but more than a dozen ukrainians are still being held. and my colleague will be here in less than thirty to thirty minutes to bring you the top news of the day but right now it's back to washington studios for our part two of the alyona show that's coming up next for you right here on r.t. . guys it's time for a show and tell on. last time we took a page from our interview with republican presidential candidate buddy roemer he explained that he has kept his campaign contributions and one hundred dollars so that no special interests can interfere with his political message so should americans be limited in how much they can donate to political campaigns it's going to produce a pretty reason to send to you to find out what you had to say so when it comes to campaign financing well there's individual money public money political party money hard money soft money matching funds political action committees and t.v.

advertising paid and promotions paid for by outside groups corporations and labor unions with their own agenda in fact in two thousand and eight president obama raised and spent about seven hundred fifty million dollars and many analysts are convinced he will raise close to one billion dollars for two thousand and twelve this at a time when real estate values are still down and unemployment remains stubbornly high it just looks a little odd in an economy that has been going down that political contributions while they keep going up i make sure wonder if politicians are only serving those that can afford it so do any of our viewers think we need to put limits on how much money americans can donate to elections germy said absolutely all the candidates should follow buddy roemer's example and not accept donations greater than one hundred dollars bill had a good idea he said all contributions should go into a public pool and only lections should then be publicly financed kyl said how they will know donations we also receive some input from miles in new zealand who wanted

us to know that in his contrary to the amount of the amount people can donate to a political party or candidate and how much they spend is restricted well miles it may never have looked that way to you but in this country we used to have similar restrictions. kind of makes you wonder with campaign finance laws decimated since citizens united ruling the office of president is starting to look more and more like the option for the highest bidder maybe buddy roemer has the right idea after all. now as always we thank you for your responses and here's our next question for you you just finished an interview on the economic and political turmoil which has rocked the european union to its core we want to know your thoughts on the do you think of the european union the european union as we know it will survive that the next couple of years you can respond to us on facebook twitter and you tube and you know is your response that just like me on it. now over the next week you're going to be seeing

a lot of coverage leading up to the tenth anniversary of the nine eleven attacks and we'll mostly see and hear our arguments that ten years on we're safer sure we may be involved in a few costly wars overseas and sure our civil liberties may have been eroded but at the end of the day there hasn't been another major attack on our soil so makes up for all of it well tonight we're going to look at exactly the opposite argument we're going to ask it ten years later and even after the death of bin laden if we're still losing this so-called war on terrorism from our bloated military and intelligence budgets are exploding debts are motional reactions and over reactions our guest one argues that perhaps the biggest mistake our country made in the wake of nine eleven was not knowing our enemy not understanding the strategy of al qaeda to morally and financially. joining me from our studio in new york to discuss that as ross author of bin laden's legacy why we're still losing the war on terror i want to thank you so much for joining us tonight and i guess for starters let's just start with the really simple question as is part of the title on your book why

are we still losing the war on terror. i think the way we have to understand security is to see security as our keep abilities to defend ourselves and our resilience in the face of an attack versus the enemy's capacity to attack us i think if we look at it that way. if it were the united states is ten years after the nine eleven attacks it's a significantly degraded country now obviously not all of that is due to the fight against terrorism you have a number of things that are unrelated to that problem like the subprime mortgage crisis the explosion in health care costs as well as the research the era of resource scarcity that we're entering into but despite that you know the cost that we've spent on our fight against terrorism have been enormous and in many ways it's exactly the basically placed us in harm's way with respect to al qaeda strategy by giving them a bloated system that they could attack. now the thing is about a strategy here for one talk about like i mentioned bleeding the country dry when

it comes to nearly bankrupt. morally doing the same thing if you look at guantanamo bay and some of the remnants of what's happened in the war on terror of the last ten years it's not like that was a secret these are things that we heard bin laden say on on videotapes i just don't understand how is it that the government missed that. i think in many ways we got trapped by the term terrorism i mean i thought that our understanding of the enemy was rather poor coming into the writing of this book but i was actually surprised that in my view it was indeed much much worse than i expected looking through key documents national military strategic planning for the war on terror the white house's national strategy for combating terrorism the nine eleven commission report very basic analyses that one should do when confronted to be had ramped up military resources simply weren't performed for al qaeda we differ had an ends ways and means assessment of this enemy that is what is al qaeda pursuing and what are the

ways in which it ways and means by which they want to achieve those goals there was a focus on their goal of establishing the caliphate and their tactic of terrorism but there was this unresolved disconnect between that goal and their tactics if you look at bin laden's both biography and also his public statements it's very clear that he had the economy and i had even before the nine eleven attacks i have to say that it terms of our overall strategic assessment i think that that was an area where we've had a clear failure for the past decade now of course we have to remember that there was a financial crash and you mentioned the subprime mortgage crisis and we that wasn't because of al qaeda but this has contributed to our debt trillions of dollars in fact of spending now that has been on our record because of these wars that we waged but you know i also wonder. you bring up the fight between a muhammad ali and george foreman in one nine hundred seventy four as a way to look at the way that we've been fighting against al qaida or against

