all.

thousands flee political unrest in north africa and the middle east but as they arrive in europe looking for safety they're accused of bringing violence and instability with them a tiny italian island of lampedusa has been overwhelmed with refugees from tunisia . libyan leader moammar gadhafi who rejects calls to step down despite hundreds killed in anti-government protests this is british prime minister david cameron comes under fire for taking defense company representatives on his tour of stricken countries in the middle east and president medvedev warns of extreme volatility in the arab world as the government pulls hundreds of russian workers from libya moscow's concerned islamic militants could seize power in north africa and set the whole region on the structure of course. plus the red planet has seen its last guest for an hour with three men making their final walk on

a mock martian surface as part of a simulated mission to mars the project is an eighteen month long experiment to bring an actual mission to the planet one step closer. to go to our d.c. studios for the alona show when the latest developments from pro union demonstrations in wisconsin where workers have been threatened with dismissal if they don't toe the line stay with us. for the feast we've got. the biggest issues get the invoice face to face with the news makers. and they alone a show will get the real headlines with none of the mersey are going to live in washington d.c. now say there are new revelations in the growing conflict between labor unions and wisconsin governor scott walker with

a warning of pink slips are the protesters going to give up r t correspondent as they see a chicken they will give us a live report from wisconsin and we'll look at the bigger picture with this heated argument as union protest spread to other states there's also a lot of pushback coming from republicans and the tea party what should this be a moment for american workers to join together and they're somehow just missing it the young turks and his ferry and will join me for that one next we'll speak with author laura dickinson on her latest book outsourcing war and peace now despite the gruesome stories that we've heard about blackwater and the like the government continues to award multimillion dollar contracts to these farms so it's all reliance on private contractors here to stay and if so what can we do to make them accountable then we'll discuss the case of raymond davis the diplomat who was ultimately exposed as a cia contractor in pakistan but the question here is why do we have to learn about this from the british press should the u.s. media have told us the truth instead of protecting the government former c.n.n.

correspondent jamie mcintyre will give us his thoughts on it and you've heard of wiki leaks but have you heard of pailin leaks the manuscript of a tell all about the former alaska governor has been leaked to the media and well it contains some real gems as well as sixty thousand e-mails to give us an insight into help alun really operates. have fun with that at the end of the show but now let's move on to our top story. protests in wisconsin continued today but not without new threats coming from governor scott walker who continues to say that he will not back down from his plan to take away bargaining rights from public sector unions but today governor walker warned that state employees could start receiving layoff notices possibly as early as next week if this bill doesn't pass so how are protesters in wisconsin reacting to that news on joined live by r t correspondent in the who's in wisconsin with more details now on this i think can you tell us today how many people were still out protesting on the streets or in the capital as

well i don't know what the number of people outside the capitol building as well and inside we have estimated that the number is probably around ten thousand people which is still a very large amount of protesters of course we know that during the weekend on saturday there was many of seventy thousand people here that number has somewhat die down because many of the protesters they were not just teachers and students they were people who actually had to return to work when we go to work week started so we had to go back to work but definitely about ten thousand people and it is not looking like it's going to be dying down any time soon but how do they react to the news today from governor walker that they should be expecting pink slips sometime soon well i don't know do you be as simple as you that is the people are not planning on leaving they are all over inside the capitol building there outside the capitol building i don't know if you can get a glimpse of the buildings actually right behind me if you can see some people

outside there but they're not giving up they're not seeing this is a threat and they're definitely telling us all throughout the day today that they're not going anywhere until their voices are heard but it is a threat so you know we talk about people being laid off do we know who it is that would go first or you know how long until some of these layoffs are ordered by the governor. i don't know what we do know is that scott walker has said that if the bill is not passed as soon as possible like you said as many as fifteen hundred workers would have to be laid off but he has not been more specific in terms of who these people would be not that we have heard here on the ground and he has also said that he hopes that's not something it is going to come to but if that's something that we're going to take happen we think that the number of protests protesters will increase actually because the people are in a very serious spirit to make sure that their needs are met and the governor doing whatever he deems necessary this time around now last week governor walker had said

