well i'm john marvin in washington d.c. and here's what's coming up tonight on the big picture forty three years ago today a man with a dream of breaking down racial walls and fighting for equality for all mankind sadly take it from this world is the number the legacy of dr martin luther king plus uprising breaks out in afghanistan after a florida pastor burns the holy koran so is this performed act freedom of speech and couldn't tea party movement today be

a copycat movement of the eighteen sixty's oh no if occasion is once again taking form across the political political spectrum. you need to know this violent anti-american demonstrations flared up all around afghanistan over the weekend and three days afghans are taking to the streets ostensibly in response to florida pastor terry jones decision. on a blaze back in march twentieth last year i confronted pastor jones about his plans for nine eleven and burn a qur'an on my radio show here's what he and i both had to say. i want to know why you're so committed dr terry jones why you are so committed to doing the work of

osama bin laden who said before nine eleven and then an attack like nine eleven was in his mind designed to create a war between christianity and islam why sir are you on osama bin laden side and why are you doing his work we feel that the koran eventually leads to radical hate against really leads to the real. we are sending their very clear message you . have them as they say they're going to do is that you're a coward who is doing osama bin laden's work and exactly what he predicted and exactly what he would if you look if you some has the radio get a little upset. the television has since use that desecration to rally afghans against the karzai government and american military forces who are already reviled after last tuesday's revelation in rolling stone of british newspapers complete with photos the u.s. soldiers had been killing innocent afghan afghans intentionally and even cutting

off fingers as souvenirs on friday seven u.n. employees were killed and in total over the weekend there have been twenty reported deaths and more than eighty people injured yesterday a crowd of people gathered about one hundred people gathered in jalalabad to burn effigies of president obama whether the real reason for this ferocious anti-american sentiment in afghanistan is the qur'an burning the story coming out about our troops atrocities or just a decade of us soldiers and blackwater occupying their country or all of the above situation in that country is it. in the aftermath of this fall there are a lot of questions we have to ask ourselves today about pastor jones decision to burn a qur'an a few weeks ago there's there's a variety of issues here and let me just go through some of them i mean first of all alexander the great was one of the few people actually conquer afghanistan he was not there very long and the comment that he made was that afghanistan was easy

to march into and difficult to march out of we've been in that country for ten years can you imagine if during the first year of the bush administration mexico the president of mexico and it was five incentive products at the time and said yeah george w. bush he wasn't really allowed to the supreme court put him in it's illegitimate we're going to liberate the american people of mexico and come in and baited america bob the hell out of washington d.c. got george w. bush out and set up their own government set up a government acceptable to mexico and we were all occupied for ten years and then we discovered that the mexican soldiers for fun had been killing us i mean you know some among us. this is in some ways how many of the afghans are viewing what's going on in the united states are going on in their country the horrible headline that was in the in the mail the this is the british newspaper the mail and of course it's it's a play off of it's a stuff from the rolling stone article death squad full horror emerges how rogue us

brigade murdered and mutilated innocent afghan civilians and kept their body parts as drove that's the headline and then these bullet points are just you know before the text of the story rolling stone reveals that soldiers cut off fifty fifteen year old boys finger and kept it as a trophy video captures u.s. cherubs troops cheering as an airstrike killed two afghan civilians new pictures show dead afghan man's dead honest stick soldiers stab the body of a dead afghan civilian military tries to pull circulate pictures out of circulation and the army's says you know these photos are in striking contrast to a value well i was tuesday a week ago tuesday. terry jones is burning the qur'an about a week before that but this isn't the kind of stuff generally that at friday night prayers gets discussed it's everybody else is talking about it everybody knows about it you know perhaps what part of solder would go out on it although he's in

iran right now but somebody burning the qur'an that is something that gets discussed and so friday night going out going out of prayers going out of services going out of you know you could leaving church friday night people said ok that's it you know that this video that terry jones had made. i'm really upset even calling pastor frankly this video terry jones had made of himself or his buddy burning the qur'an. got virtually no notice in the united states either in the media the corporate media mainstream media the united states even even even my i did interview to me year ago i didn't want to talk to me nobody wanted to we all just figured he was a craze but he got the video out there he got it out largely through a christian group in the middle east that was trying to have a edgewise and what not and and trashes on and it went viral and the consequence of this is that people are furious i mean you know this is

so the question is you know one question is you know what's our future in afghanistan and how this is affected we'll discuss that in just a minute other questions are what could be done about terry jones the supreme court in two thousand and three in a case called virginia versus brown virginia had a law that made it illegal to burn crosses to guys to k.k.k. guys were having a party out at a farm in the woods and two guys burned across they got arrested for another guy burned across the black pants front yard both cases went to the supreme court pick supreme court combined them into one and ruled that if you do something like burning a cross with the intention of creating harm or threat it is it is a crime that that law is legitimate and back in one thousand nine hundred five the florida supreme court had decided the same thing about a florida laws of the us supreme court basically just substantiated that only did

