up in the ilona shell you know that the real headlines with none of interstate parking lot in washington d.c. now economists pay attention because the g.d.p. numbers are out and it's not looking so good we'll have details on u.s. growth and we'll find out of the government's trying to downplay this dismal forecast then reform protests are turning violent in syria the u.s. has made it clear that they're not getting involved we want to know how the government picks and chooses which countries do deserve military involvement and

its official general david petraeus has been nominated to be the director of the cia will determine what changes will be coming to the intelligence agency it's a military official is put in charge and let's talk about copyright infringement and censorship should it be up to private companies to take certain pirate sites out of their search results or should the government force them to host a debate on the issue and we'll call on one of our favorite guests to discuss the big is story in the media but i can't really figure out who cares about the royal wedding they're about to cause will join me to basically make fun of it or because they have that gossip and that fun for the end of our show up first our top story. the syrian government has been violently clamping down on pro-reform protesters with human rights organizations as to meeting that at least four hundred people have been killed and yesterday more than two hundred bath party members announced there was resignation in response to the government's brutality and the

international community is once again expressing its condemnation like we saw in libya although yemen not so much now the e.u. is said to be meeting this friday to discuss sanctions on syria and the u.s. is reportedly pursuing its own same plan as well but nowhere have we heard that assad must go for that limited humanitarian intervention is on the table quite the opposite of white house press secretary jay carney only announce that every country is to frank and different indeed but is that in action toward syria once again prove that there is no such thing as an overarching ideology for human rights and democracy and the duty to protect but only when political conditions favor joining me to discuss it is robert farley assistant professor at the university of kentucky patterson school and blogger lawyers guns and money robert thanks so much for joining us tonight now clearly every situation is different nobody can deny that

but if you look at syria where upwards of four hundred protesters have been killed now according to human rights organizations where the violent or the government is clamping down violently and where the protestors are rebels where they have no arms how can you look at that situation and then look at libya and the way the international community has acted and justify the two. i mean i think that you can't on any reference to high principle and i think you make a very good point when you mention that the syrian protesters have not arm themselves in the same way as the libyan rebels and so we're not talking about a civil war likely we're really libya we're talking about a government clamping down and shooting good citizens in the street apparently without any sort of sort of sets of conscience or anything along those lines i think the difference here is that syria is much more dangerous country it's much more powerful country than libya and the implications of calling for regime change in syria seem very dangerous to almost everybody is in the neighborhood. well it's

one thing i guess to the current regime change but if you look at the obama administration they at least try to have better warmer relations with syria recent years they even went so far as beginning to call assad a reformer clearly all of that rhetoric is now off the table and it's no longer being used but still do you think that the obama administration should be louder in their condemnation you know what is it that's in their interest to so far justify staying on assad side. i think the wondrous pressure because my my my guess would be this that they are extremely concerned about boxing assad and i think in the end that it was overthrown by this movement and he fell the same way as no bargain but how it will be ok when you vote in a recession no i would be ok with the and so forth but the problem is so hard to do a number of very dangerous things if he understands the west to be looking forward

and this is where the us is really looking for regime change. and so to the extent that he feels boxed into the extent that you feel that the west is out to get him you can do dangerous things you can do dangerous things to israel you can do much more dangerous things to the people of syria and so i can understand the caution about instructions approaching this would mean i suspect that the europeans are going to approach it in the same way this is a very dangerous situation one in which there is every reason to hope that the syrian people will overthrow assad and you know some sort of new regime by the same time this could be very very is really could be a very bad situation in a way that he. also talked about why options so far are on the table according to obama the obama administration according to europe they are both the european union and the u.s. now looking towards sanctions towards syria do you think that those really have you know a chance of affecting the situation there. i still deliver moral condemnation they'll

deliver an attitude that the west doesn't approve of serious the syrian government and syrian military. and that may to some extent be an indicator to some of the people within the regime that there is an outside constituency that wouldn't mind seeing change in syria if it actually might also send messages to people within the regime or within syria within the scope of this man that there's somebody out there supporting them as the same time it's hard to see the sort of glad of an economic sanctions that you're going to see from the west and from the united states calling about sears and so forth it's hard for me to see that this will determine about what's happening i don't see the kind of thing that less is going to do and actual to the syrian regime let's say if the situation there continues right now the death toll perhaps at four hundred people let's say that it gets worse but it gets more violent and you know in the weeks to come then like the international community.

