welcome to the lower show at the real headlines with none of the mercy are going to live out of washington d.c. now tonight we'll take a look at what we can expect next in libya other historical examples mean anything it could be a long difficult and even more violent road ahead then whether it's the obama administration claiming that congress has its hands tied and sky or republican critics claiming a business resident is indecisive in week this myth of powerlessness seems to be everywhere too that all the evidence points to the contrary david sirota is going to join us for that one and the tea party grist on the scene with messages of

fiscal conservative conservatism anger at washington but one person claims that their real goal is a christian nation we're going to see what evidence he has going to have all of that and more for you tonight including a dose of happy hour but first let's take a look at what the mainstream media has decided to me. now the reports coming out of libya have been changing up by the minute over the weekend and continuing on today first they said coffee at the tripoli that he was rumored to be day then he came out and made a record for an arab leader three addresses within twenty four hours on defiance maybe those around him surrender were captured including sons muhammad safe at the moment there is still no confirmation of where he is and hasn't been captured the fighting still continues in pockets of the national transitional council has declared his rule over and we've all seen the images of libyan celebrating in the streets. i think the biggest questions are of course what's to come now despite the

fact that even our own president barack obama made a statement that the situation in libya is still fluid is still uncertain mainstream media of course has already announced that this is a victory and they've moved on to asking the really tough political questions now most of that being can we now say that obama has won can we all say that perhaps that congressional displeasure that we saw with the move that he made is going to go away is that it a little bit of congressional displeasure just some more vapid political rhetoric that supposedly leading from behind those critiques will stand now i've got a big problem with that listen is most everybody happy that an arab dictator whose rule for more than forty years or probably soon be gone yes so is there for a reason for celebration for happiness for the libyan people who wanted him out just that the fact that of course the hardest times may yet be to come yes of course if you're just going to turn it into a political win here in the u.s. have that what now attitude when your missing one very important piece of the

puzzle the fact of the way that obama got us involved in this war to begin with was illegal it's not just congressional displeasure it's about a lot more than that it's about blatantly by leading us laws clouding your idea of congressional authorization it's about a unilateral action that is a very dangerous president just because it often might be out doesn't mean we should give president obama a free pass otherwise it's going to happen again now might be some republican war hawk that gets us in toronto about asking anyone next in might not and so quickly in my not end without the loss of any american lives but if you let it go this time and you have absolutely no power to speak the next time around and what about that u.n. resolution in which ousting gadhafi was not one of the goals i guess they forgot about that too you know and if the media can still ask the question about leading from behind with a straight face when they're well aware of the illegal actions that he took by being over as well as with his executive authority well then i say they were really screwed but unfortunately. that seems to be the pattern that we've seen time and

time again as glenn greenwald pointed out today on salon dot com the shamelessly exploiting hatred of the latest evil villain to rationally shield all sorts of policies from critical scrutiny the everything is justified if we get a bad guy mentality that is one of most destructive most comic staples of american political discourse now use his words because he said it best and thankfully a few other voices out there today like tim carney of the washington examiner and out of the american prospect of doing that to the mainstream with televised media i guess that's just thinking too far back and maybe a little too far forward for that they only know how to live in the here in the now in the most simple way possible rather than connecting any of the dots placing things into historical context rather than realizing that the next time the president tries to do the same thing they'll be partly to blame because they let it go the first time around and just ponder office congressional displeasure when it's the government watchdogs it's that media who should be the most displeased and who should hold our political figures accountable for their actions but apps ok choose

to miss. now walking off he has yet to be located or caught and fighting continues in pockets of tripoli they have to start thinking about what's ahead it's one thing to watch images of celebrations jubilation on t.v. screens and think up a hard part is over we've seen this happen in the past if you think iraq you think you can think haiti now unfortunately after the celebrations though the hard part is the calm one country after another is now recognized the national transitional council but where we are but knowing who they are who in libya they represent and one of the chances that the boots on the ground which we were promised wasn't going to happen well become a reality in this case this with me is christopher swift of the university of virginia law school's center for national security law professor thanks so much for being back on the show to be back like i said we couldn't play our clips unfortunately having a bit of a technical problem but i'm sure you've seen the images right of everybody in tripoli the people on the streets celebrating but is it

