a second explosion at the fukushima nuclear power plant in japan has set off panic and speculation about the crisis but lost in the technical mumbo jumbo is what it all means we're going to try to make sense of exactly what's going on. mortgages will very old. whatever means the rule of law has to be told and told so far it's treated so as bradley manning just getting what he deserves and what about the now former state department official who criticize the pentagon for manning streetman will debate. and the u.s. is arguing a cia operative accused of shooting two pakistanis should receive diplomatic

immunity and now it's up to a pakistani courts to decide so what can the case of the raymond davis tell us about the current u.s. pakistan relationship the news starts now. so japan's nuclear situation has taken another dark turn today after a second explosion rocked the fukushima nuclear power plant some one hundred fifty miles north of tokyo now the reactors are said to be intact but reports say that the nuclear fuel rods are now completely exposed and officials are warning that radioactive material could spread over the next several weeks they're going to pay and learn anything at all from the one nine hundred seventy nine three mile island nuclear accident in pennsylvania well who better to ask and then the man who handled that disaster himself former governor and u.s. attorney general dick thornburgh they think you so much for being here now there must be some sense of deja vu as you look at the stunning pictures coming out of byrd to pay. there there is

a eerie kind of. correspondence between what's happening in japan and what we had to deal with three mile island in one nine hundred seventy nine technical challenges very cynical we want to bring the reactor to a cold shutdown and we want to prevent the leak of radioactive material and sounds easy but it's tensely difficult as we're seeing in japan now how do you deal with the myriad of information that's coming out in crisis like that i mean you have experts coming out of the woodwork pretending to know x. y. and z. about this you have for media reports how does the government in time the government actually be trusted to know what's really going on with the government and i think any of us who have responsibility in these kinds of areas has to work very hard to retain our credibility because it's important to be able to be an authoritative source for information that people can make their own judgments as to their own well being. very kind of well you're absolutely right there's

a welter of information coming at you from every source and in the case of three-mile island we found out we were generally relied on the utility that ran the reactor for information we found out during the first day that they had misrepresented things to us and stated things that weren't true and we had to go back to the public and say look what we told you is incorrect we were lied to by these folks and we had to start looking around for other facts it's a terribly frustrating and painstaking process because you have to double check every source and you have to more or less triangulate to get accurate information and meanwhile the public is very impatient when i was forward thirty three years to the day of the situation just saying i could not sleep until the japanese authorities have been saying that you know there shouldn't be too many worries about high level about radiation could could the people of japan be like that they could be but there's no reason to think that they are being a lot. to unless you see some real evidence of that the the the difficulty is the

worst thing you can do is put out misinformation and the temptation to do that is very intense because there is great pressure on people in authority to say something or do something and oftentimes the best thing is to keep your mouth shut and wait and see what develops but as i said in the meantime what you've got to do is painstakingly check every possible source balance them off one against the other and as you point out there are a lot of so-called experts out there who are going to tell you more than they know or less than they know is the case maybe and that's the real challenge of being in a position of authority during these kinds of incidents and i certainly want to not want to be in those shoes that could be argued that the psychological impact that the three mile island after was far more worse than the actual physical impact there were no casualties of course in that situation but we have not seen a new nuclear power plant commissioned since the one nine hundred seventy nine run

accident took place what do you foresee were the psychological impact on the nuclear industry following the japan factor well there's no question that the three mile island accident stock the development of nuclear power coal in its tracks there hasn't been a single plant commissioned since that time. and i don't think this is very good news for the nuclear industry happenings and japp in the interesting because prior to this episode in japan there was a resurgence of interest in including nuclear power in the mix as we attempted to free ourselves from reliance on foreign oil and still unable to get on to exactly exactly what. i think that probably has dissipated somewhat with concern about what's happened in japan now again we have to keep in mind number one we don't really know what the outcome of this is going to be what the lessons learned will be from the japanese experience how do we understand what actually.