the international community is going to increasingly be laundry. but i it's just it's so difficult for me to see anyone in france or the united kingdom or the united states coming up with some sort of military option after sanctions are done after the ambassadors have been recalled and after all of the condemnations have been given if assad is still there that assad is still there there is almost nothing else that the international system can do we're not going to have another security council resolution giving a no fly zone syria the arab league is not going to be supportive of another intervention in an arab country a matter of twenty syria maybe and the countries that are involved simply don't have enough military for the united states public over over for us here if it wanted to but britain and france certainly can't at this point the only thing that i can see changing the equation would be a turkey became interested but they have expressed no interest in the stabilizing assad regime so i don't think there's anything to be done and i want to switch now

but they see libya because i guess that's the the other opposite example that you can say what are the huge tough position in terms of the way that everyone is reacting and here libya has seemed to have reached a stalemate and yet we still have of course people like john mccain in our world are saying that we should arm the libyan rebels we should do it just like we did in afghanistan but i don't understand because i think that if the end of the day that didn't really work out well that it. no it really seems like a terrible idea and it has become clearer and clearer that the fears of the people who were the targets critics of libya intervention. are really being demonstrated that right here there was no plan there was no set of objectives here that anybody had any ideas for an end state where you know gadhafi because or we would have some sort of partition or something along those lines and so what we have is this stalemate and we have people like john mccain saying and talk a little on the rebels which may not even be the most important thing training the rebels as much as arming them and we are going to have

a situation where we'll have we may have this little state that used to be libya cut it in different parts with the date of the united nations being here in force. and well supposedly advisers now on the ground there as well or at least going there from italy and from the u.k. i just also want to ask a quick question obviously there was a lot of chaos because obama went into libya without asking for congress's approval there's a sixty day period at some point after the sixty days he's going to have to ask for some money for some proof approval is a need do you think that they're going to say yes well a little over the first person the first person asking the constitutional issues my understanding is that if congress is interested in pursuing its responsibilities with regards to the war powers act which of the sixty two sensors or then we might have some sort of issue but there is no issue right now that congress has the greatest interest in challenging the president individual congressmen and senators and. talking do seem to have some skepticism about this but congress as

a body seems to want to let the president either insult or simply make this go away they don't seem to be interested in charging the president well it's definitely not going to go away if you sit there and don't do anything about it is now robert i want to thank you very much for joining us tonight. now as the chaos in the middle east and north africa unfolds the u.s. is trying to walk a dangerous tipple my tightrope and washington is trying to make new friends in the arab world but at what cost that can't happen the u.s. meddling in several countries actually end up causing problems for one of their closest allies in the region israel artie's policy reports. these gunmen mean business and they're upping the stakes just that little bit higher than these years the egyptian regime like the zionist enemy trying to stop us for ages and girls are but we always got the weapons we needed to fight the zionist enemy. and now they're getting more than they could ever hope for but for me gyptian president hosni mubarak's main guy on the borders couldn't be easier to

get through to the greens. who will smuggled. who. have much more freedom to do whatever they like. and they doing it smuggling weapons into gaza the result two attacks in three months on a natural gas pipeline that supplies a quarter of israel's electricity which is why is the us claims it's bringing a new tomorrow to egypt most israelis would rather remember history year the eagerness of the united states to topple the formated from president hosni mubarak and bring about regime change i don't want to meet most harm that's closest ally in the region israel the u.s. says it wants to establish democracy in the region but instead of democracy it's a very real possibility that radical islamic could come to power the u.s. strongly supported the opposition in libya despite al qaeda connections among its friends now it's apparently governance and support against syrian president bashar

