that's it for now from all of us here if you don't have your sound spotlight just drop me a line we'll be back with more first hand comments on what's going on in and outside this country until then stay on our team and take care.

two vessels trapped in freezing waters off russia's far east coast are nearing safety after being stuck there for almost two weeks. concerns are raised over whether plans to reduce the u.s. defense budget go ahead so long as companies continue to make billions from war. and if the golden age of retirement is losing some of its shine for british

pensioners as they struggle to get by rising costs and rock bottom interest rates. those are the headlines up next we cross to our washington studio for some topical debate on the only on the show. for the full story we've got. the biggest issues get a human voice face to face with the news makers. welcome the loner show will get the real headlines with none of the emergency or can live out of washington d.c. six are dead and fourteen including a congresswoman are injured after a man opened fire into a crowd over the weekend in arizona pundits and politicians are pointing fingers at each other for hateful rhetoric but is it time to revisit gun laws in this country

we're going to speak to the young turks and experience the government asked twitter to hand over account information for julian assange and a number of other wiki leaks supporters but the court order was secret until twitter fought back so as twitter now become the new privacy advocate going to speak with cato institute's julian sanchez next people are biting their nails after reports of china upgrading their weapons arsenal this comes right after robert gates announce defense cuts for the u.s. but should china's actions really warrant fears or are people overreacting we're going to have a debate on the issue and then we'll tell you about the latest chapter in espionage animal spies there's been a recent reports all over the world where countries are suspecting animals of spite but these claims might not be as crazy as you think we're going to look back at the long history of you know using animals as spies and weapons around the world but now let's move on to our top story. this weekend on saturday morning america experienced another killing spree

a tragic event that saw twenty people shot six of them dead as well as leaving democratic congresswoman gabrielle giffords in a very serious condition after being shot point blank in the head now what we now know about the shooter twenty two year old jared lee loughner is that he has a history of his mental stability being questioned that he has posted anti-government rants on the internet that don't necessarily make a whole lot of sense loftier seems fixated on literacy rates government mind control methods and american currency he likes my income and the communist manifesto he defies any ideological branding and yet if you watch or read the news this weekend you. would have thought otherwise instantly pundits and politicians began jumping on one another to see who they could ultimately blame whose vitriolic rhetoric was worse than representative bob brady announced a new bill to make it a crime to use words or images that look violent or threatening to public officials but is hateful rhetoric really the problem here is toning it down to stop

a deranged individual from committing heinous crimes probably not but keeping a gun out of his hands might have the earlier from our studio in los angeles i caught up with the young turks and experience and i first asked her considering how little information was out there directly after the shooting about the suspect no real evidence as to his motive and she was surprised at how quickly the partisan and ideological blame began to spread. well i'm not surprised by that we have such a ferocious partisan divide in the country especially right now but you know it also doesn't surprise me in terms of the party that did get blamed and you know let's not beat around the bush is the party that got blamed was the republican party and the reason why they got blamed is because you know you turn on fox news any time of the day and you have talking heads like glenn beck or bill o'reilly saying things that could be identified as threatening or violent so it doesn't

surprise me in that term but do you think of they're the ones to blame here and first i want to play a quick clip of keith olbermann who extended his show who went on a nine minute long rant about this let's take a listen. if sarah palin whose web site put and today scrubbed those targets on twenty representatives including gabby giffords does not repudiate her own part however tangential in amplifying violence and violent imagery in american politics she must be dismissed from politics she must be repudiated by the members of her own party and if they fail to do so each one of them must be judged to have silently defended this tactic that today proved so awfully for telling allison i clearly do not agree with everything the glenn beck says everything that bill o'reilly says i definitely think in terms of when they blatantly a lie about things a lot of that can be dangerous but it's keep alderman really want to talk i mean this guy is he's the impediment of the flame throwing the us versus them mentality

that we see you know the ideological divide that's in our media today. yeah i mean i would agree with you as far as the ideological divide i think it's important to really differentiate between you know threatening speech and political speech and i think that it's really hard to determine the difference you know there are certain things that glenn beck has said that i think incites direct violence i want to read you a quote from two thousand and five this is glenn beck's quote in regards to michael moore he says i'm thinking about killing michael moore i could kill him myself or i would need to hire somebody to do it no i think i could i think he could be looking me in the eye you know and i could just be choking the life out of him is this wrong i mean that's inciting direct violence how is that acceptable at all so you know i think that there's a clear difference between that type of speech that i just read to you from glenn

