all of us secure if we are to the ground in fear of. the torch which the torch coromandel you can the and such will close with it to its ability to go and clear resistance to kill was the true sister retreat. a hardworking state department official for twenty three years now interrogated by the very place he pledged loyalty so why then with peter van buren treated like a terrorist suspects by his own employer we'll speak with the man who's now could stand to lose his job after speaking out about losing the hearts and minds of the people in iraq. drone first asked later an american born cleric killed at the hands of the u.s. government so our mainstream headline celebrating the death of our new enemy number one or the loss of justice rule of law and due process we'll speak with investigative journalist jeremy scahill.

occupy wall street protests are gaining momentum this friday and we've been there since day one today we'll speak with yet another woman pepper sprayed in the face by police plus what's up with the mainstream media saying protesters are overreacting to being pepper sprayed the news starts now. after two decades and the state department peter van buren is now under investigation for allegedly disclosing classified information he could lose his job and he's been interrogated as you might imagine a terrorist suspect would be why well because he coasted a link on his blog to a diplomatic cable that had already been released by wiki leaks and other words one that is available to anyone on the web at any moment and has been very much public independently of dan burns' blog now block was the reportedly supposed to be.

cleared by the state department part of publication but then burn thinks he's getting special attention for another reason you see he's written a new book about how he helped lose the battle for rockies hearts and minds as part of the civilian surge in iraq where he helped try to buy iraqis love to win the war with projects like these here are a few examples he highlife in his book there was a donkey play for twenty two thousand dollars paid for by taxpayers there was also a french pastry class sessions for disadvantaged iraqi women at a cost of close to ten grand there was also a huge mural painted on the wall of the gym at a cost of twenty three thousand bucks and one of our other favorites the children's art calendar for eighteen grand so those are just a few examples but what is behind his treatment and is this part of a larger trend to crack down on whistleblowers and dissent within the government here now is the man himself peter gambler and author of we met well how i helped

lose the battle for hearts and minds of the iraqi people which is now to go by i got to go here thanks for being on the show and thanks for having me this wonderful it's great to have you on so my first question is could you just describe your interrogation because it sounds a little to me like what i would imagine a terror suspect going through rather than a twenty three year veteran of the state department was a little bit alarming to me i hadn't really seen this side of the organization in all the years that i had worked there they brought me into a very small gray room in the diplomatic security building saddest down there i noticed that there was a bore on the edges was able i asked with a look over his whole rack and they said oh that's where the handcuffs get attached so there was an element of intimidation to this that really caught me off course there were two agents who took turns interviewing me because i think they do hope to do the good cop bad cop thing was because it came off as bad cop and bad or cop they weren't very good at that but they were very concerned about their i needed the money or were there i don't need any. parities and i wanted to know which

charities i had donated to they were concerned that i would talk to journalists that i'd given out any classified information treating me really the way you might treat someone who was caught red handed at the chinese embassy handing over the plans to the stealth bomb or something like that this or something as silly as a link on the internet but to be fair i know that you reported that any blogs were supposed to be clear with the state department of our hand and i know that a department and employees aren't allowed to look at wiki leaks documents even though they are public is that right that's correct in fact they were a computer fire was set up to prevent us from looking either at the weekend these documents themselves or even websites that talk about their weekly leaks documents at home however there are no such matters and i was able to look at the documents myself as well then my question is you know so then why do you think that you've been thinking about or are getting some kind of special treatment when you throw parties with clowns sometimes they're not very happy about that and my book is very

truthful very accurate but unfortunately very critical of the efforts we made in iraq right now there are some thought hundred foreign service blogs on the internet now to be fair most of them are travelogues we're here in ethiopia and it's a great time in the sun shines all the time or whatever but there are a few that do press political issues and as far as i know as long as they stayed on topic on talking points well then nobody seemed to bother them about that. sure we're all supposed to clear everything in advance but the idea of five hundred bloggers clearing five hundred posts every day plus a thousand tweets and maybe seven hundred fifty baseball postings it's impossible to adjudicate that fairly and so the states organize to make choices i think they picked on me because they didn't like what i had to say interesting now but what i understand part of the state department had clear your buck so what do you think happened because i understand they went back and said they wanted more of it action