that he put the national guard on high alert just in case there were any disruptions today we heard from the president of a police union who said that in general whatever orders they received from the governor they would follow them even if that includes using force against the people are there any signs that we might see something like that happen. we have not seen any signs of any sort of violent or kind of reactive activity from the police what's actually been surprising is that many police officers have joined in the protests here on the ground and earlier last week the police department here had actually released a statement where they were cheering that people coming out onto the streets they were saying that these people are practicing their democratic rights and according to the constitution they're allowed to be there so the police department has actually largely been on the side of the protests and from what we have been seeing today they have definitely been very kind of friendly and helpful with the protests

definitely no aggression as of yet and of course the police and the firefighters in wisconsin being excluded from this bill that the governor walker is trying to pass i also know that over the weekend tea partiers about two thousand of them were bussed in to counter the union protesters now that it's tuesday are there any stragglers left any tea partiers still hanging out or perhaps some angry residents that want to end. i don't know we've seen a couple of tea partiers but it's going to fight and you know mostly them getting somewhat of an ironic reaction from all of the people the thousands of people that are protesting against walker these couple of hundred or maybe even a dozen tea partiers that are left here on the ground are not really being taken seriously at all at this point so and it's actually interesting there was a sign into the entrance of the capitol building that says no arms allowed and we were told that that sign was put up when the tea partiers showed up into the protest and not before so it's not something that was sort of you know not taken

seriously here on the grounds of their presence here whatsoever and lastly do you have any details because someone reported earlier today that i pro-union web site was actually shut down inside the capitol building of course everyone screaming censorship what do we know about that we have been hearing some reports about that the web site is a pro-union web site it's called defend it was constant dot org and some of the protests were saying earlier today that our on monday and this morning this web site was shut off from inside the capitol building and we have been hearing reports suggesting that many of the people were really blaming the governor or are switching that website off by the press person his press person said that that's a lie and that instead of focusing on that the democrats should focus on getting their lawmakers back into the house to be able to carry out the vote but that's that's of course something that has not happened yet but for now the website is back on again so that kind of side of the story has died down at least for now and

i saw thanks for filling us in there from wisconsin. now the fight in wisconsin is becoming a national battle more obvious with each passing day as more than twelve states across the country drop legislation similar to his conscience many threatening to cut off collective bargaining rights thousands of protesters came out to ohio state house indiana's lawmakers fled the state today for illinois copying those in wisconsin and even texas saw a vigil of hundreds of union members showing their support for those wisconsin but there's plenty of pushback and critique coming from those on the right as well as the tea party could work in class americans from both sides of the aisle the missing the opportunity to join together because of the partisan propaganda and spin or earlier from our l.a. studio i caught up with an experience from the young turks i first asked her if she thinks that this is a unique moment in america considering that these days we don't often see masses

protesting on the streets across a number of states compared to decades ago. it's definitely unique considering the fact that in the past couple decades we haven't seen such political action. liberal democrats you know we've seen the tea party they've been making news for the past couple years but now all of a sudden we have liberals that are standing up and fighting for their rights which i think is not only unique i think it's absolutely awesome and you know when there were international protests in egypt in france in the u.k. i was thinking to myself when are americans going to get up get together and fight for their rights and i love that this is happening right now but do you think that there's an opportunity here that that's being missed by americans where they actually can get together but they're not doing it because you know you mentioned the tea party and the tea party for example was busted into wisconsin to counter the union protesters the former tea party express chairman said that they should dress up in disguises as cia you members so they can embarrass them you know i feel

