as a technical update put a little too much power into the government's hands we'll have on cato's julian sanchez to find out next we're talking u.f.o.'s believe it or not over one hundred retired military officers came forward today to tell their stories about unexpected sightings of an identified flying objects archie correspondent cedric moon will join us with that story then we'll ask our hackers heroes or villains the controversy surrounding wiki leaks has brought the question to the foreground those who want to make information free to the public and those who believe that the author already should not be trusted also down professor peter ludlow to discuss that topic and we're sure that you know the westboro baptist church gets you guys as fired up as it gets me we're going to introduce you to a comedian who really gets a laugh out of them and their ridiculous and quite offensive protest his name is rick stone and he'll join us at the end of tonight's show but now let's move on to tonight's top story. well there is

a war brewing in pakistan and for some reason people keep denying it but we are fighting just this past weekend fifty three people were confirmed dead after nato helicopters chased militants across the afghanistan border into pakistan and then struck rather unusual attack because this one came from a manned aircraft not just dropped now this violent weekend brings the total number of killings there to one hundred and one so we know that the number of attacks and drone strikes in pakistan have been on a constant increase we now know thanks to bob woodward's new book that was just released today that the cia's operating a three thousand man paramilitary of local afghans who cross into pakistan when needed yet for some reason the obama administration insists that the u.s. is not at war in pakistan in other words they're just saying what the american people want to hear but you know what the u.s. presence in pakistan goes all the way back to the bush administration as taliban and al qaeda leaders fled afghanistan they found pakistan to be

a safe cell and they just relocated their forces outside of the country where the u.s. officially declared war and it's no secret that the pakistani people don't want u.s. troops in their country the anti-american sentiment runs high and that their own government and military aren't keen on acknowledging that our two countries work closely together but you know at the cat's been out of the bag for a long time so how about instead of treating the us populace like ignorant fools that don't know any better our government just admit. now politics and war are these days and extra could be linked but that doesn't mean that they always play nice and by that mean our civilian and our military leadership as bob woodward's new book obama's wars released today points out obama during the review of the war of afghanistan at the end of two thousand and nine wanted out politically his advisors wanted out but the military branch of his national sick. team well they wanted more more more and more importantly they

didn't give the president the united states the commander in chief of the armed forces another option drawing from internal memos classified documents meeting notes and hundreds of hours of interviews with two players including the president himself woodward shows us that there is an internal war between the white house and the pentagon so the question that we have to ask is at the end of the day who really want to hear to discuss that with me is robert dreyfuss contributing editor at the nation robert thanks so much for being here my pleasure so i mean you know we look at this book and i haven't got a chance to read the entire thing it just came out this morning but even from the excerpts that we've seen so far you know you see a president really that is in battle and he is there asking for an option asking for a way out of the war and they're really not giving it to he ends up coming up with a compromise where he says fine i won't give you forty thousand you won't give me twenty thousand like biden's asking for i'll give you thirty thousand troops but i

mean at the end of a day did he compromise too much you know who really wins here did he lose out to the military leadership i think part of the problem is that obama is so inexperienced in being able to deal with the military that he didn't understand how to ask for another option how did he do that how do you ask for another option properly what you do lay down in simple terms what your objective is if obama is objectives truly to get out of afghanistan by a certain date let's say he wants to run for reelection in two thousand and twelve so i ended the two wars that bush started that you simply tells the military i want to end this war by the middle of two thousand and twelve he can do that it's their job to figure out how to do it not to come back with options for escalating the war in fact obama has tripled the american commitment to the war in afghanistan since he took office less than two years ago it's been a large expansion and one of the things that really struck me in reading this book is. there is no discussion by the president or really most of his his advisors

about how to solve it politically how to create a political solution how to negotiate a deal that you mentioned pakistan and that's a really interesting case throughout the book the entire focus by both the military and obama is how do we push pakistan to fight the taliban to fight the militants on its own soil to fight to the belief that it's sponsored that's where the militants are now you know our problem now has become afghanistan a war that we've been in for almost nine years and yet it turns out that the cancer the bad guys have just hopped over a border and they're all now in another but i'm not really because if you go back fifteen years it was pakistan that created the taliban they instead trained it they funded it in some cases they pay men to do that as well well yes but that goes back now to the one nine hundred eighty s. but i mean pakistan is in command here they're the ones who still to this day