what happened is i did submit the manuscript as i was required to do about a year ago and the people who reviewed it review it specifically for classified information which there is nothing in there a review it's a make sure that i'm not trying to misrepresent myself to speaking on behalf of the us government and if you read the book i don't think you can confuse what i'm saying with any official statements. it's a big organization the left hand doesn't know what the right hand is doing the right hand doesn't know what the other left hand is doing my book quietly went through the editorial process and with the publishers for about nine months and then one day the huffington post picked up one of my blog posts and scattered around the internet and this brought the wrath of mesopotamia down on me interesting and that's why you think that you are being intimidated and interrogated by the state department you have to see yourself quinces insists to happen but when after twenty three years i've never been interrogated by the diplomatic security people before when in twenty three years they've never gone back and reevaluated my travel vouchers and all of a sudden everything's under

a microscope and i don't have taxi receipts from a trip to peru three years ago there's a lot of silly things that go on that let's let you know that they're looking what do you think that trying to achieve i think they want their money back or the taxis in peru. which are the peter paper which i'm happy to pay back it was my mistake and i said here for the very first time on your show but i bet you that it didn't make any will give back the money for the taxis in peru jet. please stop harassing him over the blog posts getting i think. there's two things that are going on here one is that the state of oregon is very much like the mafia you don't talk about family things outside the family and i did talk about family things outside the family my book gets into the mechanics of how the state department does its work particularly in iraq and i think that upset some people the other thing is i think once the department realized that they couldn't stop publication with my pork they wanted to send a message the easiest books to stop are the ones that are never written and so for

my colleagues out there who are seeing things and making notes and thinking about their own books watching the treatment that state organs given me sends a very clear signal that if you do want to publish a book you're going to pay a very heavy price for it perhaps your career so you think they're trying to send a message to everyone else i'm curious at that part of a broader trend i don't know if you know lieutenant colonel anthony shaffer he's also wrote a book and it was vetted by the government it was about military operation but then as it was getting ready to be published with already appetite pressure that pentagon freaked out and did something similar to what it sounds like that they did with you but let's play a little bit of him describing that and then i'll get your comments. late in the summer when the book was ready to be released you know three guys in black suits in sunglasses shows up in a publisher and basically says hey we've got really get a lot of knowledge of this book and if you publish it the free world going to fall so the publisher would take notice i mean any time guys show up from washington

you've got to do something so same thing he had to go back and work with the pentagon again to change his book your experience tony shaffer his experience is this part of a broader crackdown on government dissent you've got to ask the question in my case the state support and have the manuscript for over a year and as a jew first case they waited till the very last minute to approach the publisher they contacted the publisher of my book six days before it was going to appear in bookstores and said we'd like you to redact some things and if you don't the security of the united states might be in jeopardy i didn't the words were that dangerous and i certainly didn't know anything i had written was was classified and in fact the redactions were silly and i thought just to give an example i had listed a person who works for the government it was a composite character no name was listed and i mentioned that he had worked in two different places they wanted me to redact one of the two both locations were well

known to all your viewers as places where the american government is and actively involved the google search to confirm the information to the usual point zero zero zero five second ok ok i think so then my question is do you think that it is the obama administration's efforts because many analysts and critics have said that the obama administration has been very aggressive in a campaign against whistleblowers we have thomas drake we have bradley manning do you think that that's hard to get a demonstration crackdown or concerted effort to cost dissent within the administration i believe it's true and i'm so saddened to say that but again as i mentioned earlier the easiest book to stop is the one that's never written so by making exam. impulse of people that they can get a hold of breaker schaefer or myself and making those examples public making sure everyone out there realizes we're going to make him pay a price and we're going to take as much skin off you as we possibly can the things that happened drake was dragged around and in the end of the day really nothing

