thank you for your time. have a good night.

>> there is the ttp and that's what i prefer to call them, and i would love it if everyone made that choice.

we don't want that stain on our identity. there are 200 million of us. you say some pakistanis have supported the ttp in the past. i don't know if there has been explicit support. i think there has been confusion in our society and across the muslim world. since 9/11 we still have not created a coherent narrative about the rejection within our faith of this kind of player, and pakistan is one representative of a larger problem that plagues the entire muslim world. so we're not where we need to be, and i think these kinds of attacks make the lines much more clear, and i think the vast majority of pakistanis are sickened, and would like this to end. >> do you think that the group is getting more powerful? or is it just getting more horribly daring? you mentioned the attacks last

year. they also launched a major attack in karachi in june. >> i think they're getting more and more desperate. i think over the last couple of years in pakistan the governments, at least, there was a whole--about a year's worth of trying to engage in some kind of a dialogue with the taliban. it was a ridiculous notion. especially in the way that it was pursued. but what that process did was it helped split up the original ttp into a number of factions. so i think there is both disunity in their ranks, and there is also desperation. and clearly what happened was desperate and unfortunately they were bracing for more desperation. the tighter they get squeezed, the more desperate they're going to be become. how much space do we leave in our discourse, and for a number

of us this is going to be shutting down the oxygen in terms of the discourse. there just can't be any more room for confusion or duplicity in our national discourse. >> well, let's hope they unite and figure out a way to fight this. a tragedy like this is inconceivable. good of you to join us. we wish you the best. >> keep us in your prayers. thanks. >> "consider this" will be right back. >> pan am flight 103 explodes december 21st, 1988 was the right man convicted? >> so many people, at such a high level, had the stake in al-megrahi's guilt >> the most definitive look at this shocking crime >> the major difficulty for the prosecution that there was no evidence >> al jazeera america presents lockerbie part one: the pan am bomber

>> is waterboarding torture. in the wake of last week's release of the report on the interrogation program, a new poll found 69% of americans think it is. even so 49% think that its

sometimes justified, while 36% think it's never justified. the horrorture memos that were used for many of the enhanced techniques admitted that some of the interrogators went far beyond what was justified. here in its aftermath, bruce fiennes. very good to have you with us. we'll start with listening to dick cheney. >> for 13 years we have avoided another mass attack against the united states. we did capture bin-laden and an awful lot of senior men, i would do it again. >> he is saying that the ends

justify the means. >> there are two reactions. there is no justification for committing torture and crimes. the fact is that there are certain prohibitions that we undertake because of who we are as a people. the torture convention that we ratified in an athletey and criminal law makes no exceptions, no ticking time bomb exceptions whatsoever with regard to torture. same with enslavery. even if we enslaved some of the al-qaeda people and we thought it would deter others from joining, that still does not make it legal. it would be criminal. mr. cheney seems to think that the reason why we've not had another terrorist attack here is because we flouted the law. there is no reason to believe that that is true. our constitution is not a suicide pact. there are ample grounds to thwart and prevent terrorism.

that is what prevented the additional terrorist attacks, not committing torture, it finishing it makes the problem more difficult, not less. >> cheney is not alone here. cia directors agree with him. they say what was done was not torture and last week we had another former cia director on the show, james woolsey who defended waterboarding by saying this. >> if you want to call on waterboarding torture, which some want to do and some do not. most u.s. law would not call it torture. >> you know, he went on to say that there is no long-term health impact for the person. it's like pulling someone's nails out it's not torture. legally does he have a point? >> no. for example, on waterboarding, the torture statutes prohibit

mental torture of simulated death. the purpose of waterboarding is to make the person who is subject to waterboarding fear from death from drowning. that's specific express terms in the torture prohibition. when it comes to the idea that it's questionable whether water board something questionable, we prosecuted japanese troops as war criminals for waterboarding americans. how can you say its torture if the japanese do it, but it's not if we do it? >> you know, their argument is that our waterboarding was different. that the japanese--s that it was a safer version. let's go to the waterboarding. some of the interrogation methods were much more brutal, rectal feeding, being forced to stand on broken limbs. when these techniques were described, the former justice employer who wrote those, the