and on that i found that maybe for those nuclear fuel rods it sounds bad but i don't really know what that can be though the nuclear fuel rods are three mile island more exposed we had a what's called a partial meltdown that did not produce any environmental or health. adverse consequences later study showed but sifting all that out takes a long time in the public gets impatient and they see their gas prices going up and it's it's not. an ideal situation but again as i said the worst thing to do is to push out misinformation and falsely reassure people or falsely frighten them they're going to very quickly of course the situation in three mile island has in some way to a halt to the development of the new ministry here in the united states anything that you would have done differently if you could do it all over again at the time i'm sure the thousand and one things i would have done differently but the essential decision that we had to make was whether or not we're going to try to evacuate two hundred fifty thousand people from that area it's

a very risky kind of thing because when you move that number of people you're going to include a lot of elderly people frail people people in hospital intensive care units maybe using n.q. baiters as they're known risks and the and to undertake an evacuation of that size . in an unjustified way would be a tragedy so we thankfully with the good lord's help in this that all right well it remains to be seen what will develop out of the situation in japan that was exploring for former governor of pennsylvania. now if you die from ill you're with the bradley manning case to should probably go back to watching the jersey shore whatever else you do for fun to recap the young soldier who's suspected of leaking classified documents to the file sharing website wiki leaks now the twenty three year old has been held in virtual solitary confinement in the marine base in virginia and faces numerous charges including aiding the enemy a capital offense but that earned him the death penalty now the fact that he has yet to be the fact is that he's yet. to be convicted of

a crime despite this he spends twenty three hours of his day in a windowless six by twelve foot cell forced to strip naked every evening conditions that according to at least one friend have left manning in a nearly catatonic state where the saga has divided the country and it seems also the obama administration now in the latest developments the public face of america's foreign policy p.j. crowley has been forced to resign after speaking out about manning's treatment saying it was quote ridiculous counterproductive and stupid on the part of the department of defense now there's a lot to discuss here and for more on this we're going to be joined by two men with a rather different perspectives michael prysner is an iraq war veteran and antiwar activist who joined us and joins us from the los angeles studio and here in washington we have the founder and president of less government seats and mostly now gentlemen we have quite a bit of time for this so i do want you to express everything you have to say but one at a time please send and i want to start with you bradley manning villain or hero

overall and for sure if he's guilty. of mind there were if he's convicted of what he's been accused of he should be executed for sure that is a capital offense the amount of information some of the high security some of the admin some of the information but yes i definitely think it is if he's guilty of all these things he should definitely be executed michael prysner same question villain or hero. well absolutely he's a hero what bradley manning has revealed is this web of lies around the wars in iraq and afghanistan and around us foreign policy as a whole and i think i think it's very important for us to focus on with the release of these documents in particular because right now it's kind of the most pressing issue for u.s. service members and for people here at home is this war in afghanistan and that these documents prove that the obama administration the pentagon the u.s. government know full well that the war in afghanistan is

a lost not only that they cannot win the war in afghanistan yet they're sending wave after wave of more young men and women for united states to have their legs blown off to be killed in a war that they know cannot be won and what bradley manning has done is tell the truth when all we're getting from the u.s. government is lies and lies and lies just like we are fed before the iraq war telling the truth is not a crime telling the truth is heroic the criminals are the ones in the white house and the pentagon criminals are the ones in the white house in the pentagon reaction why would we would put a hold of sort of issues. look whether or not we can win a record of being a stand is not the point the point is a private in the army is not. charged with releasing that information there's been in the damage goes well beyond just what he released about iraq and afghanistan i keep going back to the damaging information he released on the problem the king of yemen who's been working with us and one of the most damaging cable was you keep killing al qaeda and i'll keep taking credit for it because of course in the muslim

world everything has to have a. face on it and he's been taking credit for us killing al qaeda in yemen and now he's been outed he's going to be a target of al qaeda he's going to be a target of terrorist organizations muslim brotherhood throughout the middle east because of this idiot manning now i know i've been stuck in the studio for a while but was he manning was actually charged i mean there was those part of the information that he put in the lady gaga. legibly put it here in the city i was in the scouts of the bigger isolationism doesn't get the bigger issue which is that i thought you know how i was i was born in russia but i thought in america you had a constitutional right to a fair trial by jury but i did i started there's a lot i said if he's guilty move i don't want to have do i have to say that every time before i say something at the plant where operating of the assumption that i've said at the beginning i will say it again now the blanket overarching theme of this is everything i say can be prefaced with a three word phrase if he's guilty karma and then whatever i say we don't know if

