long. at this moment i'm a preacher you know people are you know a candidate for president in a republican primary and with that the political phenomenon known as ron paul becomes a contender in the race to the white house so will his third run be a charm. the throes of war once again from an organization that once promised peace so after years of military intervention after the end of the cold war it was still trying to answer why. and solitary confinement in the u.s. a form of invisible torture save for the worst of the worst criminals or so you would think will unlock the truth behind who is really forced to live in those tiny

cells. good afternoon it's friday may thirteenth four pm here in washington d.c. i'm lauren lyster you're watching our t.v. well ron paul has made it official today he announced he will be running for president in two thousand and twelve and the news was everywhere very different tenor than back in two thousand and eight when he was considered a candidate of the libertarian fringe so is this a political phenomenon and could this be a sign of a true rise of a third party candidate here in the u.s. before we get to that are two senior broadcast journalist megan lopez takes a look back it a history of third party candidates and the hurdles ron paul may face take a look at american politics you have the elephants i'm newt gingrich and i'm announcing more in term of the schieffer frozen donkey. movie. action.

i'm going to need each and every market i'm going to and then there are those dark horses at this moment i'm officially announcing that i am a candidate for president the ones that in the past were such a long shot not even the us needed was willing to take a bet another question about electability. do you have any sir there's always the question of whether you were fired as the race for twenty twelve gears up does a third party candidate really have what it takes to cross the finish line if history indicates anything the answer is no from ross perot to ralph nader and even billionaire steve forbes no third party candidate has made it's number one in one thousand nine hundred eight the candidate that's a mill your face. right here running for president. ron paul ran on the platforms of non interventionism restructuring of the federal

budget and a return to the gold standard bold ideas for someone running on tough conservative turf. george herbert walker bush do solemnly swear four years later just as here we ran our three hundred forty one billion dollars. billionaire businessman ross perot took center stage wanting to set the record straight on us debt that's our legislators and our president trying to buy our boat this year. we're not that dumb even though ross perot didn't win he was the most successful dark horse to ever run poor rose right again in one thousand nine hundred six but there was a new third party face in the mix ralph nader. ok. with that enthusiasm nader nation was born his hatred for big government earned him the green party ticket think of the hubris here these two parties have spoiled our

elections they've spoiled argh. they spoiled are both making him a popular contender but not a champion neither was steve forbes but he did forever change the third party approach to presidential races using thirty seven million of his own he made it so that money was no object for candidates running outside the well oiled two party system but no amount of money could buy steve forbes or ralph nader the white house that year or the former with the democratic reform if you break the fifty or forty four and that is the real work for the first half was recorded in two thousand both nader and forbes were back running this time nader became known as the spoiler who paved the way for a george w. bush victory jump forward to two thousand and eight a decade after his first presidential run ron paul stepped back into the limelight are you running for president. with the tea party joining his stride in the

political landscape changing his stance remain steadfast but america wasn't ready to hear his message you know during the campaign before i talked about the economic crisis that nobody quite understood was coming and then the then the housing bubble burst i think that gave us credibility so we're twenty twelve right around the corner can ron paul make his third run for presidency a charge if the ability to raise a million dollars in one day is any indication perhaps americans are finally ready to bet on him meghan lopez r.t. . and joining me now is shelley roche of bite style dot com or excuse me by style dot tv but she is better known as an avid and burly ron paul supporter to us shelly thanks so much for being with us now three years ago when ron paul announced that he was running it was not the big news that we have seen today splashed all over the media and got this thing like there was just one channel that was giving ron paul a lot of attention at the time it was

a russian one but anyway what has changed well spent two thousand and eight we've seen ron paul a red and become the left because that's when you see the tea party movement really take on a like this so we see obama's approval ratings plummet to talk. and as a result a lot more people are really starting to see the truth in what rob hall has been saying for stepping we think it is that has really held the most court because you've seen you know we saw in that report in talking about how he was talking about the economic crisis before other people were what do you think are really the main tenets of his policies that the american public has really grasped onto well first of all i think people are drawn to him because you see only whole existence in our time but i really don't see a consistent principle but. he goes what he believes and he doesn't back down and so when you couple that with the found logical best things like all responsibility