a little too early to just start celebrating is the hardest part well it depends on who you ask if your the libyan people in your emerging from a forward back eight long nightmare then you have a lot to celebrate but after the celebration comes the hard job of institution building of national reconciliation and of building a transparent legitimate government and that's where the rubber is really going to hit the road now what do we know so far right about this transitional national council as the former justice minister of the moment is heading it but where do we think that they're going do we know exactly who they represent in terms of the libyan what we know we know a number of things about them the first is that several months ago they started off as like a loose grouping of everyone who was against gadhafi who was not afraid to show up and then they evolved into a somewhat effective fighting force and during the course of about process they had actually developed internal consultation mechanisms an institutional structure and a way of negotiating in mediating all the various interests within their own factions whether or not they will be able to take that structure that they've built

on the worst possible conditions and turn it into. something that looks like a government we don't know yet again the proof is going to be in the pudding but they are a long way in terms of their institutional development from the ragtag group of rebels that started this war several months back but i'm just wondering how much of their ragtag group of rebels right because if you mentioned i'm blanking on his name right now the former justice minister he is not a ragtag group of rebels he's not a young kid that was just down the streets trying to be angry and so now we've had a constitutional charter that's been written to you and that's been presented to the international community but who wrote that and what's a do right average libyans out when it comes to me constitution well let's put things in perspective unlike a european or north american democracy civil society in libya has been controlled entirely by the state so if you wanted to go and get a college degree if you wanted to study abroad if you want to do anything other than live in the village you came from that had to be decided centrally by the regime so it's not surprising to me that there are

a lot of former regime people or people who had some connection to the regime be it the bureaucracy or the cabinet in the transitional national council the issue isn't where they're from the issues where they're going and we look at the question of where they're going that that's a much more complicated set of parameters that when you consider do we also expect of course there are those who are talking loyalists that are still around what happens to that i mean what are the chances of this breaking out into a civil war i think we already have a store and we have are going to have a civil war with every conflict whether it's a civil war or an international conflict has two phases that has a political phase and that's a military phase the military phase is far from over my personal opinion that we're going to see another three to six months of intermittent conflict and it may look ugly on some days and may look better on others but the political phase of this conflict has just kicked into high gear it's time for institutional consolidation it's time to begin the process of knack of national reconciliation and there's

a lot that the international community can do in that political phase without having to get involved. with the continuation of the military sort of the same time might we see you know if we go back to you had mentioned of course the example of iraq when there was also a lot of jubilation and then how many years later and it still has to have a lot of political problems right how long was it before they even had a government the last time around might we see the same looting the same type of stealing right of the country's resources when it comes to when you mention it used to be a nationalized system now who gets to put their hands on everything is a messy affair right the business of war is about destroying one kind of social political order and creating putting in its place another one right so we should expect things to be unpleasant on predictable and difficult over the space of the next three months six months even the next year whether or not it's going to look like iraq or not that's going to depend on local conditions so let's avoid making historical analogies here because they're never actually good never exactly the thing to ask is whether or not the transitional national council has the

institutional capacity to step into the vacuum that's been left by the collapse of the about the regime now if indeed we do see of course some fighting continue on like you said to even now they're still fighting in pockets of tripoli are we going to see nato are going to see the u.s. try to use that as an excuse to keep people around to have more trainers go inside i mean after all if we look back to the u.n. resolution then their job is done they were just supposed to keep civilian safe it wasn't even about ousting it off the this the goals have already far exceeded what they were supposed to do with the beginning but that is a fair critique it's hard to say what exactly is going to happen next i think if you look at the united states and you look at its primary european allies france britain and to a certain extent nearly everyone's exhausted by this particular conflict in the united states within the white house the president today said he has absolutely no interest in boots on the ground i do think however that the international community

with the united states the european union and also the arab league at. all of those entities have a continuing interest in a transparent legitimate and pluralistic libyan government that's at peace with this people but what really counts is boots on the ground everything to see when peacekeepers are going to see some type of police force sense of her from here on it is it is way too soon to see to say in the interim there are a lot of things that the international community can do to help the transitional national council get going but don't necessarily require that sort of effort one example being releasing some of the thirty billion dollars of frozen khadafi funds sitting in north american and european banks now do you think i mean i was just doing my sake of beforehand that this has been dictated the president in terms of the way that he actually went about getting the u.s. involved which i firmly stand by this because i'm still very shaken by the fact that he did unilaterally without asking congress get the us involved in another war but now the media is very happy to say the game is over this is a done deal we've succeeded from a legal perspective this is