terrorism globally explain that a little bit more to less. yeah the reason i go with this is because there is actually an academic article in the journal international security published just a few months before nine eleven it was called how the week when wars and the analogy it used for how a small non-state actor like al-qaeda could defeat or undermine a power like the united states is precisely like that fight this was a fight in one hundred seventy four when george foreman was the strongest most powerful boxer of his generation he was heavily favored gives muhammad ali and what ali ended up doing in that fight is cowardly against the ropes and sometimes he even whisper horse taunts towards george foreman saying george hit a nerve george you disappoint me what form and did is unleashed a furious flurry of blows against muhammad ali and to the crowd that was watching and to form of himself it almost certainly seemed that foreman was winning the

fight because he punched him he punched me punched what they didn't realize is that the elastic ropes were actually absorbing the majority of the blows and so foreman succeeded in tiring himself out then in the eighth round muhammad ali knocked him out what this article in international security argues is that this is how the weak win wars that you turn the stronger opponent's strength against it so that the harder it hits the more ramped up it becomes the more it's simply exhausted so in resources and while it is certainly hasn't fully replicated muhammad all these successful strategy it's actually a very good analogy for what has happened over the course of the past ten years which is one reason incidentally why i have such a problem with some of the current talk about al-qaeda being on the ropes because one could argue based on that analogy that they've actually been on the ropes for quite some time and they don't necessarily mind being there. well yeah that is something that we've heard actually repeated numerous times by countless officials including leon panetta including general petraeus to they've said that at one point

there were only about one hundred al qaeda left and all of afghanistan now i think the most recent statement coming from leon panetta was that there are maybe two dozen al qaeda members left tops that do you think that there is part of it i mean there are other networks out there you can go to somalia look at al-shabaab as al qaeda in the arabian peninsula is al qaeda more a mentality more of you know a certain strategy rather than just counting how many figures there are. but i think the group actually matters a great deal and part of that deals with kind of how this has been framed has been spraying does a strategic challenge to the united states and if you're dealing with a number of individuals who have a radical idiology then that's a problem you have to deal with you still have to deal with that that threat of terrorism but overall i think that it's it's the organization and the ability to have safe space where you can plan attacks we can communicate that really matters a agree with the analysis of the nine eleven commission report which is that for carrying out a catastrophic strike like the nine eleven attacks having

a safe haven like al qaeda had afghanistan prior to nine eleven is really quite critical though you mentioned somalia and you just looking at the world and the geography of where this militant group is ten years ago it had one safe haven in afghanistan today they have a safe haven in southern somalia they have safe haven in parts of yemen parts of pakistan also in northern mali so to me when you look at just the basic facts of where the network is not necessarily just the central leadership which i do believe at least for the moment is in a degraded state but when you look at where the affiliates are and groups that have threaten the united states or pledge that are allegiance to al qaeda they're in more places now than they were a decade ago which in part indicates that we can't be you so quick to declare that victory is just around the corner. now if we go back to this emotional aspect he said that interviewing a lot of these documents you realize how utterly unprepared we were how there wasn't a strategy here but this is something that we've seen a lot and i wonder if you think that it's something that's getting worse if we talk

about as well as the conflict in libya that we got ourselves involved in where our excuse me at the president got involved in unilaterally there was no real end game there no strategy it was a humanitarian intervention now of course we know that it's very obvious that they wanted market off the out but so is that problem that still plagues us does this mean that we're going to lose the fights that like george foreman they had. i don't know if we'll lose and certainly i hope not and i am very invested in the united states i believe in the country and part of what i do professionally is try to advance u.s. interests but. you know i agree about libya both that it was rather premature decision and also i have kind of a broader strategic problem with that intervention which is that it's it was in a part of the world to a neighborhood of the world if you will in which we had a lot of very strong strategic interests we have strong strategic interests in yemen in pakistan in afghanistan iraq somalia i mean these are difficult and the

cell these are difficult places to deal with libya was a place where the you do us had almost no strategic interest at the time that it started bombing i agree actually with many of the advocates of the libya intervention that there could have been a very real humanitarian crisis on our hands of libya but i also don't think it's the u.s. or israel or the roles of certain other countries either to solve every humanitarian crisis that could be out there indeed if you try to do so you end up expending so many resources that you undermine your own ability to act in the future so i think that libya was an example of humanitarian intervention in which u.s. national interest didn't play the kind of role in the conversation that i would have liked obviously. the story isn't fully told why hope for the best there if things end up going south if the t.m.c. ands up not being what a lot of people in the us thought they would be if there's

a strong insurgency on the ground all of these could make this libya intervention which is very celebrated right now look much worse say six months a year or two years from now and let me again say i hope that's not the case but i do have concerns based on our past experience that we paid insufficient attention to the law of unintended consequences are definitely in a lot of questions that need to be asked their debate i want to thank you so much for joining us tonight. my pleasure. now sort of come you want to visit an inmate imprisoned a one state says he have to pay up first but have more of that time segment that happy hour a judge orders a man who paid his wife for lack of sex last of ron paul uses a dead president and a former vice president to go after rick perry stick around for the epic campaign ad i'm just.

