i welcome the law to show where i get the real headlines with none of the mercy for me live in washington d.c. now it's time we're going to speak with thomas drake former n.s.a. official and whistleblower about his case and the obama administration's war on leakers and we'll look at the pentagon spin machine regarding the delhi helicopter crash in afghanistan the last thirty u.s. service members that yesterday the military told us that they got a good guy that shot the helicopter down but don't really believe them and then

let's talk about polygamy why do so many americans disapprove of it does it affect their view of mormon's people like presidential candidates mitt romney and jon huntsman and can polygamy and democracy go hand in hand or in a look at all that and more tonight including of those of happy hour but first let's take a look at what the mainstream media has decided to make. all the riots in london and other english ladies haven't quite stopped but they are quieting down could be because british prime minister david cameron is not the author already start cracking down. british prime minister david cameron says his government is acting aggressively to restore order following some deadly riots it was much more action in the courts as judges stayed on the bench all night to process hundreds of arrests in the weeks rioting and looting david cameron promising that there would be raids to try to hunt down some of the people responsible for the violence and it could be

a clampdown on social media and the use of black would be made. did you hear that last part there there could be a clampdown on social media let me fill you in on the details here british prime minister david cameron was addressing parliament today about the riots and he was discussing the role that twitter facebook and blackberry messenger plate when he said that he's working with the police with the intelligence services and industry to look at whether it would be right to stop people communicating via these websites and services as in to shut them off as an censor them he then added that the free flow of information can be used for good but it also can be used for ill geo pain if you really just occur or did that just occur to you mr prime minister you know unfortunately that's the way the world works if you're going to live in a country that abides by the principles of free speech so port's the free flow of information then you have to support that free flow of information at all times you can just pick and choose based on whether you think it's being used for good or for

ill it just doesn't work that way especially if you criticize arab nations that we saw clamp down on social media during the uprisings of the last eight months which western nations did but now the u.k. wants to clamp down and it's supposed to be ok because it's the west that's doing it talk about hypocrisy i don't get me wrong i'm not saying that this is in defense of the violence of the looting that has taken place during these riots this is about something much greater than that and by the way mr cameron social media has also been used throughout these riots for british residents to organize cleaning crews to war and other individuals about avoiding areas that were particularly violent but the thing that really gets me is that after cameron made this announcement well where is hillary clinton our secretary of state has not only launched initiatives work millions of dollars but constantly spoken out about the need for that belief free flow of information internet is a network that magnifies the power and potential of all others and that's why we

believe it's critical that. it's users are assured certain basic freedoms it goal is not to tell people how to use the internet any more than we ought to tell people how to use any public square whether it's carrier square or times square the value of these spaces derives from the garage have you back to these people can pursue them from holding a rally to selling their vegetables to having a private conversation. interesting right that we haven't heard a peep now that it's our best friends are all the allies the ones to restore those freedoms and the mainstream media they don't even bother to call them out on it they don't even bother asking the state department even making the connection that there is some hypocrisy at play here and that throwing this idea around could be a very dangerous step toward censorship in england and it really makes you wonder what our government would do if we were to ever see the same type of rights here in the us i'm betting that they would also want to clamp down on social media and i'm

betting because we've now seen examples of it surrounding events in the u.k. that are mainstream media would be happy to miss all those contradictions. now back to a subject that we've spent so much time covering here on this show the obama administration's war against whistleblowers and government leaks and we spoke in great depth about the case of thomas drake former n.s.a. senior official who the government tried to convict of ten felony charges some by using the espionage act but in reality drake has shared information about waste fraud and abuse of the n.s.a. with a reporter from the goals of course and none of that information was classified now it also took the justice department two and a half years to indict him after waiting his home after years of persecution by the government the threat of thirty five years behind bars and