a pretty complicated constitutional question and it would take longer to explain what i have available to me but in the short from a political science perspective there are two rules about getting involved with a civil war the first is don't and the second is if you do make sure your side wins and from that perspective. the mainstream media may have a point the issue really isn't who wins in terms of our domestic political context though because he was really talking about iraq is that why do they have a point there is a tendency to reduce everything in washington to a political game or process story the story in libya is whether or not the libyan people and the transitional national council has the capacity to try and form their society into something that more accurately represents the aspirations the legitimate aspirations of the people who live in that society of course but how much is the international community going to be able to control itself to fight the urge this is simply a very large role in setting up who is going to be the next leader alive because this is what's happening all around the arab spring as clearly some of these

autocratic leaders you could say have been in power for decades thirty years for a. the years we've worked with them the entire time this is a goldilocks situation if we intervene too much or for too involved then we may interfere with the natural process of developing a new political and social equilibrium if we aren't involved enough then there may be the kind of fragmentation and disorder and continued problems that militate against the kind of long term goals and interests we have in the region and by long term goals and interests we have in the region i'm referring to transparency which it in the sea and pluralistic systems that respect their people not an order of them how about oil but interest well go out to primary interest in oil there is in your order from marilee and that's primarily in italy ok now i'm just wondering when it came to syria of course last week on earth excuse me last week president obama also made a call for bashar al assad to step down also announced a new round of sanctions by he made a statement that we can and we should not intervene because this has to happen in

syria but then we intervened in libya so is this is this a lesson learned is this is the sign of hypocrisy how do we see the different approaches different countries different conditions different restraints but i am struck by just why i make these universal statements that we can see is that we cannot or we should not intervene in other countries and it has to be done by their own people i think the president's statement is not to defend or support the president only fashion to present a statement with respect to libya sorry with respect to syria was focusing on what he hoped the regime would do and his position and i might add is this one of the european union the arab league saudi arabia and turkey most importantly turkey being that they shouldn't be in the process of exterminating their own people they should allow protests to happen in a peaceful consensual fashion and that the some sort of dialogue should be opened up between the ruling authorities and the public such as it's mobile ice that process is going to be different in syria than it wasn't in libya it's different in egypt than it was in yemen and every one of these countries is specific our

capacity to influence events on the ground ah. the nuclear negatively in every one of these countries is different and one of president or any other decision maker makes that kind of call they have to look at the situation and have a look at the resources and constraints they presented with and i think that's what we're seeing here smoking ocracy it's not inconsistency it is different conditions and different restraint i think that it's an inconsistency and sometimes the progress the only because they choose not to necessarily make those announcements and you know make it obvious that they feel like this is a different situation they still claim that we have certain principles which obviously you can say that we want democracy we want freedom everywhere but you have to admit it's going to happen in a different way and not just act like we have one policy and that's the policy and so be it that's exactly right one of the things that i think is important distinguishing syria from libya is that we in libya there was pretty clearly early on a recognition by the united states government by our allies in europe that there really wasn't a deal to be cut off i think with assad's regime there was a desire over

a long for a long period of time to try to find some mechanism of engagement and hope that they could sort of present supposed to be about the deal was supposed to be about saving the civilians are now over two thousand according to u.n. reports have died in syria wasn't about making a deal with it i'm going to at the moment we don't have you don't have a solution in syria i have to i have to wrap it up but thank you so much for joining us tonight of course it's going to be like you said a long haul as we'll be following this story for a long time pleasure to be with you. now coming out on a member of wiki leaks decides to make a very memorable exit and i tell you what one man did that could set back the organization's next massive leak of information out of the horrible economy and whole numbers many people are asking if iraq obama is a president in progress was outside while joins me in just a moment to discuss. you know sometimes you see the story and the scene so. you think you understand it and then you glimpse something else here's some other part of it and realized everything you

saw. i'm sorry this is the. see. the legs and you know i. feel for the first few. legs. let's not

forget that we had an apartheid regime right leg i think rocky even funny well lead. whenever the governor says there keep him safe get ready because your freedoms. are going. well a massive whistle blowing organization wiki leaks it's quite possible when they learn that some of their most prized information try to see one of the former insiders for songes organization the fact that and when he parted ways it turns out he took