like somebody is playing some sick political game because wouldn't this be a good opportunity for the working class in america to actually band together to look at some of the policies such as you know letting wall street get off scot free after the economic crisis or extending tax breaks on the rich and yet you know if someone is just manipulating its of there's a partisan divide. yes i think that this is the right opportunity and the best opportunity for americans to get together and fight for their rights ok the reason why the tea party has been so successful and it's something that isn't talked about enough is the fact that the tea party had an easier time organizing itself because they're backed up by the wealthy the koch brothers are the people who are paying for the buses who are paying. any type of cost it's necessary to get members of the tea party together and organize them so they can spread their crazy message as much as they want right the working class the working poor these individuals don't have

the same resources as the people who are backed up by the tea party so now they have the opportunity to get together now they have the time to get together and they're starting to really feel the pain that's inflicted upon them because of the fact that people are attacking the unions they're attacking their pensions while street is getting away with murder i think the middle class of the working class at this point is like no we're not going to have it happen anymore we're feeling you know the pain in our own pocketbooks and we're going to rise up and we're going to do something about this so you know they don't have you know billionaires like the koch brothers supporting them but i really believe in the american people and i really believe that these protests that are happening in ohio and wisconsin are you know good increase to the point or explode to the point where real change is going to happen i mean i think you could say you know that there are unions out there

public sector unions that also had a lot have a lot of money at their disposal money and they also put into political campaigns that what they don't have is the same type of media backing that i think the tea party has and i think that we have a perfect example of that if we play a clip of the way that fox news has been a painting these protests in wisconsin. like this with a wall. forbes it's not a particularly big position for the prose of the united states david i want to go to you i mean it is this is this is scary stuff but far as i can tell the union thugs roughed up your client well i think here's the thing. don't confuse conviction with anger ok i think a lot of democrats are trying to position the tea party is big in. these angry people they're demonstrating that's not a bad thing. so what do you think of the media's role and the way that they depict

the uprisings depending in you know on who it is that's coming out and protesting on the streets. let me just start off by saying that lauren graham is a despicable human being ok i despise her more than any other person on fox maybe glenn beck is on the same level as she is but anyway let me get some my point. the good unions are not the thugs the thugs here are composed of wall street people ok those are the real thugs those are the people the top thirteen hedge fund managers in the united states are making one billion dollars or more in their yearly income and they're getting taxed at fifteen percent that's the reason why our economy is suffering right now it's not suffering from unions ok public sector employees in wisconsin are making forty five thousand dollars a year or less by the time they retire they make nineteen thousand dollars a year in pension what the hell is that those are the thugs those are the american thugs you know the right wing media is completely twisting it and every single time

i hear b.s. like that it just drives me crazy because there are americans out there that are buying it they're listening to that they're thinking oh my god yeah the unions those are the real thugs. it's just not it's not the case well you know the thing is though that union membership across the u.s. has completely been dwindling over the last few decades and i guess you could almost say that the public sector unions are the last to bastion the left so let's say that this proposal in wisconsin next is successful let's say that it's successful in a number of other states that have similar legislation right now in the books you know that are also facing budget crises do you think that this is kind of the last gasp of the death of unions in america right now. look it'll be the death of unions as long as the republican media continues to spin it as long as people like the koch brothers from the tea party and find ways to you know say terrible things about the union and change unions and change public opinion about the unions i

think the only thing that could save us at this point is you know people who educate themselves people who are really feeling the pain having their benefits cut really coming together and protesting that's the only thing that can save the unions that's the only thing that can. act the middle class and the working class in the united states people don't get it yet people don't understand that there's a class warfare in the us they don't understand the fact that right now the top one percent in the united states are paying less in taxes than we are ok we need to educate the public the media people you know the news outlets like r t the young turks people on the internet we need to educate the public they need to know what's going on that's the only thing that will save the unions that's the only thing that's going to save the middle class in the working class in the u.s. our animal thanks so much for joining us definitely people should be a paying attention here and also note that not all democrats are on the side of

