forward is a politics of everyday life and radical action that focuses on empowering grassroots movements and labor organizations. “When we look at what people can [do] — involving people at a local level, building community so that it is truly kind of a form of life to be in this politics, rather than just a donation, rather than just a vote, rather than just canvassing even.”
In conversation with Jessica Washington and Jordan Uhl, Lennard emphasizes the importance and resilience of the working class. "Nurses unions, food workers unions. Most of the working class in this country are women. And it is a profoundly multi-racial working class. And we have a working class of care workers. And a service economy. And an increasingly growing care economy," she says. "That needs investing in. That needs support. That needs building."
To hear more about the future of progressive politics, listen to this week's episode of The Intercept Briefing.
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There will be much analysis and innumerable postmortems of what Kamala Harris and her campaign got wrong about the electorate this election.
Already, the trends are becoming clear: She failed to reach Black and Latino men, who flocked to Donald Trump this cycle. She underperformed in cities, typically Democratic strongholds. And she even lagged among younger voters vital to her party’s present and future.
What’s behind this dismal showing? One explanation is Harris’s inability to put forth a distinct agenda that would appeal to disaffected Democrats. Instead, she held steady to the policies of President Joe Biden, despite general voter dissatisfaction and anxiety about the economy and the direction of the country.
“We see Democrats over and over turning to courting this mythical moderate voter,” says senior politics reporter Akela Lacy on this week’s episode of The Intercept Briefing. “We also see a big failure to account for the rightward shift among young people and figure out how to give young voters a reason to support the Democratic Party.”
Listen to understand what Intercept reporters were hearing at the polls in Georgia and Pennsylvania this week.
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Welcome to The Intercept Briefing, a new podcast from our newsroom. In our first episode, politics reporters Jessica Washington and Akela Lacy break down The Intercept’s recent investigation on how the American Israel Public Affairs Committee has shaped U.S. foreign policy, as well as, as well as its record-breaking spending in the 2024 election cycle to unseat members of Congress who are who are insufficiently pro-Israel.
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The process of Jewish expansion over Palestinian land has involved maintaining a "system of domination," says author Nathan Thrall on this week's Intercepted. In order to constrict "Palestinians into tighter and tighter space" over the decades, Israel has deployed a strict permit system, movement restrictions, walls, fences, segregated roads, and punitive actions such as arrests and detentions, even of children.
In “A Day in the Life of Abed Salama: Anatomy of a Jerusalem Tragedy," Thrall’s book, published just before the start of the current war, tells the story of one Palestinian man’s struggle to navigate Israel’s painful system of legal and security controls after his son’s school bus is involved in a fatal accident. Thrall joins host Murtaza Hussain in a discussion about the system of control that Israel maintains over Palestinians, violence in the West Bank, the future outlook for a negotiated solution to the conflict in Gaza, and possible escalation amid fighting at Israel’s northern border.
"A Day in the Life of Abed Salama" is a 2024 nonfiction Pulitzer Prize winner. Thrall is also the author of "The Only Language They Understand: Forcing Compromise in Israel and Palestine."
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Throughout the past nine months of Israel’s scorched-earth war against the people of Gaza, the world has watched as the official death toll has increased by the day. Nearly 40,000 Palestinians have been killed. These figures are likely a stark undercount of the true devastation. A recent report from the British aid organization Save the Children estimates that more than 20,000 Palestinian children are missing in Gaza. A new documentary by Fault Lines called “The Night Won’t End: Biden’s War on Gaza” tells the story of the war's impact on the lives of three Palestinian families in Gaza.
This week on Intercepted, Jeremy Scahill speaks to the film's correspondent Sharif Abdel Kouddous and executive producer Laila Al-Arian, the Emmy award-winning executive producer of Fault Lines, Al Jazeera English’s flagship U.S.-based news magazine.
If you’d like to support our work, go to theintercept.com/join, where your donation, no matter what the amount, makes a real difference.
And if you haven’t already, please subscribe to the show so you can hear it every week. And please go and leave us a rating or a review — it helps people find the show. If you want to give us additional feedback, email us at [email protected].
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The escalating military confrontation between Hezbollah and Israel now threatens to expand the conflict in Gaza into a full-blown regional war. For the past eight months, Israel and Hezbollah have traded missile attacks, leading to the evacuation of tens of thousands of civilians from northern Israel and southern Lebanon. The two sides have fought devastating wars in the past, but a cold peace has reigned for nearly 17 years. That peace is now in jeopardy, as Hezbollah has mobilized in sympathy with Hamas following Israel's invasion of the Gaza Strip. To discuss the situation this week on Intercepted is Sam Heller, a fellow with the Century Foundation and expert on Lebanon and Hezbollah. Heller spoke with host Murtaza Hussain on the prospects of the conflict escalating, as well as the potential impact on the Lebanese, Israelis, and the broader Middle East.
If you’d like to support our work, go to theintercept.com/join, where your donation, no matter what the amount, makes a real difference.
