but. as president karzai visits moscow. alleged russian arms smuggler claims u.s. media coverage of his case is preventing any chance of justice says he appears. and outrage in norway as a russian woman and former citizen of the year he says deportation while recognize a terrorist is a lot stay. up next after the u.s. supreme court ruled that it's constitutional to be unconstitutional to limit campaign contributions the alona show takes a look at the effect that it's had on the american political process stay with us. we've got. the biggest issues get your voice face to face with the news makers.

welcome to load a show where you get the real headlines with none of the mercy for you live out of washington d.c. now it has been a one year since the supreme court's ruling on the citizens united case so all of back as to how this ruling has changed the way that washington operates and the effects that it's had on the rest of the country next new reports show the afghan towns being destroyed due to u.s. troops using thousands of pounds of explosives to wipe them off the map while the military says that there are no civilian casualties with this method we can't help but wonder is this really the best way to win hearts and minds in afghanistan we're going to speak with mother jones out of there out of weinstein then a legend russian arms dealer viktor booth made an appearance in court in new york city today two months after he was extradited to the u.s.

from thailand so we'll have more from artie's as they see a chicken on why he's in court and we'll hear reactions from his family on the accusations also you probably heard about m.t.v.'s new hot show and it's now the jersey shore it's skins this is a originally a british soap but now it's hit the states many parents are none too happy about the content of the program they want it off the air but if the show is just depicting what teens are actually doing these days is m.t.v. really out of line for putting it on air we're going to bait that issue and it's friday so we're doing a roundup of some of the craziest stories making headlines this week a birthing ball it's making some people a little uneasy and the first lady is being linked to a rise in pedestrian deaths it sounds crazy but we thought so so we're calling on seaton smith to give us his two cents on all those stories at the end of a. but now let's move on to our top story. today is the one year anniversary of the supreme court decision in what's now simply known as citizens

united and this is the ruling that said it was unconstitutional in any way to limit the amount of money that corporations can spend in our elections and in two thousand and eleven a midterm election year it instantly became obvious the impact of this ruling spending by outside groups jumped to one two hundred ninety four point two million dollars that's nearly a four fold increase in the last returns in two thousand and six and eighty percent of congressional races the candidate who benefited the most from outside spending was the one who won the race and because so many independent groups aren't required to disclose their donors barely a third of those groups did actually report on who gave the money so one year later what we have to say we're discussing with me is paul blumenthal senior writer at the sunlight foundation and seton motley president of less government gentlemen thank you both for being here thanks for having me now do you think of us ruling could have a more perfect time because it was the ruling came in two thousand and eleven which happened to be

a midterm election year and that really let us see the impact that it had i mean four times the spending that we saw in the last midterm election that's not a small feat it's certainly not a small feat and what's especially worrying about it is the increase in the lack of disclosure i mean you have so many groups coming in and spending tens of millions of dollars in our elections and we really don't know where that money is coming from and it really goes against a lot of the principles that we have in this country towards transparency and even against the ruling the citizens united ruling that anthony kennedy wrote where he affirmed that transparency and disclosure very important for democracy i'm happy you mention that because there are in the opinion for the majority he thought that if anything could save the fact that there might be a huge flow of cash into this it's that you know the people would now be able to make. wise judgments when they go develop because everything would be transparent and disclose and then we saw the exact opposite thing happen so how is it that we can defend citizens united if we have no idea where the money that could have been

going to thing that could have happened sooner i do not see is this man with transparency with regard to the first amendment being practiced the last person i want to be responsible to reporting to on my practicing my first amendment rights is the government which is from whom i'm being protected with regard to my first amendment rights. money is speech money isn't groceries you might say but try leaving safeway with groceries without some money is speech money is groceries money is everything money is speech and therefore spending on political races is perfectly justified and you can call for transparency if you like but i don't want to have to report to the government before been gauging in my first amendment rights what if money is speech if money is a way of saying something then why don't you tell people who you are if you're putting your money and he would electioneering to a campaign well i think that that's definitely the issue here is that you know money may be sweet speech and we've had numerous supreme court rulings that say that but supreme court rulings have also affirmed the need for transparency in

