Journalist Kevin Gosztola runs down Biden's transition team and possible Cabinet picks and it doesn't look good for progressives, on theAnalysis.news podcast with Paul Jay.

Paul Jay

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After Joe Biden won the Democratic Party primary, in order to win over supporters of Bernie Sanders, Biden joined with Bernie to create working groups on various issues to develop a joint platform. Interestingly enough, foreign policy was not on the table. I don't know if that's because the two sides were too far apart on the issue. But Biden's appointments to his transition team now working on foreign policy and rumors of who he's considering for secretary of state and other key posts are not suggesting any recognition of progressives' concerns about his policy direction. Domestic appointments, so far, are not all that much more encouraging for Sanders supporters.

Now joining us to keep track of what we know so far about the direction of the incoming administration is Kevin Gosztola. He's a managing editor of Shadowproof. He publishes The Dissenter newsletter at Substack and is co-host of the weekly Unauthorized Disclosure podcast.

Thanks for joining us, Kevin.

Kevin Gosztola

Yes, thank you.

Paul Jay

So, start off with: what do we know? Kind of go through the list. Let's start with foreign policy. Who are the key people on the transition team? What seems like the direction he might go for on important appointments?

Kevin Gosztola

So, we've got a list of people who we know in the last week have been providing national security briefings and then we also have these agency review teams. These are people who are going to plot the way forward for the first hundred days and after. So, we have people who are on State Department teams, a Defense Department team, and then there's an intelligence community team. These people are going to be most consequential for the way forward on foreign policy and how he interacts with his national security apparatus, the officials and the intelligence agencies.

To me, people that stand out are individuals like General Stanley McChrystal, who we know as someone who commanded JSOC, the Joint Special Operations Command, under President Barack Obama's administration, but was also brought on board while Bush was president. He was involved in running these operations in Iraq, oversaw Camp Nama, an acronym [NB: a "backronym" taking advantage of the pre-existing Arabic name for the camp from the Saddam Hussein government, which built the camp] that spells out "nasty-ass military area," actually. And there was just horrific torture going on there. It's heavily documented in Jeremy Scahill's book Dirty Wars. He's someone who is a pioneer of this "world as a battlefield" paradigm that we've been living under in a post-9/11 era.

He systematized mass killings and the capturing of suspected insurgents in Iraq. And at this camp Nama, we know from Jeremy's book that a CIA general counsel visited and found that there were torture techniques being employed that were far worse than some of the te...