welcome to the lower show we'll get the real headlines with none of the mercy are coming live to washington d.c. now tonight we're going to take a look at the protests that have swept through much of the globe this year and we'll see what binds and what divides that time magazine has named of the protester as their person of the year but can the media actually differentiate what each country is protesting scott horton is going to join us for that then human rights groups are launching a broad campaign to bring legal challenges to the u.s. use of drones and speak to clive stafford smith one of the men leading this charge

and show you some very devastating pictures from pakistan the normally unseen results of striking from afar then president obama continued his iraq victory tour by speaking at fort bragg today and telling the troops welcome home or just because john soltz who just returned from iraq will ask him what kind of a country he thinks we've left behind are not all that morphine and i could have a dose of happy hour but first take a look at the mainstream media has decided to miss. all right so as i just mentioned time magazine which nobody really reads in a war except for when they come out with this one issue finally said who their person of the year winner is and i was a little less vague that one time when they just named you but was still a gigantic group of people fighting for different causes around the world they all got lumped together. time magazine has just announced its annual pick for person of the year someone who for better or worse has done the most to impact our lives over

the past year and this year's winner is. the protester as they've done a handful of times before editors chose to honor a group of people over an individual protests have really been the story of two thousand and eleven and they're going to be the story of two thousand and twelve in this past year there have been protests in countries that total three billion people that's a lot of the world i'm going to show people the list of two through five i might have gone with admiral mcraven he's the guy who led the team that took out osama bin laden twenty seconds each guys time magazine as you know named the protester its person of the year for two thousand and twelve so in a big political year who's your person of the year. and i find this to be particularly interesting because we all know that our mainstream media can be one of the biggest cheerleaders for protesters and protests usually as long as they're happening in another country occupy wall street on the other hand mostly just mocked and scorned here at home but moving on the mainstream media is obviously drawn to large numbers of the pictures are good when the pictures are powerful but

they do tend to suffer from a very serious inability to do much further analysis and this is unfortunately the case almost always no matter what they're covering as we demonstrate here on a daily basis but when it comes to their foreign coverage or stories that don't deal with the what the one percent are worried about and instead the ninety nine well that's when they kind of suck so i just find it so interesting that time decided to make the protester there person of the year i have the media very much helped elevate the protesters to this status still doesn't really understand many of them because often after the pictures fade the media moves on and then doesn't follow up or just continues to paint a narrative that isn't entirely representative of the full picture now we can go down the line that by that we can start with egypt where we saw the mainstream media really go all out send in all of its big reporters for constant nonstop on the ground coverage of the revolution it was a cheer for democracy coming from our trusted names in news forgetting the fact that they didn't really say all that much during all those decades in the u.s. was propping up a bargain and forgetting the fact that democracy doesn't necessarily mean what

americans think it's a case in point the elections in egypt where the majority of voters chose islam as parties brotherhood and now the media wants to play there. and throw the word moderate around what about libya what about syria one of these was justified under the blanket of a humanitarian intervention when in reality what our president and other nations did was try and eventually succeed to get more market off the out and the media immediately embraced the libyan rebels despite even our top diplomatic officials admitting that they didn't really know who they were then never get off the everybody has once again moved on not watched around to stay and well not stayed around to watch the developments and you've got syria bahrain yemen that have barely even been on the radar where the concepts of what sectarian strife really means have never really been explored but it's been a big year for protests in time's person of the year theme doesn't only apply to the arab spring although you could say it's what originally caught everyone's eye and set off some kind of a spark but what about the protests in greece over austerity measures what about protests in london over to issue hikes here in western countries we saw civil

discontent with something similar the power being held in the hands of very few and austerity and fee hikes coming down on all the rest of us but it's interesting how we never saw the same kind of cheerleading for the protests of western european nations because they were all just rioters and looters and no good. kind of like those occupiers that are all just hippies and druggies and spoiled lazy kids but even now as the eurozone is on the verge of collapse over a sovereign debt crisis the mainstream media doesn't really care and they certainly haven't followed up or looked into what caused so many people to take to the streets there and of course we've got the example of the protests in russia that we've seen since the parliamentary elections at the beginning of this month again reporting that essentially looks like a collective cry of jubilation from the press because they think this spells trouble for putin but then they don't look at who and what the ideas are the make up the surging opposition the communist party arise and nationalist sentiment rising zina phobia go ahead call it white power yes there is something happening there a trigger

a fact that spreading around the world the sense of protest everywhere but i do wish that the mainstream media would be able to cut the ball look at what's happening internally when they cover these events rather than just yell democracy and fred like to pretend like the world is a hunky dorey place a little sense of realism a little analysis yet again is what they choose to miss. all right so let's take a closer look at what time magazine might mean when they label the protester as their person of the year let's look at what these protests have in common what draws them apart and why the pictures so often is muddled by the media's misunderstanding of what's really going on joining me from our studio in new york is scott horton contributing editor on legal and national security matters for harper's magazine scott i want to thank you for joining us tonight and before we get into time in the entire rant that i just went on i want to start with some news that we recently got which is that the white house issued

