now richardson over the weekend was quoted saying i'll stay until we get to meet growth and the mainstream media has covered this they've covered the trip richardson's trip now there is no mention of this cover in this coverage though of the cuban five these are five cubans imprisoned in the u.s. who claimed to be in the u.s. monitoring terrorist groups now they're working thirteen years of incarceration in prisons across the u.s. today and if you haven't heard anything about them it made me because the mainstream media doesn't talk much about them despite calls saying that this trial these trials were miscarriages of justice earlier i spoke to william endorsees attorney for one of the cuban five luis medina and i asked him his thoughts on richardson's visit to cuba and if we can talk about freeing an american from cuba without talking about extradition for the cuban five. i don't see how you can there are really two sides to the same question i have of course no personal knowledge of mr gross's case but the cuban government decided that he was

engaged in activity which is illegal under the laws of that country and they tried him and convicted him in a sentenced him and for my client you mentioned luis medina that was his cover name to protect his family his real name is ramon love and then you know he was accused and given a trial and sentenced initially to life in prison that has subsequently been reduced to thirty years but still a very substantial sentence when you say two sides of the same question what is that question. so the question is this someone is engaged in an activity which tends to further the interest of their own country and they're doing that in a foreign country do they thereby become evil people without paying any attention to what their motive their objective and indeed their methodology is for achieving

that. in mr lobban in his case in the case of the other five they were tried in. in miami florida in a media market that. was an to the call to a fair resolution of their case are you saying that they were convicted and the court of public opinion by the media. absolutely and beyond that we use a sense learned that the united states government was paying something on the order in the range of thirty four to thirty seven million dollars a year on the office if you've been broadcasting which was paying journalists to. beam messages into cuba with the idea of on the seating the current regime i think the commonly used phrase now is regime change and of course that the media

message was being disseminated in the very community that my client was tried. and indeed these so-called independent journalists who were writing in the newspapers of miami were being paid to participate in a propaganda campaign against the cuban government you know propaganda what do you think of the mainstream media's coverage of something like richardson visit to cuba which talked about him being rebuffed by cuba and has been quoted as saying you know i don't know if cuba really wants to improve relations with the u. last is this one sided. well i think that it is i could give you examples. from from other matters which are somewhat beyond the scope of this discussion but you know for example i saw in the media that richardson had been invited by the cuban government and yet it

seems to be the opinion of at least a president or kong from things that i've read and other sources that richardson is coming as a private concerned citizen so what is it is he is a fish or easy fowl you know that's that's certainly beyond my knowledge but it is a matter that i think is significant to evaluating the the purpose and the scope of his reason mr richardson is being there and certainly then the question of what's appropriate or inappropriate for the cuban government to respond i think if if a former cuban politician came to the united states and demanded to see my client the government would. not respond very supportive lee to that request we become victims of our own propaganda and certainly when for example a voice of america was set up in the in the days following the second world war

congress recognized that and took very very careful step stay insulate the american public from the propaganda message that we were broadcasting abroad is it is it terribly surprising that they come to believe the very message that they were transmitting the question is are those grievances still the the appropriate way for us to to develop and execute our foreign policy yes or now i think. there are absolutely legitimate grievances that there is no question but if every person or you know my own family came to the united states because of the irish potato famine the irish potato famine doesn't drive our foreign policy with respect to ireland interesting point that would layman north attorney for defendant luis medina now fifteen activists faced a criminal trial this morning for staging a peaceful protest to expose

a school of americas which is now called the western hemisphere institute for security studies but beyond the name to find out why you should care kalen ford has all the details. come on your. twenty seven activists lay down. to stand up to the u.s. army school of the america sometimes you just have to put your body where you are strong beliefs of concerns are facing criminal charges fifteen activists came to court in washington to put the school on trial instead. founded during the cold war the school of the americas was designed to teach latin american soldiers how to fight communism. what its graduates did with their quote counterinsurgency training maybe infamous for murdering jesuit priests and massacring a thousand villagers in el salvador the torturing dissidents in colombia

overthrowing democratically elected governments in chile argentina and hundred. if you insurgency tactics being those that are thought to like an american military to go back and or press their own people in the interests largely of u.s. corporations and oligarchies these u.s. corporations support sixty nine congressmen recently sent a letter asking president barack obama to close the school permanently saying the pentagon's refusal to disclose the names of graduates in instructors shutting its doors would also save american taxpayers one hundred eighty million dollars over the next ten years most us people don't have a clue as to what's being done in their name and being done with their cats tax dollars under pressure the school was closed briefly in two thousand and six before the pentagon reopened it as the western hemisphere institute for security cooperation changing the name was like pouring perfume

a toxic dump activists say closing the school would send the right signal to latin americans lost their respect closing the school i think would help them to be our neighbors and. if our enemies until then those hears they will continue to fight many of the activists i'm trial here in washington will put their bodies on the line yet again outside the gates of the school of the americas in fort benning georgia this november risking arrest once more to call attention to what they call the school of the assassins killing ford artsy washington d.c. and with that it's going to do it for our seven o'clock show but i will be back for more news and analysis at eight pm so i'll see you in what half hour stick around. well when one deals with war for us to realize that this tremendous amounts of damage that are done not just human damage but damage to the physical environment in which the battlefield takes place tremendous amounts of damage done by aerial

bombs by napalm boy chemicals that whether it's hard sonic booms extract to bring mammals or it's the burning oil fields around the rock or it gets destroyed. in the pacific for landing purposes the list just goes on and on the geneva conventions of nineteen forty nine states that tear shall be taken in war to protect trendline against widespread long term and severe damage the united states although it is accepted almost all of the provisions protocol one has taken exception to that. wealthy british style signs that's not on.

