tv [untitled] January 4, 2011 11:00pm-11:30pm EST
11:02 pm
rockslides breakers have begun the rescue operation for the positive negative trips trying to buy only some of the country's finest cars some five hundred people are believed to be stranded in the stuff i mean they were weather conditions less than a. pulse and light inside of a space the israeli army is trying to control it's going to treat each other and so that's why a generation of soldiers secret contacts and pictures on social networks. on those washington sons hundreds of billions of dollars abroad to maintain it would have gotten stunned experts say much of that right it would be better spent.
11:03 pm
at the next with the i don't know girl coasting for our washington studios thank you. but in the alone a show will get the real headlines with none of the mercy or can we live out of washington d.c. now it might be a new year we're going to take you back to two thousand and three where cameras in iraq caught saddam hussein's statue being brought down a new investigation by the new yorker and pro publica highlights the media's gross exaggeration of the events importance but since that has the media learned anything we're going to speak to former c.n.n. correspondent jamie mcintyre next some well known conservatives like rudy giuliani fran townsend and michael mckay see went to a form in paris for the mujahideen a cock and the k.
11:04 pm
this is a group that has been classified as a terrorist organization so why on earth were these well known americans in attendance and isn't that illegal i mean hash it all out with matthew dust from american progress then we'll tell you about cornelius du pree he spent thirty years in jail wrongly convicted of rape and robbery and he is just one example of several of wrongful imprisonment so is this just more proof that the u.s. justice system is unreliable and what does it say about capital punishment in our society we're going to have a debate on the issue and with the new year comes a new congress which is filled with several tea party members but will the outsiders who set out to change u.s. politics just fall into line once they get to washington or we're going to speak to a tea partier to get his take on the new members and if he thinks they'll stay true to their campaigning words and is there a back handed deal going on goldman sachs and facebook are setting up a special purpose vehicle to allow their clients to invest in the social networking site but could this be just a slap in the face to the s.e.c.
11:05 pm
business insiders joe was involved join me to discuss the details of the end of the show but now let's go. on to our top story. april ninth two thousand and three that was the david a statue of saddam hussein was brought down to baghdad's fair dos square now we now know the truth of how that moment was created but a battalion of marines found themselves near a hotel that was a journalist hangout though one man sergeant leon lambert took it upon himself to tell his captain that iraqis wanted the statue taken down so he was given permission to lend them his sledgehammer but as much flak as the military received perhaps it's more important as peter maass of the new yorker has done in a long investigation to point fingers at the media for their embury saying overreaction that date brit hume of fox saying this transcends anything i've ever seen c.n.n.'s bill hemmer calling it a seminal moment a nation in a nation's history like the fall of the berlin wall but why do we really care about
11:06 pm
the media's reaction to that one event because i'm wondering if they've learned anything here this guy with me is jamie mcintyre former c.n.n. senior pentagon correspondent who now blogs on military and media issues at line of departure dot com jamie thanks so much for being here thanks for having me now this is some people are calling this the mission accomplished moment for the media much like george bush had on the aircraft carrier but i mean here are the governments didn't need to create a story the military didn't need to create a story do you go online with moss' argument that this is the media's fault they really hype this thing up well first of all i think it's an excellent article they really did a terrific job in going back and doing what journalism should do best which is to go back and look at an event bring more reporting to bear do more research and write a very nuanced piece about what happened there and to answer your first question the u.s. has the media learned anything i don't think they've learned a lot i think if this were to happen the same way again today they probably fall into the same trap we see you're saying you know that's good when journalism when
11:07 pm
we can look back through history we can take the time to investigate but that exactly points to what the problem was. right is that there's there's a picture there's something going on and everybody jumps on the story without any regard for facts or really you know the odds are for the bigger picture well if it looks good then you're going to make america gets a little more nuanced than that but i think that the criticism i think is well placed one of the problems is it's difficult to put things in historical perspective without the benefit of time additional information and really knowing what's going to it was hard to know exactly what was going on that said the full context of what was happening when the statue was brought down and and the fact that it was really a very small crowd it was really clear who the iraqis were and what they really wanted and that it was it was pretty much a very much a symbolic moment event if not staged by the u.s. military was at least stage managed by the military they facilitated but now symbolic moments like this can be you know they can be meaningful they are symbolic they can also be newsworthy but they need to be put in the proper context and you
11:08 pm