significant happened shaffer was dragged around in the end of the department offense spent money our taxpayer money to buy up all the copies of this book last time i checked america is still out there still looks pretty good we're still pretty strong i don't think any of us have done any damage but there's a very strong message being sent out there do not dissent stay on the train stay on point is a way but you have written and other it hasn't created damage that has this message done damage as far as instilling caring people so they won't do a book like this sure i hear from my colleagues at the state department all the time very privately a thanks for this i think you said a lot of important things but. i can't really be seen saying that right i get a lot of messages on the internet because my email address is out there on the website saying good for you can't support you in public but in private keep going keep doing what you need to do and even i'm sorry you can have a couple of people offer they want to talk to me about their own experiences in

iraq in hopes that i can write them down because they're afraid to. or van buren author of we met well how i helped lose the battle for the hearts and minds of the iraqi people now speaking of us wars the us government has reportedly killed alleged al qaida recruiter and we are all a lot with a drone strike in yemen now a lot he was near the top of the u.s. terror hit list but here's the catch he was a u.s. citizen he was born in america he was never charged with a crime and was assassinated without due process which the obama administration says is a ok and us mainstream media seems largely to be championing his killing as a victory for the u.s. the president hailed it two as a major blow to al qaida is most active operational affiliate now whether you agree or think that the locket was a bad guy or not the question is what does this mean for the u.s. constitution and the rights supposed to be guaranteed by it to citizens earlier i

was joined by jeremy scahill is national security correspondent for the nation magazine he's also author of this book black lot of the rise of the world's most powerful mercenary army i asked him regardless of what a lucky was alleged with what crime was he actually guilty of here's what he had to say. i mean that's what the white house and others are not saying i mean there's there's been no indication that anwar alok he was guilty of any documentable indicted will crime under u.s. law if that was the case why not indict him so what we know the concern that i would have about the anwar locky killing right off the bat is that we are setting a very dangerous precedent for killing our own citizens without anything resembling due process you know maybe the administration had evidence if they did then they should have brought forward a federal indictment against him but the fact is that they didn't do that and so

that raises a whole slew of questions particularly we're talking about killing and targeting your own citizens when they're not on a declared battlefield under a lot he was not killed in a gun battle with u.s. troops in afghanistan he wasn't killed in a gun battle with u.s. special operations forces in iraq he was killed driving in a convoy in rural yemen in a in a targeted killing operation that congress was aware of that the white house was was organizing that was participated in by the u.s. military and the central intelligence agency and only a half a dozen members of congress have ever raised a peep about the threats against a u.s. citizen so to me the court the key issue here is what crime was this u.s. citizen accused of and the answer is none he was not accused in a court of law only in the court of public opinion and by u.s. officials mostly anonymous ones and in fact if they can add the president can now i thankfully kill the defense without due process of law let's say about the united states even to a mark of an authoritarian state. well i mean i think when we start to talk about

killing our own citizens you know a country that cannibalizes its own is is heading down a very dangerous path but let's remember that we should also step back from from harping on the fact that he was a u.s. citizen and remember that assassination has become the name of the u.s. foreign policy game president obama has dramatically expanded these kinds of targeted killing operations with the joint special operations command and the cia in pakistan increasingly in somalia where i just was. in afghanistan elsewhere around the world we're not just using drones or using tomahawk cruise missiles what i think is really dangerous here is that president obama has solidified as a bipartisan policy the idea that the entire world is a battlefield and that the u.s. has the right to go into any country allies or enemy and kill whomever it wants with very flimsy with a very flimsy stretch of the legal justification for doing so in some cases so

you're more concerned with the expansion of what it means to have a war on terror and everywhere. well i think i mean i think that this was sort of you know donald rumsfeld's wet dream was having a world where you know the united states was able to pummel whomever it wanted whenever it wanted regardless of what international law says avowed regardless of what the home country says about it and i think that if you had had a president mccain in the white house instead of a president obama i think you would have had ludicrous ridiculous policies that would have been rife with opportunity for blowback you know mccain may have been much much worse on a foreign policy level in terms of large scale military deployments but to me the concern is that president obama has made it acceptable for many liberals who otherwise would have been protesting it or objecting to it so it my concern is going forward we've now set a precedent where democrats and republicans both embrace the idea that the united states has a right to bomb any country that wants whenever it wants or to assassinate people