beck and the type of speech that you would hear if you turn on m.s.n. b.c. and watch keith olbermann but you think that people are going to start using that as an excuse now for example we have representative bob brady who announced that he's going to be drafting a bill that make it it would make it a crime to use words or images that look violent or threatening to public officials these include things like bull's eyes and crosshairs i mean you know we saw this after the oklahoma city bombing after nine eleven where politicians immediately pounce on a tragic event they use people's fear and they just start passing legislation the in my opinion you know it definitely threatens your freedom of speach. alona i agree with you on that i think the legislation goes too far in the way that it's very very very difficult to categorize categorize the type of speech i think it's going to be a slippery slope and that makes me extremely uncomfortable how about enforcing laws that we already have in place ok inciting directed violence is not protected under

our constitution and i don't understand why people don't enforce laws that ban the type of speech that incites direct violence i think that it's more important to enforce that than create this legislation that i think is going to lead to a slippery slope where one thing. we could say which i don't think is being discussed enough is easily as quickly as everyone started pointing fingers and blaming really this hateful rhetoric we still have the fact here that this shooter you can't really brand him as following any ideology he just sounded like a crazy madman and he was a crazy madman who had access to a gun access to weapons and that's part of america's laws that's part of america's culture but for some reason nobody really wants to delve into that part of it. yeah you know that is so infuriating and we talk about how liberal the gun laws are in the united states on the young turks show on a regular basis and we get a lot of heat for it because people in the united states love their guns they love

their guns we have a gun culture in the u.s. that is incredible for every one hundred people in the u.s. there are night i'm sorry there are ninety guns for every one hundred people in the u.s. how crazy is that ok right now you know you can go to a gun show and purchase a gun with obsolete no background checks out a gun show how is that ok you know people don't want to discuss regulation when it comes to guns i'm not saying that we should ban guns but i do think that we need stricter regulation how did this mentally ill guy lochner purchase a gun legally he did not purchase it illegally he purchased it legally how is that justifiable in any way shape or form ok the n.r.a. right now is in a battle to grant eighteen year olds the rights to purchase guns eighteen year olds were living in a gun culture nobody wants to call out the n.r.a. nobody wants to call politicians that you know vote for relaxed gun laws and it's ridiculous well that's why i find it so frustrating that everybody here just wants

to point fingers and make it about ideology make this a partisan battle which at the end of the day i think they're just using it to get ratings you know they're just using it to get their point across but if you look at america's greater issues the fact that we do have these lax gun control laws i mean are we really in any position to be it is consider ourselves you know this moral authority on the rest of the world when we can't even get crazies away from weapons according to our laws. no we don't we don't have the right to do that you know just to give you some numbers on the gun lovers out there who are launching this and thinking that you know what i'm saying is complete b.s. there are about thirty thousand people in the united states that died because of guns two hundred thousand get injured because of guns ok and then they come out with this argument about how good it is don't kill people people kill people kill people i'm not buying any of that at all that's a crazy argument we need more regulation when it comes to guns we need to make sure

that people who are mentally ill do not have the right to legally purchase guns that's the real question not about whether threatening speech should be bad not about whether or not you know certain vitriol should be banned we should focus on our gun laws that's the most important thing here our animal thank you very much for joining us and of course you know i believe also that is very important element to focus on when after we've had such a tragedy in the country and everybody seems to be pointing fingers at each other rather than really one of the key causes here thanks so much thank you. now as the u.s. recovers from this tragic shooting in arizona like i just discussed many are pointing fingers at politicians pundits rhetoric and a few of us gun culture but david frum former bush speechwriter and current political journalist thinks that we shouldn't be concentrating on how the suspect in the shooting got the gun but rather what he does in his spare time let me

explain here suspect jared lee loughner is described as a disturbed outsider with grievances and easy access to guns a twenty two year old had a history of behavioral problems and was a quote pot smoking loner when he was described by peers and classmates articles claim that lochner clearly had mental health problems got kicked out of school the first time he tried to buy ammunition for the glock used in saturday's shooting he was turned away by employees for erratic behavior so when from wrote about this shooting rather than proposing tougher gun regulations the journalist attacked wife ners easy access to marijuana he says that this incident should remind us why we regulate marijuana he went on to say after the toxin shooting there may be renewed pressure to control the weapons that committed the crime but what about the drugs that may have aggravated the killer's mental disease the trend these days seems toward a more casual attitude and easier access to those drugs all right so from has a point here that marijuana is an illegal substance but the ammunition for the

glock that are used in the mass shooting on saturday was also illegal up until two thousand and four but why does from really attacking marijuana here maybe it's because from his conservative he knows other conservatives out there are fans of toting guns in the second amendment maybe he knows that making a statement against lax gun laws isn't going to win many friends so he goes and attacks the problem the conservatives love to hate marijuana and hopefully anyone with any common sense out there realizes that guns are not we is the problem in this situation first of all off their head according to reports stopped doing drugs . and that's when many acquaintances said that he fell off the deep end but really i mean how many stoners a really killed people how many murders can you blame on pot alone maybe some on the streets thanks to the black market drug dealing as a result of our national war on drugs but again i'm not advocating for pot here i'm just saying that you could be on any drugs you could be on no drugs but if you have a lethal weapon in your possession then you then have the possibility to and lives