these areas i mean you have antonin scalia no you know liberal lion at all stating that we need transparency in elections and that you know if you want to play in the political arena you might as well stand up and state what you're doing why it was you know if a rival green being company wants to run an ad against agree a green bean they don't have to disclose who they are why do we only have to disclose and be transparent when it comes to the most important thing going on the air if you do yours every four years and as you look at the most important thing going on so why wouldn't it be that case because you could. wrong on this because i don't care what the supreme court's ruled i care what the constitution says and the constitution does not have a transparency clause in the first amendment well the constitution may not have transparency close but the supreme. which interprets the constitution has been targeted at what is a bit emanation from the number of transparency as there have been i mean they came up with a privacy clause which is totally made up and then they came up with an emanation

from a plan number zero of the privacy clause which was made up out of whole cloth and the transparency penumbra is made up to i rather go by the text of the constitution and not whatever nine guys in robes decide well i'm going to be the transparency close is made up we could go back and close the doors of the senate we could stop releasing information from congress to the public we could stop letting the you know these are the elected officials i want transparency from the elected officials not to the elected officials well let me ask you a personal question i mean of the voting is something that's your right that a citizen of the united states and it's something that i enjoy i'm sure that both of you enjoy it as well but do you care if other people people let's say from iran from north korea i mean who knows if there are foreign donors that are influencing your elections here at home barack obama going to right well is the one raising over that if you don't say you know barack obama did quite well in fund raising overseas and to go do it what it's illegal now it's no it's not illegal it's being done for the exit of the loopholes that you want to get it there's

a difference between what's legal and illegal and reporting you can certainly track the transactions coming in from overseas that's not the same thing as reporting every dollar you get from every domestic donor and going to the government and saying please gave her personal rights here's our list of people who have given us money can we please have money can we please have your permission to engage in our first amendment rights do you think this is about the government knowing who gave why or this is about other voters knowing i think that line about the citizens and knowing who gave what and who is trying to influence elections influence lawmakers and influence citizens as well and so this is the fundamental problem of people on the left if you will be a very average american sheep they're not cheap they know what's going on and they figured out barack obama's been woefully untransparent and that's what gave birth to the. deportee important was the fact that not only was he shoving laws down the american people sorts of they didn't want but he was being closed up about it if you'll recall during the process big locked the republicans out of

a health care hearing meeting they moved a meeting without telling republicans that wasn't trying to remember obama ran on a promise of we're going to have all the hearings for health care on c.-span and then brian levin from him had to write a letter saying would you please put him only you there are i want transparency from the government i don't want to report to the government for my first amendment rights all right walt how about the fact that some people out there are now proposing a constitutional amendment we have seen a few lawmakers talk about this idea to make it that corporations cannot be counted as a person as an individual do you think that that would have any chance of flying passing was the that's the way to fix it if you want if you want to amend the constitution amend the constitution if you want to go that route fine i just want to. do you think you know for me it's a little frustrating because we have the republicans who in fact completely blocked this disclose act that some people brought up which after the citizens united ruling said ok it's clearly not being done the way with the supreme court you know

why did it to happen so let's have this bill that would force people to disclose it and here republicans what pisses me off is they're like oh no no no no no because they just value the rights of corporations so much but then when it comes to actual human beings things like the dream act they completely block that why do they care about corporations more than people because corporations are here legally and illegal aliens are not but they're human beings how hard is it going to currently yesterday the supreme court was hearing arguments in a case where eighteen t. a corporation wants you to feel so bad for it because it has feelings too it can be embarrassed to just like people i feel like this is going to be united and so should we be corporations over the head and shoulders and then act surprised when they get up and leave and go take their jobs overseas so you know yes eighty has rights just like the rising has right. it is a chance to have feelings does aids you do you get embarrassed of corporate i care if i has feelings i mean i think that what you're seeing already in the hearing is that most of the justices aren't terribly interested in the eighty's case they're

trying to claim that they have personal privacy rights which while they may have be a corporate person they don't necessarily have personal privacy rights which is what you're seeing you know john roberts is very skeptical of this says is antonin scalia and more of the liberal justices as well well we'll see where it ends up jan i want to thank you both for joining us is one year after citizens united if anything i think that it proves that elections in this country can be bought and i personally just want to know who's buying them thanks bunny chases ideas not the other way around still to come tonight new pictures of surface every destroyed afghan village thanks to military commanders who are using thousands of pounds of explosives to take out the enemy so this is really pretty much the u.s. model of winning hearts and minds and accused arms dealer picture but you finally have a state court or remind you why he's here and tell you why is family is crying foul right after the break.