memos now authorizing the interrogation techniques said the people who did this are at risk legally because they were acting outside of their orders. are they at risk? could they be prosecuted? >> under the statute everybody is at at risk. even those who got approval from the justice department under the statute that john mccain authored. still that's just a partial justification. the reliance has to be reasonable, something that they thought it was plausible. could they still be prosecuted? the answer is yes. the law does not say that they have to get approval from the justice department before doing something, but certainly they're under greater vulnerability. the statute of limitations which

typically is five years. now maybe with regard to torture you want to lift the statute of limitation, i don't think there would be problem with the law of that sort, and they certainly remain vulnerable for being prosecuted abroad because it's a universal crime. so they are clearly vulnerable if they travel 57 want to come on the alert on that score a. >> right, they said that they will not prosecute. ajustice scalia jumped in on this. he said that we have laws against torture, the constitution, though, says nothing about torture. he said people will say torture is terrible. you know a person who knows for sure the location of a nuclear

bomb that has been planted in los angeles and will kill millions of people. you think it's an easy question? you think it's clear that you cannot use extreme measures to get that information out of that person? >> it shows our ridiculous the argument is. because that extreme case never occurred. certainly not during the enhan enhanced interrogation techniques utilized by the cia. we stopped them for seven years, and we haven't had a disaster, have we? no one said since 2007 since we stopped it, we've lost all sorts of vital intelligence. if you have to make up an extreme case, it shows you on what thin ice you are, and the last observation i would make-- >> some argue in the philippines case, the torture ended you will foiling that plot. but i want to get one final question in to you.

allen dersheritz. he said while he's get torture he said in some cases it may be warranted and we may develop a system that is called torture warrants, if there was that extreme case you can go to a judge and ask for permission? >> then he needs to change the law. right now the law that the united states ratified, the convention against torture makes zero exceptions for it, zero. and he needs to convince people that the law needs to be changed. you don't just get to decide that the law is not a good idea and flout it. the way in which you have civilized government you need to change the law and convince the majority of the american people and legislator that it needs to be changed. that's what i find so difficult about thighs arguments. it is unambiguous. there are no exceptions. no ticking time bomb exceptions,

nothing whatsoever. we passed the law knowing that there were no exceptions. we can't just decide to disregard it because dick cheney or alan dersheritz wants to disregard it. >> thank you. >> thank you. >> turning now to the 16-hour hostage stand off monday in sydney, australia, those hostages could be seen through a window with their arms raised or holding a black flag. a handful escaped throughout the day. thin shortly after 2:00 a.m. tuesday morning police heard a loud bang and reacted by storming in as hostages fled. two of the hostages and gunmen mr. killed. the suspect man haron monis appeared to be acting alone.

david, great to have you us with us. you said we're only starting to recognize how ahead the extremists are in their use of social media. we invented this stuff. why are we having so much trouble dealing with the threats they pose on social media. >> i think it's the application. extremism has been around for a very, very long time. and so have counter extreme efforts. but they're far ahead using these social media platforms to propagandize and spread their message. >> why are they being so effective, and do you think they're playing a major role inspiring this guy in australia, man haron monis is to do what he did? >> they have a huge role. they brought up a level of organization and sophistication to their online propaganda

activities, especially-to-the isil affiliates. they developed clearinghouses are individuals can go to report if they've been suspended or taken off lined. and these clearinghouses put up a new line to take its place. >> why can't we get rid of these clearinghouses. the clearinghouses are telling people where to go. if the u.s. company has managed to take down their account. >> exactly. part of the effort is--part of the problem is that social media platforms themselves like twitter. >> what would you like them to do? there are many complaints to twitter and facebook about accounts of all sorts that people think they should pull down. are they not paying enough attention?

