all right it's time for you said i read it or i take time to respond to my brilliant and engaging viewer comments from facebook twitter and you too because when you've got something to say i listen now first i want to find a viewer who watched our interview with anna sparing of the young turks where we spoke about the young turks campaign for a constitutional amendment against the citizens united ruling artist welker said on facebook right on with the constitutional amendment activism ana the status quo of a corporation as a person is a fallacy at best if not an outstanding invitation for criminal activity minus the personal accountability and you know what i think ernest is absolutely correct that the status quo is simply not working citizens united ruling has allowed money to further corrupt our already fragile political system and drown out the voices of everyday people even more and the occupy movement is evidence of that the bottom line here is that americans just don't see the government representing their needs above those of the fat cats it's as simple as that so in september just fifteen

percent of americans said that they trusted the government to do the right thing always or most of the time and the approval for congress just tied an all time low at twelve percent so this point a constitutional amendment to get the corporate influence and money out of politics is just one step in the right direction and next on respond to a viewer who watched our report on skyrocketing student loan debt in the united states and twenty three said on you tube the one trillion used to fight two pointless wars to make our lives safer could actually went toward something that could have made america greater and more competitive free higher education now let me start by saying that unfortunately one trillion dollars for both wars is by all accounts a very conservative estimate it doesn't account for many of the long term costs that are going to be incurred by these two wars and according to brown university's watson institute for international studies the real cost of the wars comes in somewhere between three point seven trillion and could reach as high as four point four trillion now of course the administration sticks to the one trillion figures for both wars but that can be. it leaves out many of the health care costs that are

going to be needed to provide health care to wounded veterans and projected increases in military spending that are going to come after ten years of constant war so let's just take a moment to compare that to what the government spends on student loans last year the government spent eleven point four billion on pell grants for college students the defense budget during that same year was a bare minimum of six hundred eighty billion so when you look at those numbers i think it's pretty clear exactly where the priorities in this country lie now finally i want to respond to viewer brian penney who tweeted to us if anybody wants a reliable news that's actually entertaining at the alone a show is awesome so brian thank you so much for watching we do our best to bring you the latest news and analysis and we try to make it fun to watch too that's of my rantings today and have more for you later in the week as usual. now as the so-called super committee continues to fight over areas of the federal budget federal spending cuts and not get anywhere a funeral of course should lead them to look closely at that extra six hundred billion dollars that could potentially be cut from the bloated military budget just

last week president obama announces the troops are coming home from iraq by the december thirty first withdrawal deadline as we discussed last week the war in iraq is far from over because u.s. contractors are still going to have quite a major presence in the country which is why its next report is so disturbing and internal pentagon reports prepared for senate senator bernie sanders shows that the d.o.d.'s been hit by one point one trillion dollars in fraud from defense companies over the last ten years so over the course of a decade the pentagon paid five hundred seventy three billion dollars to over three hundred contractors involved in civil fraud cases two hundred fifty five billion dollars went to fifty four contractors convicted of seriously criminal fraud cases and sanders called this a very shocking report saying of the ugly truth is that virtually all of the major defense contractors in this country for years have been gauged in systemic fraudulent behavior while receiving hundreds of billions of dollars of taxpayer money so you want to know who the worst offenders are well they're probably the ones that you know best lockheed martin pay. ten point five million dollars in two

thousand and eight after the company was found submitting false invoices on a multi-billion dollar contract but just a year later lockheed martin was awarded thirty billion in brand new contracts worth of grumman shelled out sixty two million dollars in two thousand and five after they were caught submitting false contract proposals and like lockheed martin those guys got sixteen percent more in contracts just a year later so in both cases those are companies who are caught falsifying information finding ways to make more money for themselves and despite getting caught the government rewards them with even more business so senator sanders is right that report is shocking and goes to show how incredibly dependent the pentagon is on those private contractors so when the super committee reviews where cuts should take place in our country's federal budget maybe that report is going to encourage them a little bit go ahead with a second round of cuts to the d.o.t. but even as u.s. troops are preparing to leave iraq the u.s. is going to continue working to train iraqi security forces and there's a program that's the responsibility of the state department out there by the way even though the troops are leaving they're already moves underway to just