this street still keeps you keep. time to feel. the soviet house on the embankment.

tonight we have a story about the war in afghanistan that shows the fire power that the u.s. is using their foreign policy dot com has obtained two pictures of a destroyed afghan village and kandahar's arghandab river valley this was back in october and the pictures show a before and after of the town of to row collection on military officials say of the destruction of this town was necessary because the villagers have been run albine intimidation campaign by the taliban and then the town is rate with i.e.d. paula broadwell west point graduate described the destruction of the town on tom ricks foreign policy blog she said nothing remains of the area after lieutenant colonel david blaine commander of combined joint task force one dash three twenty have made a fateful decision in october to take the town out share port on october sixth the airstrikes from eight ten b. ones combined with powerful graun ground launched rockets that are the village with

forty nine thousand two hundred pounds of ordnance and she says it resulted in no civilian deaths now since the reports have been coming out wired's danger and received word from a spokesman for general david petraeus that this town is not alone and there are entire neighbor. they are empty of people and booby trapped so i guess the point there is we should expect more before and after pictures that look just like this town but it does raise a larger question as to how exactly this fits in with counterinsurgency and winning hearts and minds when joining me from san francisco to discuss it is adam weinstein editor of mother jones adam thanks so much for joining us now to tell me do you think that that seems just a little bit far removed from the counterinsurgency manual that general david petraeus himself supposedly wrote i mean there in the guidelines you know talks about not doing damage to the property of civilians during the course of operations and here they they make it seem like it's so easy to just a wipe out a town and then build it right back up the next day. well it does seem like there's

kind of attention going on. as you say david petraeus kind of wrote the manual on counterinsurgency it literally asked him three twenty four which everybody in the army and marine corps uses and one of the things that he drove home constantly was this economy of force don't use more than you need because hearts and minds is the most important thing the people are the center of gravity is the way they said it. and it does kind of raise some questions about can we be doing things that are tactically smart in other words they keep our troops safe but they're strategically stupid they're kind of flipping the script if you will and turning enemies turning locals into enemies where we could be having friends i think that that's a fair question that we should be asking well you know one of the things to hear is that they say that there were no civilian deaths at the same time they didn't want to risk any american lives to go in and. really check the place out before they decided to bomb the whole thing so it just makes you start to question how are they

so sure of the no civilians died does that mean that they're showing that one life is more valuable than another. yes well i spoke to a couple of experts both in military and outside of it this week and. the first thing that they all said is far be it from us to make judgments from our offices in washington d.c. about ground conditions in afghanistan but having said that they did say that there are some concerns about that i'm pretty confident that our intelligence would be very good about something like that but whether there were civilians in the area i know that this this particular operation which is part of a larger campaign against the taliban outside of kandahar involves a lot of special operations forces so there were actual small scale sweeps into the village beforehand and there were a lot of eyeballs on it. and this is something that we've heard before about the taliban sort of taking over a village and checking out the civilians now can they say with complete certainty

that they didn't have any collateral damage or any unintended casualties i think that's a pretty bold statement and it's also very long that's very hard for them to prove now one of the things that you know that really sparked such a debate over the story is because of i think of the way that you know the pall of reported it here because it kind of seemed like there was no regard no concern for the way the afghan civilians actually perceived this the people whose town was just completely demolished you know she even wrote one line that man named mohamed in a fit of the asterix accused flynn of ruining his life after the demolition and i'm sorry but how can you say that that is if it's f three at the asterix if somebody is being just so dramatic that their entire home their entire town was destroyed. yeah this is a constant tension in counterinsurgency i mean yes we can talk about the tactics of securing a village and whether development works you know giving them wells and rebuilding their communities but fundamentally you have to have some understanding of the