know to give everybody some credit it wasn't entirely clear at that point april ninth two thousand and three which way the war was going to go but at the same time we have there is there are pieces in this article evidence of certain reporters calling their editors telling them i don't believe that you know the importance of this moment is what you say it isn't and there's tell them all scrap everything else you're working on make sure that we focus on the cell over tori nature of really of what's happening here so here you have editors from way of far telling you in iraq what the story is and that's something that i think they ruled that we haven't learned the lesson of that and part of that is a couple of dynamics going on there one is. the editors and producers who are far away think that they have the big picture and that the reporters who are there are too close to the story they don't see what's going on that happens all the time reporters are constantly being. told by their editors that you don't have the whole story and you need to get with the program the other thing is it's
11:09 pm
a very appealing narrative. statues coming down that the u.s. is being welcomed as liberal. rader's and that the iraqis are happy and a lot of times news organizations aren't really interested in hearing a lot of contrary facts that go against the narrative whether it's a positive narrative as in this case or negative narrative but they're not interested why because this is going to be a negative nagpur narrative for of war that a lot of americans because we wanted to begin with something of the government want of the media does it work because it's in this is the case with a lot of stories is because the editors tend to favor stories that have a simple compelling story line and when you start to bring a lot of extra facts and context it takes the edge off the story which is not as exciting a story it's not clear what it means it's not as big a deal it's not as good a story it's you know the expression we have in journalism is another story ruined by too much reporting or you know don't let the facts get the way of a good story so it's a really beneficial thing that peter maass and the new yorker and pro publica have
11:10 pm
gone back and really tried to in a very can text or a way put this back in perspective anybody who really wants to sort of understand all the dynamics that were played there would get a good record of course comes the argument well it's nice that he's doing it now but what if we had known even before invading iraq that they didn't really have weapons of mass destruction if the media had been doing their job properly then so i think checking the government's lie i think one of the myths about that is that the media was critical of whether or not the intelligence was correct but there was no way i would submit in two thousand and two to prove or disprove what the bush administration was saying short of going to war and i think there was also no way to speak out against it without being called. you know treasonous they were you're not a patriot if you're not supporting what they got there was always you had to be very careful and the problem was you couldn't you couldn't come up with the evidence to refute that and you would you did what the media did take the bush administration at its word was that they believed what they were say some people have debated
11:11 pm
about whether there was deliberate intentions to mislead the public in the press or whether it was just honest mistakes that were. so i think that's where the odds are running on time i just want to ask you another question here which is you know it when you're in that kind of environment if you are a reporter the goes abroad to a warrior embedded with the military or if you're a choir that has access to high level officials is there any way to get past that sort of hero worship because you're dependent on these people if you're in a war zone you're depending on the military for their protection and for the story if you're with these high level officials dependent on them will letting you in to get the story sir is there any way to be you know independent anymore or you know i think reporters don't give up their critical faculties just because they are embedded with somebody or traveling with somebody i think if you went with somebody you would still probably have the same inquisitive questioning mind that you have but one of those reporters have to remind themselves is they don't have all the facts of the situations and if they're going with what they what they have at the time and what they can see at the time and what they know at the time they also have an obligation to go back and keep correcting the record as they get more
11:12 pm
information as they continue to report as they find their contacts and yes sometimes you can take a while there's been a long time we have seen this article here in the us has done what we're good reporters do that over time you do get a nuanced picture that really does help you understand what's going on we definitely have an interesting picture here though the right picture the true picture i guess but this piece thank you so much for being here jamie. now sticking with the iraq war and a reporter who helped push the weapons of mass destruction story leading up to the invasion judith miller she used to be a reporter at the new york times she's now working at newsmax and goes by judy miller and over the weekend she was on a fox news panel discussing stories from two thousand and ten and she was asked about wiki leaks and its founder julian assange listen to her response when asked if sites like wiki leaks are the newest forms of journalism and her views on a staunch and general. billion the signage may be a vadra analyst but he is a journalist
11:13 pm