so come on from the problem here is the incredibly easy access to weapons by people who are not mentally fit to carry that not marijuana let's keep our eye on the real issues at hand and not make weed the scapegoat. now still to come tonight we have our show and tell segment plus the u.s. government is going after people connected to weekly leaks and their twitter accounts or twitter fought back and let the world know what the feds are up to them to discuss the case with julian sanchez research fellow at the cato institute and d.c. based writer and journalist in a moment and then the trial began today first cia trained terrorists accused of terrorizing the western hemisphere for decades tonight artie's john hafiz reports on luis posada koreas and why the u.s. continues to harbor this man who is notorious worldwide.

the official. from the.

all time for show and tell again on tonight's program last time we told you about president obama's new chief of staff william daley is a man of the strong political background but most recently he left his job as a wall street executive for j.p. morgan chase to come to the white house does the same obama who criticizes wall street likes to call them fat cats and yet brings these people into his closest circles so we asked you if you thought the wall street in washington had become one in the same and here are some of your responses alondra sanchez says have wall street in washington become one of the same haven't they always been since the fed was created back in the early twentieth century so fun bore writes i just read about bill daley at wiki and he looks brilliant to me perfect choice no kidding on twitter polly murphy responded it's become an incestuous relationship between them and it can only lead to another financial meltdown and even gave us his response via you tube check it out. if you want to see the washington wall street connection . or the federal reserve bank.

and that's exactly what it's done. now as always we appreciate your responses and so here's our next question for you last saturday's shooting rampage in tucson arizona left six people dead fourteen more injured and the suspect twenty two year old jared lochner use a thirty two round semiautomatic handgun to fire into the crowd outside of a grocery store but today a lot of people are questioning the lax gun laws in the state of arizona they currently allow eighteen year olds to purchase weapons and people who are twenty one and older to carry concealed weapon without a permit and as investigators continue to study law for they've learned of a long history of behavioral problems and as planned attack on congresswoman gabrielle giffords so at the same time many americans embrace the second amendment the right to bear arms saying that they have the right to protect themselves so we want to know what you think does the availability of guns make us safer or put us

on greater risk you can respond to us on twitter or on you tube and who knows your response and just might make it on air. now this weekend news came out that the u.s. justice department obtained a court order directing twitter to turn over information about the accounts of activists with ties to wiki leaks this includes not only julian assange himself but also for you to john titor a member of the icelandic parliament. a dutch hacker and jacob apple by a former wiki leaks volunteer and u.s. citizen now the information the government wants includes all connection records in session times ip addresses used to access twitter e-mail and residential addresses plus billing records and details of bank accounts and credit cards that is a quite of a broad sweep for information to say the least but perhaps the most interesting bit about this story is that the only reason we even know about this request the only reason the news became public is because twitter the u.s. government they were sent a secret court order known as

a national security letter which comes he quipped with a gag order but challenge that secrecy in court and they won the right to inform the people whose records the government was seeking so thank you twitter here to discuss it with me is julian sanchez a research fellow at the cato institute and d.c. based writer and journalist join thanks so much for coming back on the show now i want to first talk about this specific type of court order these national security letters. they're authorized under the patriot act and the government apparently receives is that wrong down to the basics what was used here was what's called a twenty seven a three do you it's part of the stored communications act which is itself part of the electronic communications privacy act which is long authorized in nine hundred eighty six with very few changes since that was written to govern e-mail or other kinds of electronic communication is now a trunk storage and it really been substantially updated since then with some minor tweaks again in the patriot act but services like twitter i think are showing just

how badly outdated something written for the state of online technology in one thousand nine hundred six is when you try to apply what they're telling us now though is that you know they might send. up to fifty thousand of these requests to hear and they all come equipped with this gag order when what is your national security well yes this is the national security letter so you know i would call that attempts to silence people would you not if everything is equipped with a gag order yeah and of course these orders also twenty seven three d. orders are routinely issued attached to to gag orders of their own delayed knows or often in other cases they're bundled together with what's called a pen register order which is a different kind of electronic surveillance order and those tend to also go under seal unless you know until they're through for the release of that's another way that the extent of this kind of monitoring can be concealed and unlike wiretaps want when the government does a an ordinary phone wiretap that ultimately has to be reported so that at least at the end of the year you get a tally of what states are issuing these how many for what kind of investigations