unions anymore they're not necessarily you know behind you either thanks so much. thanks alona. well it's time for a break but coming up we'll speak to laura dickinson the author of the new book outsourcing war and peace she gives us some insight on how to maintain accountability and the rule of law when so many functions of our government have been outsourced then leave libyan leader moammar gadhafi showed the world his true colors with a rambling hour long speech earlier this morning we're giving you the latest details on his attempts to hold on to power. good some. excellent professional. medics travel possessing extraordinary power are. the doctor who

helped many people in his country. the political criminal responsible for thousands of deaths. was it an attempt to repent. or just escape a fair trial. the other line. on our. we continue our coverage of the unrest in the middle east and north africa egypt bihari yemen morocco are all facing protests in the streets as they cry out for democracy in their countries but today our focus goes on to libya reports are

saying that over four hundred people have been killed in the unrest and these are just as commits most international media outlets are restricted from this country now colonel gadhafi has made a few appearances on state television one short video to say that he is in fact still in tripoli the nation's capital but he also made a longer appearance giving a very defiant speech to the people today and he made comments about cleansing the country of protesters said that he will not leave his country because he is a martyr he also vowed to take out anyone who fire shots towards the author already the state and claims the protesters just want to turn the country into an islamic state get off he also took aim at foreign countries saying that he challenges the u.s. and pointed out hypocrisy of the west but after speaking for more than an hour the people on the streets became even more and raced shooting off guns into the air so the situation becomes more volatile by the day as it looks like it off he is losing

his grip as we've seen he is not afraid to resort to violence against his own people. now over the past decade states and international organizations have shifted a surprising range of foreign policy functions to private contractors a little noticed by the public the extent of this shift is breathtaking contractors working for for profit and nonprofit organizations as well as for government are now delivering aid negotiating peace settlements and fighting wars but who is accountable when the employees of foreign private firms do violence or create harm that's taken from laura dickinson's new book outsourcing war and peace she touches upon the stories that we often cover on this show the tories firms such as blackwater who've been brought in civilian deaths cases of defrauding the government buying hookers and drugs with the money and yet they keep getting contracts so who is accountable and how do you deal with it that's what this book aims to answer so earlier i caught up with laura dickinson author of outsourcing

war and peace and foundation professor of law and faculty director of the center for long global affairs at arizona state university and i first asked her why she wrote the book. well we have radically changed how we're projecting our power overseas we instead of doing military and foreign aid work with government employees we're now using private contractors to an unprecedented degree we've got probably two hundred sixty thousand contractors more contractors than troops in iraq and afghanistan and i was struck by the pressure that's putting on our legal and regulatory oversight regime we have to come up with a new mechanism for dealing with the things that are happening because it's putting tremendous pressure do you say that because you believe that contractors the extensive role that they're playing is here to stay that we're only going to see more of it in the future with our conflicts or even with our aid work abroad yes and it's a somewhat controversial point but i think we're so reliant on contractors now that that's the way of the future and the use of contractors puts tremendous

risk puts puts public values what i would call public values at tremendous risk and we've seen a lot of high profile incidents of this particularly cases involving private security contractors such as blackwater shootings and these are square the use of contract interrogators at abu ghraib prison are very well known examples but there are lots of lesser known examples i interviewed uniformed military lawyers who served in iraq and afghanistan and they said that there were at least two or three incidences of abuse of force a week by security contractors so this is a real issue and we're looking at values like human dignity limits on the use of force in armed conflict as well as things like transparency and public participation the use of these contractors with those values at risk to our government as you said perhaps now contractors for her to stay our government is

