mark. do you know what's really happening to the global economy with much stronger no holds barred look at the global financial headlines. there's reports on our. welcome to the lower show where you'll get the real headlines with none of them or say we're going to live out of washington d.c. now tonight if you're a twitter user how about following the taliban that's right it turns out the militants are trying to use social media to get their message across but you even need it to win the propaganda war also take a closer look at solitary confinement and the analysts say that it's a form of torture and if that's the case have americans been torturing their own people thousands of them for years then it's

a story we first told you about earlier this week that's tracking americans using g.p.s. devices on their cars we'll speak with wired about how the feds are pulling this off and we'll ask if this process is even legal then they call the big five the c.e.o.'s of the top five oil companies in america so as they came to capitol hill to testify over their unnecessary tax breaks today they can't help but wonder if anything is really going to change or of congress is just putting on a show to appease the american people will get to bottom to the bottom of those issues and we'll get a dose of happy hour in tonight's show but first let's move on to our top story i and the taliban are now on twitter in what's becoming more of a war of information and propaganda by the day and a struggle for hearts and minds in afghanistan as well as the world over are for militant groups are embracing of modern technology the taliban has an official web site they put out information through text messages e-mail they circulate songs they edit video clips of fights against coalition forces. and as you know al qaeda

even puts out glossy magazines each month and the form of inspire and the majestic woman known as the cause no more jihadi women now it's a bizarre mix of zealous religious ideology and modern p.r. but how successful is this effort especially in recruiting a western audience and is there any way for the u.s. to win this information war here to discuss that with me is the tenet colonel anthony shaffer senior fellow at the center for advanced different studies and who is also still serving as a reserve lieutenant colonel anthony thank you so much for being here thank you for having me so where do we begin here tony and let's look at what the taliban is already doing like i said they have a website they put signs out there they put videos out there now they're on twitter and starting today they started tweeting in english so does that mean that these people know what they're doing all they do and this is one of those very interesting stories as early as zero three they were videotaping their rates in afghanistan we actually captured some of these tapes i mean these were actually recruiting tools to bring others in so that even though this was low take at the time they were very effective now we're seeing

a move into the well into the information age and let's remember two things about this tweeting thing first only the western audience really will understand the tweets now not say that they may have a commander here and can understand one of the things we saw during world war two p.v.c. was able to transmit open text messages to have things happen i wouldn't put it past them try to do that with more educated ninety five percent of the population don't read or write and the idea here that they would actually be doing something to affect the populations thinking is lunacy this is all aimed at the west so obviously if they're aiming it at the west an english speaking audience that means they're in direct competition with nato with the u.s. military why is it that we're always seem to be one step behind because it takes longer to verify information and reports in this media it's not that nato or us wants to be deceptive i think there's they do want to be very very accurate the problem is this something called the. was something the air force developed is

called observe orient the side act well they could do that in a matter of minutes while we would sometimes takes days take days to do it we have to be correct sometimes they want to be totally blind sometimes our side wants to pick out what the high points they want to highlight there's things they don't want to talk about so that makes it takes decision time and frankly the narrative has to be true probably does not suffer from any sort of coordination issue of that they don't care if it's true or not that serves their cause we're going to say it and also they have no need for slowing it down regarding let's make sure that we understand what the message is they know what the message is that put it up there and that it's often on the defensive we being nato in the u.s. so of course we've seen examples here in the u.s. we have our jihadi jayne's we've seen similar examples in the u.k. as well but is there any way to even know how much of these propaganda efforts this information war actually feeds into recruiting people or how much of it is just the simple fact that we're occupying muslim countries abroad in fighting wars i think

it's there clearly there's things like the video they used to recruit people but i think it's the latter i think really there right now trying to put out a message to africa basically affect our decision makers here much like any other media war you want to find people who actually control the budget and make the decisions so this is where there's a there's a clear issue here not to say that these jihadi this are looking at real technology let me divert is one word second we know that groups are actually looking at some some very sophisticated technology could be used as weapons things like electromagnetic pulse which would attack power grids with that said as they develop the understanding of those higher technologies they're clearly understanding the war the narrative and this is where i think al qaeda to zero is going with this you have the taliban as one aspect of learning about this and i think the whole effort that includes anyone who has a bone to pick with this as i understand understood has learned how to use the narrative to their advantage and that's what this is all about do you think that we're going to lose i mean how do you think it's going to look let's say ten years from now technologies continue to develop as. in other offshoots around the world i