a better analyst because he didn't care at all about attempting to verify the information that he was putting out or determine whether. it would hurt a heavy if i learned look you're so judith miller is really calling out julia signs for not checking his facts critics of miller obviously jumped on this statement many still follow her new york times reporting on the run up to the iraq war for helping push that myth that iraq had w m d's now when it was revealed that there were no w m d's after the us had already invaded really was question about her reporting and she told michael massing author of the book now they tell us the following she said my job as a reporter wasn't to assess the government's information and be an independent intelligence analyst myself but to tell times readers what the government thought about iraq's arsenal to jude it just takes all the resources at their word never double check the facts what is saw and is totally wrong here just think maybe if she would have done her job we may not have been involved in the iraq war since two thousand and three we would have lost more than forty seven hundred soldiers maybe
11:14 pm
if julian assange and wiki leaks were around back in two thousand and three due to actual reporting this war may have never happened. now there's still much more to come on today's show so big names like rudy giuliani michael mackay c. and fran townsend attended a forum in paris for a group deemed a terrorist organization by the u.s. working out the details on why they were there and ask want things matthew does if he thinks a group of liberals could have gotten away with doing the exact same thing and a man in texas was exonerated from a crime after spending thirty years in prison which made us ask how many more out there just like him and how many of them could be on death row. for the feast we've got. the biggest issues get a human voice face to face with the news makers. or is that so much easier to believe
11:15 pm
a lot of people are curious enough brooklyn is it the most important international body or a dysfunctional consideration the united nations often criticized. on december twenty third of last year a leading group of conservatives including rudy giuliani and former bush officials michael mackay see tom ridge and fran townsend all appeared at a forum in paris organized by supporters of the iranian opposition group the mujahedeen a the enemy k a group that was declared as a terrorist organization by the u.s. since one thousand nine hundred seven a group that helps saddam hussein carry out attacks against iraq's shia population in the ninety's but attacked americans in iran in the one nine hundred eighty s. and the health of the one nine hundred seventy nine takeover of the u.s. embassy in tehran and yet these conservatives voiced their support for this group and they called their labels a terrorist organization to describe and they called obama's foreign policy towards
11:16 pm
iran a futile futile appeasement now on top of all this they may have committed a federal crime according to the supreme court's ruling that said that any. advocacy performed in cord nation with or at the direction of a foreign terrorist organization is a crime but how much do you want to bet that these guys are going to face any repercussions for their actions or earlier i caught up with mathew das the national security editor at american progress and i think progress when i first asked him if he thought there would be more backlash if a group of liberals want to broaden criticize the president and show support for a terrorist organization. well i don't think we have to imagine that we can just look back at what happened when the speaker nancy pelosi visited syria i believe it was two thousand and seven and was just criticize across the board by conservatives for you know not even criticizing u.s. policy but just for going to syria which supports groups like hezbollah but yeah conservatives always had an issue with this idea of going abroad to criticize u.s.
11:17 pm
policy in them and it just it's amazing the silence that we've seen from conservatives. on this giuliani and this crowd going abroad to france to criticize president obama's iraq iran policy and supporting this group the m k o i mean that's something that essential a fox news of be calling treason you know word anyone else that i got abroad but then now let's talk about the group do you think of a deserve that title as a terrorist organization which the u.s. came in they have been you know involved in incidents where american citizens died in iran clearly i mean they meet the definition i think it's very much worth looking into what has been their record over the past few years but in the past yes they've been linked to among other things the taking of u.s. hostages in iran after the revolution they have carried out various terrorist terrorist acts they were aligned with saddam they said they attacked iran from iraq they were given refuge by saddam in iraq they aided him in his crackdown on shiites and kurds in the early one nine hundred ninety s. so it's just it's just deeply ironic that these conservatives would go and support
11:18 pm
this group that was aligned with saddam hussein well there has to be some reason right why are they doing it now why are they deciding to shield their eyes like all . they're wrong doings never happened i mean it's all in order to be that iran war drum we've talked about this before you essentially predicted that this is what was going to happen right i mean glad you brought that up because i think the last time i was here i talked about we should expect to see you know conservatives aligning behind a group that could essentially serve as the new iran you know the committee for the liberation of iran and unfortunately seem to have identified the m k o is that group it's worth pointing out the has very little support within iran for understandable reasons they fought on saddam's side during the iran iraq war so i think it's not very hard to understand why you're wrong this would not be crazy about this group. so yeah really it's seems like the the goal here was simply to criticize the obama administration's policy so they don't necessarily have any any weight in iran even if the u.s.