assad with the wiki leaks website claiming that washington has been funding some anti-government factions what is afraid that if he goes away. the muslim brotherhood will take civil so instead of in freedom illegal in syria we're going to work islamist. swapping one dictator for what could be worse if and when radicals hunted power they nightly to direct the arms at israel people will be very conscious of the fact that syria is not libya and the fact that if you do decide to intervene in syria you will have knock on effects across the region in iraq in lebanon to israel palestine what every new threats israel my face from an even more hostile arab world emerging from the present instability some experts believe the security of the jewish state is not under any grave threat israel has never been a long safe place one of the greatest lies the northern father of all lies as it relates to the israeli palestinian conflict is israel's been in danger of

annihilation i detail in the three volumes of my book is a complete loss in israel's existence as never ever be in danger from any combination of arab military force and that is unlikely to change in any foreseeable future but the fighters on the ground aren't giving up hope and there are minister mourning is that is worse to come. and live on the time of defeat and retreat is over now it's time for the israeli people and the israeli enemy today. is what is keeping quiet from the current chaos in the middle east and north africa but behind closed doors not be plenty of disquiet here about how much america's desire to make new friends in the arab world is fueling serious instability quality r.t. television. i had tonight turning the cia into another arm of the u.s. military for the pentagon and cia the first ever team is for the arrival of the

triumph of the health. let's not forget that we sat in a parked car. i think. either one well. we never got the liver can safely get ready because freedom. and john are been here broadcasting live from washington d.c.

coming up today on the big picture. new website with twenty four seven live streaming news tells what to do about the ongoing financial part unlimited free high quality videos for download. and stories you never saw one mainstream. in the me so. maybe the political. parties are just. hey guys welcome to shell intel on the alone a show we've heard with our guests not to say on the topic now we want to hear from

our audience just go on to you tube to video respond or to twitter for part of the questions and leave host on you tube every monday and on thursday when the show long response is late your books are. the commerce department released numbers today for u.s. growth in the first quarter and the results are rather dim compared to the three point one percent rate of growth in the final quarter of last year the g.d.p. only rose a one point eight percent in the first quarter of two thousand and eleven and if you consider that the economy has to grow at a rate of two point five percent just to create enough jobs to accommodate a growing population and more efficient workers and that's not the news for unemployment now a lot of economists including fed chief ben bernanke who gave his first ever press conference yesterday are hedging their bets on this being temporary transitory the cold winter weather is over government spending especially defense is set to pick

right back up and the rising gas and food prices are happening he says not to worry too much about that either so are they right or are they playing down what could be a much larger economic downturn during these have discussed it as peter schiff president and chief global strategist of euro pacific capital peter thanks so much for joining us tonight what do you say here rising gas and food prices inflation is this all transitory is it going to fly wait a month or two or do we have a much larger much more long term problem on our hands absolutely not in fact the way you know it's not transitory is ben bernanke he thinks it's transitory and beach since he's always wrong you can pretty much take it to the bank that inflation is going to get worse you know you mentioned earlier about the u.s. economy the data came out today that showed the economy grew by about one point eight percent but i don't think it grew on the contract i think there were understating inflation if you measure you wish. any other currency measure it is

swiss franc maize really was the dollar is really the euro our economy is contracting measured in gold measured in silver and is going up the edge of a cliff if you measure g.d.p. and silver so i think that we're really going to get activity is contracting inflation makes it look as if the economy is growing and that's not happening and. really all we're doing is spending more borrowed money we're digging ourselves into a deeper hole i'm afraid we may never get out of it well in that sense if we look at rising gold prices rising seller prices like you said there are a lot of murmurs out there that we could be seeing a collapse of the dollar coming up soon you are the king of predictions here what do you say i think the dollar will collapse and i think it could happen maybe as soon as this fall but if it doesn't collapse in the fall it will collapse and soon i mean i think if you look at the charts the dollar is weak and look at look at ben bernanke used press conference yesterday where he you know advocates any responsibility for inflation for rising prices he thinks it will prices or other

