issues that shimmers to me there's a huge music history. in the markets too many musicians to be born in search of a mission to do right as a competent and in a very good deal when it is also accused of the. occupy wall street protests are gaining momentum this friday and we've been covering it since day one today we'll speak with yet another woman pepper sprayed in the face by police plus what's going on the mainstream media saying protesters are over reacting to being pepper sprayed. plus a hardworking state department official for twenty three years now interrogated by the very place he pledged loyalty so why then was peter van buren treated like a terrorist suspect by his own employer we'll speak with the man who now stands to lose his job for good after speaking out about losing the hearts and minds of the

table of iraq. and 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. good evening it's friday september thirtieth seven pm here in washington d.c. i'm lauren lyster and you're watching our team starting off this hour as the economy continues to hit average people hard occupy wall street continues as activist efforts to fight back and now the movement appears to be gaining more steam it's gotten support from a number of unions the new york transit workers voted to support occupy wall street and they were supposed to be joining protests this afternoon just a little bit earlier. the teamsters union declared support the united pilots union

reportedly had members protesting in uniform so this could get interesting unions are a large part of why we see so many people turn out to protest in other countries in europe or latin america archie his own correspondent and as i was out there just earlier to show us how this is impacting the protests and just exactly what's going on take a look. as it is occasion for these crowds around social networking sites groups two weeks ago hundreds of people out of the twenty thousand signed up for these protests came out onto the street this flipped the financial district initially breathed a sigh of relief as well as the mainstream media the opportunity to marginalize these crowds as a fringe group of people about to see here until december and has the attention of course these pros they're straining to continue fighting the system is only getting bigger this could be the skeleton of

a revolution out of the gaining of one possibly but i don't think people in america overall are awake in a metaphorical sense to wait awake enough to actually start a revolution i would change the way our government is run as high profile activists and scholars started joining these crowds it became harder for the media to ignore these demonstrations it also became hard for most americans to not take these crowd seriously as police brutality started to occur last weekend over eighty protesters were arrested several women were surrounded by a police man and nice with pepper spray but these protesters say they're willing to pay any price to get their voices heard a lot of people are them out of the one percent you know and you know a fraction of the one percent that have all the money and really all of our if you think about it because what they say goes they influenced a lot of decisions which doesn't help anyone else but them so that's why everyone else is going through now as the protests together first family and support maybe

are beginning to wonder if this is the prime minister of what america saw and was stance in this one truck perhaps seventy thousand people essentially storm capitol building because there was also we don't know what it was so you can support that. two hundred fifty have come out on any of the protesters are here for a simple reason they feel duped and defraud. by the system that was wall street greed financial meltdown the nomic one in six americans currently living in poverty bankers were killed on the council and it was people who live where people are hurting or they think it's time for real change to finally come bankers have to pay the price for shuttered economies these demonstrators are planning to speak here and in numbers so a real piece of reviews of them for after all is the arab spring was wanted by the powers that be why not listen to a similar price. but the truth. well done but i was right out there

at occupy wall street earlier i spoke with someone who had occupied water herself protester julie lawlor she was one of those people that anastasio was talking about that was. by that met and pepper sprayed by police to start off so i asked her why she was out at occupy wall street what she was protesting what she had to say. 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 had. a way to express that anger. typical platforms for having our voice heard aren't really working anymore because wall street has so much power whether there's all the titian what are those typical forms you're referring to. call such as voting and.

so you don't think your vote counts. no well i mean you know it's. even broke obama. gets most of his money from wall street that's where all the money is and that's where most 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 you know blocked so in some ways it's just. ok it's so huge that 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 typer sprayed at a protest over the weekend and it was caught on video if we can play a little bit about that so people can see at our viewers are watching it right now and you can tell exactly what's going on but it didn't look like you ladies are

posing any threat maybe you could just describe a little bit about why you were pepper sprayed there. no we weren't doing 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 off and to i think separate us secure you know 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 stander of a car i watched another police officer beside me grabbed this lady and dragged her by the hair underneath the fence and everyone was screaming and it was just totally chaotic and. so why did it how did it how do you free ad

i don't know i didn't see it coming i didn't even know that any of them had spray on them it didn't seem like a situation to use pepper spray we were behind the fence and we were staying there that 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 and. it was just difficult to watch your fellow . friends and be treated by the police in such a brutal way and i want to play a little bit review of how because fox news did a debate on this earlier this week and i want to play you what meghan kelley 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's like they've

