few. folks. welcome back to the big picture i'm tom hartman coming up in this half hour as we draw near the first decade anniversary of the nine eleven attacks the shocking new allegation leveled at the cia by one of the nation's chief terrorism experts is it possible that the government knew more about the nine eleven hijackers than the flooding on the while japan is not out of the danger zone in fact the nuclear

crisis is getting worse and worse we've recently learned from japan if the amount of radiation released was more than twenty times that of the ferocious obama and now looks that they may be experiencing the early stages of a total china syndrome melt down and is the united states in danger to finally ideally take on the next corporate personhood battle brewing in america should you back of companies have free speech rights to lie about the safety of cigarettes. is there something the government isn't telling us about nine eleven or the tenth anniversary of the nine eleven attacks just around the corner richard clarke the former white house counterterrorism czar under both presidents bill clinton and george w. bush unveiled some shocking allegations about the cia soon to be released radio documentary clarke alleges that the bush administration c.i. . ok under the leadership of george tenet purposefully withheld information about

the nine eleven hijackers from both the white house and from the white house both before and after the terrorist acts are claims the cia not only knew the were about seven to nine eleven hijackers but actually tried to recruit them prior to the attacks and kept the white house in the dark about it after the recruitment efforts failed but this bombshell contradicts what clarke said in two thousand and four about george tenet and the cia. george tenet was same to the white house saying to the president because he briefly met every morning a major l. it. is going to happen against the united states somewhere in the world in the weeks and months ahead he said that in june july august so what's behind clark's new take on nine eleven and could it be true for more on this i'm joined by phil shannon investigative reporter for newsweek and the daily beast as well as the author of the book the commission the uncensored history of the nine eleven nine

eleven investigation phil welcome thank you for having me great to have you here with us first of all of course the latest allegation you're your take on this is all we see ladies he actually said this in two thousand and nine and these documents terry and i have been sitting on this information for two years clarke gave an interview in two thousand and nine in which he said that after many years of thought on this subject he'd come to the conclusion that the cia probably tried to recruit two hijackers who were living in the united states beginning in two thousand and hid that information from the f.b.i. and the white house because it wanted to try to recruit those guys and after the recruitment effort effort went sour it continued to withhold the information because it was essentially so embarrassed by it and would be accused of not fees and simply fessed up that that certainly would not be the first time that a government agency to cover something up because of embarrassment not to go around it or very human characteristic i'm curious why you know you've really dug into this stuff why did george w. bush ignored the. briefer who flew down to crawford i mean they sent

a special guide out across projectile over that famous memo that condi rice finally had to blurt the name out before congress you know been wow determine a strike inside the united states and then after he got the memo he was scheduled to go back to d.c. but instead he extended his vacation for a couple weeks and nothing happened and then he went longest presidential vacation in history back to george washington and then he went to his brother state of florida rather than going back to d.c. and jeb walk down the entire state. it makes one wonder if bush was just like waiting for something awful happened maybe didn't know what it was i'm not trying to play you know the nine eleven conspiracy theorists here but. what was going on with that well i think all the investigations going on from the the nine eleven commission the congressional investigations there been a lot of investigations of this is that the bush administration just terrorism wasn't their thing it wasn't their subject or prior to nine eleven it just wasn't what interested george bush and condi rice and. it did interest people like george

tenent and dick clarke who was at the white house who was supposedly giving the expertise needed on terrorism they're in from their information their warnings just weren't needed until nine eleven but i interviewed sandy berger saper it was they are going national security advisor again and he told me that he had told. it was a condi rice was quote you know the running national security advisor. your number one priority is going to be nine eleven is going to be there and they are going to attack us your eyes states and that he had personal knowledge that al gore had said the same thing to dick cheney and that bill clinton had said the same thing to george bush bed that they had heard the message and that they all appeared to have taken it seriously. did is it literally that they just you know i know that dick cheney was put in charge of the counterterrorism task force in march and they didn't even meet until september was that really just because they're saying this isn't our thing i mean the you know israel was telling us the attacks were coming

london was telling us attacks are coming in russia was i mean i think if we're going to tell you that if you go back and look at the performance of the first year of the of the bush white house it just seems that they were much more concerned about you wrap and get he ran the you know the axis of evil the axis of evil that george bush talked about in that first year that didn't include osama bin laden and al qaida they were focused on these nation states that posed a risk they just couldn't quite get their their heads around the idea that this group they thought sitting in a cave in afghanistan could pose much of a of a threat and history shows that they were you know if we wrong about that do you think that the nine eleven commission did a competent. i think they got a lot of questions answered i think they missed a tremendous amount as well and i think there were some really remarkable conflicts of interest that face the people who are running the investigation that were only acknowledged after the investigation right now we've learned now i mean in the historical record that the warren commission that the reason why earl warren had