a financial burden of fighting for his freedom just a few months ago all the charges. suddenly dropped and drake played guilty to only one misdemeanor charge of unauthorized computer access now what's important to note here is that this is a case carried over from the bush administration and it pursued actively by the obama administration the same administration that promised to be the most open and the most transparent you have the same one that's launched a full war on whistleblowers and to use as you know jack to press criminal charges in five different cases of alleged national security leaks more prosecutions than all other administrations combined so now that one of those cases has been resolved let's hear the firsthand account joining me to discuss this is thomas drake former senior executive with the n.s.a. and n.s.a. whistleblower and his attorney just on radek national security and human rights director for the government accountability project the nation's leading whistleblower organization on i think both of you for being here tonight now thomas i'm going to start with you because this is been going on for the last couple of

years of your life and just a few months ago you face to face the possibility of possibly spending thirty five years behind bars and now you're not going to now it's over how does that feel extraordinary really. did this entire experience did it ruin your life or at least the last couple of years of your life i mean you were labeled a traitor you were demonized i can even imagine the emotional stress the financial stress that this is placed on you he said or you would want to be american or any human being to go through but would you do it again do you fundamentally believe in the information that you did pass on and the value of it yes but certainly with issues of public concern you raise very serious questions about the conduct of our government so let's get into what some of those issues were exactly because you always stood by the fact that none of the information you put out there was classified information that you you know carried over to the to the baltimore sun and for you what was that what is that information mean especially talk about some of the leaks that you put out there will permit it was focused on ensuring

a billion dollar fraud waste and abuse on me. your program it was a flagship program for n.s.a. at the time but i also discovered that the government had engaged in illegal activity with respect electronic surveillance of americans in clear violation of the statute in the constitution and how many times did you try to get this information out there before you went to the baltimore sun when you had other people that were trying to work with you that recognized that this was wrong and you tried to report it to people that were subpoenaed ears or within the same argumentation it was a multi-year effort it started from within and i say reporting to my immediate superiors of the general counsel inspector general's office but then i was also a material witness on three major investigations two of them were nine eleven congressional investigations and one of the all the departments inspector general audit investigation of n.s.a. and its flight schip program and any clear legal alternative so this was a number of year long effort for you to try to get this information out there and what was the response that you always got when you tried to bring it up abysmal

failure nothing was done but what do they tell you when you when you when you try to say we need a point we need to pay attention to this something's wrong and if they chose to cover it up remain in denial and choosing to pursue the decisions that it made they didn't seem to matter it didn't seem to matter what was being actually called out is that by you then decided to go to the press or you feel like that was the only option you had left at that point was a fateful decision because it was fraught with significant power by her by virtue of actually going to reporters outside of the system outside of the formal reporting shows it was fundamentally centered on my first member rights as an american to do so now what do you mean when you say reporter outside of the system you mean outside of washington d.c. outside of these so major publications that work closely with off already it's by virtue of going to reporter under the first amendment you know freedom of the press i was technically administrative violation to do so in an authorized manner mean i

did not have prior approval to have contact with a reporter. you know the free press that i was an administrative corelation. understand now just when i want to go over to you for a minute too because this case was going on there was a lot of media attention surrounding it and then suddenly we learned that all the charges were dropped that we were that the government was trying to get a plea bargain and you ended up with only one misdemeanor was unauthorized access to a computer what really happened here why did that suddenly go away well i think the government thought on many occasions that they could get tom drake to clete guilty and he always said from the get go i refused to plea bargain with the truth and i have to say in my history of lawyering i have never seen a defendant reject so many plea bargains because they couldn't find one that actually fit any crime he committed it was to the point where it was like time haven't you ever parked in the wrong parking space or you know spit on the sidewalk

or anything but he stepped past rejected please it's what we could find something that would actually fit what he did which was excess of authorized use of the government computer which pretty much every single government worker has done if they've ever checked facebook while at work and yet that was still charged here but the the federal judge in this case actually be rated the prosecutors he paraded the government for the fact that it took two to five years after they raided your home before they even indicted you and you know how did that feel to at least have somebody finally be on your side that is supposed to be you know upholding the law that demonstration viewers are sure through proof of government called to do sure they're actually holding executive orders to account for their actions now do you see a difference between what it is that you do this information was and it was not classified it's easy to get of was it was unclassified that you leaked out there did you see