also continue to learn how to use these new developing technologies there's a great scene in the movie life of brian or a jew who is writing romance go home you know is graffiti on a wall. you see the romans one although not in a good way i think this is were a lot of folks who are talking about how long we should stay in our selves in that region and why i'm opposed to a much smaller footprint i'm talking about maybe twenty thousand folks in afghanistan who just anti-terrorism and color but i would be really i think it's what we're looking at here we've got to be very realistic about why we're there and if people don't want to be there there's really no good reason to be there and i think if we're to do that how quickly can not be forgotten even if let's say we do pull out troops out of afghanistan by two thousand and fourteen it may be twenty fifteen sixteen like they're saying you know memories that short you know it's not special it's part of the world we're talking about so if you do go back literally two three hundred years and plus i don't believe we've done much in a way of helping ourselves with some of the grown programs that we've talked about

this i'm not for the drone program and for every terrorist you kill you created three more if you kill three something so you've got to consider the risk versus gain here with that said the vietnamese didn't follow us home after vietnam so i'd like to believe if we get the right way we actually do create a peace process such as the northern ireland peace process works inclusive that brings people back together to allow them to work politically together that may help mitigate some of these bad feelings but we just we just don't know what's going to happen over the next five years and i also want to divert our attention for a second over two weeks because if we look at the way that our government is waging a massive war against against whistleblowers against doing science against bradley manning who is you know if i get angry e-mails will be held here at home too you yourself are a whistleblower as well does all of that become trivial you know we hear that this type of information that you can just get out it puts our national security at risk but our are there many mother things that are putting our national security at risk isn't there even taliban propaganda like we said it doesn't even have to be true video is there. out there that make all of that minuscule most whistleblowers come

forward with for a very clear reason they believe something's wrong they're trying to do the right thing that was my motivation i think is war through as it was i think bradley manning manning's basic motivation was to do good very very bad way he did it but clearly that was it so i think part of the problem with our political process is that people talk terms of wanting to have blowers but they really don't and this is why we've not been able to successfully set up a process for bringing a whistleblower and letting him get his information out and let that information disclosure become an issue if that person is a saint who walks on water because that person always be able to really come up with a program like god out there i mean how many whistleblowers he said have you heard say that they actually tried to come forward and present this in everyone on various to their superiors and you know they were brushed aside so i guess maybe there isn't a right way to do it you said the bradley manning didn't do it the right way but i don't know what i you know would be for you forty percent of the deity report about my issues about me trying to discredit me so you know you've got to wonder what the issue is here the issue is always people don't want to be called on the carpet much

more and it is one of the ironies of the nine eleven issue the cover it's not about you know we doing it it's about the fact people are trying to cover their butts so to speak this is where we've got to get a system in place which allows both comes forward and say a mistake was made this is why it was made this is what we do to fix it until that happens we're going to continue to have problems with the government calling whistleblowers you know dangerous national security when they're really not and if they just understand that we're going to a process everybody is much better off and you can see the jackson position now and we reported yesterday in our show that australia in fact gave julian a gold medal of peace prize from their country and meanwhile we have a grand jury convening here in alexandria trying to bring criminal charges against him here in the u.s. tony i thank you very much for joining us thank you for having me now still to come tonight we focus at length about the case of bradley manning and how he was held in solitary confinement but did you know that there are also thousands of prisoners here in the u.s. place in solitary confinement for a decade plus more and not. and then tracking the movement of u.s.