bringing our troops home he has government out of our personal lives i think it really really hits home and all sounds really good in theory but what about in reality going back to what that questioner asked him during a debate in the prior run is the electable. that's that's what we're going to be here in toronto i think getting a lot more media coverage this time around and much more of a positive his message resonating more and more of people and he demonstrated that he still has the ability to sundry so we started off in a really strong position and you can see he's going to be seeing how well we can translate the enthusiasm that you have to vote in the primaries so you can do the evan and some more and i want to look at a reason poll that they just conducted that showed that if we could bring that up lead that i'd be great yeah right there you can see that process of reason which is

a libertarian organization so we have to take that into account in who's doing this poll but they they found that sixty percent less that twenty percent or maybe that eighty percent would consider voting for a third party candidate for president two thousand and twelve what do you think that says about the two party system and people's lack of confidence in it or a feeling that it's failed them what do you think is behind. yeah i think you know we don't really have a true democracy in this country more and more people are becoming frustrated with the choices that they're given and you see you have a lot of you know how popular the tea party movement has become as a cause party and libertarian is much more popular so the word is going to get out people are better out there looking or you answers and ways to channel their their kind of political order and i would love to be

a third party become a viable a viable route to the white house how does that happen in this country without getting co-opted by by the two major political parties because one of the comments about the tea party is that they've been co-opted by the republican party or co-opted by big money like the koch brothers billionaires so how do you actually make a viable third party in this system that we have any less. well you have to have a strong leader someone like ron paul in grow up people. you know people who are wealthy but it's. i think that's all we're going to hear from shelly right now but i want to thank you so much for being on our show and talking about ron paul's latest announcement now meanwhile as you heard ron paul was a major military noninterventionist so we go from him to our group arguably the globe's largest interventionist nato the secretary general of the western military alliance needs but the u.s. president today barack obama in washington and he's been on a bit of

a speaking tour in the u.s. as well this week now the north atlantic treaty organization has continued plowing forward with missions military missions in the decades after the cold war while continuing to try and explain and find a reason to tray and my horrible friends that means reason to be but its allies continue to enter into wars is nato still trying to find that reason to be take a look. at several decades and wars and leader still the question that's top of mind when it comes to the world's largest military alliance any people likely to they wonder if the of the. nato lo and behold it is busier than ever. set up to counter perceived threats from the soviet union the north atlantic treaty organization has plowed ahead without an enemy after the end of the cold war. some facts that the alliance cost its

reason to exist instead what happened in fact and in violation of even the accords and the agreements at that time was nato aggressively expanded. and a larger alliance that once promised peace is instead pledged bombs in troops to afghanistan going on a decade. and in its latest endeavor the bard's air strikes into libya the fight uniting a new strategic goals back in november libya has launched the allies is the dischord some countries don't want to actually you know shoot ground targets some just hit air targets which are not. i mean in fighting it's unclear what motives are really behind the planes flying in the name of nato over the african country is that the personal aspirations of a leader the french to do is it a french forty c. or or is it a sarkozy police he. tried to convince to. induce

. the leader of the. france was among the first to push for intervention france wants to get in on what i call the imperial condominiums a really kind of africa is it the showcase in a new arms race military buyers love to have weapons that are tested in war if your weapon system does very well in the war you can count on sales going up in fact the only two planes now in contention for a ten billion dollar order of one hundred twenty six planes from india are the euro fighter typhoon and the french are felt the very ones french and british allies have been flying over. is it the opportunity to oust the khadafi regime it is u.s. policy that gadhafi needs to go and prop up one more favorable to us foreign policy . interests try to.

