On this episode of Going Underground, we firstly speak to John Ashton, the former president of the UK Faculty of Public Health. He discusses the recent revelations on Panorama which showed the government had been manipulating PPE figures to make them appear larger, the likely real current death toll and future death toll of coronavirus (Covid-19), the government’s £60,000 compensation scheme for NHS workers’ families whose lives have been lost due to Coronavirus, the failure of Boris Johnson’s government to achieve 100,000 tests a day by the end of April, the lack of pandemic preparation following Exercise Cygnus, and more!
Finally, we speak to Dr Thomas Hegghammer, author of ‘The Caravan: Abdullah Azzam and the Rise of Global Jihad.’ He discusses the threat jihadism poses today in a pandemic world after the defeat of ISIS and the death of Osama Bin Laden, how the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan was the springboard for the rise of jihadism, over-simplifications of the US-Taliban blowback theory, why jihadists and Islamists hated communism, causing the West to de facto ally with them against the Soviet Union, who Abdullah Azzam was and why he has a key role in the rise of global jihad that led to the 9/11 attacks among many other terrorist incidents around the world.