the entire wiki leaks encrypted submission system with him is very old and was once the voice for ricky weeks however is that a gradual falling out with the song at the end of two thousand and ten he finally left but he's remained vigilant to the whistleblowing cause and has formed his own organization known as openly but the thing is before he left the saunders group he claims that he wanted to make sure the names of the leakers were protected so they all decided to delete thirty five hundred files that wiki leaks was repairing to share with the world and the wiped out includes five gigs of information about bank of america the complete u.s. no fly list and details on twenty different neo nazi groups if you remember a song was hinting awhile back about how profound this massive amount of data on bank of america might really have on the company thinks america has a team of some twenty people. trying to. board it's too simple for the corporation to run control of public speech afterward so they're

pretty pretty aeration road. so why did daniel do it was it out of spite he claims that it was to ensure the identity of the leakers remained intact and out of the wiki leaks of mission ability to do that now signs immediately fired back assuring that way he does not retain source identifying material and also made allegations that his former colleague is now working with u.s. authorities he also said that he has damaged the ability to inform the world about many issues of public importance and meanwhile daniel says that he left because co-founder doesn't know how to properly handle this highly sought after information and interview with spiegel daniel said that he feared the saudis released a massive four hundred thousand files on iraq too early without properly protecting those who leaked classified info let's get past the obviously personal spat to the real issue here the information the loss of entire u.s. no fly list the loss of a bank of america information this we have to assume we'll never going to see now

and all of that is a slap to international transparency. now like i mentioned earlier in the show despite the fact that president obama unilaterally involve us in a war in libya with our congressional approval republican still like to claim that he led from behind and the media repeated that freights of the responses that we've seen from republican senators and president with presidential candidates have been absolutely absurd graham and mccain said we also commend our british french and other our allies as well as our arab partners especially qatar and the u.a.e. for their leadership in this conflict americans can be proud of the role our country has played in helping to defeat that often we are granted this success was so long in coming to the failure of the united states to employ the full weight of our air power when it comes to presidential candidate rick santorum he said ridding the world of the likes of gadhafi is a good thing but this indecisive president has had little to do with this trial so it's obvious here that they just can't give obama any credit even if you agree with

his policies so they call him weak democrats on the other hand it almost entirely silent so as not to question their party leader but where is the very real critique about an abuse of executive power just think of how many times this president when it's in his favor his claim to be powerless and out his hands tied by congress and yet when it comes to waging war on his own he steps over that same congress so why does this myth of a weak powerless obama still persist we're going to try to break it down join me to discuss this alex cites all progress thanks so much for being here tonight they showed me now what do you say there are some people out there that think that obama is a weak president and often we've heard also from the democratic party when it came to the debt ceiling debate things like that that he has his hands tied by congress he just can't do anything about it he by that or now there is some truth to both sides here i think he's definitely a strong president in a lot of sense has been one of the most successful legislative presidents that we've seen in recent memory in other hands he has dealt with republicans in

congress that have been totally negotiating in bad faith not at all willing to call the rise so he has had his hands tied on some. but what he can do through congress what kind of issues through congress right because even let's talk about you can talk about health care reform and there there was a lot of blame of course placed on republicans but at the end of the day it was the president who decided to give up the public option he decided that it would be ok to make that concession immigration reform we haven't seen anything like that happen in congress that then just last week president obama changed his deportation policy and just announced that even though before he said that he had already used all of his administrative powers same thing with the debt ceiling debate it was the president who actually said that social security can be put on the table so i feel like very often where people think that it's really all the republicans doing the wrangling it's the president that gives the gives up these issues i mean you certainly can't put all the blame on republicans and i would definitely like to see the president taking a harder line on a lot of issues and there's a lot of things that he could do through executive action bypassing congress like

we just saw with the immigration thing which is a really welcome step and will go a long way i think with health care and with immigration from some sort of the three main legislative agenda items that he had coming in health care immigration reform and climate change he only got one through congress and the health care to be fair and health care debate took much longer than anyone expected not leaving enough time for those other issues so he made the decision right or wrong that he had to sacrifice the public option in order to get it through and then a consequence they didn't get the vision for and this is what we have and what happened last week the executive order was positive but it wasn't as far as a full immigration reform bill would likely go but on the third issue climate change the e.p.a. could unilaterally impose a kind of cap and trade system or or other methods to deal with climate change but i think with any kind of big legislature any kind of big policy reform you'd prefer to go through the legislature but since that's not an option now i'd like to see him pushing for more executive action but what i mean he got us into libya without ever asking congress that is quite