And if you haven’t already, please subscribe to the show so you can hear it every week. And please go and leave us a rating or a review — it helps people find the show. If you want to give us additional feedback, email us at [email protected].
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An Israeli military operation in Gaza this week aimed at rescuing four hostages from Hamas killed over 270 Palestinians and wounded hundreds more. The Nuseirat refugee camp, where the attacks occurred, became a scene of horror as the injured sought care from Gaza's few remaining hospitals. Karin Huster, a Doctors Without Borders medical coordinator, witnessed the aftermath. She joins host Murtaza Hussain on Intercepted to discuss what she saw following the Israel Defense Forces attack alleged to involve grave war crimes, and the ongoing impact of the war on Gaza's civilian population.
Transcript coming soon.
If you’d like to support our work, go to theintercept.com/join, where your donation, no matter what the amount, makes a real difference.
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After eight months of brutal fighting with no end in sight, the war in Gaza is at risk of metastasizing into a regional conflict. Recent tensions between Egypt and Israel — normally security partners who have cooperated in the blockade of Gaza — have thrown into stark relief the growing risks of a spillover from the war.
This week on Intercepted, security expert H. A. Hellyer discusses with co-host Murtaza Hussain the growing hostilities between the two countries, which have resulted in Egypt joining the International Court of Justice genocide case against Israel, threats to annul the Camp David peace accords, and even a fatal shooting incident between Egyptian and Israel troops.
The war in Gaza is at risk of exploding into a far greater war that could cause the destruction of the tenuous security architecture that has held the region together for decades.
If you’d like to support our work, go to theintercept.com/join, where your donation, no matter what the amount, makes a real difference.
And if you haven’t already, please subscribe to the show so you can hear it every week. And please go and leave us a rating or a review — it helps people find the show. If you want to give us additional feedback, email us at [email protected].
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The past week in Gaza has seen a major escalation in Israeli attacks against the besieged and starving Palestinians trapped in a killing cage. The Biden administration has aggressively sought to portray itself as being increasingly at odds with Israel’s tactics, mostly focusing on U.S. threats to withhold some weapons shipments if Benjamin Netanyahu conducts an invasion of Rafah. But the cold reality is that Israel has already bombed and occupied large swaths of Rafah.
The regime has ordered the forced exodus of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians, not only from Rafah, but also from areas of northern Gaza, once again thrusting masses of civilians — many of whom are wounded, starving, dehydrated, and traumatized — on a desperate hunt for a place to pitch a makeshift tent as they await either death or a ceasefire.
Despite the White House leaking stories to insider media outlets about how Biden is fed up with his great friend Netanyahu, the U.S. has made clear it continues to arm and support the Israeli regime.
This week on Intercepted, Medea Benjamin, co-founder of the feminist antiwar organization Code Pink, speaks with Jeremy Scahill. Since the launch of the so-called war on terror in 2001, the 71-year-old activist has spent more than two decades disrupting congressional hearings, chasing members of Congress through the halls of the Capitol for answers, and traveling to countries the U.S. has labeled as enemies. Benjamin discusses her personal path to activism and the siege on Gaza, and offers a guide on how ordinary people can disrupt business as usual in the chambers of power in Washington, D.C.
If you’d like to support our work, go to theintercept.com/join, where your donation, no matter what the amount, makes a real difference.
And if you haven’t already, please subscribe to the show so you can hear it every week. And please go and leave us a rating or a review — it helps people find the show. If you want to give us additional feedback, email us at [email protected].
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Evergreen State College, in Olympia, Washington, reached a deal with students to work toward divesting from “companies that profit from gross human rights violations and/or the occupation of Palestinian territories.” It is one of the few schools to reach deals with students protesting Israel's war on Gaza as demonstrations spread to more than 154 campuses nationwide.
This week on Intercepted, we bring you a special episode from inside the student movement for Gaza. Prem Thakker, a politics reporter for The Intercept, breaks down the campus protests and students' demands for schools to cut off financial ties with Israel and weapons makers. Thakker is joined by Gillian Goodman, a freelance writer and journalism graduate student at Columbia University. Gillian takes us inside the protest encampment at Columbia, which inspired similar demonstrations nationwide before it was violently dismantled by police.
If you’d like to support our work, go to theintercept.com/join, where your donation, no matter what the amount, makes a real difference.
And if you haven’t already, please subscribe to the show so you can hear it every week. And please go and leave us a rating or a review — it helps people find the show. If you want to give us additional feedback, email us at [email protected].
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Last month, the famed American philosopher and gender studies scholar Judith Butler was thrust into the center of a controversy after remarks Butler made about the October 7 attacks in Israel. A longtime critic of Zionism and Israel’s war against the Palestinians, Butler had condemned the attacks in the immediate aftermath. But at a March roundtable in France, Butler offered a historical context for the Hamas-led operations and stated that the attacks constituted armed resistance. The blowback was swift, and Butler was criticized in media outlets across Europe and in Israel. This week on Intercepted, Butler discusses the controversy and their position on Hamas, Israel, and crackdowns on student protests.