citizens in with g.p.s. and environmental activists says that she was tracked after finding a device on her car so we'll speak with a wired reporter who's working with an activist to expose the current problem. and we are part of the lead. and. well. we haven't got the chance to be safe ready for freedom. hey guys welcome to showers tell me about

a show we've heard our guests have to say on the topics now i want to hear our audience is going to use you to video response our twitter for thought of a question that we've hosts on you tube every monday and on thursday the show long responses we will be. fun fun fun. fun to. you know how sometimes you see a story and it seems so you think you understand it and then he glimpse something else he hears sees some other part of it and realized everything you thought you

knew you don't know i'm sorry welcome to the big picture. the so. i think for most americans that yourself just roll system it seems like a necessary measure to lock up the bad guys and for those who are really bad they've been placed in follow terry confinement when research shows that this method of punishment can have severe of facts on a person or many can't help but wonder if this is really a necessity if it's even humane archy's person present all looks at the economic social and mental effects of solitary confinement six. by nine. by twelve the measurements of a box of a house and for more than twenty five thousand people in america the measurements of destiny. it is

a space reserved for the most dangerous criminals in the world but also. for many like robert king who were innocent locked up for a robbery he did not commit king spent thirty one years behind bars twenty nine of them in solitary after prison officials discovered he was a member of the black panthers and he says pinned a murder charge on him not to murder but through the curse word. now cleared thank you to the advocates against the use of solitary confinement proletarian with soldiers but innocent or guilty the conditions are harsh many say even cruel and inhumane and often results in permanent psychological damage self mutilation and even suicide told us one mendez the u.n.

special ruppert's war on torture slams the widespread use of solitary confinement for prolonged periods of time it's not the same to put somebody in solitary confinement for one day and to put him or her there for months it's common for those placed in solitary to be there for to. twenty three hours a day over the last two decades the number of supermax prisons in this country has grown to more than fifty david bossie director of the a.c.l.u.'s national prison project says the gloom was not a result of higher crime what happened in the mid one nine hundred ninety s. was there was really a wave of hysteria about super predators and predictions of a wave of fire alarm that never really materialized what did materialize hundreds of millions of dollars devoted to the business of building prisons if you look at how these places came to be built in many states it wasn't the corrections professionals it was the politicians politicians and presidents often have of hi

this prison is owned by the corrections corporation of america got more than fifty prisons like this around the country and spend millions of dollars lobbying to build more politicians in turn bring jobs to their deaths right and beef up their reputation as being tough on crime the still other politicians fight the system i don't know any place in the world where people are held in. solitary confinement for over three decades china russia. eastern block. dictatorships you know are america's most famous prisoner bradley manning spent more than eight months in isolation suspected not convicted of leaking military secrets to wiki leaks in a letter a former army private tells of being stripped of his clothes his prescription eyeglasses and on the rare occasions he was allowed out his hands and feet were

shackled this is not something anybody should be subjected to except in the most extreme circumstances. and also poses not a problem which is you can you know if you're his ability to get and. it is yet another example of solitary being used. unitive lee rather than for safety reasons for more than ten years kendall gibson has also been in solitary he refused to cut his dreadlocks because he says they represent his roster far in faith a decision that at the time violated virginia law and stated that inmates must not have beards or wear their hair below their collar maybe most disturbing are the hundreds of children in solitary cells kept there to protect them from adult prisoners with little concern for the consequences in the words of robert king you may leave solitary but solitary never leaves you christine for now r.t. . i am we've covered the case of bradley manning extensively on this show but we've

failed in giving out a good coverage to those who aren't high profile cases you know the world over so let us start making up for it today according to available data there are some twenty five thousand inmates and long term isolation in a country supermax prisons and as many of the eighty thousand more in solitary confinement in other facilities if we look at international standards but consider solitary to be a form of torture that means we've been torturing long before this war on terror and it's not something to be proud of you and me to discuss this further is a myth but a senior staff counsel at the a.c.l.u. national prison project and we thank you so much for being here tonight thanks for starters so these are the figures i was getting from solitary watching that organization also that you know really dedicate his time to this is all this true is it even worse yes actually twenty five thousand individuals in solitary confinement is a conservative estimate. as you mentioned on your short little bit before this.