incorporate into nato troops so that they can stay continue the training program but a new report from the u.s. special inspector general for iraq reconstruction describes that police development program as a bottomless pit out of the millions of dollars that are a lot of that training only twelve percent is actually going towards training the iraqi police the rest simply goes towards the personnel the troops that are doing the training and having security for those troops and the special inspector general also found that even though the state department was aware that it was going to inherit this training program from the d.o.d. didn't really do all that much planning to make sure that the money would be spent efficiently now as if that wasn't disgraceful enough it turns out that the iraqi government doesn't even want the u.s. to take part in that police development program one of the officials in iraq ministry of interior even suggested that the u.s. should be spending that money on something for americans instead ouch but seriously guys the problem here is that now you have a militarized state department which is taking over functions that they don't even know how to handle. and let's not forget the state department is going to have

a whopping five thousand contractors working for them and thousands more are going to stay in the country as well performing various other tasks so even after obama announced a drawdown we're going to continue pumping u.s. money in iraq through the state department which doesn't know how to handle it and contractors who are actively defrauding the u.s. government comforting isn't it. now recently a new york times report claimed after speaking to anonymous officials of course of the obama administration had intensely debated launching a cyber offensive in libya and the goal this plan would have been to break through the fire walls of the libyan government's computer networks to sever military communication links and prevent the early warning radars from gathering information and relaying it to missile batteries and nato warplanes go in and they just decide to go with the cruise missiles and drone strikes but here are some of the interesting tidbits according to this report as to why the administration decided against the cyber offensive number one they fear that might set a precedent for other nations to carry out cyber offenses of their own number two they didn't think it bad enough time to really carry it out and planned the whole

thing and number three they wondered if that meant the under the war powers act the president would have to inform congress so let's break down some of those explanations see what all this says about the administration and its policies and the changing face of warfare here this gustus with means allan friedman fellow in governance studies and research director of the center for technology innovation at the brookings institution thanks so much for being here tonight so what do you make of this report here i mean it's interesting to hear that the obama administration or you know somebody people within the administration were having this fierce debate as to whether or not they could launch this cyber offensive but some of the problems here were that maybe they would have to tell congress or. we don't know exactly what was happening this is that you know we know that in the north reports we know that something was considered on one hand this is great to get a serious military operation or indeed any serious action some consideration let's look at our own troops let's consider what's going on. let's try to find the

optimum balance we don't have the full measure of how those calculations were made but we can derive a little bit first we know american government is has a lot of attention to making sure that they follow the laws of warfare going from international law down to domestic law so what is this they are careful about making sure they do that i mean you could i would i would argue that very many of our actions including the drone strikes that you know that we launch in pakistan and yemen in somalia don't necessarily take international laws into account i think binocular with them there is a very big legal gray area there which is why it's funny to me if they're worried about getting any record anything is to understand how those laws were interpreted by the united states of course international law as a body and we can get to this a little later it is a very new area and when it comes to guiding our military forces there is a very strong strict control of what is legal and what isn't legal but ultimately it comes down to every country makes that decision for themselves so does this really change what the war powers act is so i don't think it's as big a deal clearly there's not as large a difference or large

a distinction in the starboard and as all the forms of information warfare jamming radar for example or connecticut that was you say that it's the last hospital that you know then cruise missiles or drone strikes because part of the legal argument coming from the obama administration as to why they felt that this didn't count at the war powers act why they didn't have to ask congress because it didn't fall into this very vague definition of hostilities there because it was a humanitarian intervention so you know by that logic you would say that a cyber attack price seems less hostile than all the bombs that are there i think you hit on a key definition we said it's still defined it's hard to figure out exactly where the lines drawn in that case he would say listen this is an operation we're going through that already has a certain number of risks there's already some uncertainty domestically but we're getting to let's keep it as safe as possible let's do things that we know are going to happen turns out you drop a bomb if you use good technology in your systems work as properly and. you follow