around the world even its own citizens with no indictment and nothing even vaguely resembling the process figure thing that obama has made now the white dream come true. i'm saying that president obama has continued policies and intensified policies that would have been widely protested and objected to including by congressional democrats if you had a republican in power this is exactly what president clinton did with his domestic agenda in the one nine hundred ninety s. where he pushed through the precursor to the patriot act the anti-terrorism effective death penalty act where his policies and. the omnibus crime bill were very much in line with with the republican agenda and what you do that is that you move the country a little bit further to the right when you have democrats embrace these policies and go off to the races with them and that's my concern is that we this is taking our country in a in a far more dangerous direction than if it was just republicans doing it interesting

and i do want to get back a little bit to a lot because i think it's interesting that today the white house and the cia are calling him the chief of external operations for al qaeda in the arabian peninsula and they used to call him a militant cleric and only more recently have they said he is increasingly an operational role for a.q. a.p. has the white house exaggerated this man's role. well i mean first of all neither you nor i have access to the intelligence that president obama is looking at so but what i do know is that the use of that term the chief of external operations i don't know anyone that's ever heard a lock you referred to in that way and it clearly was an attempt by the white house to give al lucky more of a military significance so that they could justify him as a military target but to directly answer your question i think there's been tremendous exaggeration on the role in importance of anwar a lot he was at best mid-level management of a.q. a.p. the greatest threat that he posed to united states were his online videos

encouraging you know young english speaking muslims to they would join a jihad against the united states and that's that was despicable what he was doing was despicable you some could say it was hate speech or inciting violence but we have a way of dealing with people that engage in those kinds of activities particularly when they're u.s. citizens you don't just go to sesame them unless you're the u.s. government i guess that was jeremy scahill national security correspondent for the nation magazine and author of blackwater the rise of the world's most powerful mercenary army now we were just talking to jeremy and austria not far from where he was occupy wall street continues and now the movement appears to be gaining steam it's getting support from a number of unions the new york transit workers voted to support occupy wall street and are supposed to be joining a protest right now as we speak we'll have more on that later we do have a reporter there and it teamsters union declared support to the united pilots union

reportedly had members protesting in uniform so this is a development this could get interesting because remember unions are a large part of the reason why we see phil many people turn out to protest in europe for example but now from our new york studio we have someone who has been occupying wall street herself protester julie lawler thank you for being on the show so first i just want your take on why you're taking part in these protests. well i feel like. the mainstream americans haven't had their voice heard and i think that most people can agree that we have a reason to be angry and we haven't really have. a way to express that anger or. typical platforms for having our voice heard aren't really working anymore because wall street has so much power when your little attention what it is difficult forms you're referring to. all such as voting and.

so you don't think your vote counts no well i mean you know it's. even obama. gets most of his money from wall street that's where all the money is and that's where politicians get their money from so even though some of them may have good ideas about how to fix our economy they're still getting. blocked so in some ways it's just ok so you say you're saying you're angry over wall street's power versus your power you have another reason you could possibly be angry you're one of the people who was pepper sprayed at the protests over the weekend and it was caught on video if we can play a little bit about that so people can see it our viewers are watching it right now and you can't tell exactly what's going on but it didn't look like you ladies were

posing any threat maybe you could just describe a little bit about why you were pepper sprayed there you know we were taping it we weren't doing anything to provoke the police and we certainly did not deserve it. the police started deploying these orange netting fences to try to block streets are off and to i think separate us. and. everyone felt trapped they didn't know where to go it was very chaotic and confusing there was a lot of police brutality going on there i watched a man with a camera get his face bashed into the fender of the car i watched another police officer beside me grab this lady and drag her by the hair underneath the fence and everyone was screaming and it was just totally chaotic and. so why did they show