11:19 pm
were to take away the terrorist organization label from them you know start supporting them jump behind them that's not like it would help really the obama administration take on iran because you know we even had some of the leaders that went over there are calling the obama administration efforts when it comes to iran really a few tile appeasement can you say that i mean what about what about the sanctions what about everything that's happened exactly i mean to call the obama administration's iran policy of appeasement just absolutely makes no sense i mean they've he has reached out to iran and in doing so he's made clear to the rest of the world that iran is the recalcitrant actor here ronnie and dissidents that i've spoken to across the board say this that obama his outreach has made it clear to iranians themselves that the united states is not the one who's hostile here it's put the iranian regime themselves in a very difficult position now that would be very damaged were the obama administration to follow the advice of people like giuliani and turn around and support the m.k. oh now i want to talk about the legal aspects here because of course the interesting twist to the entire story is that the supreme court recently ruled that
11:20 pm
this essentially amounts to aid to a terrorist organization this is a federal crime what these people have done but because of their status because there are these elites there are higher ups. as anything actually going to happen to them i doubt it unfortunately you know according to as david cole wrote in his very good new york times op ed the other day. you manage syrian law versus holder which was the supreme court's june two thousand and ten ruling defining material support for terrorism advocating on behalf of terrorist groups like the adding to their legitimacy qualifies as material support and what's interesting is that frances townsend the former bush homeland security advisor prays that ruling was issued to date in days she is going to now she's going to france and essentially violating the law as defined and then again she praised that law when it was defined as such by the supreme court what does that tell you about the way that justice is applied about the way that you know hiring and firing as
11:21 pm
a player we have been asked our producer for c.n.n. was fired for a tweet fran townsend also works as a contributor for c.n.n. she's going abroad talking with terrorist organizations and nothing's going to happen to her she's not going to get fired right right well no i think we do need to look at i mean i personally have an issue with that with that ruling i don't think it should be illegal for americans to advocate on behalf of terrorist groups who they believe are unfairly classified as terrorists i mean that leaves aside you know my feelings or other people's feelings about the entail not to mention i you know in my opinion i also disagree with the ruling and i feel like that and that case the supreme court is saying that once a terrorist always a terrorist there's no such thing as perhaps talking to these people like we do with the taliban you know i think that it's bringing the debate up again in america which could be a good thing because there anything we can do about it now i don't know if there's anything we do about it except to raise these kind of double standards i mean i think it does it does kind of highlight how the term terrorist is applied in a very political fashion i mean clearly has carried out terrorist attacks but the
11:22 pm
issue here i mean it's a free speech issue if someone feels as giuliani and his friends clearly feel that the m.k. or unfairly tarred as terrorist a should be able to say that but i think there are those issues of going abroad to criticize u.s. policy. and there's also the wisdom or as i believe the wisdom of supporting a group like the m k o in terms of supporting democracy in iraq. thank you so much for being here is definitely a story but i feel like we're not hearing enough about surprisingly our maybe ironically thanks thank you. here we go again yesterday cornelius du pree jr was declared innocent of a rape and robbery conviction that put him in prison for thirty years now the d.n.a. test results came back verily a week after he was paroled and now fifty one years old you prius spent more time wrongly imprisoned than any other d.n.a. exoneration texas which has since two thousand and one free to forty one wrongly convicted inmates through d.n.a. more than any other state that makes us wonder how many more out there are like him
11:23 pm
who are wrongly imprisoned and how many in this country have been put to death on false charges can we really have a death penalty until we know that our system really works well joining me to discuss it is richard dieter executive director of the death penalty information center and from oregon josh marquis district attorney of clatsop county oregon john mona thank you both for joining me and now richard i want to start with you because a man was just released after thirty years in prison after being wrongly convicted i mean does that tell you that there are fundamental flaws that our justice system is broken in some way this is incredible i mean in this case goes back to the one nine hundred seventy s. and since the one nine hundred seventy s. texas has executed over four hundred fifty people so you can imagine that some of those people were probably innocent as well and that's the that's the fundamental problem with this kind of new evidence with the death penalty nothing can be undone although that's right here this man who was released from prison but just recently
11:24 pm