been shot in the face i was a member of pepper spray to the face but i was already argument that they've been that they're being overly dramatic and they're playing it up for the cameras they're making kelly there was a centrally alleging that that you guys were playing it up for the cameras do you have a reaction to that you want to defend yourself so i felt the two girls that were on the floor screaming got the pepper spray six inches i mean right in their faces i was behind and i got a direct stream of it right in my eye and also on my skin on my face in the skin on my arm it 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 was a very scary frightening experience and it hurt i believe. there are a lot of pictures too but afterwards my skin was really red my eyes were swollen my fiance also got hit with the pepper spray and the second incident that have been so

are you today. so are you saying that the reaction in that video was completely authentic. it was completely authentic i mean then mediately started screaming i mean i couldn't imagine getting it right in the face they got a lot more than i did and were still painful very painful there you have a reaction to megan kelly's question hopefully their answer that was protester julie lawler. after two decades in 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 posted 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 blog posts are reportedly supposed to be

pretty clear by the state department part of publication but then current 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 iraqis hearts and minds as part of the civilian surge in iraq where he helped try to buy iraqi's love to win the war with projects like these here are a few examples he highlights 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 two thousand bucks and one of our other favorites a 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 gander and author of we met well how i helped

lose the battle for hearts and minds of the iraqi people which is out you go by the book here thanks for being on the show or 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 in a terror suspect going through rather than a twenty three year veteran of the state department a little who are minds from the your heard and really seen this side of the organization in the years that i had worked there they brought me into a version. gray room in a diplomatic security building sat us down there i noticed that there was a bar on the edge of the table i asked with a look kind of like a towel 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 guard there were two agents who took turns interviewing me they i think they were they hope to do the good cop bad cop thing but they kind of came off as bad cop and bad or cop they were very good at that but they were very concerned about where i made the money

off the were there i don't need any charities and 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 bomber or something like that suppose something as silly as a link on the internet but to be fair i know that you reported that any blog posts are supposed to be clear with the state department beforehand and i know that state department. employees aren't allowed to look at wiki leaks documents even though they are public is that right that's correct in fact it worked the computer fire was set up to prevent us from looking either at the weekly stock in its themselves or even websites that talk about the weekly leaks documents at home however there are no such predators and i was able to look at the documents myself as well and my question is you know so then why do you think that you've been singled out or are getting some kind of special treatment when you throw parties of 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 five 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 dress political issues and as far as i know as long as they stayed on topic on talking points will 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 do to keep that fairly and so the states army has 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 book so what do you think happened as i understand they went back and they wanted more reaction what happened

is i did submit the manuscript as i was required to do about a year ago and the people who review it review it specifically for classified information which there is nothing in there they review it to make sure that i'm not trying to misrepresent myself or speaking on behalf of the u.s. 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 in the right hand doesn't know what the other left hand is doing but the client went through the editorial process and with a publisher's for about nine months and then one day the help engine 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 to depart you have to see yourself queen sweden has 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 the let you know that they're looking what do you think they're trying to achieve if they want their money back or the taxis in peru which i wish i was happy to pay which i'm happy to pay back it was my mistake and i did that here for the very first time on your show but there you have it is it meant that you will give back the money by the fact is in peru yet. please stop harassing him over the blog posts it's getting i think. there's two things that are going on here one is the state department is very much like the mafia you don't talk about family things are outside the family and i did talk about family things outside the family my book gets into the mechanics of how the state government doesn't 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 the publication of my poor 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 the state department's 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 or so you think they're trying to send a message to everyone else i'm curious that this is part of a broader trend i don't know if you know the ten a colonel anthony shaffer base here also wrote a book and it was that it by the government it was about military operations but then as it was getting ready to be published was already apt to start the 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 thank you. late in the summer when the book was ready to be released you know three guys in black suits in sunglasses shows up at the publisher and basically says hey we got really good a lot of problems in this book and if you publish it the world's going to fall so

the publisher and 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 that question in my case the state department had the manuscript for over a year and as in chief worst 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 read back some things and if you don't the security of the united states might be in jeopardy now i didn't know words were that dangerous and i certainly didn't know anything i had written was was classified in fact the redactions were silly they slang just to get an example oh my 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 ok both locations were