tears running down his face when he walked in that photo with l.b.j. when he was asked the chief justice for gore to head up this commission the reason why he was sobbing was because he had just been told that. they were pretty certain that fidel castro killed kennedy and that if the american people found out about it there be such an outcry for invasion of cuba that it would certainly provoke world war three and so they were going to have to basically do this investigation in a way that did not belong to that job so the conclusion that they've already arrived at. you me you're more than i do but i think more and more and put it you know i'm not saying that for the record i'm saying that as a set up for the question is there was there a similar narrative. that might have run through the nine eleven. commission had they had they established. any kind of. presuppositions before they went into it that they were looking to prove rather than simply trying to find the evidence i think or anything that they were trying to conceal for that matter i think you can

certainly be criticized for having gone into this investigation with the mindset that they were going to hold no people human beings accountable for what had gone wrong even though all of the evidence in front of them showed that some human beings had made terrible errors and should be held accountable and should be punished and i think that mindset i think to this day. it's a real feeling a bit to this day nobody has ever been disciplined or fired for what went so terribly wrong in the government prior to nine eleven and for that matter the bush admin i find it astounding that the bush administration not only escaped responsibility for that happening on their watch but basically has bragged about the fact that. it happened on their watch but it is perverse in many ways but that is the case it's very interesting phil thanks so much for me my pleasure thank you for she dropping by there are still a lot of unanswered questions out there about nine eleven.

it's the good the bad of the various maisha simply ugly first the good jim hightower the texas author when at most n.b.c.'s today and offered up the best political analysis of the rick perry that i've heard yet. no one should get me on the air but there's there's a real rick perry and you know it and they say that the higher the monkey climbs and we see him it's only sad when perry has got a very ugly so yeah we're already seeing that it was more and more every day and age george w. bush without the intelligence things were warning us straight off the bat the tea party poured into a new new york times c.b.s. poll released today the tea party is officially one of the most unpopular groups in the nation only twenty percent of americans now approve of the tea party a whopping forty percent disapprove of twenty three different groups asked about in

the poll including democrats republicans atheists and muslims tea party ranks dead last in approval in fact the only group that rival the tea party's unpopularity was the christian right it looks like america is finally moving on and leaving the tea party crazies behind and the very very ugly herman cain he's a shop owner turned islamophobia republican presidential candidate jumped on the impeach obama bandwagon yesterday speaking to a conference call of internet walkers cain said impeaching the president would be a great thing to do and then ran down the list of impeachable offenses beginning with the president's support for the affordable care act and ending with the president's opposition to the defense of marriage act so let me get this straight president obama passes a law to provide health care coverage to nearly every single american so they don't die and takes a position supporting greater equality and civil rights for gays in america. and cain things those are impeachable offenses that's appearing here. coming up

disaster continues to strike at the fukushima plant in japan but danger lies under the ground after the birth. drives the world the fear mongering used by politicians who makes decisions to didn't break through that sort of if you may who can you trust no one who has you in view who would have global machinery see where we had a state controlled capitalism is called sasha's when nobody dares to ask we do our t. question more.

even though the fukushima nuclear is asteroid japan has disappeared largely from the front pages of newspapers at least here in the united states the crisis still continues and is apparently in fact worsening here's what a special witness at the diet the japanese parliament said at the end of july a new radiation measurements. i don't want my team at the radioisotopes center took it upon ourselves to measure and calculate the total amount of radioactive contamination and using all of our expertise on the subject and found the total amount of leakage to be about twenty nine point six times the amount of contamination caused by the nuclear bomb dropped on hiroshima assuming the source material would be your brain him we think the total amount of leakage is about

twenty times the contamination because of that rushing the bone there were also reports that the ground under the crippled nuclear facility is beginning to crack as the nuclear core is melting down into it and deadly radioactive steam might be now as you were in from those cracks further amperage efforts to contain the crisis as one unnamed focus in the worker emailed to a friend earlier this month a lot of the cracks came out of the ground massive steam is coming up from there it's too small to hear yet see a thing it seems like a nuclear reaction is happening underground now we are a back to back here waiting watch out for the direction of wind. so what exactly is going on there and why the media blackout on this increasingly severe nuclear disaster here offer some answers as paul gunter director of the grat reactor oversight project of nuclear power welcome back thanks again for having us tom it's appreciate your being here i it's