control the i mean i've talked to experts who say that that mullah omar the head of the taliban might actually be living on a pakistani military base but certainly he's living in pakistan and the pakistanis know where he is so if we really want to end this war if obama wants to end it then you what you do is you approach pakistan and the taliban and say ok we want to get out what kind of deal can we make and the pakistanis can bring the taliban to the table but instead you see them fighting to get pakistan to go to war against its own creation and that is not obama's fault is that the people that he's surrounded by the military advisers that are telling him what the proper options are i mean you look at the trace and there are quotes from him in this book where you know saying you know i don't think this is a war that you win i think this is a war that's going to keep going on for decades and you have to stay there and you know it's going to be there as long as i'm alive possibly even when my children are alive clearly. this guy doesn't want this war to end i mean these are military

officials this is what they make their career out of is the u.s. fighting wars well it may not be completely fair to say that they don't want the war to end but they do believe like almost with religious faith in this notion of counterinsurgency that you have to go village by village valley by valley throughout this vast country with thirty million people and win over the tribes one by one the tribes and the sub tribes and the clans and to get the people to support the american project but how long can you keep on doing that you know see what happens it might take a decade and that's exactly what obama said point blank to the his own officers is i am not going to fight this spend a trillion dollars and ten years or lose my political base exactly even as a democrat not doing this for a decade i'm not leaving office to my successor and i'm certainly not letting you keep as claimed by troops and get it back to seventy thousand and twenty six and then the military they saluted and they said ok mr president but here's our plan

and they gave him a plan to to escalate to one hundred ten thousand troops and then gradually over six more years to deescalate to sixty eight thousand which is more twice as many as were there examine a lot of you know he was serious about others me too is you know if we look at the internal divisions here i mean the book also we have quotes of the guys seem like they're trash talking each other like like they're a bunch of teenagers and you know whatever i guess that happens but then at the same time you have options that are being kept off the table because they don't even want to show them to the president they have war games that are being created that are destined to fail and they're designed to fail so it's like these people treat war like a game because like i said again this is their business and that's what was bothering to me i don't know if that bothers you know is one of the most famous quotes in american history is war is too important to leave to the generals and in this case obama seems to have deferred to the generals now the big out is. he said we're going to start withdrawing in july of two thousand and eleven that is less

than a year from now we're going to start pulling out our troops the military has been trying to kill that idea from the beginning they're going to have to be dragged kicking and screaming out of afghanistan was specially general dave betrays which is interesting because you wrote recently you know i mean there have been a number of articles coming out that are saying obama petraeus now we're joined at the hip these guys are buddy buddy and petraeus has obama's full trust and so when they get together for the next afghanistan review this december it looks like he's probably going to go along with everything the general i don't know does this book change your mind or does think the in the last year obama really is now joined at the hip no i don't think obama is joined at the hip he's dependent on the trail because he's the he's very politically powerful he's popular he's got a lot of connections to the republicans and obama is afraid that if he you know short circuits the military that he's going to have to face a unified alliance between the military and the republicans in two thousand and

twelve even been rumors that betray us wanted to run for president as a republican and he's a media darling as well you know it's really loves this guy but that's what's so i don't know what somehow is unsettling to me the fact that you have the president of the united states scared of his the military officials that he's working with that are supposed to be following his orders and yet you see it going without any word to use the commander in chief absolutely so he can decide what he wants to do and if next july comes if he is not convinced that this war is going well he could say i want you to start taking out ten thousand troops a month or personal see if that actually happens you know for now he's been kind of getting what they want thanks so much for being here my pleasure i have sort of come on tonight as a major scandal for the f.b.i. it seems that some agents and supervisors are cheaters i'll explain in just a moment and is it a power grab by the obama administration reports say at the white house is pushing

a bill that would allow the federal government to wiretap the internet all in the name of national security of course so we'll look into the issues as we come back. well tonight there is a scandal brewing that involves the f.b.i. a justice department investigation found the f.b.i. agents and supervisors cheated on a test that covered the bureau's policy for conducting surveillance on americans and an inspector from the d.o.j.

