DSR Daily September 17: UN Reports Potential War Crimes in Iran

for today, Riley Festler, joined by Minestine. How are you, Minna? I'm well, thanks how are you?

Not too bad. David, it cannot join us today, unfortunately. He is out, but we will soldier on in his

“absence and bring you the depressing news stories you need to hear and maybe even some positive ones,”

but spoiler alert. I don't think we have any positive ones today. So buckle up. Someone has to do it. Well, the good things started. A UN effect-finding mission reported reasonable grounds to believe the United States committed war crimes by launching deliberate indiscriminate strikes on a school and sports complex in Iran. Concurrently, the report accused Iran's government of committing

crimes against humanity gets its own citizens through widespread repression, torture, and unlawful

executions. The independent panel urge both nations to all human rights violations and provide a full reparation to the victims. That will not happen. The U.S. will certainly not recognize this. There is zero percent chance of that happening. And there's probably zero percent chance of Iran recognizing it either. Although I'm not really sure who would be more likely to recognize such a report because it seems completely remote for both. But all that being said, I don't think

“this finding is going to shock anybody. I think this was pretty obvious that these kind of things”

were happening. I mean, I guess there was a question of like, was it deliberate that we struck this school or not? I'm of the opinion that it doesn't really matter. The result is the same. All those children are dead because of U.S. military action, whether they intended to strike the complex or not. To me, it doesn't really matter. But, you know, I don't think this is going to surprise anyone. I think this is going to change anyone's mind on the war. I think people are pretty much

already set on this. But I'm glad that you are still doing its job and investigating these kind of things, even if the tangible results are, I'm skeptical of. Yeah, raise your hand if you're surprised the U.S. is committing crimes. And if you're listening neither of us raised our hand and I'm sure you didn't raise your hand either. Like every single part of this has been a crime, including the way it started to bombing schools to literally every

single step along the way. I don't think this report is surprising. Although it doesn't make it any less disgusting. So, I can say I wish that things would change and that the United States would take accountability and get out of this mess that we put ourselves in, but I don't. I'm not going to be naive. That's not going to happen. But, thanks for starting us off that way. Starting off with the war crimes, not a good way to start the day. But I try not to

start my day with war crimes. Sorry. Yes, well, our next story, a new government accountability office report. So, starting off our day with two different reports revealed that that the federal government spent nine, $0.5 billion on paid administrative leave last year, driven largely by a 6.7 billion dollar deferral resignation program under doge. The initiative paid nearly 140,000 federal employees to resign while continuing their full pay and benefits contributing to the

overall 12% drop in civilian workforce across major agencies. While OPM defended the one time expenditure by projecting $20 billion in recurring annual savings, critics appointed out that

agencies have already had to rehire tens of thousands of workers to replace essential staff

“who are paid to leave. I think this is similar to your story where in we all knew this,”

but now there's a report that kind of just reiterates and proves what we already know. I think something to me that stands out about this story as a young person living in DC is that I know DC is the city in the United States with the highest rate of unemployment. It has come down a bit. I assume because of some of these rehirings, but as horrible as this has been politically or for optics, it's had a really huge impact on actual community of people who are

living in DC and people were really hurt by these firearms. DC was hurt. Our government was hurt and our whole country was hurt by this. I think that even though we already know these things are true, it's important to remember what was done and the lasting impact that it had. But yeah,

least one person who was affected by this. I know personally two people that were either directly

laid off by DOGE or indirectly because a program was slashed and then they couldn't maintain their funding so they had to fire their staff. I mean, everybody here knows somebody affected by this. That's definitely like a very tangible and real hurt here and the district that, you know, might not be as direct around the country, but certainly here, I mean, this was a big deal. The memory of DOGE is going to last for all of the people living in working in DC.

But also cost taxpayers everywhere. I mean, that's what this report is showing. So it affects all of us,

“but I think that, you know, it's important to remember that, like behind the numbers,”

are real people who lost their jobs and are facing in some communities 10% unemployment in DC.

So yeah, I know somebody who has let go by DOGE and only recently found another job, so I mean, people suffer. The effects of this are ongoing. It isn't something that just happened. It's something that is happening and continues to hurt people and destroy their lives. Well, I mean, slightly more cheering out. And this is going to be the, unfortunately, spoiler of the most positive story of the day, and it's still not that positive.

Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney told that the European Parliament that he proposed associate membership with the EU would secure Canada sovereignty, strengthen transatlantic ties and create a more resilient partner for the US. The initiative follows months of strainer relations

“with Washington, though US president Donald Trump warned that the potential alliance could be viewed”

as a hostile act subject to heavy tariffs. Go figure. I mean, I got to think if you're a Canada, you're willing to take that because you know, you're going to get heavy tariffs anyway. You might as well just get some kind of deal with a more reasonable partner at this point. Despite concerns of our sovereignty and a formal framework of details, Carney emphasized that

this strategic partnership across critical industries and education aims to protect open markets

and share democratic values without competing as a great power rival. This is the approach a real country with real leadership should take building up partnerships with allies. And you know, it's refreshing to see leadership actually, you know, do things that make sense. I've become personally numb to my leadership and the US doing things that just make zero sense for literally anyone. So this is nice for the Canadians. Obviously, unfortunately,

unfortunately, this has to take place under the sword of Donald Trump threatening to tear off the country into oblivion or whatever the hell else. He's threatening to do, but