twenty five thousand folks in solitary confinement in supermax institutions but there are tens of thousands of others who are held in isolation rooms in. typical prisons around this country so we are talking about a lot of americans behind bars being held in solitary but this isn't something that we always did right at some point it had to be acceptable trend in prisons across the country to start putting people in solitary confinement so where does that stem from you're exactly right solitary confinement was very uncommon in american corrections about until about twenty years ago when under the political rubric of tough on crime states around the country started building the supermax institutions and really embracing solitary confinement as a corrections management practice. but it's actually very true that one hundred years ago our supreme court criticized condemned this practice and said it was inhumane and it drove me crazy but it hasn't changed and it's happening. male in this country one hundred years later every day so do you believe you know from all

of the studies the physics that you looked actually that solitary confinement is a form of torture we believe that it really can be a form of torture especially in the american context where you're not spending days or weeks or confinement you're spending months years even decades in conditions of extreme isolation where you don't leave yourself for twenty three twenty four hours a day you don't talk to or interact with another human being you're just left there i don't complete the social isolation for such extended periods of time that it's almost inevitable that your average individual and especially those who have mental illness preexisting before they get to solitary confinement are going to break down and horrendous so it'll drive you mad literally now you know like i said we've been covering the case of bradley manning a lot and i think one of the things that really gets people riled up about his case is the fact that he hasn't been convicted of anything yet so this is pretrial solitary confinement but he's in fact not the only one that this happens to be they

didn't do this to juveniles in us absolutely it's a common practice around this country when juveniles are held in adult males which they are with increasing frequency as we prosecute thirteen and fourteen year olds as adults they can't be kept safe in the normal general population and so what institutions have done in order to keep them safe is to lock them up in isolation in the same disciplinary ways that they might get someone who is real do you buy an argument do you buy the this is this is good for you this is what's going to keep you safe is by locking you up in a room by yourself absolutely i don't i think that there should and must be other alternatives you don't need to lock someone up for twenty four seven to keep them safe you could take juveniles and let them interact with them out of their cells let them go to school it's just a matter of changing policy and practice and mindsets it's not impossible and it should be done because it causes real and lasting harm can these children and houses. this is acceptable let me please use the example of senator john mccain who

we don't himself was at one point a prisoner of war who also you know had to suffer torture and he ended up writing it off today and he's using the material in a lot of the statements being made these face around to death of osama bin ladin and you know a lot of people out there are trying to claim that torture is what eventually led us to a song tonight in which is not sure if you look at the facts and john mccain himself refutes that statement here he as someone who has experience with this is know when you're tortured what you do is you say anything these people want to hear in order for them to stop physically torturing you but at the end of the this already comes to the basic point that it doesn't matter how we really define torture it's a moral argument it's about who we are and what we want to do as a country and so you know we here in making this case but only when it comes to getting osama bin laden the bad guy why is this not a moral imperative for our media and for our politicians to talk about all the time that you know as many as one hundred thousand people are facing this in the u.s. i think it's high time that we practice what we preach we've got good laws on the

books but we oftentimes don't follow them and embrace them especially for american prisoners galt's kids this is the largely hidden population even though there are millions of we don't want to pay attention to what happens to them behind bars because of that law lock them up and throw away the key mentality of the tough on crime mentality absolutely and it's a short sighted sighted mentality as we now know because our prisons are full of people who continually cycle you know it cost us billions of dollars a year we don't get good results in the permian people so that when they come out of places like solitary confinement they commit more crimes they act and this is actually a policy that is bad for public safety we know in the in the future of stations that have actually taken a look at hard data like in california for example people who need solitary confinement come up to prison commit crimes at a twenty percent higher. from those in the general population it also cost

a lot of money putting people in solitary confinement is two to three times more money than someone in the general population and in the other and yet our other prisons in california are currently overcrowded as well and we have somehow room and money to put people into solitary confinement that's really it's horrible but it needs to be talked about more often if you want to thank you very much for joining us tonight thanks so much and. now on monday of this week we brought you more information about using g.p.s. trackers to spy on people the practice that's becoming more common and more contentious as court cases have been popping up all over the country we've interviewed on this program yasir of b.p. a young california student who found a tracker on his car when going for a routine oil change and he's now suing and he believes that there's no other reason for authours to have been tracking him other than the fact that he was muslim now while district courts have ruled differently in a number of states it's an issue that many expect to go all the way up to the supreme court as the obama administration is now taking the stance that the don't