the instructions well you know what's going to happen something's going to blow up we don't know that full detail yet in the cyber domain certainly not in an active operational setting especially when you try to do something complex you may have the best intentions you have very very good people involved but it's very hard to know exactly what's going to happen when you click a button when you run a program when you attack a certain system how much do you think that a lot of this is already going on because you know one of the things that you hear is that the united states doesn't want to cross that threshold they don't want to be the first ones part of this we don't want to set a precedent but if you talk about a stuxnet virus right or if you think about certain attacks that we don't know if they are waged by state actors or not coming from china let me start a war is actually how i don't like the term cyber war it's a very big there is warfare. and that we knew what it was until around one thousand nine hundred seventy and now we have modern conflict which has its own distinctions and lawyers are willing to deal with that and policymakers are studying that in this cyber domain and there are

a couple of dynamics first. very conceivable that state state conflict is going to involve some cyber component it just it's a strange thing to not include your arsenal we've seen in the ms really attack on the syrian nuclear reactor they disabled the syrian air defenses we have heard multiple sources reported that now what's interesting about that is that actually less lead to less conflict you can imagine you have an attack against a specific target resume an attack against the specific targets and the military installations that you have to hit in order to do that if you can disable them be a cyber means it's a much simpler operation so that leads to the conflict and deescalation we also have we can debate who did it or who was responsible but in the tax against the country of georgia there was a strong cyber component against the government websites certainly that was timed to maximize the confusion inside georgia we can talk about whether those states that are similar have been attacked in stuxnet stocks that attack against the

iranian nuclear program probably involved state actor with strong incentive to dissuade iran from developing nuclear weapon to retard that program and certainly there's a list of suspects that have that goal in mind. the challenge here is saying what are we going to do and how we're going to define it i feel in the libyan operation the simplest explanation is why bring that into the picture why make it the story that we're doing this in the cyber domain especially when there's an operator option for things to go wrong so for example. even real time you actually have to coordinate your air strikes with taking down the air control system if you don't have it lining up properly then your operation is for not it's just going to be an element but you think that's something that we're going to see more and more of in the future i mean you know when you can say that this is something that will probably. make the situation less violent as you just said but at the same time we have military officials that now say that cyber war a cyber attacks are an act of war that could you know elicit a response in terms of using military military equipment it's true and i think the

important thing is not to just look at the internet as something new and special it's part of our lives we've been dealing with it for years and now let's try to understand what is the broader picture we have a spectrum of conflict that ranges from espionage to kinetic attacks blowing things up there could be a cyber component in any of those just as there could be an air component there are many ways to look at a problem i think the important thing is as we move forward to understand where the cyber option is available make sure that from a defensive perspective states have the capacity to fund themselves and so in libya you think of the cyber option was not should have been an option right that we did they did the right thing i guess i think in a way they had to leave it on the table i have to wrap it up in farsi thanks so much for joining us and i thank you. still to come several g.o.p. presidential candidates are desperately fighting ways to bash president obama for sticking to the original iraq troop withdrawal deadline we're going to tell you who takes the cake inside still time and a happy hour one of the g.o.p.

contenders the further and senator john mccain can't get enough when it comes to the u.s. sending troops abroad to find out which country he wants to invade next. just

. a very warm welcome to you this is your news today protesters on the. street they have. the chance to get the status of the human experiment gives. them some limits and it's all changed. things are financial terrible these are the reasons clambering to maintain our confidence in markets and being in office relative wants to be easing trade imbalances recession look at the missions close

to collapsing a sub prime loan foreclosed homes people. to fail so we played the game feel level i think is us crash and imminent smash the ceiling team still exists in the closet in athens greece the i.m.f. imports spokespeople just programs increase the total economy. but i do. strive for somalia australia i do know the museum know who is going to see the film on screen if you want to have sex go and have sex.