a big executive action if you ask me right he also has placed american citizens on an assassination list that's quite a big. role when it comes to executive action and executive decisions so how do you explain that you would you would like you'd like to see more of those well those particular positives the foreign policy is always going to be different from domestic policy the president the executive is going to have much more leeway and a free rein on foreign policy and congress the constitution doesn't really give congress very little power they can ratify treaties the senate ratified resulted in the house you know on a point ambassadors of what not to approve about theirs but basically foreign policy is toy left to the president so you know whether those were smart policy decisions or not he had more legal authority there than he does on domestic policy that's what i would still like to see action one thing that we can do to stimulate job growth and to help a lot of americans the government basically controls fannie mae and freddie mac. which controls millions of mortgages across the country and there's been a lot of ideas about there about how you can refinance mortgages through fannie mae

and freddie mac's are not involved congress and you know lower mortgages on millions of americans which are more money into the economy you know help create jobs it's sort of like that's something that i would really like to see but i was speaking of mortgages right at the same time have the obama administration now pressing courts which the new york attorney general is trying to fight back to just drop cases when it comes to you know investigating a lot of the banks in the way they handled the mortgages so he clearly thinks and chooses here where he wants to exert executive power and really wants to say that his hands are tied and i'm just wondering how he makes that choice you know i mean i don't i don't know if you can really say that this is the president who's you know surveying all of this and making those choices the administration is a big bureaucracy there's a lot of different things going on i don't really know what's what's going on in the machinations of the bureaucracy if this is actually like a conscious decision that's going on to pursue one policy and not another feel like when it comes to his justice department it has to be some kind of conscious decision that's being made you know especially when it comes to statements that he made when he was on the campaign trail today of course

a lot of people are angry that he's been cracking down even though they said the federal government would stay out of states where they legalize marijuana that's just one issue where he's. you know a lot of people be really disappointed so that the day you buy this rhetoric of this president is weak i guess i have to come down somewhere in the middle i mean i want to go on the usenet honorable ultimately is accountable no doubt i would like him to be stronger i'll definitely give you that and i think there are some places where it could be stronger on appointments he could be making recess appointments right now congress is gone congress is not interested in approving any of his nominations the judicial branch is getting hollowed out by judges who are retiring and not being replaced and so you could be appointing a lot of judges who could be pointing fed nominees who would loosen economic policy which would help stimulate growth so there's a lot of things that he could be doing and we've starting to see some movement there with this integration of thing with doma not defending the defense of marriage act that was another positive move but not quite there what about another stimulus of course the president says that he's going to announce another jobs plan after labor day right after september fifth but why doesn't this go for another

stimulus why do you have to get it through congress if you're going to make it a big thing but he could sell it if you wanted to write i mean you could say david zurawik piece about this today to comparing george w. bush with president obama you are part of this political system you can't just act like you're a bystander and say the congress is doing all this work and i'm just standing around here the american people elected you to do something so if they need to go out make a speech make a strong statement instead of always coming out like somebody who wants to compromise and just say i'm not sure if this would work with congress right shouldn't you push for ideas that you believe in rather than just ideas you think might be able to get passed absolutely and i think it definitely seems like he comes to the table it's like walking on to a used car lot and saying you know i'll give you twenty thousand but really all actually give you twenty five thousand you know he's got a pretty conceding a lot of times when he's heading into these negotiations so i don't know how much a speech gets you just a big tour of the midwest and has a you know legislative policy agenda i think you could be selling things better i

think in general democrats have a much harder problem selling their messages you know they're more interested in compromising the more interest in doing things through a rational process. and you have publicans who are basically negotiating so you can't fit you know obama's economic agenda on a bumper sticker it doesn't so i just think i guess i just wish that they would admit it a little more right the democrats who just say you know what you're right we suck at this and we actually want to compromise we're not doing everything that we honestly can to you know actually create jobs or to keep certain policies in to keep teachers from being laid off which of the end of the day they are doing that right they're signing on to certain legislation but they just don't want to admit it and they want to pretend like there's no pushing pushing pushing pushing but we'll have to agree to disagree on this little balustrades are joining us. are coming up next we have you said it i read it and it's he party claims to be a movement people. and government spending but is the group really trying to make us push the nation or typing the topic.