he's guilty or for sure i want to be tried if he's convicted i want to executed but going forward in this conversation every time i say something it's the unspoken three word phrase if he's guilty and then i'll say whatever i say michael prysner should bradley manning be executed as our friend here south. well i think that's completely ridiculous and you know he's already being published seems as you know if he's guilty but he's already enduring pretrial punishment you know that's you know reminiscent of what we saw coming out of guantanamo bay and abu ghraib but you know see and argument would make sense if u.s. foreign policy in iraq and afghanistan in the middle east in yemen was designed for national security in the interests of the vast majority of people in united states but it's not us foreign policy is driven by what is best for the oil giants what's best for wall street and the defense contractors what he will and us intervention what they want to hire and i think pride is for is for rich men and rich corporations and every single soldier who's dying in these wars all of those

civilians in yemen that al qaeda is being killed in yemen all of those civilians and yemen and pakistan are dying for regional domination of banks and corporations here in the united states i do want to say that of course we have to focus on afghanistan look when the vietnam war when nixon came into power in the nixon administration came in they knew full well that the war in vietnam was lost and could not be won but to avoid the political setback of a military defeat because they didn't want to take responsibility they sent more soldiers to that war and dropped more bombs on vietnam after they knew the war was lost thirty thousand more u.s. troops died and millions more vietnamese died before the inevitable u.s. withdrawal and if you are against what bradley manning has done over allegedly done which is told the truth about the situation in afghanistan if you're against that then you're saying you're for all of those tens of thousands more soldiers we're going to be sent to their deaths we're going to be sent to get their legs blown off for a war that this government knows very well is lost now i don't sell michael you were

an iraq war veteran and when you sign up to join the military i mean you take an oath to to swear this country and to stand by the laws of this country so let me put this question to you did he violate paddler irish allegedly releasing that information. oh he sort o. is to defend his country defend his friends and his family and his coworkers and his neighbors here in the united states and if he did release these documents he has done exactly that we have no reason to support these words these words are costing us over seven hundred million dollars a day at a time where in the united states to wishing is skyrocketing people are being cut off of social services and health care unions are under attack public sector workers are under attack because we're told there's not enough money when over a trillion dollars a year is being flooded into the into the pentagon to fund its military operations in iraq and afghanistan and yemen and pakistan and all of these other countries that are in the crosshairs of the pirate well that's what i have to ask you to do is radley manning the man at issue here now p.j.

crowley is not some sort of you know east coast liberal hippie running around and trying to stop wars anywhere he's a democrat but he is he is he has spoken out on the harshest terms against bradley manning and against wiki leaks who do you think that he was speaking for when he called this treatment i'm just stupid and. that which is why you guys are here to i mean so do you see a split within the obama administration on this bradley manning case brought obama picks and chooses certain spots to look tough on foreign policy to look tough on immigration to look tough on issues that he's actually. genuinely we call on and bradley manning is the is the you would say michael would say unfortunate victim of this he's the exception that proves the rule in the broad obama i'm weak on foreign policy. play he's he's being used as a scapegoat he's a guy would be tough tough for being on bradley manning look out of

a little who would get a lock down in quantico so i'm not you know i don't know the sort of the case i don't know how much they know about what he's done and they may feel he has more information and need to keep it like this i don't know this. but i want to say michael was rambling but. as he meandered all over the place. just because you don't like the country's foreign policy doesn't mean you can out it to the planet that doesn't make you a truth teller that makes you would treat a traitor well i mean the us government could be blamed for not protecting information better a lot of people have all of the women that's fine but that means both sides are guilty that does not detract anything from him if he's guilty but what it does is it adds blame and culpability to the idiotic system that was set up in a private to go in and unload logo download that much later and i thought i felt the earth move because you seem to agree at least on one thing which is that the treatments are probably manning is not exactly the best. but if he's if he's guilty

and they know something about how much information he still may have then that may be the lockdowns just i don't know and i'm not going to accuse the security personnel of anything if not knowing what they know about the situation both clearly a divisive issue and one of our producers lindsey garfield had taken to the streets to ask people exactly what it is they thought bradley manning whether he should be rightly treated as he's being treated are treated differently and whether p.j. crowley should have actually resigned as he there let's take a look e.j. crowley resigned his post state department spokesperson yesterday this just coming after his comments saying that bradley reading's treatment is stupid counterproductive and ridiculous you know what the state department thinks about this but a d.c. residents let's find out how to productive probably stupid you're supposed to be innocent until proven guilty. and so i don't think that that is indicative that he is being considered innocent until proven guilty if he's already