ensure it was the first to screw. the so-called humanitarian intervention that critics argue was never warranted but which now may be causing a humanitarian crisis we didn't stop a bloodbath but we are prolonging and perpetuating the suffering of civilians in libya the suffering that is now washing up on the shores of nato allies by the boatload of refugees as nato is leader comes to us shores the nato secretary general meets here with the keeper of the keys in washington president barack obama now though the united states has seemingly stepped back from libya he was the number one contributor to nato and therefore many would see the u.s. really as being nato now this comes at a time when the conflict in libya on the ground more and more people are calling a stalemate and it's like infighting as well as rising costs in every sense that same question people have been asking for decades comes to mind at the end of the.

nato lauren lyster artsy washington d.c. . and still ahead here on our team we will have our report looking into solitary confinement in the united states but our reporter found dunn you. know sometimes you see a story and it seems. you think you understand it and then you glimpse something else or see some other part of it and realized everything you saw. i'm sorry this is. what drives the world the fear mongering used by politicians who makes decisions to break through thirty three may who can you trust no one who is in the. you know with a global mission to receive where we had

a state controlled capitalism is called sasha's when nobody dares to ask we do our t. question more. just.

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up. welcome back today amnesty international released its annual report of the state of the world human rights and highlighted some positive movement in places like egypt and tunisia but light harsh criticism at dozens of other countries in that report criticism of the united states hampered attention to kuantan of obey and in afghanistan but it mentioned very little about a form of punishment that's becoming more and more widespread the use of solitary confinement archies current course on a christan president takes a look at solitary in america and what she found may surprise you watch six. 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. terrible 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 through the course we're talking about. right. now cleared thank you to the advocates against the use of solitary confinement. but innocent or guilty the conditions are harsh many say even cruel and inhumane and often result in permanent

psychological damage self mutilation and even suicide told us why mendez the u.n. special rough a tour on torture slams the widespread use of solitary confinement for long periods of time it's not the same to somebody and. so you can find him for one day and to put him or her there for months it's common for those placed in solitary to be there for twenty three hours a day. last two decades the number of supermax prisons in this country has grown to more than fifty david fati director of the a.c.l.u.'s national prison project says the boom 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 but never really curiosity 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 hi this prison is owned by the corrections corporation of america got more than sixty prisons like this around the country and spend millions of dollars lobbying to build more politicians in turn bring jobs to their vests right and beef up their reputation as being tough on crime the still other politicians fight the system they placed in the worm. people held in. solitary confinement for over three decades china russia. eastern block. dictatorships north 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 your except in the most extreme circumstance in which there's no evidence. and also poses not a problem when you can do it if you're going to go and. it is yet another example of solitary being used punitively 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 rusty foreign faith a decision that at the time violated virginia law it stated that inmates must not have beards or wear their hair below their color maybe most disturbing are the hundreds of children in solitary cells have to there to protect them from adult prisoners with little concern for the consequences in the words of robert king you

may leave solitary solitary never leaves you christine for zero r.t. very emotional last words now earlier articles christine for us out interview and then para more a fellow at the roosevelt institute and founding editor of the new deal two point zero blog she said the irony is using solitary and confinement for safety reasons backfires. the irony is it doesn't control violence at all in fact some of the prisoners become more violent after being put in solitary confinement and the danger is also if you when they're released back into society if they have been subjected to this treatment which has left them mentally deranged in some cases more agitated more prone to violent behavior they become more dangerous to society i think it's really important to point out and to make clear that it is a question once in a while solitary used because you don't know what to do with violent prisoners but

so often more often than not i believe this is not used to keep violent prisoners away from the rest of the population away from the rest of the prison population this is used as a form of punishment and and here's something that i find so interesting a lot of times it's used as an interrogation method but let's think about this if you want to interrogate somebody to get the truth out of them putting them in solitary confinement is going to make their mind less able to answer questions less able to work properly if i want to interrogate somebody i want them to have ten hours of sleep have a meal in their belly so they can talk to me. you're exactly right it's a form of torture it's a way to ranging and mutilating the human brain and the results of interrogating prisoners who've been tortured are widely understood to be unreliable and it's you know one of the most disturbing things is that as you say it's often not used for violent criminals many times it's the mentally ill who are housed in facilities and