need a warrant before placing one of those trackers on someone's car without their knowledge now an environmental activist has handed over a tracking device that she found on her car to wired to help expose it more information on what they look like and how to find that so earlier i caught up with kim zetter senior reporter at wired and i first asked her how it was that wired in this activist decided to work together to expose this. who we were in the story line and it's an arab american student who turned on his horse and when she read the sunni and shia mediately there is very similar to the place that you can read her this was an environmental activist involved in not just environmental activists for animal rights activists and she's going to hurt her six years ago and she just wanted to let me know that she had a similar to maurice and to shoot people in the senate and she did that's pretty unusual right because you've ever merican stigler talked about you asked her if he could we interviewed him right here on this program as well. and i know the feds

came knocking on his door saying that they wanted their so-called property back so how did he actually get to keep their hands on this one. well they didn't want this one back from her as well six years ago when she found out she could be gone for cornish and then she got concerned that they would be knocking on her door asking for it back or something else and i don't see her attorney contacted a prosecutor's office announced. their government acknowledge that it did and said that they wanted it back. but she refused because it suited so they kind of abandoned it now i know that if she pouted think years ago so it might not be the most modern technology but is there anything you can tell us about it when you did dismember it anything we found out. even though it's she found six years ago and it using you know technology that's from that period it doesn't mean that there's not suiting used. by not a whole lot about it we do know that it's using pretty expensive lithium batteries they cost five hundred dollars just for the batteries and it's going inside

security council altered suit it's like they're custom made for a long source of which would make them more extreme but it isn't that there'll be a lot of that and what appears to be operating orca four hundred megahertz chip and that's right it. now it's really crazy because you know the law enforcement doesn't have to monitor or give up any information in terms of how often these are being used i guess that will never really know but how many cases are out there that you know of at least that have been reported of people that bound these devices put on their cars are people that now are suing the government for it. what we've all heard about about maybe half a dozen of these over the last maybe six or seven years they were a couple back to basically running out of the letter from their cars as well those were also environmental accidents and we've heard of a couple of other arab americans were found on their mars. and then we know from court cases where this is the battles that drug dealers of course as well. and let

me either i found an object or it becomes part of some kind of legal proceedings we don't really know how many off their years and you know the government is using the quite quite often but there's no success to cats over forty five that's now how would you suggest that people actually look for these trackers to see you know if they might be on their cars. will there are some predators that will just be on the undercarriage of the car and so you can see those who actually are and also the trackers that will go inside the engine compartment are there they're wired into the battery and so those are going to be more difficult to find it might also be in the dash of the car so those you're probably not going to find through just a nice search and chemicals and takes things apart i guess showing all the more you know how invasive some of the thing some of these things can be at that can just come right up to your driveway get into your car and put that tracker on there now of course there have been a lot of cases here mostly in district courts and they've had very decisions or

very rulings here but do you think that this might go all the way up and so the supreme court because the obama administration itself is now supporting the fact that the feds don't need a warrant but these truckers on your car. right you know me administration and the supreme court's look at this last month and so it will be up to the supreme court whether or not they'll tweak it i suspect they will because it's becoming a contentious issue and as you said there's a patchwork rulings around the country so that in some states they can use it without a war and in some states they can't really say that the court's going to want to have some kind of final settlement and i'm curious quickly to the obama administration the justice department what's their legal reasoning as to why they don't need a warrant why this isn't an invasion of our privacy. what do you think you've been since similar to this surveillance they don't think that it's any different then a police officer standing a suspect in a car they don't see that it's a privacy violation in that sense and you don't you know warrant for an officer to tail. i want to tell since they're so that's the way that they feel that. i can i

want to thank you very much for joining us today and well i'm with you and hoping that the supreme court does take this one on because that makes me uncomfortable thanks. to you up and. coming up just the other day i saw you got a gold medal for his exceptional courage in human rights and is that all for transparency this may be a bit of a hypocrite i'll explain in tonight's poll times that mitt and i with gas prices hitting four dollars here in the u.s. congress called big oil execs to washington this congress really serious about ending it tax breaks for big oil or is this all a political stunt we've got interested in it. that we in the fourth grade. be the.