going to be soon which bright. song from silence to. start on t.v. don't come. worldwide manhunt for him lasted for fifteen years. one million euro award was promised for his counter. political smurfs for the west. the national hero for minions in. general and the serbian army. problem are they. are going to. one or two. mission free.

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hardest time for tonight's told time award that's not of those two arizona lawmakers now if you haven't heard arizona's tried a new trick to raise some money for their state and how they can raise like cash well by going after people who visit prison inmates. arizona is the first state in the country to charge people to visit inmates the fee twenty five dollars it's called a background check fee. well arizona is now charging anybody who visits a prison or one of the state's fifteen run complexes a twenty five dollar background check to according to new york times the one time fee is believed to be the first of its kind of the nation arizona a state of uniformly bad now as you can imagine this move quite a few people upset two lawsuits have been filed by prison advocacy groups after complaints from inmates families and critics of this piece say that it's going to have a negative impact on the inmates. critics say it's a bad idea because it discourages people from visiting family members while they're

locked up and having strong community ties is one of the best way to make sure people don't and when they get out so i don't know do you think arizona lawmakers actually put any real thought into this bill not only is there a twenty five dollars fee but the state is now charging a one percent fee on deposits made to a prisoner's spending account and times must be really hard arizona lawmakers go after the spending accounts of prisoners now the new york times asked the chief of staff for the arizona senate wendy baldo about this she said that the money really wasn't going for background checks instead it would be used for maintenance projects of prisons since the state is cut the budget for the corrections department so this fee is really a tax so is this issue a hot topic in arizona they do have a pretty strong anti-tax movement there so are residents upset are they sympathetic to the inmates and their families well not really. so the state is doing what it means to do to help with cost be mad at the person who's sitting behind bars off

the street and i want to read an e-mail that someone sent in glenda hargrove of prescott valley she says i do believe a prisoner should not have visitors but if they do allow the visitors then they should charge heavy fines the state has paid to have the person arrested then court fees and then the incarceration they are being punished do we forget that they gave up their rights when they committed the crime i'm tired of paying paying paying with no increase in solar security and people losing their jobs and homes when is the free stuff going to stop a little harsh well here's some info for arizona residents the reason they are prison system costs so much is the state currently requires all prisoners to serve at least eighty five percent of their sentences why not parole some of the forty thousand prisoners in your state sooner let the nonviolent people out early i bet that that would save your state quite a bit of money but instead your lawmakers would rather come up with taxes i mean fees to charge people who are just visiting family members or friends that are in

jail now lawmakers say this is an easy fix because this fee would target an unpopular group clearly but really it's an unconstitutional special tax on a certain group and that's why it's being challenged in court so we're taking advantage of their prison population and a cheap money making scheme we're giving to arizona lawmakers who voted for this measure tonight full time warp. ok time for happy hour and joining me tonight is our chief producer jenny churchill and that is a nonny heard on the hill reporter for roll call thanks for joining me ladies things happen so it's i guess some people are saying that now that it's past labor day now that summer's over the real campaign season has begun what you could have fooled me because i've literally heard nothing else on t.v. lately except for campaign talk anyway now the real campaign season has begun let's take a look at the latest ad coming from ron paul. you started this with

a call to the sixty three electable race he was the wrong man for the job while your young texan named ron paul was one of only two congressmen to endorse ronald reagan's campaign for president america has decided to trust texas cheerleader. with great. ron paul is really coming up with an epic ad lately and we played some other ones on the show but i mean i kind of i kind of like that strategy right because the one thing that we always hear from every republican candidate is them harping back to ron paul as the godfather and yeah go i mean it's maybe i wasn't going to say i learned. my bible but the thing is paul was one of only four a congressman to endorse ronald reagan when he first ran as a little rabbit in your face style right but in two thousand and seven right didn't come didn't come out and say something about ronald reagan being