a difference in what you did and with that or. engine is classified but do you think it still serves a purpose that it needs to be put out there in the press to actually yes i do all the different the distinction is that are released on close of our discourse on closer information or the allegations in terms of what you please and events around that incident involve classified information are you support that we can release as an alternative source in terms of a place to go now just what do you think of the fact that. the government tried to explain when it was going to happen that the charges were dropped they again tried to use this idea of secrets and say that really what was going on here is there are too many secrets that we didn't want disclosed and the judge would actually ask well that's the government's medium and that is a myth they say they had to be the case because it would have revealed too much confidential information in point of fact they knew ahead of time they had indicted him on information that had not been classified and they just figured he would fold

under the enormous weight of the new leashing the full force of the entire executive branch and he didn't and they lost a string of rulings but believe me it had nothing to do with revealing secret information in point of fact this information turned out to be stuff that had been posted and seen by thousands on the n.s.a. in trying that so why do you think that this is ministration did put their full force and full power behind this did they try to make an example of you do you feel like this is an intimidation tactic so that others don't leak information and don't want to be whistleblowers all of you. as that's surprising to you the suit you just wrote and op ed recently where he said it's surprising that obama did this and it's surprising but it's certainly become the norm it certainly has expanded the war whistleblowers they don't trust it anymore now do either of you think that this type of war on whistleblowers this excessive government surveillance excessive

government secrecy is not something that can be stopped at this point are we just moving towards this perpetual ever expanding surveillance and secret classified state but. for you senator it's not work or if it doesn't start i do feel like there's a lot of movement even disappointingly by obama towards expanding this the secrecy regime that was put in place by bush and the fact that obama has indicted more people under the espionage act of all things for mishandling classified information then all previous presidents combined sends a very chilling message and i think it's sort of a backdoor way to get an official secrets act which we don't have in this country in which we've managed to live for two hundred years without but you still think that it can be stopped you said of the latter situation would be a very chilling one but can it be stopped tell requires more exposure disclosure of

government officials high crimes and misdemeanors and all girls and using the cover of secrecy to hide all that is unconscionable all that means that it requires more people like yourself that are actually willing to put yourself on the line and know that the results might be this type of persecution this you know the government going after you for a number of years but here you did prevail and i want to thank you very much for joining us tonight thomas and thank you very much you for years. now just ahead you know your congress members vacationing this summer or who is paying for that trip stick around for a very interesting story out of pentagon says that it's killed the taliban leader who shot down a u.s. helicopter. very afghanistan killing more than thirty people including one thousand maybe seals that night was the news of this taliban that's really a p.r. move by the only that in just a month. you know sometimes you see a story and it seems so cool a complete you think you understand it and then you glimpse something else here's

you some other part of it and realized everything you thought you knew you don't know i'm trying hard welcome to the big picture of. the world your. world. and yet though. for. fun.

let's not forget that we sat in a parked car. i think. one well. we never got to says they're safe to graduate you can. also see cars of the us and israel are the best of friends hell when netanyahu came

to the us back in may and took the podium in front of congress he got more bipartisan standing ovations from the president of the united states himself. and i do see a lot of old friends here. and i see a lot of new friends of yours will democrats and republicans alike thousand now we all know august is government vacation season so while president obama is on vacation so is congress collectively and guess where a lot of them are going bright sunny israel that's right nearly twenty percent of congress in fact both republican and democrat will be visiting the middle eastern country for a week during their vacation and while the eighty one congress members are there they'll be visiting with president shimon peres prime minister benjamin netanyahu and will also visit with palestinian authority president mahmoud abbas in the west bank town for some of this is going to be their second or their third trip i study

hoyer who is hosting a vacation for twenty six democratic members and he releases recently said that he is pleased members of congress have this opportunity to study american interests in the middle east and gave a deeper understanding of the issues involved in increasing stability in the region he's probably also referring to all the republican congress members most of them who are freshman this year as this is going to be their first trip to israel let's get to the juicy part of the story right these vacations are all sponsored as and paid for by the american israel education foundation which is basically a pac now a self-proclaimed america's pro israel lobby is treating u.s. congress members to an all expense paid vacation the same congress members who vote for their aid package isn't that nice you know i'm feeling of goldman sachs was paying for twenty percent of the u.s. congress to head your rule for a week if you looked at quite a bit differently or a pro china lobby sent eighty one members of congress to china on vacation that