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play. play. play play lists. lead mission free liquid intake should free zones for charges free to make amends three. three. three the old free lunch chancellor video for your media projects and free media. sometimes we think that it's easier to make war and to work to create an it or to clean up after it the military is

a major player in terms of environmental outcomes. the environment is war's silent casualty when we talk about the costs of war on the rarely focus on what happens to the land the animals are rarely focus on that which sustains who are or. were completely out of sync in defining threats to our security. at one time the principal threats were in the lottery they no longer are there now environmental and homeland security department are sleeping about vulnerability and preparedness and we just haven't made the same commitment yet in climate change but we really need to do that at the moment it sit for sleepwalking insta zoster we can't afford to state walk into the future we must take decisions an action which

creates a world that we want our children and the children to grow up. the .

war has changed much over the centuries yet our perception of war has changed a little we memorialize the fallen takes some note of collateral damage to civilian lives but in calculating the cost of war we seldom acknowledge its toll on the natural environment. when one deals with warfare one has to realize that this tremendous amounts of damage that have done not just human damage but damage to the physical environment and which the battlefield takes place and whether it's a small war of a couple of days or whether it's a major war will one will work to vietnam war or the recent wars in the middle east tremendous amounts of damage done by aerial bombs by napalm. chemicals that are used i would say there's very little consideration during combat operations to the

effect on the environment what one gets totally preoccupied in the firefight itself . after major combat operations are over and almost anywhere you have unexploded ordinance. staggered about the landscape you deny the use of agricultural land to the population you can post ten chile in fact water supply and the food chain and i would say that that's basically the case almost anywhere that you use fire power either air power artillery. the primary goal in warfare is to beat the enemy and when you want to defeat the enemy as quickly and is. probably cost effectively as you'd like but you use the most dangerous weapons you can for the most part unless you're your own troops or your own population happens to be on

a battlefield. with three six battle. each capable of firing up the sixth regiment one of these filled the dragon ships and in every day. when i arrived in vietnam. february one thousand nine hundred seventy. there was a really a great deal of destruction and we were taken out on missions mainly by helicopter i missions were called search and destroy we would try to search out the enemy and destroy the enemy in the coup cheerier they were in numerable tunnels and usually we would try to build these tunnels up the center for explosives. and we seldom saw the enemy we tried to destroy the earth that concealed and sustain the enemy

i often wonder if our struggle is not against human beings but against the earth that sustains them. we've become experts in growing the earth using bonds i tell me more tears see for gunships and they point to me deuce the earth to ashes. everything. in the history of life on earth there been five moments. in which they span a major spasm of extinction and the best known as when the time a source left the stage as it were we are now clearly in the first stages of a potential sixth spouse of extinction the human footprint on nature

is it's just quite you can see the increase greenhouse gases in the atmosphere you can see it in the proliferating dead sun some coastal waters around the world you can see it in the oceans becoming acid in terms of warm preparations for war that becomes a list of things in itself whether it's. our sonic booms are factoring rumoring mammals or it's the burning oil fields in iraq or it's destroyed coral reefs are in the pacific for grounding purposes are. just goes on and on in war time damage to habitat and wildlife is a given sometimes unintended sometimes the result of a deliberate strategy one of the worst examples of the environmental impact of warfare the same during the iraq invasion of kuwait in ninety ninety one and the

deliberate igniting of the oil will sink you right by saddam hussein's troops it is high spilling a vast amounts of oil tens of millions of barrels of oil into the patient gulf region and this had it cherohala fate on the moraine farm and on the life in the area by three my criterion now if there it's. cancer was in that is it had is fine and may fit under it is it is not just a collection of millions of patents of sand it is that is an ecosystem engine for vast amounts of oil into a consistent not that is terribly destructive for. holes fair in love and war as they say and that's why. aircraft will hit the chemical industry they'll sink tankers will hit a nuclear power plants will hit anything that might bring a society or a city or wherever you're fighting it to its knees as quickly as possible with tremendous amounts than likely of environmental damage such deliberate targeting of

the environment during the vietnam war prompted the addition of article fifty five protocol one to the geneva conventions article fifty five of protocol one additional to the geneva conventions of nineteen forty nine states that care shall be taken in war to protect them violently against widespread long term and severe damage to the united states. although it is accepted almost all of the provisions protocol one has taken exception to that. in our bombing campaign and nineteen ninety nine most of which did not capitulate in just a few days as we had anticipated and we bombed for seventy eight days we bombed oil refineries resulting in a mile long slicks that extended down the danube through remaining