local cultures and i think that this is always been sort of a weak point for the united states military there's an old quote that goes around america that says war is god's way of teaching americans ya graffiti and from everything that i've heard from a lot of the serving soldiers they are fighting much more smartly and working much more intelligently than they used to when this war started they know a lot more about the locals but i think you're also seeing some sort of pressures here to show some results very quickly in afghanistan public opinion from soured on the war and we would like to kind of accelerate our withdrawal and i think that makes corner cutting a little bit too easy and i think that sort of you know operating with the locals being just a target rather than human beings and you have to relate to on some sort of a human level. can be a proper byproduct of that rushed decision making but i think it's sad to me to

hear polly was reporting on the situation as a journalist now i know that you were able to speak to her did you ever did you ask her about this specifically because then you know you not only have the military it seems that in one way by the reporters there telling everyone else about on the ground. well the community of military bloggers recorders and commentators and analysts many of us are x. moderns ourselves is very small and you know is a very capable and talented researcher i think one of the things that we might want to ask some questions about here is she is an acolyte she's she's sort of a protege of general petraeus is and is working on a doctoral dissertation right now that examines his leadership in both of these wars in iraq and afghan. stan so you might want to ask the question or is she a little too close to the source i will say that i personally from several people who thought that her analysis sounded less like an academic criticism and more like

a public affairs guidance from the army. maybe she needs to be a little bit more critical but i also think that she is doing good work and frankly if she hadn't put those photographs out here would be talking about this to their well that's true you know it happened in october and look it's january we're only talking about it today but i think that it definitely shows the of this is just one way of how general petraeus has really changed this war and the fact that there is a lot of violence there is a lot of force being used and from what wired danger room. earlier today from a general petraeus the spokes person basically they said that you know when you're going into southern afghanistan there are a lot of neighborhoods like this and it might happen again and again and we'll see if that actually gets any of the population on their side comes brain but thank you so much for joining us on this one thank you. well it's been two months since victor boot was extradited to the u.s. after being arrested in thailand he's been held in solitary confinement in new york city and today he appeared in court after being charged on several instances of

conspiracy why have more his appearance in court in a moment but first how did all this even begin stacey a chicken that tells us more about victor boot. or three. true to form hollywood and most of the us you love a great villain in the film lord of war nicolas cage please him u.s. officials celebrate his arrest the so-called merchant of death is now a federal inmate who is this merchant of death and why is he getting all of this attention was full of us a course of eight years cultivated this image of an even mastermind apparently you can have no other problems nowadays there is only big to boot there is no. some of bin ladin no al qaeda no problems in afghanistan no problems in iraq there is only a victim boot the evil man victor boot is a russian cargo dealing businessman chased by the us for

a decade upon the request of america he was arrested in thailand two years ago after thai courts twice found him not guilty of any crimes he was still extradited to the us this november to face one conspiring to kill united states nationals two conspiring to kill united states officers and employees three conspiring to use an acquire anti-aircraft missiles and for conspiring to provide material support to the far already dubbed and international arms trafficker by the us victor boot is being held in a new york prison even though the two boots trial date has not even been set yet the man has spent almost two months in this jail in downtown manhattan in solitary confinement his only contact with the outside world consists of meetings with his defense team as well as once a week check ups from the russian consulate having arrived to the u.s. to support their relative family has already received a far from warm welcome in the states his wife was held at the airport for almost

three hours. then the gratian offered me if i knew my husband was a terrorist well accusations are flying its case legally remains in thailand. according to boots thai and russian lawyers his case to this moment remains in a thai court hearing there was no official decision of an extradition this has been raising the question of whether the u.s. broke laws in whisking him away onto its soil. has not committed any criminal activity and has not been found guilty neither in the us nor in any other country victor boot has said he is the victim of a propaganda war launched in america this is the lord of war. the merchant of death right and you've got him in your hands spread he's in custody it's a great feeling whoops wife believes the case against her husband was fabricated and calls what happened to him a kidnapping the full sky i can accept the possibility that victim might have some