put in solitary confinement because there's nothing else to do with them maybe the mental health resources in the community are such that there's no place for them there and putting a prisoner a mentally ill prisoner in solitary confinement is like putting somebody with pneumonia out on an arctic tundra i mean it is a really dangerous medically medically devastating thing to do and it turns doctors into participants in something which is actually damaging to a patient's health so it brings up the question of medical ethics we still have an idea i think in the back of our minds that. we want to put these people out of sight and out of mind and torturing them in this way really is a mark of shame on our society and something that i think that people are going to look back on in future times and you know judge us according to how we've been treating these people but they're not getting certainly not getting better in solitary confinement and in many cases they're getting worse and they may you know

what may have been a temporary condition may turn into a permanent condition is that as you said suicide is a problem you know in the case of bradley manning it was interesting because he was put on suicide watch actually against the recommendations of the psychiatry is that the brig in quantico and as a result of that he was subjected to all kinds of deprivations he was not allowed to sleep with a pillow and a blanket he was forced for a period of time to stand naked in front of the guards in the morning and this. by the way is is treatment you would never see in a mental health facility that you did that would have been absolutely unthinkable and yet he was exposed to it and finally you know it got to the point where there was a public outcry and international outcry and this one person thank goodness has been moved to a different kind of facility but you know again there are so many that are suffering from this kind of treatment whose names we don't know and whose faces we don't know

and they're locked away and it's our shame that was lynn param or a fellow at the roosevelt institute and founding editor of the new deal two point zero blog still ahead here on r t as the libyan rebel the delegation at the white house we will have more on the conflict on the ground that after the break. you know sometimes you see this story and it seems so. you think you understand it and then you glimpse something else here's the part of it and realize that everything you. are implicitly. welcome back at stalemate grips libya many would argue and as i mentioned earlier the nato secretary general meets with the president also welcome to the white house

is the libyan rebel delegation and in midst of all of this a nato spokesman says the use of ground troops may be the only way to move the situation forward our correspondent daniel bushell has more. months of libya's. according to me to libya's leader colonel get there for years they'll give you food six positions he will civilian casualties from. continue to mount. this solution groom troops. the u.n. security council should adopt a new resolution on libya was a little nine hundred seventy three this is not invisible man operations we need a new resolution western forces plan that all along says a leading u.s. law professor clearly what we're seeing unfold here in libya is a pre existing war plan by legal by the british by the french by the

americans do with air moved everything now is following the forty players which is why i believe that since they have failed to do polls gadhafi with these steps are sold far the next stage will be moving into a ground invasion and nato powers have jukes the international community into supporting the war and that's one author protecting civilians was the claim but grabbing the country's resources is the real goal this is one of the most. worries and transgressions of rights of nation national sovereignty and international law that we've seen in the post-war period the west the u.s. and france and britain have been called berkeley according to the evidence that's leaking out covertly arming the opposition to gadhafi in hopes of grabbing control of the oil and the different parts of libya the libyan government promise is still for nato if it sends in ground troops some agree such

a war may be tougher than expected we will see increased military activity not only in the air but also on the ground and maybe this will solve the problem from the perspective of all the major countries maybe it will simply be we're the ones who. really are. bombing from thirty thousand feet coalition soldiers feel fairly safe i don't see what activists want putting troops on the ground risks not just more civilian killing but nato deaths as well the further away they get from high tech and they and the nearer they get to know tack and the greater the danger of casualties on both sides turkey china and russia who will criticize the bombardment of libya for minister sergei lavrov he thinks nato has already gone far beyond the first u.n. resolution to maintain a no fly zone and hints the second resolution to move in ground troops may not come as easy now several nations feel trick.