probably wouldn't go over too well either but when it comes to israel anything goes including vacations and they're really really just the tip of the iceberg see a guy who has already spent one point four million dollars alone this year. and as open secrets dot org explains there may have been upping their lobbying expenditures over the past couple of years so perhaps that's why congress has dropped an aid to israel according to a graph from the congressional research service the us has dropped a total of one hundred and nine billion dollars in aid and if we get a rough average looks like the u.s. is getting between two point five and three billion a year in israel in aid to israel and that number is always rising so just let all those numbers sink in for a minute all the u.s. economy teeters on the edge and congressman fight viciously over what cuts to be made to social programs they still manage to find bipartisan consensus to always pump out billions to israel every year that's just a sign of where the priorities of your elected representatives really lie. now this

week we've been talking about the deadly helicopter crash in afghanistan that took place last weekend in the wardak province and it took the lives of thirty american service members clued in one thousand nine hundred seals this was the biggest loss of life in a single incident since the war began and yesterday the remains arrived at the dover air force base in delaware and event which the pentagon decided to close to the press but while blocking any video of the tragic reality of this war there was another effort to get another story in the papers yesterday and i sad statement said it through a person an air strike from an f. sixteen the man who shot down the u.s. helicopter had been killed and the statement also said they killed not only the shooter but taliban captain. and several of their taliban associates after they received multiple intelligence leaves and tips from local citizens on how to contact that taliban has disputed the claim and said that while taliban members were killed in the airstrike the shooter was not one of them but we do have to raise a few questions here you have to wonder how the hell we know where this one guy is

and shot down the plane especially since the military has it you have determined what exactly is the helicopter is that plane but the military hasn't yet determined what brought this helicopter down the general john allen who is now in command of afghanistan so that he believes it was a single rocket propelled grenade but they don't know with any certainty yet so we get how do they expect us to believe with certainty that they know who this one guy was it means we need to take a good hard look at the military's attempts to spin this war and discuss this with me is jim hansen retired special operations master sergeant and military blogger at black net. jim thanks for being here tonight are you with me here are you with me that it's a little bit hard to believe if they don't even know right they haven't even concluded the investigation to see what exactly brought this helicopter down how how would they possibly know who the one guy is that maybe shot the r.p.g. if that's what it was. like this if you have a lot of satellite coverage

a lot of drone coverage what they got in addition to the tips from local villagers and what they watched this group of people leave so they had fairly good idea of exactly where that group of people who conducted the ambush went to and the people who were in contact with the ranger unit to start with so they just assume that since they were black that whole group they got the one guy who they have one hundred percent certainty i doubt it ok so then why that's the well because it's a regular you go sounds better but you know i feel like it really makes you have to wonder because obviously this was a tragic loss of life you know for this war in the u.s. but it's this concept of revenge that i think that they're trying to spin because you could look at this this helicopter crash and you can say this is another sign that this war isn't going well ten years and it's still not getting any better they can still take down helicopters but yet they want to make it seem is don't worry cause we've got the guys back and now let's keep it going i don't know that makes a particular statement about whether the war itself is going better because anytime

you go on a raid like they're going to turn you go on a mission to an active firefight it could go through that's got nothing to do the taliban right now has trouble gathering enough people to make a good firefight so i don't think it's a sign that the war itself is going poorly i think this is the same time all they need is one r.p.g. and it could take down a helicopter and it could have some of us if we were for they sometimes have the ability to take one incident like that and catch us in a bad way socks but stuff happens but you don't think this is about the concept of revenge you don't think of this is trying to appease americans trying to pacify them it's not only there there's also in tribal culture there's the idea. when you take down the guy who you then you make an impact so part of that is information operations against the taliban and to influence the local population and of course there's an element of that to make the american public feel like we've got some revenge and we did it with whether we got the exact guy who pulled the trigger we got all these clothes if we didn't kill him and that's good but then again today what are we actually getting out of this war again why why did these men die well