well known to all your viewers as places where the american government has been actively involved the google search to confirm the information from the usual point zero zero zero five seconds ok ok i see so then my question is do you think that this 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 this is part of this administration's crackdown or concerted effort to cost us that within the administration i believe it's true and i'm so sad 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. samples of people that they can get a hold of her or myself and making those examples public making sure everyone out there realizes we're going to make you pay a price and we're going to take as much skin off of you as we possibly can the

things that happened greek was dragged around and in the end of the day really nothing significant happened schafer was dragged around in the end of a department offense that money our taxpayer money to buy up all the copies of his 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 to not to sent stay on the train stay on point you say what you have written and others hasn't created damage but has this math edge done damage as far as instilling fear in people so they won't do about like sure i hear from my colleagues at the state department all the time very privately hey 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 you know address is out there on the website saying good for you can support you in public was in private keep going keep doing what you need to do but you can even have

a couple of people off for 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 very have it peter van buren author of we met well how i helped lose the battle for the hearts and minds of the iraqi people now fifteen of us for the u.s. government has reportedly killed alleged al qaeda recruiter and we are all a locket with a drone strike in yemen now a law he was near the top of the u.s. terror hit list but here's the catch he's 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 ok and it actually wasn't just him the u.s. reportedly also took out another american citizen as part of a hostile action today in yemen without charging him of a crime the mere con was his name now whether you agree that the law he was the bad guy that the u.s. says he was or not the question is what does this mean for the u.s. constitution and the rights supposed to be guaranteed by it well earlier i spoke

with jeremy scahill he's national security correspondent for the nation magazine he's also author of this book blackwater the rise of the world's most powerful mercenary army i first asked him what was a lockheed crime exactly here's what he had to say. well i mean that's what the white house and others are not saying i mean there is there has been no indication that anwar locky was guilty of any documentable indicted all crime under u.s. law if that was the case why not indict him so what do you 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 have evidence if they did then they should have brought forward a federal indictment against him but the fact is that it 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 where 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 core of 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 in the court of public opinion and by u.s. officials mostly anonymous ones and in fact if they can add that the president can now i thankfully kill fifth and without due process that law what if a about the united states isn't just 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 yemen in afghanistan and elsewhere around the world we're not just using drones we're using tomahawk cruise missiles what i think is really dangerous here is that 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 they are 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 regardless of what international law says about a 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 due process figure thing that obama has made about what 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 were his policies on. 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 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 a centrist and i do want to get back a little bit to a lock 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 arabian peninsula and they used to call an idyllic think cleric and only more recently have they said he is increasingly in 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 of lucky referred to in that way it clearly was an attempt by the white house to give al lockheed more of a military significance so that they could justify him as a as a military target but to directly answer your question i think there's been tremendous exaggeration on the role and importance of anwar a lucky guy he was at best mid-level management of a q a p the greatest threat that he posed the united states were his videos encouraging young english speaking muslims to it would join

a jihad against the united states and you know that's that was despicable what he was doing was despicable 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 assassinate them i mean you have people on the right that have said far more incendiary things about president obama in some cases than anwar a lucky said about the united states and you know what's our response to that was there unfortunately just part of the political discourse in this country there would have been a way to deal with anwar a lockie that was not assassinating a u.s. citizen without due process and i would love to see someone show evidence that he was posing a direct threat imminent threat to the united states which would have been required under the authorization for the use of military force to hit him in yemen i would love to see that evidence and we're at a time that i was just hoping to get a quick answer because you were just in why you cover this closely i found i've been lying with kerith number one for the u.s. that went and i'll locky who is next and the u.s.

is going to be targeting well. well the u.s. is it i mean who's next is who's now the u.s. is intensifying its covert war in somalia certainly and also in yemen inside of somalia you have the joint special operations command doing targeted killing operations there's a secret cia what's not so secret anymore but there's a cia base in mogadishu where the u.s. is once again training and paying a proxy force of somalis they're working with various warlords some of whom used to be allies of al qaeda they're now on the u.s. payroll working with the united states in yemen the u.s. has been bombing it regularly with cruise missiles and drones so i would look at you know east africa is certainly an expanding battlefield for this us war and the arabian peninsula is good raging for quite some time in east africa if i had to pick one region of the world is going to be is going to be a very intense place where you go you heard from jeremy thanks so much for being on the show he's national security correspondent the nation magazine and author of black light in the rise of the world's most powerful martha mary army.