a failure yet even then you got this like four paragraph document but the important thing here is there's we're doing deal with that whatever but there's two more things here one is that ron paul is actually running for president he has a smear campaign which he didn't do last time and the other is people are actually taking him serious perry came out with this. big long statement about ron paul came out against reagan and people are starting to take notice but i think the more interesting thing is what this is going to do to perry's campaign what the allegations are going to do if anything i don't know what do you really i feel like that kind of you know that's been out there for a while i feel like you know a lot of people have tried to throw that at perry before for supporting al gore like even before he announced it i was immediately was one of the talking points to what might be a problem during his campaigning but it isn't black and white and said to slow dramatic that means anyone can get in then by the way if you just close your eyes it's the most spectacular it's like it's like a movie preview i'm sure that there are a lot of ron paul supporters that you know play before they go to bed when i did

call him the one again it was in the context of a sudden says time so the one i love it was. the odd one story of it just this one just cracks me up and apparently cracks up the rest of the world to see now in so many news sites a frenchman has been ordered to pay out about fourteen thousand dollars to his ex-wife who's divorcing him for a lack of sex over twenty one years of marriage now what happened here is that they have an article in france a civil code that states that mary's married couples must agree to a shared communal life and so what the judge did is interpret that as saying that sex is part of that shared communal life because if you're married then you automatically you undoubtedly are having sex i feel like i've always heard the exact thing about marriage i don't know if you have not married but is that once you get married or once you get married you stop having any sex i think the twenty one years is the amazing part to go twenty one years which made me think how come they didn't say anything about him did he cheat did they have that sort of exactly

what i you know you know he said ok if you're going to sue for your partner not having sex with you don't wait twenty one years discredits you a little bit also could she make him look and feel any worse. like i was leaving you know when i'm suing you. i'm sure you agree with me he blames it on health problems and tiredness and as i read what i hear is and they are saying spare me coke and headaches i guess which the wife always the one that's responsible for the headaches that came over really that's pretty hilarious i feel like only in france but i also feel like maybe she deserved to know the money to the no use saying oh they know the money not only not doing. that i think you've got to work that out on your own i'm not really sure if it's the for the courts to decide what i know now how did you get out how much was it that she had to go elsewhere for sex and that was the cause either she was put in many ways i don't even know you know you know i

know you know you just scratching the surface is true. story ok does an autism thing where apparently this is really affecting quite a few people that there are no more space shows right now the fall two thousand and eleven season is the first time that there has been no t.v. show on any network featuring people on spaceships since probably made one nine hundred eighty s. now there are a couple animated shows out there but no live action and this is a really huge deal and some people are saying that you know this is this is the end of nasa this means the end for space exploration but it's really because we're just obsessed with new crap like this. we have strict rules of the sixty's he she. would. i just have to wonder you know for

a while there there was just so much hope for humanity for the future of the space exploration who know it was a reaching the final frontier and now it's like forget it you know we're done and there's no hope for this race so now we just show the biggest degenerates that we have on t.v. fighting each other on this is so depressing but it's so you know we have an advantage over humanity you. know i mean i think i found a solution and this is a way to keep nasa in business to get space shows back on television we have to do reality space and send all of those people just to a different planet like people telling america they would be out now that's going commercial space travel i bet you could probably get the bird i'm sorry i spend it send if you reality star jersey shore season fourteen jersey shore in the middle. does anybody want a floating now. so let me know no no no no no no no no no i'm grabbing. my dog gravity zone for some reason that just kind of creeps me out a little bit. but i just really these days you have you know like locked up you

have all the c.s.i. eyes and the cop dramas you have things that are just complete fantasy the vampire shows out there when you know you have game of thrones you want to go back to these fantasy dark ages i don't know how to be fair there are reality based shows like ancient alley ends which you know kind of looks at whether or not aliens came here in the past and that's what we think are gods anyway so she was good great great reviews and great gratings and actually one one night they even be celebrity rehab while i think i might actually check that one out are you guys. thanks for joining me tonight but they're pretty tight so thanks for tuning in to make sure we come back tomorrow on the past we've talked to people trying to make christianity hit for sexy some are going to talk to paul copland the author of no more christian nice guy he's part of a movement that's working to make over jesus and the ultimate macho man now in the meantime there's a good week in the fan of the live show on facebook and follow us on twitter if you missed any of the night show or any other nights you can always catch w.q.

dot com slash the lawn chair and coming up next tuesday.

for the full story we've gone to. the biggest issues get a human voice to face with the news makers. a number of khadafi loyalists including his security chief willing to share with the whereabouts of the colonel himself still this is concerns grow over what kind

of regime could be replacing. anger at austerity spills into the streets of italy and spain with their governments preparing to tighten belts even further to calm the markets and save the faltering here. calls for independence from the u.k. grow louder in wales where nationalist sentiment is high. and third annual global policy forum kicks off here in your novel today's focus security and multiculturalism needs to now with more in just a moment. it's eight am in moscow i match reza good to have you with us here on r t our top story the security chief of ousted libyan leader colonel moammar gadhafi has fled the country and is now in neighboring new share according to officials there could offer wasn't said to be part of the convoy.