a shame though that this is just continuing hundred sixty days no in fact that that clip that we just played of the guy in the diet testifying was sent to me by dear friend of mine who is japanese and lives in tokyo he's they're really starting to get worried in this this. cracks of the planet radioactive steam coming out of the earth that sounds an awful lot like and my knowledge of this is limited to having seen the jane fonda movie but it's a lot like the china syndrome the core melting down through the earth and hitting the water table right that's that's clearly a concern that we've had all along that we know that now that the there have been three meltdowns at the reactors at this six unit site and. the vessel has failed now what seems to be the situation is that is that this korean this melted reactor core has burned through the concrete floor of the reactor building or buildings and has now burned into the earth and reaching

groundwater is creating steam and the readings we're seeing now suggests that it's off scale for the instrumentation that's being used by workers which is ten sieverts per hour so right now it looks like the spent thousand milla seaver it's one million miller room it's five hundred so five hundred is a lethal dose this is a thousand room coming out of these cracks so we're seeing. you know doses that could cause. fatalities within days just put this in context that people are saying that it's a million mill around how many milligrams is dental x. the u.s. in our c. permissable goes through the public is one hundred mil or milligram per year this is one milligram one million milliron per hour so these are lethal doses that are

coming up out of the ground so you know they've been looking to contain this accident by building tents over the reactor units which is kind of ludicrous and of itself and shows the desperation measures that are now being employed but now it's coming up out of the ground through cracks around the facility so the the accident is now you know clearly much more seriously out of control than they're willing to admit into the wild absolutely and you know we were involved in a in our c. u.s. nuclear regulatory commission hearing on july twenty eighth of this year where the u.s. nuclear regulatory commission basically admitted that the fuel fragments found over a one and a half miles away from the facility. did not come from explosions from the fuel pool from those spent fuel pools up on top of the reactor buildings that we've been talking about these were fuel at the corner of the u.s.

nuclear regulatory commission those fuel fragments were rejected from the reactor cores in those explosions so the grazer greets the media that seems to be the concern right now and you know we continue to see stories about aerosolized radioactivity turning up on the west coast clear i think the most recent story los angeles times absolutely headlined radioactive isotope maybe from fukushima detected it's radio absolutely and sulfur which is the right of product of. chlorine from sea water being poured on to those reactors in those early days. of california so good. the problem is that as we pointed out on our very first interview with you that the first thing to be controlled in these nuclear accidents is the information and now it's one hundred sixty days after into this accident and still worsening we still see that the information is being withheld there's an

incredible lag time months before we really understand it is that it's just fellow who testified before the die at. twenty to twenty nine times more radiation has been emitted from fukushima than the roche i'm about i mean this horrified the japanese made the japanese press this is a big deal in japan i didn't see it mentioned in a single newspaper in the united states right is so is the blackout i'm here or there or in both places it's a global nuclear industry that can control the airwaves the media and it you know really were really dependent upon in the media right now like your program like what's on the blogs what's coming up on you tube you know this is where news on fukushima breaks first the just just to clarify in the last minute we have here. in china syndrome like we're apparently seeing right now in

fukushima nuclear reactor their nuclear core melts through the through the reactor vessel melts through that cement underneath it melts into the ground and if it was in say nevada it would be no big deal it would end up in the dirt someplace buried forever but if it hits a water table it explodes out isn't it true that pretty much every nuclear power plant in america or in the world for that matter is built right next to water so there's a low water table because they use it right all the plant isn't this like inherently insane. system it's certainly inherently dangerous and once it's out of control the consequences are an acceptable you know the big concern right now is that we don't really know because we don't have reliable information on how hot that kori i'm material that melted core is if it's hot enough it can separate out the elemental forms of water hydrogen and oxygen and that creates an underground explosive environment well thanks so much we have no nukes yeah. while

the rest of the media ignores focus shima will keep an eye on and bring you the latest news on this global tragedy. imagine there's an industry that sells a product that kills twelve hundred people every single day and that's not because twelve hundred people misuse the product but because the product actually causes death when it's used as directed now imagine that this industry has been given free reign to sell their product for decades killing more people around the nation every decade and it died in all our wars from the revolutionary war and seven hundred seventy six to world war two to vietnam and afghanistan combined so

a lot of risk just in that but then they doubled down when congress asked the c.e.o.'s of the corporations that make up this industry to testify about just how destructive their product is they lie right through their teeth. you see corporate law has evolved over the years to the point where there's virtually no risk to c.e.o.'s or us or shareholders stockholders even when their company or product kills people and even when they lie about it. you are not given leave nicotine is not addictive i believe nicotine is not addictive your thank you john for. congressman cigarettes and nicotine clearly do not meet the classic definitions of addiction i don't believe that nicotine or products are addictive. i believe. i believe the nicotine. addict there's.