“you got to do what you got to do. And I think Mark Hardy and Canada are making the right moves to”

try and find some stability when you have a neighbor to the south that is completely unstable. I'm sorry to interrupt, but I really have to tell you about our sub-stack. The DSR Network sub-stack is the absolute best way to follow deep state radio. The DSR Daily Words Matter need to know Silicantiousness, AI Energy and Climate and the Daily Blast. Sign up to get notified every time a new episode drops and stay up to date on the latest news

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If you live in a real country, what's that like? Let us know in the comments. We want to know what it's like to have real leadership and live in a real place. We've only had the Mirage of it for four years and recent times, but... Yeah. Well, I'm going to follow up your good question mark story with another good question mark story. Ice agent Christian Castro surrendered to law enforcement in Minneapolis on assault and

false reporting charges after shooting a Venezuelan man during President Trump's operation Metro's surge immigration crackdown. Castro's arrest follows months of legal delay caused by Texas Governor Greg Abbott's refusal to extradite him as well as separate federal indictment charges. The agent was lying about the confrontation. Castro now faces both Minnesota state assault charges and federal prosecution for making false statements regarding the incident.

I feel like these days things that just should happen are like tiny wins. Like, yes,

What a win for us that Greg Abbott couldn't get in our way anymore and let justice

run its course. But unfortunately, that's where we're at. And Greg Abbott did get in the way and unfortunately, that is considered a win. I am glad that this happened. It reminds me a lot. I don't know if you read the Washington Post article about ice agents getting fired and one committing suicide after finding out that they were going to get fired.

“Obviously, that's horrible, but I think ultimately it is a good thing that they're”

waiting out. Some of their officers and firing people who have backgrounds of assault and other such charges. These are not people who should be in law enforcement. People with violent

past. It was a really interesting article. If you want to read it to hear about or to read

about, excuse me, some of the officers who are in charge of immigration enforcement. It is not a good situation. This is a disaster. It's a disaster not only politically for the administration, but also for us as a country, as a people. We need people with empathy. We do not need people who want to sign up to hunt people down and torture them and throw them out of the country. These are not the people that we want. That's the people we're getting because I mean,

“you have to remember live people who couldn't hack it in traditional law enforcement. They're”

there because they couldn't get in anywhere else. I mean, it's not surprising that there's so many bad apples in ice. I've got to imagine it's quite a few. I mean, I think that those are the people that they want it, right? I think some of the badbashes forced their hand to take a second look at the people that they've let in, but I do think that if you look at their advertising, it was like directly targeted at

for lack of a better word, deeply evil people. No doubt. And I mean, yeah, I think with this and a lot of other stores where we see the administration somewhat backtracking, I mean, it's hard

to even call it backtracking a lot of these cases, but backing off is that they've reached a critical

mass of people hating what they're doing. And this was just one very visible instance of cruelty by the administration that was just not sustainable. And are they going to materially change what they're doing? No, of course not, but they're, I think, recalibrating their public tact for how they talk about ice and do ice in a less maybe cavalier way, but don't let that fool you, the material conditions of what ice is doing is not going to change.

You know, maybe we'll see some blue states kind of have success in raining in ice, but you know, it's going to be a battle every step of the way. Well, to wrap things up, we've got another AI story, which we have every day now, much to my dismay. Open AI has disclosed six instances of, quote, misalignment, where its AI miles exhibited unexpected behaviors, such as evading oversight, inventing data, and uploading files to the internet without

authorization. In response to growing safety concerns and calls for a slowdown in AI development, the company entries a new framework to track, probe, and publicly share these concerning incidents. Well, analysts view this voluntary disclosure, so as a positive step toward industry transparency, the increasing ability of AI agency's deception it makes them progressively harder to contain. We talked about this on our silicaciousness this week with Alejandro Nelson. I encourage everybody

to go check that out for you. Much more educated and in-depth discussion of this issue, but to summarize some of the findings on that, we should be happy that the industry is trying to

“implement guardrails, but I think it's important to remember that voluntary self-regulation is not”

a real solution because if it's a voluntary self-regulation, they can stop doing it at any time. And when it's a huge existential technology, like artificial intelligence, that has huge ramifications for our society at large, we can't leave it up to the AI industry to regulate itself. We need real regulation from the government and from governments around the world to rain in this technology. Well, it's great that, you know, open AI anthropic and these other companies

are giving us band aids to the issue, the issue is a bullet wound, and it's not going to be fixed by these companies just trying to kind of gloss it over themselves. So, I'm, well, I guess you

the fact that there were six incidents before they decided to do this. How many more are there

“actually behind the scenes? I refused to believe that it was just six. So, I think we're going to”

be learning a lot more about AI doing things like this, and it has been doing things like this

for quite a while now that companies are starting to realize that the public is not going to tolerate

“opaque opacity, I suppose, from them anymore. So, we're going to be getting some stories like”

this every day, I assume, from here on out until things change. I thought Trump said it was fine,

and then we shouldn't worry about it. Yeah, I mean, unfortunately, to that point, the government is not going to do anything about it, at least with Republicans controlling Congress and the White House and the Supreme Court, currently. So, we're going to need fresh voices in there, which is why

“it is important to vote in the midterms among every other reason we've talked about here on the DSR”

daily and every other show on the DSR network. So, I encourage you to subscribe to us on YouTube, on Substack, become a member on Substack, so you can engage with us on our Friday live shows. We have one tomorrow with Mary Trump at 12 p.m. Eastern time, so tune in for that, and again, if you're a member, you can ask us questions directly in the live chat, so another nice little incentive to sign up and support us. So, until we see you tomorrow, bye-bye.

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