being tortured everybody could have their day in court and could be treated with dignity or were you surprised to learn that he was in solitary confinement had been forced to strip naked and had been essentially tortured does that surprise you. well it doesn't surprise me considering all that happened with you know iraqis and you know finding out that those who were put in jail were treated unjustly and they were you know the same thing happened with them so it doesn't surprise me the government cover that up and i did you see what you're saying about iraq because a lot of people have been comparing this to iraq an obvious grave but you know they're saying that this is one of our own u.s. citizens being treated the same way that we treated iraqi citizens you know that's fair karma and you know goes around comes around i mean i hate to say it but each three others you know that way i don't think it wouldn't come to your own citizens i mean at the end of the day you know it's kind of it's really crazy but it's kind of like you know what goes around comes around you do it to other countries who say

who is a line crossed you know this until guilty so no one should be treated badly you know while they're in custody before they have been tried including in solitary confinement it's a. you know quite grateful psychological torture if he is guilty he'll serve the time that you know he needs to serve and that's how it should be but he should not be he should not be tortured you know this isn't a police state or not this is a fascist government that the u.s. has so no i don't i don't think that's appropriate or you know what this country is about what it is wrong very wrong but whatever happens the rule of law has to be followed in terms of how he's treated if it is true if it turns out he is being found guilty of leaking this information do you think that lives punishments more warranted. i don't think torture is warranted ever. this is what a military dictatorship my family's working on military dictatorship is it's sad

but it's what you expect from a military dictatorship and this is a democracy and you know the us is about equal rights it's just not. acceptable. well there you have it a lot of divided opinions and i'm going to go back to you we are in fact that democracy is a separate issue a public institution problem for upbraiding from what the consequences of manning's allegedly are do you think that the treatment of him to date is democratic well first of all i can i go back to if they think if they would generally think that he's got a lot of additional information and they're afraid he's going to leak it because he has a track he has a potential track record of doing that then the solitary confinement may be. we want to be trust the government in deciding this without i trust the security personnel for sure you know the boys at quantico know what they're doing and i certainly give them the benefit of the doubt i don't i don't assume the worst with

those types of people assume the best now michael you're leading a group of people to meet the boys want to go this weekend to the coming rally on the twentieth to free bradley what do you expect to accomplish with that. yeah that's right you know this saturday on march nineteenth actually thousands of people all over the country from los angeles to washington d.c. are going to demanding an immediate end to the wars in iraq and afghanistan and freedom for bradley manning allegedly has exposed so much about these wars now you know i went to iraq in march of two thousand and three with the u.s. army as a part of the initial invasion force in that country country and occupied the country for twelve months i went there because this government said that there is an imminent attack from these weapons of mass destruction this government said that the iraqi people wanted us to come into that country liberate them the u.s. government lie about every single thing surrounding the war in iraq so they could go in and give nationalize its oil around five thousand u.s. soldiers are dead over

a million iraqis are dead tens of thousands of soldiers have been maimed or wounded hundreds of thousands have psychological trauma now the american people had the right to know that the u.s. government was lying to them about why we went to war in iraq the u.s. government how are the you the american people have the right to know that their tax dollars are paying for the death of scores of civilians in iraq and afghanistan and pakistan and yemen the american people have the right to know that while the obama administration goes on t.v. and says the afghan war is going great we're winning we're making gains we just send some more soldiers it's all going to be good and then we can leave the american people have the right to it there are a lying when they say that and that every single soldier that's the ploy there right now is doing so in a war that they know is lost and those people's deaths will be in vain so what bradley manning has done if you did it is heroic because the u.s. government is incapable of telling us the truth all they told us is lies and millions of people around the world have been so detrimentally affected by it that

they've proven they're incapable of it so we have the right to expose ourselves as a heated debate with the president of less government in iraq war veteran michael prysner in our los angeles studio now the ongoing case of rain and the this. the cia contractor who speaks in murder charges and a whore for the execution style slayings of two men reportedly pakistani intelligence agents have sparked a diplomatic crisis between the united states and pakistan and the details of this case are lost among the rubble of spin rumor and even secrecy in fact it seems the only certainty in the situation is that u.s. intelligence operations are increasingly being contracted out to private companies and with those contractors do wrong the globe can be severe so now we turn to one man who's taking a close look at what's really at stake in the raymond davis case scott horton is a contributing editor at harper's magazine and he joins us right now from our studios in new york scott thank you so much for being here now there is a lot that doesn't really seem to add up in this case now if you listen to the