highly dependent on hiring these contractors but in any of your research when you're preparing for this book did you ask them you know when you brought up these specific examples of new. square. you know there have been other ones out there where they're buying prostitutes and buying drugs on government money or perhaps pimping out young boys in afghanistan and there are many really gruesome horrible stories out there that our audience is familiar with did you ask these lawmakers how it is that they keep awarding them contracts that sometimes are worth hundreds of millions of dollars and how they do that in good conscience well nobody wants these abuses to take place but the reality is that the what i would call the idiology of privatization has made it very very difficult to increase the government workforce and it's very very easy to add contractors because we have this idea that the private sector can do everything better and in some cases they probably can do it better they can do things more cheaply more efficiently but in a lot of cases they can't and when we outsource start investing functions health

care prison management we had a big public debate about precisely that that never happened in the foreign policy arena and nobody did the math either so we outsourced all these functions without actually calculating whether or not it was going to save us money and in fact the commission on more time contracting recently noted that we lost billions of dollars under the log cap contract for logistics in iraq because we didn't have sufficient oversight of the contracting process so not only now are we involved in two wars but at the same time we are outsourcing our wars and the american public really has absolutely no say about it but do you think that some of these contractors and of being demonized also from the stories that we hear that there are good guys out there doing good work where you know we've spoken with a number of contractors too that i believe in good faith are doing good work and are risking their lives every day but you know these are the stories the bad

stories were the ones that you hear thousand you know more than a thousand contractors have died and certainly there are plenty of contractors who are doing their job. honorably the problem is that our system for oversight and accountability is broken it doesn't work and so one of the things i do in the book is i identify specific things that we can do to try to improve respect for public values in an era of privatising what are some of those things so first of all we need to expand the jurisdiction of our courts to handle cases that go bad to improve accountability when contractors cross the line and there are some important gaps in that legislation and we need to fix that so we need to pass the contractor. extraterritorial jurisdiction act but we also need to enforce the laws that we have better part of the problem is the authority to prosecute cases lies with the u.s. attorneys who are all around the country they don't have the incentives or the

expertise to do this we need to have a centralized place within the department of justice with people who have the expertise and the training to do this and then we've got to require that office to report to congress so that people can stay on top of what's happening then on contract management and oversight you know i did a comparison of the contracts the foreign affairs contracts and domestic privatization contracts and the foreign affairs contracts fall far short the terms are shockingly vague there's been some improvements but we need to specify with greater rigor the kind of training that these contractors need for example eighty percent of the contractors are not u.s. citizens which makes training and vetting a huge problem but a crucial issue that contracting can solve and we need to have better oversight management of the contracts we've doubled the contracts but we've reduced our contract work force and it's not sexy and there's very little constituency for it but we've got to have people out there overseeing these

contracts otherwise are going to lose a lot of money now very quickly i want to ask what you think of this raymond davis case that's going on in pakistan of course the government was the first didn't want . admits that he in fact is a contractor for the cia they said he was our diplomat now it turns out that he was a cia contractor but that means that we have contractors who were essentially paying to spies and who were trying to protect with diplomatic immunity does that open a whole other pandora's box of issues yeah and arguably he's not really entitle to diplomatic immunity and we don't know all the facts but if he crossed the line and engaged in an act that we would consider to be a crime it shows how we don't have the appropriate legal accountability framework in place because we don't have we wouldn't have jurisdiction our courts would have jurisdiction over him because the crime took place overseas and he's not a defense department contractor and he's not in a particular u.s. facility so if we passed then our courts would have to or stiction right now the

only venue for any criminal accountability assuming there is criminal responsibility would be in pakistan and the host nation courts are often not going to be able to deliver fair justice in a case like this but we know that it wouldn't be. the results that our government would be looking for laura thanks so much for joining us i do hope that somebody listens to your suggestions here on how to create this legal framework you know i guess whether they abide by it would be the next question thanks so much thank you so much for having me. and we're taking a break but coming up next he spearheaded the move to go to war with iraq but it doesn't seem like he was too successful with their priorities from the looks of one of the memos that we found on his website you can have more on that in our tool time segment tonight then it turns out that the american diplomats are under arrest in pakistan was actually work.