no two. that was in one thousand nine hundred four and none of those millionaires you just saw lying to congress as ever been charged with a crime of perjury although you or i would probably go to jail for it and bill clinton got impeached for perjury congress cut them out passed back then but when did democrats control the congress in two thousand and nine they did try to reduce the number of americans that big tobacco kills every year from the four hundred thirty thousand or so a year to something lower. the strategy was to force cigarette makers to warn people about what could happen to them if they continue smoking by putting one of their graphic images or one of these graphic images on their cigarette packs so what do the corporations who make up this industry do now the government is forcing them to at least be honest about their deadly product or they do it took mitt romney's a place. corporations are people my friend we can raise taxes and of course they

are everything corporations are also that goes to people so what do you think oh of course they are as corporations as paypal and as people they have a first amendment right to free speech as in the right to tell us that using their product will make us look like tomorrow man leaving out the fact that smoking their product will actually make us die like the actual marlboro man did from lung cancer the government can't stop you and me from line so i should be able to stop gracious as their logic using that tortured reasoning four of the five largest tobacco companies in the country are now suing the f.d.a. over these graphic labels labels and arguing that as people who back our corporations have the first amendment right of free speech you see you and i as part of our right to free speech also have the right to lie ever said yes dearie a little great that outfit when you didn't really mean it or i can't go to the

party because i have to study when in didn't really have to study we all have the right to lie except in a very few circumstances like when you're under oath and these corporations are now coming right out and saying that they have the same right of free speech to say or not say whatever they want about their product including whether or not or how it can kill you. lorillard the third largest cigarette maker in the country so that the f.d.a. has new regulations are an unconstitutional way of forcing tobacco manufacturers to disseminate the government's anti-smoking message considering the smoking as i said kills twelve hundred americans a day and costs the nation a fortune in health care costs and lost productivity but it's actually really important for our government to adopt an anti-smoking message throughout our nation's history there's always been an understanding that the government plays a role in protecting the consumer from corporate wires from hucksters so innocent

fake bill of goods or advertising that their products will help us when in reality it poisonous the supreme court has even backed up this principle saying that commercial speech as in speech used by corporations to sell a product is not protected by the first amendment since the constitution clearly gives the government powers to regulate commerce but in recent years the supreme court now fully embracing the idea of corporate personhood as expanded the free speech rights of corporations in the citizens united decision last year the high court ruled the government cannot restrict a corporation's right to free political speech opening the door for corporations to pollute the airwaves with lies about politicians they didn't like or to push laws or ballot initiatives or politicians that they don't like so when this tobacco versus the f.d.a. case reaches the supreme court then five right wing justices will have an opportunity to expand a corporation's right to free commercial speech as well opening the door for

corporations to brazenly or implicitly law i about the products they're selling. even though big tobacco has lost a friend in congress they may still have a lot of friends on the supreme court and should they prevail and if corporations are granted complete free speech when it comes to advertising and packaging their products as in the right to lie and welcome to a wild west economy where consumers will have no idea what products will help them or which product will kill them pharmaceutical companies will not be allowed to advertise on the airwaves their drug will cure depression leaving out the fact that a side effect of the drug is instant death or car companies will not be able to tout how fast their new car model is leaving out the fact that the gas tank occasionally explodes eventually as most free market libertarians argue the invisible hand will weed out those products that harm us but only after a few hundred or a few thousand or a few million people die first that's why corporate personhood is

a very dangerous idea and that's why it's crucial we fight back against this notion that corporations are people you can start by reading the best book on the topic on equal protection by somebody else it was a radio t.v. show as a whole history of corporate personhood from the boston tea party to citizens united and tells us what we can do about it and i'm going to move to amend or and support a constitutional amendment that once and for all those corporations are not people that's what actual people decide what products are safe and not big tobacco see those. that's the big picture first night for more information on the stories we covered visit our website to tom hartman dot com free speech dot org r t dot com also check out our two you tube channels there are links to tom hartman dot com and this entire show is available as a free video podcast and i tunes and we have a free trial have an i phone and i pad app in the app store you can set his feedback at twitter atomosphere are on facebook atomosphere arbonne our blogs message boards and telephone comment line and thom hartmann dot com and don't

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