united states they would have us believe that this is just you know a clean cut former soldier a u.s. diplomat with immunity who killed two men but did so in self-defense which of course is not really what we're hearing from the pakistani side walk us through some of the more glaring inconsistency is here. well if you're reading the press accounts and pakistan you know the ray davis was not a diplomat that he was a cia contractor probably the station the acting station chief in lahore pakistan that he shot two young pakistanis through the windshield of his car then got out of the car pumped further rounds into their bodies and photographed them or this was done coolly and methodically and if you're reading the parts on the pressure you also would have heard that the two pakistanis he shot were not young street thugs they were pakistani intelligence officers who had been assigned

to tail him because of concerns by the i.s.i. pakistan's intelligence agency that he had crossed a red line so we have entirely different accounts and i have to say frankly if you're following the pakistani media you're giving a lot of information that's hyperventilated and excited but also a great deal more detail about what's happening most of which stands up for scrutiny and we start with the fact with what was actually in his on the civic when he was captured in that included to fire arms that included an arsenal of weapons including armor piercing bullets included theatrical make up a g.p.s. device which evidently have been used to help target drone strikes and was era stand and id badges in different names for different consulates so all this of course points to the fact that he was a spy which you know two weeks later the united states grudgingly had to admit and

you know they have the media coverage and this is so unusual because you have i don't understand as how it is that this could be felt by the report in the pakistani press and yet almost either silence when it comes the united states present back to one fellow london or. british newspaper spilled the beans that the american media suddenly said ok we knew that this guy had cia contacts but he may have been involved in the cia talk about the inconsistency here in the media coverage and the role that the u.s. press played in sort of playing up the u.s. line essentially. what do you call it exactly right i mean i was looking at these issues in real time and was being told by a reporters at major publications we can't trust this information that's in the pakistani newspapers and i would go back to them and say they're reporting what the police report says and in my experience a police reports don't mess with this sort of information and of course after the fact we had the new york times acknowledge that yes they knew all along he was

a spy but they didn't print this information because the cia had asked them not to print it and that's a pretty serious matter. and i think it's serious in several scores i mean we can understand the fact in fact i think publications in many countries will withhold the identity of spies of their countries on the request of intelligence services that happens almost all the way around the world but it was going on here was a sensually relaying false or highly misleading accounts of the totality of what happened so they were misleading their readers and they only got around to correcting that much later two or three weeks later and of course most readers have already formed their opinion early on so why is all this of course glenn greenwald here at the salon dot com harshly criticized the new york times washington post and others for their basically being propagandists for the united states government i

think no matter how you cut it bets true their defenders have said no they're patriots and that may be true to a certain extent as well except one has to wonder about the patriotism that results in their readers giving false information or incomplete information ironically have to go to foreign press for accurate information about your own government but i want to go back to the case of raymond davis i mean along with the two deaths that the pakistani man he had it allegedly called her back out and back out came they drove the wrong way down a rock one way street knocked down another pakistani man who was killed. if this play if this actually took place in the united states of fame with angela fifa bunch of pakistani officials had done the same thing here that outrage would be so severe and yet you have the highest levels of the us government getting involved in essentially trying to get us back on us soil from hillary clinton speaking out with a communicant prince to president obama speaking out about this too even senator john kerry being sent to talk about the implications for the u.s.

reputation abroad where we advocate for peace and democracy on one hand and then essentially try to apologize for misdeeds by contractors on the other well i think it's highly problematic in fact i go back inside an incident to the curb i think was in one thousand nine hundred six where a georgian diplomat morse in d.c. who been drinking too much was involved in a traffic accident that resulted in the fatality and the united this was a fully accredited diplomat the united states insisted diplomatic immunity was inappropriate in this case and pressured the georgian government to turn him over to waive immunity so he could be arrested and prosecuted now let's compare that with what's going on in pakistan these individuals who were involved the in the in the extraction mission and mr davis i think very now it's very clear they're not diplomats in fact the even the claim that the state department put out in the first two days after the concert.