how did it. i don't know i didn't see it coming i didn't even know that any of them had pepper spray on it didn't seem like a situation to use pepper spray we were behind the fence and we were staying there everyone was confused as to why there was a fence around us in the first place but because we were on the sidewalk and we were on a public sidewalk. it was difficult to watch your fellow who would friends and be treated by the police in such a brutal way right and i want to play a little bit for you of how because fox news did it a bit on this earlier this week and i want to play you what kelly said about the reaction of you and your friends to being pepper sprayed and i want to get your reaction to it i don't know i see these women screaming it it's like they've been

shot in the face tell us i've never pepper sprayed the base but i was already argument that they've been that they're being overly dramatic that they're playing it up with a camera so maybe kelly there was essentially alleging that you guys were playing it out for the cameras do you have a reaction to that you want to defend yourself. oh i felt the two girls that were on the floor screaming god the pepper spray six inches i mean right in their faces i was behind them i got a direct stream of it right in my eye and also on my skin on my face in the skin on my arms burns it hurts it feels like you've been slapped in the face with a hot iron it is not pleasant and it gets in your lungs and it makes you choke and you know it's it was a very scary frightening experience and it hurt i believe. there are a lot of pictures too afterwards my skin was really red my eyes were swollen my

fiance also got hit with the pepper spray and the second incident and so are you saying. so are you saying that the reacted in that video was completely authentic. it was completely authentic i mean they immediately started screaming i mean i couldn't imagine getting it right in the face and they got a lot more than i did and was still came full very painful right and now we're almost out of time but i just want to get your comment new york mayor michael bloomberg today on the radio said that new yorkers need to help the banks and that protesters are protesting against people who make forty to fifty grand a year and are struggling to make ends meet i guess he's talking about service workers and wall street what do you say to that. i'm sorry could you repeat the question we're almost out of time but but mayor bloomberg is saying that the protesters need to actually support the banks and that the people who are protesting make forty to fifty grand

a year are just struggling to make ends meet what do you say to that. that we should help the banks that's crazy. all right all the time oh no cost money you know we don't need help the banks are fun all right but some fail there you go final word from you let the banks fail thank you so much for being on the show for taking time out from the protest i was occupy wall street protester julie lawler think now as we speak in greece there is a lot going on fresh austerity measures have been passed and greece is figuring out if they're going to get their next tranche of bailout money from international funds or bailing them out and people are not happy people in athens are angry and their first has been covering exactly why. greece has been the place the child of the year i think that crisis will tell me bating to expand the bailout fund the country look starts to get that much needed cash injection to help come with some

condition here in greece the people say the price perving make them pay them to a new high earning the pharaoh is deadline day the first be hit with the greek government's nice special tax it's one of the measures they put in place to try to secure the next tranche of money the country needs to flee bankruptcy the extra tax which is due to tax about another three percent for people's on yelling come supposed to help the likes of the mafia that think in the budget nothing more than a year's salary cuts rises in living costs people have already breaking points the last two years almost everybody has at least thirty per cent of his salary or puncturing era cost analysis from the opposition movement entitled we pay he tells me how the need means expanded rapidly in recent months as more and more people hit that financial wall before the people most of the people who were offering because

they wanted to grow first begins to know. know there are thousands and thousands of people who will. resist people's desperation has become increasingly evident on the streets of greece by this is repeatedly pranking out between via place and protesters. even more clashes his parliament can face it in yet another austerity measure in the fall of any property tax. or. to put on. just for political reasons rich. many people increase now question just here it is the thing control i thought. very early are the bankers. and there really do gooders on his mr from

european central bank bankers have not been shareholders are not being. called again and again and again are the. taxpayers in the euro zone despite germany having dated positively to expand the size and power of the year here in panama. already critics are questioning whether that will be enough and so it's now time to many challenges here is a still faces problem who will move from greece and will start touching other european countries and then the german banks will be and will suffer a lot so even germany and other we saved the most filthy economy and you're being you know. will be affected you will find the solution to be not just for greece but for all the european countries with past measures spading to have the facts in this political leaders continue to struggle to convince that public interest here is a still.