Butler is currently a Distinguished Professor at UC Berkeley’s Graduate School. They are the author of several books, including “The Force of Nonviolence: An Ethico-Political Bind,” “Parting Ways: Jewishness and the Critique of Zionism,” and most recently, “Who's Afraid of Gender?”
For full show transcript visit the episode page.
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In the face of growing international pressure, the Biden administration has continued to double down on a policy of blanket support for Israel, even as it presses ahead with a possible military offensive against the town of Rafah that many observers have warned could trigger the largest humanitarian crisis of the war so far. This week on Intercepted, co-hosts Jeremy Scahill and Murtaza Hussain discuss the Biden administration's approach to the conflict with Thanassis Cambanis, director of the foreign policy think tank Century International. Cambanis explains how Biden’s policy toward Israel is pushing the entire Middle East to the brink of a regional war that could inflict far greater suffering than we have seen to date, in an area which U.S. policymakers claim to be trying to exit.
If you’d like to support our work, go to theintercept.com/join, where your donation, no matter what the amount, makes a real difference.
And if you haven’t already, please subscribe to the show so you can hear it every week. And please go and leave us a rating or a review — it helps people find the show. If you want to give us additional feedback, email us at [email protected].
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The war in Gaza has been among the deadliest for civilians, including children, of any war in the 21st century. After spending five weeks volunteering and administering at a field hospital in Rafah, Mohammad Subeh, an American doctor, describes what he saw to Intercepted co-hosts Jeremy Scahill and Murtaza Hussain. Subeh spent weeks treating wounded Palestinian children, many of them orphaned by Israeli attacks. He also described treating those who survived the aftermath of “mass casualty incidents” in which dozens of civilians were killed or wounded; many of these attacks appeared deliberately targeted at civilians, Subeh says, rather than “indiscriminate.” As the Strip reels from the consequences of a breakdown of public health infrastructure following the destruction of most Gazan hospitals, Subeh says that ordinary civilians are paying a gruesome price for Israel's military assault.
Intercepted has been nominated for a Webby award under the category of Best News and Politics podcast. Help us win by casting your vote today.
If you’d like to support our work, go to theintercept.com/join, where your donation, no matter what the amount, makes a real difference.
And if you haven’t already, please subscribe to the show so you can hear it every week. And please go and leave us a rating or a review — it helps people find the show. If you want to give us additional feedback, email us at [email protected].
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The conflict in Gaza has galvanized a new generation of young anti-war activists, in the same way that opposition to the Vietnam War and apartheid South Africa did in decades past. A backlash is now building in the United States, led by right-wing activist and pro-Israel groups aimed at eliminating any public dissent over U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East.
As the death toll of Palestinians rises, a new authoritarian climate is sweeping across the U.S. — particularly on college campuses, which have transformed into laboratories for censorship and surveillance. Intercepted host Murtaza Hussain discusses this new political reality with Sahar Aziz, distinguished professor of law at Rutgers Law School and author of a new report on free speech and discrimination in the context of the Gaza conflict.
Intercepted has been nominated for a Webby award under the category of Best News and Politics podcast. Help us win by casting your vote today.
If you’d like to support our work, go to theintercept.com/join, where your donation, no matter what the amount, makes a real difference.
And if you haven’t already, please subscribe to the show so you can hear it every week. And please go and leave us a rating or a review — it helps people find the show. If you want to give us additional feedback, email us at [email protected].
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Unlike any other point in history, hackers, whistleblowers, and archivists now routinely make off with terabytes of data from governments, corporations, and extremist groups. These datasets often contain gold mines of revelations in the public interest and in many cases are freely available for anyone to download. Revelations based on leaked datasets can change the course of history.Yet these digital tomes can prove extremely difficult to analyze or interpret, and few people today have the skills to do so. Micah Lee’s new book, “Hacks, Leaks, and Revelations: The Art of Analyzing Hacked and Leaked Data” teaches journalists, researchers, and activists the technologies and coding skills required to do just this. The following episode is an excerpt from the book.
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The Israeli military assault on Gaza has continued for nearly six months, with word of an impending attack on the densely populated town of Rafah. Against this backdrop, a shadow war has continued to play out between Iran and a network of militant groups on one side, and the U.S. and Israel on the other. Iran today supports and arms not just Hamas, but also groups like Lebanese Hezbollah, the Houthis, and various Syrian and Iraqi militia groups. Aside from the U.S. itself, Iran today is likely the most important outside power in the Gaza war, though its role is often ignored. This week on Intercepted, host Murtaza Hussain discusses the role of Iran in the region with historian Arash Azizi. The author of "What Iranians Want: Women, Life, Freedom," Azizi also discusses political developments in the country in the aftermath of recent elections.
If you’d like to support our work, go to theintercept.com/join, where your donation, no matter what the amount, makes a real difference.
And if you haven’t already, please subscribe to the show so you can hear it every week. And please go and leave us a rating or a review — it helps people find the show. If you want to give us additional feedback, email us at [email protected].
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