>> absolutely. that's one of the big problems. all complaints aren't the same. all objectionable activity is not the same. if you have people inciting violence, recruiting jihadi efforts, someone flags that account, it should be treated differently and in an expedient manner. >> your group has acted to stop them from doing this. this guy, man haron monis, was very active on twitter. he wrote, shame on those australiaterror terrorist australians. why don't they just put you at the top of the line? >> this is something that we would like to do, and we would like to give groups cep giving experts oh reporting status.

too often we look at activity on social media as just recrui recruitment. these kinds of activities that we're seeing now. it also becomes a sounding board and echo chamber where he can feed his animosity and his hate. >> you think that it actually makes the individual the lone wolf even more extreme because of the fact that they can post all this and the feedback that they get back online. >> this guy had a lot of followers. he had a facebook page that had been taken down, not before it 14,700 likes. so again, it would seem someone like that would come to the attention of american companies. why is it not happening? there is just too much out there? >> it may be that there is certainly a lot of propaganda out there and they get a lot of complaints, but i think they have not prioritized this and there has been acknowledgment of

the severity of the problem. we need to track these individuals, when we see that there is critical mass of people engaging in violent acts. and before they take that step, we need to take them off. >> what do you think of that argument? that argument has been made. this is a way of tracking some of these guys and it could help prevent violence because it does give us validity. >> which can't let tracking be excuse for passivity or pasiveness. had at some point they're going to commit violent act and we have to interrupt thatcal where it goes from rhetoric to violence. and once an account came down,

other accounts went off line because they were afraid of being exposed. >> and he was one of a recrui recruiting accounts. >> he was a seed accounts. he was very effective, and from him there are many other cells who grew and proliferated. >> that's getting a lot of foreign fighters to go to the middle east to take up arms on this terrible struggle. great to have you with us. thank you for bringing light to i this. it's an important topic. >> we'll be back with more of consider this.

iraq's government is taking the fight to i.s.i.l. >> iraq's government said its taking the fight to isil. they celebrated when they captured a town north of baghdad from isil fighters. whatever success iraq has had lately has not toughed the yazidis, an ancient religious group persecuted by isil. hundreds of thousands of yazidi

refugees continue to suffer in kurdistan. right now there is no chance they can return to home when run out by isil. my next guess, the sole yazidi in iraq's parliament gained national attention when she made a plea. >> we're being slaughtered under the barn of there is no god but allah. 500 yazidi men have been slaughtered. our women have been taken as slaves and sold into slavery. please, brothers. >> for more i'm joined by the only yazidi member of iraq's parliament. she sustained injuries when a helicopter, an aid helicopter crashed while delivering supplies to yazidi refugees besieged by isil. she's trying to do more to help

the yazidis. thank you for being with us. i know you're struggling from your sen accident with the helicopter. you're still walking with a cane. you were there to help many people and now you're here in the united states to try and also get help for your people. you met with u.s. ambassador to united nations samantha power today. what help do you hope to get. >> thank you for this interview. yes, i was meeting with samantha powell today. we are speaking about many things, especially the yazidi people. i think it's good news to maybe

to help the yazidi people. >> what kind of help do you need now? >> we need two kinds of help now. humanitarian aids, and more military support. >> how bad is the situation for the yazidi women? i know you've spoken to some who are still left behind. the reports are horrible of how they've been treated by isil. >> yes. after there are 5,000 girls and men are kidnapped by isis. even now nobody does anything for those girls. the situation is very, very bad with those women and girls, our children. >> there are thousands more yazidis who are still stuck on

mount sinjar? >> yes, 1,200 families. about 6 or 7,000 people. >> how are they living there in the wintertime? >> i don't know really because it is wintertime. very cold weather without food, without--without tents, without blankets. only 20% of aid are received until few. >> it's incredible that they're receiving there. it's not even just the ones on mount sinjar. we have half million yazidis living as refugees mostly in kurdistan, how are they doing? >> when we spoke about the situation of the refugee, we

have a camp, but it's a very bad camp. very bad tents. not waterproof, not fireproof. the tents, it's on mud. maybe i can show you some pictures today or tonight of the situation of those refugees in the camp, in the different camps, it is very, very bad. it is very little, and it's not enough. another thing that is very, very important thing, the healthcare for children, for women.