commodity prices are rising it has nothing to do with all the money that he's printing and so that means he's just going to keep on friday more and you know the economy is actually you know we can look you know we've got that weak g.d.p. number see we got a big jump in enough unemployment claims so the employment landscape is getting worse what's going to happen when real estate prices make new lows which is coming soon we get a new downturn more people are going to employed and. energy prices keep rising food prices keep rising what's offend you to do i mean the fed is putting itself in a box we're eventually inflation is going to be so bad if they're going to have to raise interest rates so substantially i could tackle it but they're going to completely destroy the economy but if if if that choice is to do better for the fed if instead they just let inflation run out of control because they don't want to raise rates then it's worse do you think the ben bernanke said that he's always

wrong but do you think that he really believes what he's saying or they really thinks he is telling people the truth and he did open himself up here right to be the first fed chief ever to hold a press conference why is he lying on purpose to buy comparable doubt of try to calm the markets allow wall street to keep doing what it's doing. well he did very good job of not answer your questions if you actually saw the press conference he skated around everything but he never really gave a direct answer so he just basically gave a speech he interrupted by questions and i think the reason he did that is because he's he's trying to get some credibility but you know i saw a report i read a report on bloomberg that actually described the press conference as a success because he didn't make any major gaffes i mean it wasn't a success at all during a press conference every time he opened his mouth the dollar lost more value every day every time he spoke a syllable goldman hit a new record i mean it wasn't

a success to me unless you think that titanic had a successful crossing because if you were passengers happen to make it the new york i mean this was a disaster of a press conference and you know i think you if you see a big rally in gold there's a good chance that ben bernanke is speaking somewhere. that's good i like that you know one of the other things that was attributed to either what the government is calling slow growth or what you're actually calling a retraction in the economy is that the fact that there was a less government spending so somehow i guess there is less defense spending going on although i don't really know how that's possible well let's say the congress right now does actually start making drastic budget cuts and if they increase over the next couple months then should we just get used to these horrible numbers they used them unemployment being as it is. oh if the government really made a big spending cuts that would be good for the economy because the more the

government spends the more the private sector can't invest and that's where we need to grow the economy we need more savings more investment more production but we can't afford any of that because the government is spending all of our wealth so if we really had deep cuts in government spending and you come to improve the problem is that's not going to happen and when you're talking about lower government spending in these g.d.p. numbers it's not actually lower spending it's lower spending that maybe they had more cast but the government is spending more mean the government has never spent as much money as is spending right now that's the problem and the bigger problem is the way they're financing it they're not taxing us to pay for all this government they're printing money to pay for all the government so they're paying for government with inflation which means everybody that owns dollars pays for it with higher prices and a diminished anot of living and because so many other countries around the world are trying to take their currency to the dollar when we create inflation over here we explored all around the world and the whole world is suffering because of all this government spending. i i always make me feel so good about the direction that

our country of the entire world is heading but i guess that's the truth right there isn't it thank you so much for joining us at least to make you laugh q would you say thank you have a good night. now it's a president obama officially announced that he'll be nominating general david petraeus to take over the post of cia director it's not an unheard of move to have a general head the civilian agency but it's one that's been criticized harshly in the past especially when it was the bush administration putting general mike in hate michael hayden up for the role but this time around we're not hearing any objections from congress so all things considered let's just assume that he gets the job what will the cia under ptrace look like is a put into jeopardy any chances of objective analysis of our wars abroad and it's a perfect example of how the pentagon and the cia have fused together both becoming of gloated militarized organizations but only helped fuel war war you're discussing