in texas there was the case of claude jones a man who was put to death all the evidence of a single hair and it turned out that the hair did not belong to him we just found out there in fact belonged to the victim but so in that case josh i mean should we even have a death penalty in this country if we have so many cases where people are being wrongly convicted but we don't have so many cases i think that you know that the number of people on death row and richard is dedicated according to the death penalty in a very articulate war the number of people who are on death. who were taken off death row because d.n.a. showed that they were innocent this by another nine people who were once on death row and removed for other reasons were turned out not to have done it now fourteen is way too many but fourteen is not hundreds in fact the innocence project which has been very busy had done some very good work as exonerated about two hundred fifty to three hundred people that this isn't just murders these include graves now you have everything is context of the number of willful murders on and rapes in that period is one point five million so it's likely you are are more likely to be
11:25 pm
murder or excuse me killed accidentally by your pharmacist about ten or twelve thousand people a year die because pharmacists make mistakes now what do you do about that do you stop people pursue getting prescription drugs no you try to find ways to make it better now well that's that's what we attempt to do in the justice system to answer your somewhat rhetorical question if the answer is that you want to perfect system or a system that has an absolutely one hundred percent accuracy rate and no you can't have the death penalty but for that matter you can't even really in good conscience incarcerate people for probably longer than a year or two because let's be honest if you take many of these cases many of the exoneration cases are not death penalty cases there are cases where people are been sentenced to very lengthy periods time for say rape if you're a twenty five year old man and you've been wrongfully imprisoned for twenty five years you have fundamentally taken away that person's life so but let's and and i as a prosecutor i can tell you i've been i've been a defense lawyer and i've been
11:26 pm
a prosecutor and my worst nightmare is not listening i've lost cases and i'll lose more it's convicting an innocent person but it is a system that cannot be one hundred percent perfect i mean we can assume that nothing can be one hundred percent perfect can you take actions that one hundred percent take away a person's life then i never said you know the only problem is what i think a sign language is the problem is not the cases where the people have been freed through d.n.a. the problem is the cases we don't know about where there was no reason to anybody if it was. you know this man who was freed in texas the other day if there hadn't been d.n.a. preserved he'd still be in prison if the weather is terrible bad now that there is you know scuse me right there well i you know actually you spoke for about twenty minutes so i think i'll keep going here i mean i mean the problem is is with the death penalty these cases can't be undone in a regular prison system just like this case in texas you can free the person but with the death penalty it's over and irrevocable that's the problem with capital punishment well as far as i understand the reason the dallas has exonerated so many
11:27 pm
people recently is because they actually have all the d.n.a. evidence saved in a lab but can we say that for a for any city in america not only not in america is as a matter of fact texas is before the supreme court right now with another case where they are refusing to test the d.n.a. testing evidence in a death penalty case so even when they preserve it they don't always give it up and in many other places they don't even preserve it or allow this kind of testing that's right there is a case in front of texas where there are perhaps arguing whether the death penalty should be d. i ruled unconstitutional and taxes because of the number of mistakes so clearly josh i mean it seems like excuse me like the discussion i was being had here excuse me a judge in new york state. i was a federal judge jed rakoff you know i think was two thousand and two thousand and two actually ruled the death penalty unconstitutional for that precise reason that there was too great a risk that innocent people would be would be. sentenced to death and executed the
11:28 pm
second circuit court which is the federal circuit that oversees new york overturned the second circuit court is not known as a particular conservative court like the one in texas or the or the one and for that the fact of the matter is that d.n.a. exists because prosecutors fought like the dickens all through the 1980's and i used to get it introduced now d.n.a. evidence is. as most of market when it shows that somebody didn't do it i used to be a reporter and it's and they teach us how it's not news when a plane lands safely when when newsweek ran a ran the cover of roger coleman who i'm sure richard knows where you as he was the hero of the anti death penalty movement for almost two decades he was a man executed in one thousand nine hundred two for the murder who won the mccoy virginia or ricky mcginn executed for stephanie flannery's murder in and in two thousand and texas both on the covers of time and newsweek these men are innocent
11:29 pm
you never heard about them happen and the reason you haven't is because subsequent d.n.a. testing proved beyond all doubt that they did it now i'm not saying that just because to say most cases of people who were held out to be innocent means that justice is a work in progress and i think you always after do better i i i've worked on the on capitol hill in trying to get d.n.a. more available in fact i think d.n.a. testing the position of prosecutors is it should be available at any stage of any proceedings even after appeals are over with if there's if there's any factual possibility that someone didn't do it the system should not hide behind the idea that oh people used up your appeals that means that i just retried one capital case personally for the fourth time in one thousand years and that had nothing to do with d.n.a. that has to do with with dedicated opponents of the death only like richard who fundamentally whether and i think he will go agree with us whether d.n.a. could prove that he did it or not i believe rich.
94 Views
Uploaded by TV Archive on