said that the review of the allegations showed the agents improperly took the open book test together or had access to an answer sheet and those have all turned up significant abuses and cheating but does anyone else out there find a little ridiculous the f.b.i. agents cheated on an open book test hello the answers are in the book that's why it's called an open book exam why do you need to cheat now the department of justice also says the f.b.i. should throw out the results of this exam and come up with another test the inquiry by the d.o.j. found all the strong evidence of cheating after looking at only four f.b.i. field offices before ordering a deeper investigation into this problem and the shooting scandal comes at the same time that a different report says that the f.b.i. used in accurate information to monitor domestic activist groups now during that investigation it was revealed that the f.b.i. gave false information to congress and the public when it claimed that a possible terrorism link existed to justify spying on an anti-war rally in

pittsburgh in two thousand and two in the report the f.b.i. calls the pittsburgh surveillance and quote ill conceived project honest or workday . really really worried that the f.b.i. is that slow that you just felt like sitting around and coming up with bozak bogus excuses to spy on people really way to make yourself look like an integral part of this country's security these are the men and women in charge of helping protect the country from terrorist attacks and other crimes and they're also supposed to help protect our rights not abuse them while acting like laws and regulations don't apply to the f.b.i. itself. but. now knowing what you just learned this next story should make you feel a whole lot of it according to the new york times the obama administration is planning on submitting a bill to lawmakers next year that would require all services that enable communications things like encrypted e-mail transmitters like blackberries social networking sites like facebook and software that allows direct peer to peer

messaging like skype to be technically capable of complying if served with a wiretap order so if a service can encrypt messages they also have to have a way of unscrambling them if they allow peer to peer communication they have to redesign their entire service to allow interception now essentially this means of the government wants to have the ability to know everything you say and do it at all times if they deem necessary but of course they're only talking about lawfully authorized intercepts that's what officials claim but looking back on the past ten years that doesn't make me feel whole lot better under the guise of national security this government seems to think that they can lawfully intercept everything because that's going to stop terrorism but you know what it hasn't been stopped yet can we still stop the government well joining me here to discuss it is julian sanchez a journalist and research fellow at the cato institute joined thanks so much for being here thanks for having me you know one thing that really bothers me about this i have to mention to you is that the government you know everything they do

gets to be secret but we have seen them use state secrets just recently with the case of anwar all a lot here and yet they think that everything we need to we do is subject to their . super vision in their surveillance why is that ok why we get so i mean to do a really disturbing thing is that in a lot of cases they seem to think that even the legal standards to which they are subject are secret too which i think is pretty radically contrary to the basic principle of a free society that that you would have secret bodies of law and yet the court the secret intelligence court that issues national security warren says proceedings in secret it's major opinions even interpret the law are secret and so in a lot of ways we don't even know what the statutes congress passed actually mean and when they were interpreted by the courts which i think is disturbing how is that supposed to make us feel any better i mean this is america right america is all about life liberty the pursuit of happiness your right to privacy and it was created such a way that we're supposed to check the government's power not the opposite way

around i you know what's really interesting and glenn greenwald pointed this out earlier today is that somehow it's transformed to the fact that we're the people that actually call out the government for that are now looked at these these crazies these liberals that are such extremists and that's what i don't understand is why everyone else is going along with it thinking that's normal well i mean sometimes it's the government itself calling them out there was the inspector general report you mentioned on domestic spying and on the false information was given to congress earlier this year there was another inspector general report that revealed that for years the f.b.i. only used very broad national security letter powers it was given. to actually didn't use them it used the fact that it had this broad thirty two essentially promise as an iou that they would later use legitimate legal process and then in fact they just gave post it notes basically to the telecommunications companies to get sensitive and protected records and in many cases it turned out they were getting records about people there wasn't even investigation so they couldn't have legally gotten those records and so they say well now we should trust them because