with me israeli government former cia officer and co-founder of veteran intelligence professionals for sanity thank you so much for being here tonight for starters are you with me here i mean is that he's going to get the job right he's going to get through farm. one hundred where the critics we heard a lot of critics on two thousand and six when bush wanted michael hayden who was a general we heard a lot of democratic voices saying i don't think having a military man especially general head the civilian agency would be a good idea here we are twenty eleven obama's doing the same thing i don't hear any voices will come out and as they were. right. eavesdropping on us citizens we knew would be construed for and so he was discredited not because he was a military figure because of his association with the illegal eavesdropping but the truth so is very good credentials the only problem is that the way you harry truman and this year was to have one. lease where the president could go and he could say

look mr director or mr rector please tell me which you really think what you in those two universities worth of specialists you have out there in the woods of virginia what you really think about that i don't care what the military says i don't care what the state department says they're always defending their policy i want to have an independent look at this tell me what you really think now he has betrayed us and so did a fight with two wars. you know if it's analysts say these are a fool's errand but you'll never prevail in afghanistan because for that you need the pakistanis to cooperate and there's no chance in god's creation that they'll cooperate what kind but what kind of reaction is petraeus going to have to his analysts who are trying to give it to him street and will he really have the integrity to go to the person and say you know i thought the surge is in this world

was good but the specialist told me that you know it's we've got to get out now because it was a little specialists are really going to convince general david petraeus mean this man is a mastermind especially when it comes to playing the media when it comes to selling his wars that he's very personally involved in so do you think that he's going to you know quite the opposite maybe confront these analysts sees going to tell them otherwise he's going to change their minds in a war their way of looking at this where you see he comes out of the military tradition and so he's not used to the kind of independent analysis that he's going to face now to their credit you know to their credit the analysts have come up with very good estimates they called them national intelligence estimate an excellent one in november of two thousand and seven i mean iran big news the conclusion. in two thousand and three stopped working on a nuclear weapon hollow somebody would still hold hillary clinton in the new york times but that's the judgment unanimous of sixteen intelligence agencies the same

intelligence agencies that will tell you if you look at our war in afghanistan quite contrary to what general petraeus will drill you it's not going well but i wonder because petraeus is also you could say the darling of capitol hill he's very close to many of these war hawks and those are the same people that john mccain is the world over are the bomb iran crowd so now if he can have new answers for them and says no the cia tells me iran isn't working on a nuclear weapon it's going to be a test of his. both his integrity and it's going to be very interesting because for male i i don't want to prejudge it but it's i think it's it betrays a lack of understanding on the part of president barack obama. as to what an incredible tool he can have if he has an independent view on these things now he's stepped the corps by putting four star general in charge of the cia and i want to

think that patrice maybe up to being able to listen and to tell the president look you know what i thought was really great. you know i always said that the military will never be able to do this by themselves it turns out to be that's right karzai is a hopeless case and you know i've always said we need the pakistanis to cooperate put in a lot when specialists say there's not a snowball's chance in hell that they would that sounds very hopeful quite the contrary what if instead we have general petraeus take charge of the cia a man that he wrote the book on counterinsurgency now doing counterterrorism who wants to find more drones and you know how hard drone strikes and now essentially he'll be in charge of libya and again in and of pakistan is he just going to be the general in charge of even more wars this way well there are basically two ca's ok the one that runs the drones and the ones that those the torture of all the kinds of threats that was never in this region for president truman ok that's the one that gets all the attention when the president should depend on is the one that

tells him what's really going on in the world but what are the chances for a whole with respect to afghanistan or pakistan so it's going to be a very interesting thing to see how how the tree is navigates this and you know one thing has to worry about the other directors that had to worry about and that is if for example he decides i think i think iran really is working on a nuclear weapon and that's going to tell the person he has to worry about something called we. few weeks he has to worry about how easy it is for principled analysts to say you know this is a betrayal of your country we don't know we know what we think he's distorting the goods and there are ways to wrap what we've already seen how our how our country and our government respond to wiki leaks as well but i want to thank you very much if i was wrong at all and i thank you now turn coming up ahead he's gone after he gave an earful on the floor but now a republican lawmaker in oklahoma has harsh words for working.