into the black sea. we bombed petro chemical plants and fertilizer factories spreading mercury. other carcinogens on the landscape and end to a canal that lead into the danube river it will take the eco systems decades to recover. forests are among the ecosystems that are most often damaged or destroyed in combat itself the main reason for that is because they are very useful for guerrillas trying to find concealment from forces with superior firepower forty years ago when the united states was trying to prevail in vietnam

and its enemies the viet cong were using the force for concealment the american forces tried through fire and chemical defoliants to clear large parts of the forests of vietnam. not in build up all. of them soldiers run hot under the have bases. they fly seven days in the week fifty two weeks and. most days the planes spew out the total of nearly eighteen thousand gallons of anybody. from one hundred sixty tombs in one nine hundred seventy one u.s. military conducted a large scale defoliation drive code named operation ranch had planes helicopters and tanker trucks sprayed nineteen million gallons of herbicides on south vietnam. i should mention agent orange which was also

one of the main ways that the way and was ravaged a place that had been sprayed with would die and sometimes the we sort of say banana plants would become enormous and then they would die and it looked like a ghost landscape almost everything had been killed aging our engine was developed actually in world war two at that time it was not thought that this had any effect on human beings so this became a wonderful commercial product but also a very potent product that could be used to destroy jungles to destroy food crops to be able to be used as a tactical weapon of war without being considered chemical warfare in the sense of price and yes thirty percent of the agent orange consisted of a chemical called two four five tea which. unless the conditions of manufacture

were carefully controlled would become contaminated with dioxin which is an extraordinarily potent toxic chemical so much of the agent orange or this purpose side that was sprayed in vietnam was heavily contaminated the americans did not it will be to hold the top humans or animals. on the rocks along of a human question is not mobile game will be aging vietnamese with fighting more anyway these are battles but the part of the last thing you know noble but it makes no more than i love a mission accomplished. in one thousand nine hundred four u.s. veterans who attributed a variety of adverse physical symptoms to agent orange exposure settled out of court with the manufacturers twenty years later their families fought to have a plaque added to the vietnam veterans memorial it states in memory of the men and

women who served in the vietnam war and later died as a result of their service. and remember their sacrifice. you that the united states government nor the manufacturers of agent orange have compensated the vietnamese people. when we first started working on afghanistan one of the things that surprised me was that it it actually was an area where natural and wild pistachio and woodlands grew i didn't know that they actually existed there before and in fact they were a significant part of the pre-war economy people picked at the stash and actually exported them and it was worth millions of dollars as a source of income to people. in the deforestation we see in afghanistan is a product of three forces first of all you have the mujahideen that were using the forests for cover the soviets destroyed some of the forest to prevent that second of all you have the afghans themselves harvested the forests and stockpiled the

wood because they feared that they be taken away during the collectivization process. and third you had land mines were put in agricultural areas by putting the land mines that are cultural areas that forced people to find other areas to grow food and the most obvious where the forests and woodlands in the country so those three factors have led to a virtual one hundred percent deforestation in some areas this water that was taken during a field study for the united nations environment program holes in the soil indicated were trees have been uprooted to plant crops. after three decades of war only the smallest patches of forest remain in northern afghanistan barely detectable by satellite another reason we don't see some of these woodlands and forests regenerating is also complex at the moment if the seedling happens to take root and start growing you actually have grazing of goats

and sheep over virtually the entire landscape and those codes and she obviously simply eat anything that comes up so what we saw you know in a number of different sample areas was not a single seedling had taken root. when you have such fragile soils and you have such heavy grazing on then you really amplify and cause soil erosion to the point where recovery is going to be extremely difficult if not impossible. this photo actually started with my barber when i was probably ten years old he was a marine. who had fought in the bottle of water canal in the solomon islands on world war two and i heard the stories of his experiences of storming the beaches running out of supplies and. sword fighting with the japanese soldiers on the

islands just for. they saw their supply ship people on up by japanese aircraft to try to explain that feeling of of seeing their food and their source of self-defense just completely destroyed from their eyes. i was doing some research on oil spills in general off the australian coast and that that story came back to me and i thought well his ship is still there and i but the oil still aboard. there are nearly four thousand world war two ship wrecks on the south pacific right now and over three hundred of those are oil tankers. it's no measures are taken on the us these ships will collapse they will release their oil. one side oil answers them are in advance of a very difficult to remove it. the pacific's highest concentration of world war two wrecks can be found in the federated states of micronesia to cloak room service

forward to anchor it for the japanese imperial fleet until an air attack by american forces sank sixty ships and more than two hundred planes the way that the reefs are struggling around the world due to coral bleaching global warming overfishing and dynamite fishery added to those stresses a massive oil spill would just be the last nail the coffin for these rigs they were not able to regenerate and. so i think that a war that we have. in the last century could still be destroying our future is really pretty shocking. and it's distracting things that current warfare is set based just minutes approximately ninety percent of the victims of welfare cowardly ass opinions and this is a routine around trend a bad one hundred closer.