they've used their powers well in the past i don't think she convinced anyone in this case though frankly even if we trusted the f.b.i. i would have a lot of concerns about this proposal because. what they're essentially saying is what we need to do is design our global internet networks for breach that's this is what they're saying is that the network cannot be to secure it so if you're providing some kind of cloud computing service you know especially in light of like the news last week that there's a google engineer who had been surprising into the communications of some you know young teenagers that he was interested in for whatever reason you know i think a lot of companies want the security of saying you know we're going to store our sensitive data with you maybe corporate strategy maybe intellectual property worth millions of dollars we want to know that even your own employees you know maybe someone who's looking for a cash out can't access that under this proposal at least as i understand it they wouldn't be able to at least u.s. companies would no longer even be able to provide that guarantee there would have to be

a back door not just for the government to use but also for anyone else to exploit any happier who wants to get out would know that every system is legally mandated to have a backdoor and there in plenty of cases there's a case in greece in two thousand and five where a back door like that in the cell phone system was used to spy on high government officials now prime minister sharon is such and so far with the g. mail accounts you yourself write about that i mean any time that you create such a system that's meant to have a back door as you say or some gateway into it then someone's going to want to take advantage of it you know but for some reason what i also can't understand is why you know keeping all this information isn't making us any safer we now have this top secret america we now have so much information that officials don't even know what to do with it who would have passed it on to what they've read what they haven't read so you know the notion that this is going to make us safer just seems crazy to you know every you know every analysis that was done after the fact is that the intelligence failures that led up to nine eleven and came after it were

really a problem with being on the able to connect the dots sometimes they call the problem of drinking from a fire hose there's so much information pouring in they weren't actually able to sort out what was important and won't. wasn't and it seems like maybe because this is the easiest policy solution the answer is always well turn up the fire hose turn it into a waterfall and there's just not that much evidence that that's working very well now tell me this that you know this services that are going to be a factor in the ones that now have to redesign everything so that they have these back doors in place i mean how long is that going to take how much money is that going to cost is the government willing to foot the bill if they're going to force services to now redesign everything well i think extend this if they extend the principles that applied in colombia the communications assistance for law enforcement act of one thousand nine hundred for the way that work they didn't fact provide money for telecoms to update their equipment but this is in a lot of ways a much broader mandate what you were talking about in the original kaliya was that phone call existing big centralised phone companies that already run centralized

architectures you know comcast and t.n.t. when they switch from analog where you had every phone number had a little knot in both that you could attach a wire to wire tap to when they went to digital switches they basically had to build in equipment when they went over to make sure you could still do the same kind of wire taps you could always do this is basically saying not this handful of big telecom companies with centralized architecture but any of these burgeoning little startups that might provide some kind of communication service not just have to build in certain equipment but have to architect their whole system a certain way they can't do a decentralized secure and and form of providing encryption they have to in some sense centralize it so that there's a central bank that everyone under the same blanket i mean to me out it seems just a little scary it's like the government always is trying to keep up with the latest technology the internet which is supposed to be the bastion of freedom is now getting away from them so they just have to try to clamp down but i think it's wrong like i said whatever happened to the fact that we're supposed to check the

government and not the other way around julia thank you so much for being here thank you still to come tonight when or if they only live on earth they'll apparently want control of our nuclear weapons. and is the pentagon keeping all this information on the public r t central command has that report and we come back . hungry for the full story we've got it from. the biggest issues get a human voice face to face with the news makers. that story might seem a little strange and well it is former air force officer hell's officers held

a news conference today in d.c. more than one hundred and twenty retired military personnel warn of ongoing and alarming intervention by unidentified aerial flying objects and nuclear weapons sites artie said rickman has more. perhaps few things say normal or routine more than a daily dose of coffee a cup of calm in what can on any day be out of the ordinary. out of the ordinary like a nuclear holocaust out of the ordinary. let's say there's an attack from where it doesn't matter it could be north korea iran pakistan. if that were to happen nuclear payback wouldn't happen. but. that's the claim made by the men in this room are missiles began going into what's

called a no go condition or on launchable essentially they were disabled detailed in this report full of court sanction sworn affidavits the witnesses have described these craft s. disc shaped or cylindrical shape or spherical if you think what's being said inside this building is completely ridiculous you might want to consider something my name's robert hastings thank you for coming these are men who might know what may have gone on their former air force missile launch officers missile base officers who say you with space ships flying saucers make nuclear weapon systems go haywire in one thousand nine hundred sixty six according to a launch officer david shore his missiles were temporarily activated just as his security guard was reporting a bright object moving from missile to missile to missile. and it's not just in the united states also. in russia. like in one thousand