it with material. you know it's it's illegal you know the famous cliches it's also from the supreme court ruling that it's illegal yell fire in a crowded theater is only half right it's only illegal if you will fire in a crowded theater if there's no fire but this is pretty much what was going on so we'll what is this guy guilty of is he guilty as he violated virginia versus brown equal to the cross burning or has he committed treason is he playing right into the taliban's hands any of them a recruiting tool or his he's simply stupid made not only himself but our soldiers the target whatever it is frankly i think that it's time to terry jones and do something about it or at least have a conversation with europe. the

race in recent spate of violence in afghanistan corresponds with a particularly bad year of the war in that nation since the president's troop surge at the end of two thousand and nine five hundred ninety two american soldiers have been killed in afghanistan so that one per day actually it's more than one per day and the deaths to afghan fighters and civilians are also dramatically higher so with this new wave of revolt igniting that country now thanks to terry jones and the american kill squad. how bad can this get for u.s. military involvement in a region including iraq and libya here to answer some of these questions robert parry investigative journalist and founder of consortium news robert welcome thanks for having me thank thank you it's nice to see the u.s. going to what it has been i think for since the project censored yes well as an aside years ago you've been on our radio show

a few times any of the. couple of questions here i'd like to get into it so it just broke about an hour ago that saif one of the sons of khadafi says his dad is leaving and he's taking over i'm curious what your thoughts are on that . well it might be a way out of this mess i mean the has been thoughts about how you maneuver moammar gadhafi out of the picture. there's been a lot of wild talk about his killing him or or arming the libyan rebels and the like they could overthrow him but that would be obviously have its own set of problems so i think there's a way to negotiate is with his his departure and and have some better system for libya to sound like a promising way to go obama to come out of this looking pretty good actually it would be sort of like reagan in grenada was he going to go well with a different i mean a year later look at back home most americans just look back and say yeah we want to know what's a good president but i think basically the whole point with libya was would would it be end up becoming a long minute if it becomes

a shorter problem and if and if americans in the world gets a result that makes sense and i think it probably works out well for obama to well this is something that you were writing about in consortium news on friday i think it was you wrote this fascinating piece of the lessons that robert gates learned when he was in the reagan white house when they were basically fun you know solve a lot. tell us about that and how this might relate to libya right now but one of the things that the i was trying to do back in the one nine hundred eighty s. was to use is a lot and christianity as a way to get at the soviet union which was an atheist society at least the government had. just a perspective and so to use religion whether it be the qur'an or the bible as a way to spreading the center creating dissent against that was considered a smart strategic play and the united states of course went into afghanistan covertly at that point through the pakistanis using the i.s.i. to to arm the mujahedeen who were sensually as nomic fundamentalists and they were

upset about some of the communist changes there were that that happened in kabul and quickly were the women being liberated quite so much and so you have this you have this phenomenon of the of this situation where the united states was backing people that it thought might cause by bloody the soviet union but also ended up becoming a force for islamic fundamentalism and a kind of reaction not only that we are given korans we did. that was it was never to use religion in a way that was sort of political. now that may have been a short term victory for the united states but it became a long term problem because it was there and he saw gates was the deputy director of cia during most of this and appointed in eighty nine when the soviets withdraw gorbachev who was president and wanted to negotiate some kind of resolution to the problem some kind of coalition government were not if you will the communist leader in kabul could be part of the government part and the cia of the time and the and

then the first bush administration objected saying no we basically want the whole thing we want of a complete victory and they thought they could do that quickly it turned out that the mujahideen were not as effective as the government in kabul held its round for a couple several years and actually outlasted the soviet union which collapsed in one thousand nine hundred ninety i think knowledgeable as fate has to be with you know that he was castrated made it is general or stuffed in his mouth and he was hung from a hole. has to be. mr karzai. good this can get pretty ugly and has actually. we just have a minute a half or so i'm curious your take. first of all is it possible that in libya right now we're arming the next osama bin laden by taking sides in this thing and ends and well let me just as that first well the concern is who who make up the rebel

forces there have been there been intelligence reports and captured documents from iraq showing that. they had a very big success rate in recruiting people from eastern libya they became pro-capital largest number of suicide bombers used against american forces in iraq so the question becomes is that element part of the rebel army opposing could offer you and so the united states is a little concerned that it may repeat what happened in afghanistan by supporting people we don't know and they turn out to be you know we're just very quickly your thoughts on terry jones the kills. you know with the stuff that's going on in afghanistan right now or is this a symptom of ten years of occupation time firstly i think in a way it is i think the fact is that for ten years there's a lot of anger on the part of the afghan people understandably and the idea of using more violence to somehow bring that under control is a problem in iraq what we saw was that once the american departure was assured the violence really dropped quite dramatically so in many cases the united states being