all right it's time for tonight's tool time award and tonight it goes to republican presidential candidate and former senator rick santorum see rick like the rest of the republican candidates has rushed to criticize president obama's announcement that the united states will be pulling out all troops in iraq at the end of two thousand and eleven but it seems to me that the republican party is having a little bit of trouble here coming up with a coherent response to the president's announcer because they're really just all over the place yesterday rick santorum appeared on c.b.s.'s face the nation where he was asked about the very harsh republican response on the iraq pullout and then we'll take a listen to what he said it many respects we've lost control and lost the war in iraq so according to rick santorum we've simply lost the war in iraq which

was just a little confusing to me because i thought we already got that being taken care of back in two thousand and three officers and sailors of the u.s.s. abraham lincoln. my fellow americans. major combat operations in iraq have ended in the battle of iraq the united states and around. half prevailed. yeah in fact i actually got the impression from watching last week's republican presidential debate that the iraq war was going so swimmingly that the iraqi people actually owed us money for our efforts cutting back on foreign aid is one thing being reimbursed by may shows that we have liberated is another we should look to iraq and libya to reimburse us for part of what we have done to liberate these nations. i get it the whole role the republican party is to disagree with obama no matter what he says and does but i think that maybe they should spend a minute he was trying to get on the same page here i mean are we winning the war

are we losing the war i'm just so confused and of course it's easy for rick santorum to come out now say that we lost the war that he's champion for so many years because he simply gets the blame it on obama we have a president who is not able to set conditions and actually have the kind of influence over the iraqi government now three years the president has had to to work with the iraqi government to try to mold and shape that relationship and to be in a position where really the iranians now have more sway over the iraqi government than the united states just shows the weakness of our diplomatic effort the weakness of this president oh ok i get it so now we lost the war because iran is calling the shots and of course because president obama sucks i should have known now the billions if not trillion in dollars that have been spent on a war that was entered into on a false premise no big deal thousands of u.s. and iraqi lives have been lost over a decade of war totally irrelevant rick santorum wants to stay forever just because

obama said that we'd be leaving so tonight still time award goes to rick santorum and really the whole republican field for being totally incoherent when it comes to the war in iraq. hi guys it's time for happy hour and joining me this evening is r t producer jenny churchill and julian sanchez research fellow at the cato institute thanks for joining me guys joy and welcome the happy hour it's good to be here never been on the force is exciting walter hill who's with the most innovative book is involved and you're interested ok i just spent a little bit of time talking about some of the republican candidates and how and how clueless they are but obviously the one that really takes the cake here is rick perry he just keeps putting his foot in his mouth and here is the newest example. texas governor rick perry brought the issue of the president's birth certificate back into the headlines in an interview with parade magazine perry had this

exchange quote governor do you believe that president barack obama was born in the united states governor perry i have no reason to think otherwise then after being pressed governor perry says i don't have a definitive answer because he's never seen my birth certificate reporter responded but you've seen his perry says i don't know why i have marc lamont hill associate i don't know have i actually happened to the best of us sometimes i really don't like i thought berger isn't what was dead i thought we've moved on because at this point you already have you have a new election that's coming up right so you have new contenders you don't need to talk about obama being a brother anymore because the economy is such crap this is the perfect time to bring it up you know you always have to harp on the things that win with your voters and my favorite part is that he goes on to say that he had dinner with donald trump recently and that's kind of what has some questions from who apparently according to some sources is like the new ringmaster in the with the

republican field he's keeping the brother isn't alive because he met with michele bachmann like three times recently to write this is a sign of desperation i think right now that now that area is sort of fall on seems to be falling out of that frontrunner top tier you know him and romney status and you know he's reaching for the. sport in a way didn't think was necessary before and there's like one of the classic moves where you sort of alluded to something and then try to avoid accountability for having you know thrown out that bit of red meat by saying well i think it's a distracting issue but back in the zero eight campaign one of hillary's advisers was on hardball saying you know you think these issues are distractions there are all these things we don't want to talk about we have no intention of making an issue of barack obama's childhood cocaine use you know you know how did you get to raise the issue but you know i think you're giving rick perry a little bit too much credit i don't know if he actually is getting desperate and trying to reach for people or if he just really just sometimes just as stupid step to let we were running out of time results keep going because we have one publicans to make which you know i don't know sometimes that happens here on this show john