let's hope we did not afghanistan and pakistan as bases for the taliban and al qaeda to plan operations against other places so that's the that's the old after ten years of war after more than a trillion dollars that has been spent on this specific war thousands of lives have been lost we can hope that we deny them this area in the future they have all we also look at it again to somalia and just keep going the world over it's the i mean we've got to go where we find you know i mean we can only fight and where we know they are we know they're there killing their stuff and from doing things other places you know so if they don't have that as a safe haven where they can recruit train refit and play in operations elsewhere that's a good thing because it was all going to be there isn't stopping anybody from doing things in other places because we now we see other networks rising up and like i mentioned yemen and you have somalia and you have more people who are constantly being recruited because of the fact that we like to bomb a lot of countries i don't know that that's as much of a factor as the separate al qaeda franchise you don't know the facts but you can't

deny the fact that the more wars we wage the more of these jihad is we create because of our actions i think there is a tie there i don't think it's as direct as people like to state and i don't think you know i think. you just don't want to admit it you just don't want to admit it let's talk about the fact that the pentagon also banned the media from being able to cover this event when the remains came what do you think about i think it was perfectly fine it was one of the most tragic days you know in a long time for american forces certainly sadly didn't stop president obama from having his personal photographer use those dead bodies as a photo op for his reelection campaign. that was giving her starters can you imagine what did it but can you imagine what the response would have been like if president obama hadn't gone there is not going to go this right to go he was wrong to let his photographer take your picture of him trying to look solemn in a situation where a least one of the solemn as he was also of these people are dying why release the picture why did the pentagon have to block it again and why now only is the white

house photographer because. they always are those who were killed asked that no media be either they didn't have the opportunity to tell the president not to use it as a reelection tool that was a grotesque mockery of his office and a diary trying to save president george w. bush never used any moment like that as a reelection to all yes i'm saying exactly that he was you got to be kidding me how many times he told me a picture of bush at dover using the bodies of our service members of the reelection to we have bush landing on carriers elicit bush was a fighter pilot obama is not you have to expect the president to go to situations like this if anything i think the biggest critique that's true made out there and this is one of the making on the show all this week is that a these types of situations unfortunately this only gets attention now right every single body that arrives it doesn't get the media's attention the president doesn't go to greet it and yes this is been the largest loss of life in a single attack during the entire war right so it's proper but i'm just confused do

you feel like people then put more value on the lives of these navy seals because they're the elite forces are they really more valuable than it's. more of a media event that said i think every life is equally valuable i think because the seals get a lot of you know high level attention that it's ok and it was ok for obama to go again it was fine and proper for him to go but the families us with no attention for his photographer to take pictures of him and then have them released was a disgraceful term to use in general to use things in texas there is a technicality because some of these remains have been identified yet and they can actually ask the family members they didn't even listen to the thirty said elma. and of the other ones they probably just didn't bother to dignify the question with an answer they knew better so do you think that's right do you think that if a family member doesn't want the images of the war that taxpayers are paying for that their relatives and their own neighborhood are running it we should be respected and the public and the taxpayers and the media and what the public and

the taxpayers in the media actually need to be able to visualize right they need to realize they're going to realize what a war looks like what is going on so far away in the majority of americans aren't even concerned about it aren't even connected to it at all sometimes you need to have that type of the concept but i just concur with the entire concept that we need to show caskets and go over in order to prove to america that we're still at war i'm fortunate i think that sometimes that's the only thing that works john thanks so much for joining us tonight and you're sticking around for happy hour right will see the. right sort of times that we have our thursday edition of show and tell and that is the subject a lot of people feel uncomfortable talking about polygamy but are polygamy and democracy incompatible might dive into that topic or we're going to dive into the topic and up. into little we're making it something that you don't we're pretty just sort of go to. help.