but these do you order there's no such federal reporting requirement so really americans have no sense at all of just how frequently the government is going to internet service providers google facebook other kinds of services like that that often store for us the most sensitive kind of information to get records ok so just to clarify this order of the national security letters these are different those are i think i got these mixed up in national security right doesn't even require a judge and national security letter is basically something the f.b.i. issues on their own recognizance saying they pinky swear that somehow what they're looking for is legitimate but i have to make a whole lot of this is a little better i do or they do have to go to a judge but all they have to show the judge is specific facts establishing that the information they're seeking is relevant to an authorized investigation and that's a lot lower standard than probable cause which is what the fourth amendment requires for additionally for

a full fledged search warrant so if they want to search your house probable cause that's a pretty high standard relevance is a lot less that basically means we have some reason to think this. to be helpful doesn't necessarily mean that they have any evidence that the people there whose information they're getting are guilty of a crime well what's so interesting to me too is that twitter here they had the option of just letting the government have its way but they didn't do that they decided to fight to be able to disclose to these people who are under investigation the fact that the government is seeking their records are they becoming a new you know an advocate here for privacy i mean could we imagine facebook or google doing the same thing because i would think they probably have a lot more personal information on clients that twitter to us so ironically it's google and facebook that are members of the digital devices coalition in the global network initiative which are groups of of online companies that if you are valid to fight for greater privacy and greater freedom online i don't think twitter is a member of those but they're the ones who stepped up here i think again maybe ironically it's because they don't have

a lot of private and sensitive information there are private messages on twitter but mostly twitter is for sharing things publicly which means this is a guess but i'm i'm suspecting that they don't get nearly the volume of requests that companies like facebook and google do which means maybe they can afford when they do get such a request to have a lawyer spend hours fighting for the right to make it public for their users well that's something i mean i've got a high profile targets also you can say but this twitter have these bank account information you know they get information credit card information everything that the government is seeking from them here no this just boilerplate from the twenty seven to three d. statute it looks like what they've done is just cut and pasted into the order essentially everything that they're entitled under the statute to ask for and essentially letting the provider decide what they have that's in compliance i mean the rule of thumb they tend to follow is ask for everything we can get let the provider disclose and the providers incentives you know usually these are secret orders and so their incentive is always disclose as much as as possible because if

we don't disclose enough well the government will certainly come after us but it's a secret order so if we you know are really protective of our users privacy they're . probably never going to know about it so why bother but what's the most dangerous thing they can actually get here on joining us on john this member of the icelandic parliament when it comes to their twitter accounts from twitter under this order it's not clear that much what they may be trying to get at is a social graph that is if you couldn't track who is communicating with him privately you can get a sense of what the social network around twitter looks like also those ip addresses may be useful because if you have let's say an anonymous account who are the different people who have authority to post to the wiki leaks account other people working with wiki leaks we haven't identified yet you get that list of ip logs in session times you may be able to use that to trace it back to an original user you may also have an interest in knowing where a particular user was at a particular time that something else and ip address can be used so another example of them they're obviously very. you know trying very hard to build this case build

a criminal investigation against joining us on wiki leaks here is twitter going to help them do it thanks so much for being here. now as the u.s. wages the war on terror victims of a cia trained terrorist are crying foul they were as continues to harbor luis posada korea's one of the cia's most infamous agents who terrorized the western hemisphere for decades who was involved in the destruction of a cuban airliner in one nine hundred seventy six that killed all seventy three people on board and in two thousand and seven congress failed to pass a resolution branding a career as a terrorist and hold him accountable for his actions but as of today he is on trial in texas but not for his international crimes of terrorism artie's john hafiz has more. miami florida white sandy beaches miniskirts and bikini. this vacation spot is also home to a convicted international terrorist luis posada could be less coined the bin laden

of the americas the anti castro cuban was the cia's dirty secret in south and central america trained as an explosives expert at the new tory a school of the americas posada's acts of terrorism spend five decades it impacted half a dozen countries. over seventy people were killed when cuban airliner for fifty five was bombed in one thousand nine hundred ninety six a terrorist act posada plans from venice walla and according to cia documents the agency was aware of it before it happened this was a mastermind of the. flight and still he's here posada was convicted in absentia and been a swell of masterminding the bombing however not only did the u.s. government refused to extradite posada to venezuela to serve his term the cia

continued to employ him as a key element in the contra wars which claimed the lives of seventy thousand civilians in nicaragua. he was a leading figure in the iran contra affair in the one nine hundred eighty s. had the cia stop assad in his tracks just after my shoes my brother was killed in libya distil most brother fabio would still be alive put yourself in the place of the us of a victim of the family victim of terrorism and it's absurd distil know an italian businessman was murdered in one nine hundred ninety seven bombing orchestrated by posada it was one of a string of hotel and nightclub bombings in cuba distil know describes posada as a monster create by a country that his. government officials to push their agenda are willing to go. into your in your old after jailing posidon upon entering the u.s. illegally law enforcement agencies warn the judge.