>> terrible conditions. do you feel after the rescue on mount sinjar, that the world has forgotten the yazidis? >> i think that it may be before the yazidis. i think after this isis attack, i think most of the people, i think when i go back home that it's a very complex issue because it's not a problem only with isis. those who grew up with isis are

coming from outside. it is a small group. maybe two or three hundred. but the big problem, the big issue is that orvilleages ar other villages, our problem for our neighbor, for our friends, how can we go back to live in sinjar with those neighbors? >> because you still live in towns that had many sunnies, and those sunnies ended up helping isil. that was one of the problems, and of course you have that in the future, where will the yazidis be able to live. i wish you the best in your efforts. it is a horrible tragedy that has fallen on your people, and i do hope that something is done

to help. thank you. >> thank you. >> "consider this" will be right back. investigative series... fault lines no refuge: children at the border only on al jazeera america

>> it's that time of year when hopeful high school seniors are beginning to hear back from their early college applications. but the admission process has

changed draw drastically. one student applied to 56, and one student was going to apply to 86 colleges. some are starting to worry that this all may be causing american young minds more harm than good. joining us now is thomas frank and has written about education for salon and other publication. you know, for the longest time the notion was if a school advertised it wasn't a school you wanted to go to. the good ones didn't need to do that kind of thing. i've got a college high school senior next year, and these are the e-mails i've been flooded with. at one point yesterday, times from the best colleges in the country to some you have never

heard of. one school offered to fly her to the campus. why are these colleges try something hard to recruit applicants? >> one thing that you have keep in mind. that was interesting if a school has to advertise then you know it's not any good. there was a time when we said the same thing about lawyers and other professions. what you see is an institution that you once regarded as part of the america tocacy, above the ugly demands and has become predatory. i think that's pretty much across the board. if you examine the way universities behave, private schools, some public schools as well. but pretty much across the board they behave like predatory institutions.

>> i will forward you that e-mail, and i'm telling you, it was a good college. but you're talking about this competitive, vicious circle, colleges trying to attract students with gentleman could youciescouldjacuzzis. you wrote a pretty strong statement that it's a ripoff on too many levels of too many victims. >> i don't think loans are at fault. we had student loans before this whole thing got out of control. we had the g.i. bill in the 1940s. we know when the tuition spiral took off, it was 1981, and student loans have been around before that. i don't think that's the cause. i want to go back to what you were saying about university

spending money on frivolous things, which is, of course, true. and news pales of these outrages in the news all the time. there was one of colleges building a lazy river. you know what this is? it's like a slow-moving swimming pool. okay, now everybody has to have one, right? and you sit i in an an inner tube and ride on this thing. but there is one aspect that they're not spending money on and they're going in the other direction on, it's the most important aspect of the college experience, professor, the education. these are people who have been essentially deprofessionalized just in a matter of 20 years. >> is this about the colleges acting as competitive options, you know, trying to be as high as they can on the best colleges list that are published every year? because if they get more applicanted obviously they're

getting more money, but then that looks better because their acceptance rate goes down. it seems that they're going after applicanted they know they're never going to accept. >> yes, that's probably right. i often find that in these situations the most mercenary and cynical explanation is so frequently the one that turns out to be right. all i know about this is what i read in the newspapers, and yes, they're trying to--if they can get those numbers of applicanted up, and then deny a whole bunch of them, it bumps their score of best ranking of best colleges. it has an announcing authority over what high schoolers value and where parents want to send their children, this list of best colleges in america. yes, it will bump their ratings there. >> what will it do for their high school students? you wrote that higher education is the industry that sells

tickets to an affluent life? do kids apply to college in the desperate hope of getting that all-important ticket to the affluent life? >> this is the only ticket to the middle class. or upper middle class that our society acknowledges any more. once upon a time you worked your way up. but today the only credential that matters is the college diploma. it has little to do with what you learn from college. it has more about the college brand signifier. you know, the sticker that you put on the rear window of your suv. that's what matters. colleges, high school students know this. they know they have to get into college and in to a better college, the better off they'll be somewhere down the road. and they essentially have no power in the this sort of negotiation, right?