information that might be of interest to someone why is it that some other states don't just think to themselves that there is someone who has some interesting information and why don't those governments just drag people onto their territory technical pretrial hearings for victor boot kickoff in manhattan this week but legal experts say it will be months until the start of the trial if found guilty by the u.s. federal courts bitter boot could face up to a life sentence behind bars just as you're going to or to the new york. or joining me from our studio in new york with more is our tease unless they see a choice in that now unless they say i know that you just got back from this pretrial hearing so you know what they discussed there what happened and what date that they set for the actual trial. well i don't know today's hearings didn't last longer than a half hour it was really a set of technical questions being discussed it was very interesting to see victor boot himself in the courtroom he has visibly lost quite

a lot of weight his hair's grown out his wife of course his daughter and his mother word side the court hearings trying to get a glimpse of their relative who they have not seen for these two months their first meeting with them is scheduled to take place this monday for the first conversation they're actually going to have in these in a very long time now the trial date has been set for september twelfth which means there's still quite a lot of time for both the defense and the prosecution to figure out what exactly kind of arguments they're going to present in court it's interesting that today the defense team did outline several motions that they're trying to put together for this case their main arguments and these motions are going to be concerning things like the unlawful extradition one of the very important things that the defense team is arguing that bringing victor boot to the united states was unlawful and illegal to begin with also extraterritorial jurisdiction and what this means is deciding why this case is even being heard in the u.s. considering as we mentioned in that report that victor boot. case legally and

technically continues to remain in thailand also things like the defense has been saying that the recording some of the recordings that the prosecution is presenting to the judge are quite questionable because they want to see whether or not it was even legal according to tie laws to carry out these recordings which the prosecution of course is using against victor boot so some of the interesting things there we saw a very quick exchange between picture put on his wife when he walked in he sort of winked at her and gave her a smile he seemed pretty confident he is the man of course he speaks nine languages and yet he did still have an interpreter interpreter for him just to make sure he gets every single detail of what's being said now i know that you've been able to to speak to is why you've been able to interview her why. that you know that they still haven't been able to even speak to or until this pretrial hearing today. well known that legally he has a right to one phone call a month lasting no more than ten to fifteen minutes and he did speak to his wife

over the phone once in that time he's being held in solitary confinement here in manhattan and that means that officials consider him to be a menace to be a menace to society so he doesn't really get many of the rights that the rather the other prisoners get including visits so they have not been able to the only arrived in new york two weeks ago and throughout this entire time his daughter and wife and mother have been going through the process of filing many documents proving that they're related to him to try to get a meeting with him so finally on monday they will get three hours of conversation with victor and of course he's being held in solitary confinement even though he has yet to be convicted of any crime you know i hate to say but this reminds me very much a case of bradley manning also something that we've been speaking a lot of on this program but you know very quickly when he was first brought to the u.s. few months ago there was a lot of media attention surrounding what was the hearing like today. that's true i don't know media attention as it was it was extreme when victor boot was on his way

to the united states that the nickname merchant of death was flying back and forth the lord of war even the prosecution we heard them calling victor boot the merchant of death of course essentially a hollywood nickname given to him by the media and i have to say it was surprising that none of the media frenzy was really there today except for about a dozen russian t.v. crews almost none of the actually none of the big networks were present at today's hearing which was surprising to see considering what a loud case this has been before in the united states was definitely something that got a lot of attention like you said there's a movie hollywood movie about this so it's interesting that suddenly some of that media attention has died down but of course we will continue to follow this case nancy thanks so much for filling us in. well still to come tonight g.o.p. lawmaker in the house wants to stop the repeal of don't ask don't tell so we're calling him out tonight as well as the entire republican party for wasting taxpayer

dollars and m.t.v. is in the spotlight tonight for a new t.v. show called schemes some are claiming but it's teenage court where others are just calling those concerned parents prudes who favor censorship have a debate on the issue right after the break. wealthy british style it's time to. go to the. market. to find out what's really happening to the global economy for a no holds barred look at the global financial headlines tune in to cause a report on our.