eight hundred incidents that happened in then soviet ukraine given the fact that these incidents have gone on over there including one incident of their missiles being temporarily activated when the u.f.o. was hovering above the missile base identical to what occurred here i think we can rule out who whoever our pilots in these craft are either american or russian. maybe they're right maybe they're wrong. maybe there is no way to ever know but if they all are right and in out of the ordinary day is about to unfold. remember the saucer. moon our t. washington d.c. . well subjects here in the studio with me to tell us more on this story cedric you know what were the reactions like there today because i want to hand it seems it seems a little crazy to say that they're u.f.o.'s that are dismantling our nuclear weapon systems but these are all you know military officers these these these are of

former officials you know where they looked at as crazy or were people really listening well i would probably say no they weren't looked at as crazy especially with the people in the crowd because i think and this is just a guess just by the way they were saluting each other a number of people who were in the crowd over also retired air force as well too so in terms of any sort of snickering or ridiculing it was honestly happening amongst the camera crews in the back lined up in the back rather the people sitting there right in front right by the panelists so was this supposed to be a warning you know i mean are they just telling this to expose the experiences they had or they really try to warn us that our nuclear weapons and our systems are all in danger i think it was if anything it was necessarily a warning but maybe something that's a little bit more of a pacifying i think it was like well we have aliens who are watching us to make sure that we don't blow. each other to smithereens so i think they were saying

something more along the lines of will take comfort in the fact but we want the united states government what we want the department of defense the united states air force come clean and say this is in fact happening with these u.f.o.'s or that are currently hovering the skies yes i mean there is a lot of information on there you know i've done in an interview here on the show with an author too that has had so many letters and descriptions coming also from generals from high ranking officials in the military that you know unexplained events really identified flying objects doesn't mean that they're an alien but there's one thing that i have to mention that i thought was hilarious today a story came out that the u.n. was going to appoint a first contact bassett or a malaysian astrophysicist but then it was kind of debunked because she denied the claims but i just love this story i mean who wouldn't want that job to just sit around and wait for them to never come well not just that but what if one of the i said i did find funny because quick is that when you call that number apparently there's an answering service that says the person extension for ninety five one is

unavailable that's exactly the impression we want to give these people from another or these beings from another planet that they will be put on a hold if they do try to visit as i mean i just thought though that's only whole areas so i guess the bats what you know first contact is what we've all just been poring over our favorite alien movies independence day and what not today thinking about you know how cool would be to be that first person that says yes i'm here to welcome you to earth thanks for visiting but hold on for just a second i had cedric thanks so much well still to come on tonight's show a congressman from florida lands in our tool time segment what he did to win the award is just ahead and we'll go inside the world of hacking discussed the secretive online operations of hackers with a professor who's written an e-book on the issue in just a moment. and

again this is the headline. rushes to triple crude are exposed to china to satisfy the giant nation's growing energy over the new clothes border only opened on monday by president hu jintao and he treated bed it was a three day visit to china. another humanitarian aid team is bound for gaza needed for one this after the israeli only had time for the last one headed back in the night an option the un human wise counsel says was brutal and disproportionate. on the side of the pirates and wrong should come out into the open and into politics stopping i know my compatriots time policy to christ to make coping and for a father traveling the world. as the headlines let's not go back to that.

it's time for tonight's tool time award you know politics is a tough business and democratic congressman alan grayson of florida apparently is in a fighting mood he's released a new ad against his opponent this november and he calls him taliban dan webster to . just fanatics try to take away our freedom in afghanistan in iran and right here in central florida was yourself your own husband daniel webster wants to impose his radical fundamentalism on us she should submit to me that's enough by webster tried to deny battered women medical care in the right to divorce their abusers and submit to that he wants to force raped women to bear the child submit to me the taliban dan webster hands off our bodies and our laws. well he is certainly not holding back with that what he's comparing.