where this manifests it is, the awful way in which this all turns out you graduate these classes of students who are $30,000 in debt. $40,000 in debt. these are people just starting out their lives as adults with the same kind of debt if you bought a house. >> and some people with more than that. it's an important topic, and it's certainly changing. thomas, good to have you. thanks. >> any time. >> we'll be back with more of "consider this." we'll be back with more of and surprising talks with the most interesting people of our time... talk to al jazeera, only on al jazeera america

>> church going is on the decline in much of america and in a free fall in western europe. but the desire to travel to a sacred place and experience a transcendant moment is happening

every year. following american pilgrims making spiritual journeys, and follows america's wounded warriors in france. there staff sergeant rodan, who had been badly wounded in iraq, found peace. >> the most beautiful experience that i had while here was when we went to the grato. >> every year thousands take part of bathing and renewal. >> they put me inside the water. as soon as they placed that water over my head i felt a sense of relief. i don't know how to explain that, but it's incredible. that changed me completely. >> for more on these remarkable

journeys i'm joined by bruce filer. "sacred journeys" aired tuesday on pbs and online. thankgreat to have you with us. >> thank you. >> you 200 million go every year, why the seeming contradiction. >> i think there is a correlation. for many centuries our religion was handed to us. where we live and who we married was handed to us. religious identity is much more fluid. we know half of americans will change faith in their lives. four in ten americans are in " in inter faith marriage. you get up and you decide for yourself what you believe. >> what were these americans doing? were they going to express their

faith? or were they going to find it? >> the answer is yes, all sorts of things. i went on six of these pilgrimages, india, mecca. you see people in moments of transition. they're just graduating from school, lost a parent, lost a job. you see people going through a divorce, retiring. it is in those moments of transition that people open their up to something higher. some people are going to walk in the footsteps and have that sort of experience. other people are not. we have a couple that we meet who just graduated from medical school. >> in japan. >> yes, in japan on a buddhist track. they said, we are people of science. we're not people of faith. >> many people have heard of jerusalem and mecca. you went to japan, and also to india, the biggest of all.

>> to me the one mentioned in nigeria was the eye opening. >> one that i never heard of. >> most of the slaves that came to the united states were taken from this one part of west africa, and a lot of tradition decisions have lived in african-americans. now you have african-americans going back to reclaim their cultural identity. as one priest says to us, we left africa, but africa never left us. >> now these pilgrimages, if if you have back to history, were not for the faint of heart. it was rough and sometimes you had to beg for food in some of these places. some have said that there is a disney edification at some of these events. mecca has hotels, some of the most expensive in the world. has that changed the experience for pilgrims. >> if you were with me you

wouldn't have thought that the food was that good. suffering is part of it. even in mecca you may be buying your way in to a fancy hotel room, it's rigorous and demanding. some on foot. the people aren't always generous, but that's part of it. if you look at the scriptural part through all this. when we're fat, happy and comfortable, who needs this. but when we need it we open up to something higher in our lives. >> you had made a 10,000-mile pilgrimage of your own. you wrote "walking the bible," and it became a pbs series. you traveled for a long time. you wrote that at one point in your journey "i began to feel a certain pull from the landscape, a feeling of gravity, a feeling

that i wanted to take off all my clothes and lie face down on the soil." now you're jewish, you went to these sites. did you feel any particular tug, any particular spiritual moment? >> i always thought of myself as a bungee cord. i would pop out and bounce back, pop out and then bounce back. being in the middle east the bungee cord was caught. knowing that these are connected. there are all these special places where the universe opens in some way, and we're attracted to that. what i've taken away from all these pilgrimages is we don't have to sit back and accept what the institution or the people on the high mountain tell us. we're called to decide for ourselves what we believe. there is only one way to do that. get up off the sofa and go. >> it's been great to have you with us. >> thank you.

>> again, "sacred journeys" on pbs. we're on facebook and twitter and you can tweet me @amoratv. we'll see you next time. >> august 25, 2014. michael brown is laid to rest by his family and friends