mccain wants to wage war all over the world and guess which country has that on now . i think that she really cannot be allowed to continue to slaughter its own citizens indefinitely now they are beleaguered foreign ministers are going to damascus and make demands which assad will not agree to so this is a step by step process but i would not completely rule out actions to prevent over time for sure assad from continuing to slaughter his own people. so now they care because obviously this has been going on for months and we didn't hear all that much critique coming from a lot of u.s. lawmakers but now john mccain just wants to go invade another country more military actions i've really loved his reasoning to it was like well now that we're done in libya you know here we need to go somewhere else we have to keep the military industrial complex the law and love govern and as we've learned the solution invariably to leaders in arab countries murdering their own citizens is to drop

bombs on those people although if we want to make sure that we get paid back i think maybe we should do this time is going to develop and c o d bombs you know you drop them but only just sit there until you swipe a credit card and then they blow up and you don't have to do bachman's thing where we're trying to. or. right now who is going to be reimbursing us next let's move on to obviously we're doing a lot of coverage on the show we've talked about the fact that m.t.v. was looking for an occupier to be on the newest real world now they're actually doing a true life i'm occupying wall street here's a little snippet. sure. in this episode through life we'll meet three young people fell to lose everything they love because they can't control their break. away ok that was the wrong clip. that got there and that really is a true life that's going to be airing like on november fifth big where they follow a couple kids that are doing the occupy wall street thing and i don't know i can i

well i was kind of skeptical of them trying to recruit a real world because i think real world has just gone downhill so so so much but true life i'm occupy wall street maybe you think it has a chance well i'm really intrigued because i think they were there the same time that we were so i don't know how we missed them but apparently they go from like you're right there fearing the clean up and all of that i think would be interesting. perfect right because occupy long wall street was really launched by adbusters magazine and activists around that they were all sort of fans of the old sixty's situation as some get aboard the society the spectacle of whose main idea it was a sort of brilliant power of modern capitalist societies to sort of absorb dissent involved you know turning it into a commodity turning into a spectacle so you know we'll take your revolutionary movement back to you as a reality you know we've seen the occupy wall street condoms we think of that there are a lot of people that are now trying to monetize the u.s.

thing let's do our last story really really quick this is so funny so imagine that you're traveling and you have to give up your you know your suitcase to get checked by the t.s.a. and then you open up your suitcase and somebody may or may not have found a personal sex toy in there and there's a sign from the t.s.a. is the get your freak on hunger. because this actually happen to somebody. a blogger out there who you know this is you know the. full bit from from families to posted this i feel a little bit weird talking about jill's vibrator on on national television that's why i wanted you to come on talk about going to do so. she's retiring it now because you know some t.s.a. agent pawed at it so i guess that makes my christmas shopping easier. and other know what you're supposed to be doing when you're checking the baggage for dangerous explosives like you know i mean it is out of things but if it's vibrating you know and then you can't help but notice and you know i think that you know those are and on by accident because yeah i think you know i think laterally i think window was was i going to sorry larry going to tell you operatic time thank

you so much for joining me tonight you guys and that's it for tonight's show thanks for tuning in make sure they come back tomorrow tanya solomon a different think progress from joining us for happy hour in the meantime to get to the family launched on facebook follow us on twitter if you missed anything you can catch youtube dot com slash the little show and coming up next. wealthy british sign of the sun. spot on. the. market why not. find out what's really happening to the global economy with mike stronger

for a no holds barred look at the global financial headlines tune in to cause a report on. the body of colonel gadhafi is finally to be laid to rest but questions about the way he was killed and the future of the country remain with some fearing more bloodshed to come. and how wall street protesters promise yet another global rally ahead of the g. twenty summit aimed at pressuring world leaders to tax financial transactions and

currency trades. at a georgia billionaire is stripped off his citizenship after voicing political ambitions in which he vowed to stop president saakashvili from staying in power. am of the russian capital you're watching r t with me marina joshie welcome to the program libya's interim rulers have announced that the body of colonel gadhafi is to be buried on tuesday has been taken to an unknown place in the desert to try and avoid his grave being turned into a place of worship by his supporters but as some in the country continue to celebrate artes and now a reports on how many fear of the lack of an enemy to unite against could quickly reveal the rift among the new leadership. the cars of liberation are loud and clear .