there can be a destabilizing force and apparently as robert perry it's not an honor to see thanks so much for joining us well maybe i was focusing so much attention on the partisan bickering over republicans defunding n.p.r. and planned parenthood a few weeks back afghanistan a war the longest war in american history continue to churn have forty thousand times the cost of n.p.r. per day and with the rising death toll this war must. it's time for our daily poll your chance to tell us what you think here's today's question seven u.s. u.n. workers were killed in afghanistan after a florida pastor burn the koran is what he did free speech your choices are yes the pastors a lot of burn a koran inflame the entire middle east or no this is aiding and abetting the enemy

so far about sixty percent of you voted yes log on target dot com and let us know what you think the poll be open till tomorrow morning. coming up if a state doesn't like a federal law can they just strike it down better yet can they just leave the union history tells us that's a bad idea so republicans try to do just that today. for . five. you know sometimes you see a story and it seems so you think you understand it and then you glimpse something

else you hear or see some other part of it and realized everything you thought you knew you don't i'm trying hard look at the big picture. is the rhetoric coming from republican governors across the nation similar to what we heard of the run up of civil war one hundred fifty years ago that may sound extreme but more and more mainstream republicans today have come forward advocating something called nullification of the ability of states to nullify or ignore federal laws that they just don't agree with and no if occasion hasn't been in the political mainstream since the eighteen hundreds and the one serious attempt at it by south carolina eighteen thirty two was resolved by negotiation although

president enter jackson as well as former president and father of the constitution james madison both weighed in that know what occasion was illegal. but today mostly in response to president obama's health reform law republican governors senators and representatives have been call it calling for the law to be struck down on the state level they argue that they have grounds to do this based on the tenth amendment which reads the powers not delegated to the united states by the constitution nor prohibited by it to the states are reserved to the states respectively or to the people in other words since providing health care isn't explicitly in the constitution republican governors feel they can ignore the law was that was the same thinking that led to the south seceding from a nation when it didn't like the laws the federal government was passing with regard to slavery and sure enough republican representatives zach wamp of tennessee recently hinted that secession may be the best option for those opposed to hope

obama care and governor of texas rick perry said this back in two thousand and. six is eating. the tea party. it's a. very. good reason. if washington continues. rock. so just how nutty is this idea of nullification horses session or even how dangerous are here to offer their takes on the issues alex jones filmmaker author and host of the rather far right alex jones radio show and alex and ian mill hisor reporter attorneys specializes in constitutional law and blogger at think progress or alex welcome. thanks for having me great to see you with your shirt on this time. and in very very good very nice

to have you here good to be back thank you in the studio alex what's your what's the position of the hard right in the republican party and frankly among your listeners on both nullification is a session. well first off tom back when i was going after bush for the patriot act and illegal wars and lies about w m d's i was called a hard core leftist and now that i don't like what obama is doing continuing what bush did with the same wall street backers i am called a hard right person and i guess i am pro second amendment and i am for state sovereignty and national sovereignty so that's right wing then i decided to leave i say my labels my label should be set aside and remove it but whatever is there i mean let me give you my take on any problem but i don't really constitutionalist i like thomas jefferson ok so i'm a classical liberal but my position is this look you've got the federal government bought and paid for by international fortune five hundred special interest and so

you have the issue has the federal government itself has strayed away from the constitution a bill of rights not just on government run health care with a thousand plus obama waivers given to mcdonald's and his other buddies which is a form of economic discrimination but across the board and so i am for states' rights and it's in the declaration of independence that it's not our right it's our duty and when the government becomes destructive of those aims that we can set up a new government now i don't need to go has that right now it's come on you know the declaration independence is not a legal document it is a founding document but it's and it's not part of our law well it was a legal document to the king george the third right thing and that's on it not weird after this country and it is there but there is the bill the people and the people electing their state legislatures for the states to band together and if they want to have a con card to totally rewrite what the federal government is and so there's no doubt that that's that's a technique that's that's that's provided for in the constitution i don't it's true

the purpose out of for all and i'm glad the states are talking about nullifying unconstitutional unfunded federal mandates i'm not calling for secession i want the federal government we had that. not just corporate run new world order system in is there any of the legal or constitutional basis for either secession or nullification only if you take a bigger race or the constitution the constitution says something called the supremacy clause that all laws of all federal laws are the supreme wall of the land there is a process by which a law can be struck down that process is not a state unilaterally declaring it unconstitutional that process is the court system and until that is happen federal laws are the supreme wall of the land health center what about the tenth amendment the tenth amendment does not deny the tenth amendment does not eliminate the supremacy clause federal laws are the supreme law of the land the tenth amendment says if the government then exceeds its power there

is a process in place to strike it down but the health care law is clearly constitutional the federal government has the power not just to regulate commerce among the several states mean medical regulate economic betters they serve more than one state but there is even as a safety valve in the constitution the necessary improper clause which just as the leo no liberal he has said indicates that when the congress has the power to regulate every interstate commerce they have every power necessary to do so now unless you want to say that either health care is not economic or that there's a blanket ban on health care being regulated which means no medicare no medicaid no as chipper children none of that there's simply no way to write this down under this constitution alex question the red states the ones that are the few that are calling for such an all of creation or all red states the red states without exception are recipients of more federal money than they send the blue states by

and large are senators and not recipients if the red states really secede. they're going to be losing a whole lot of cash why would they do that well on average the federal government takes a dollar and then sits back about thirty three cents with strings attached so the stranger in a strange all this you gets when you don't get official red states are getting a buck and a half ago some are getting about sixty got some of it are going to book twenty. well i mean there's a reason states like texas are thriving compared to others and it's because we don't have a state income tax and you know at the same time until my nine hundred thirteen states legislatures voted on u.s. senators which was another major state check on power that's why states of the of the apportionment of their population get rid of all we all got together and have and voted to change that will that will point is is that here has this separation of powers this this this balancing of power the federal government has its powers

the states have its powers and i understand after whatever him lincoln did that the fed said hey ship sherman just burn down half the country we've got the guns and you're going to do what we say i understand that decision was decided then but this is the twenty first century there was a major debate going on when the country was founded there's been an ongoing debate as you mention right through andrew jackson and there were unfair letters kind of dissolved in one thousand eight hundred thirty two and i was resolved by by by simply compromising on those terror attacks and threatened to march on the south and he was a southern south carolina it's showing but listen listen if you look here's the issue ok we are bankrupt and we're all talking about cutting indians money or cutting welfare i'm not for any of that that's all rearranging deck chairs on the titanic if we don't say no to the one point five quid trillion that is owed in fake derivatives that we've signed on to bipartisan bush. your time as

a banking system alex in the end you're absolutely right i agree with you ok but i also i have a minute a half here i want to get a couple of other issues in here alex in rather when the former soviet states left the soviet union there were a bunch of nukes floating around its axis for as an example seeds they have i believe they have a nuclear base down there they certainly have no military bases what do we do but you know it's a good point you know we were lucky when the. soviet union broke up because what happened was the lesser soviet republics decided that they would agree to move their nukes to russia do you trust rick perry to give up his nukes and if he doesn't give up his nukes do you trust that his finger hovering over the bottom because that's at state when you start talking about things like secession when you start to doubt things like no if occasion what you're basically talk about is be a decent session and you're saying they have the power to wave their hand and make any wall they want to go away go away and then we cease to be in it states that

have had that power to wave their hand and say they only have to follow the law when they feel like it then it means no exaction alex last word to you we're pretty much out of time here does rick perry get to get to keep the nukes. obviously those are federal reservations just like the feds have you know part of cuba under their control m n n and none of that is going to that extreme the federal government is out of control under bush under obama under clinton under reagan we are a big empire invading all these countries it's out of control special interest are bankrupting us because they get to run off with the money offshore we need to cut the size of government obama didn't deliver his ball hall of forty houses and cars the next republican isn't going to deliver that rick perry is a mainline karl rove run neo con he's not going to cede he's just putting that grassroots populist rhetoric out because two years ago he was being booed by the

ron paul tea party the republicans got scared i got like a minute i got over i got a alcoholics alex jones in the lies or i suspect we'll hear more of this in public in primary i will feel sick of it at least we have to have thank you both both for joining us thank you alice let's help our nation doesn't have to relearn the mistakes that led to the civil war under fifty years ago. it's time for the good the bad and the insanely ugly the good economist joseph stiglitz in a vanity fair article entitled the one percent by the one percent and bore the one percent stimulus spoke the truth about wealth inequality in america and its corrosive influence and government by writing virtually all u.s.

senators and most of the representatives in the house are members of the top one percent when they arrive are kept in office by money from the top one percent and know that if they serve the top one percent they will be rewarded by the top one percent when they leave office. he's right we all know the truth about wealth inequality in america and now it's time to do something about the bad trans ocean company that owned the oil rig that exploded last year in the gulf killing eleven million men and spewing crude oil into the gulf for months leading to the world's worst ecological disaster in our nation's history it is pain up bonuses to their executives is twenty ten was as the company says the best year in safety performance in our company but it is history but if that were the case i'd hate to see what trans ocean was doing in two thousand and nine skies delusion and the very very ugly donald trump if this guy can make a run back feel uncomfortable.