a press statement saying that they in fact will not veto the national defense authorization act despite earlier threats to veto it because of this because of these provisions that were put in about military detention including the detention of american citizens so what do you think again they issued a threat and then aren't following up on it well it's another election year cave to the republicans and i think it's very interesting what happened here in the conference committee basically there were two lines of objections to the in the a one was civil liberties this idea that american citizens could be snatched off the street and sent off to guantanamo and held by the military and tried by military commissions all because the president decides to label them as terrorists a pretty shocking concept one i think a majority of the supreme court says no to in fact but then on the other hand we have objections that said basically you're roading are undermining the discretion

of the president you shouldn't do that so of course what congress does is they compromise with the president on the second category but on the civil liberties issue they don't give an inch and the president's decision to go ahead and sign this measure means that in the end of the day he's not all that invested in the civil liberties issues in fact i'd say not invested at all in them. and i guess that we should have seen that one coming considering his record at least since he stepped into office that civil liberties haven't really been issue number one for this president but i don't know personally i find it disappointing another cave and you know i don't think that people are going to look upon that favorably but let's move on to time magazine which i wonder for starters if it was human think that we should really pale that much attention as i mentioned earlier i don't know that many people that really read time magazine anymore feel like people only pay attention this one time around when they named their person of the year and you know aside from the protester winning you had kate middleton who is number five but what do you think of the protester being chosen. i grew up in high school buying

it garage sales old copies of time from the twenty's and thirty's and i thought it was a spectacular magazine and the time magazine we have today is pathetic by comparison but with that i would say this is an inspired choice i think there's a lot to knock about the way the american media and the global media have covered these demonstrations a few networks have done a very good job i think i'll just zero did for instance but i think the major american networks have really let us down because they haven't gotten into the detail but i think it's correct to say that we're seeing something of a global movement here of empowerment people taking to the streets and demanding something the problem is that you have to look at these country by country and there are different concerns and different issues in every country around the world where we've seen these movements but there also is a thread i think we can say that fairly links them and that thread is

a concern about neo liberalism i think it's a concern that we're seeing a world in which the gap between the haves and the have nots is growing where power and wealth is increasingly being concentrated in the hands of a tiny minority and that's as much true for cairo as it is for washington d.c. in new york and even moscow in madrid it's that same concern that is helping to propel this movement. well i think it for you i think you bring up a really good point there and yet that somehow is not a thread that we ever see woven together. if you want to talk about not only their spring what's going on in europe what's going on here in the u.s. with occupy wall street they always seem to forget that there is a message that resonates that the power is in the hands of too few but then if we go to the individual countries sometimes it's really painful the way that the details are left out or the way that they are presented i'm going to show you an

example here this is coming from c.n.n. they're discussing the latest round of the parliamentary elections and well we'll let's play it for us and then we'll get into the discussion. they came out and we're talking about certain things banning booze in egypt and segregating beaches and banning the kenyans on beaches these are things that have a lot of people worried because each of really relies very for a lot of people worried that if these guys come to power they might destroy egypt tourism industry. ok so i had sorry i didn't give the proper introduction there but basically they were talking about the rise of these as miss parties you talk about the salafi party and all that c.n.n. really seems concerned about is that this means no bikini's and no tourism in egypt . and this was also a line that was being very aggressively pushed by the mubarak government in its waning days they were saying mubarak is giving you this thriving tourist industry

that's pumping money into our economy and these crazy and islamists will destroy it but you know i think you know the part of the problem is that the wealth wasn't being spread around the country it was being captured by a tiny group of elites who were very close to mubarak and beyond that i think you know it remains to be seen what the new conservative islamic leading parties in egypt are going to lean to whether it's going to be something more of a of a nature like the a k party in turkey which is conservative almost mainstream european conservative or something far more radical as we saw in the rand i think about still up in the air and and i think frankly one of the shortcomings and the reporting is a failure to get in and deal with the details here for instance the muslim brotherhood which was vilified for a long time you know put forward the platform i think and i read rather

a lot of detail there and i was just astonished at how mainstream it was i mean in fact it embraced neo liberal economics of all things. but what do you think that that's really about you know if you're saying if they don't get in there they don't really look at the details of the media is it in is it deliberate sometimes our range is scared to talk about i might really be happening and what might seem a little politically incorrect or my make them look bad afterwards cheering for democracy if it doesn't turn out to be the kind of democracy that we assumed it would be or is this just a general lack of understanding where you think it stems from. well i think it's both of us things but if we're dealing with broadcast media to start with remember they've only got to deal with this in terms of what a two minute a three minute segment that's probably the most you're going to get on the evening news for this and it's difficult to get into these issues and address them with any level of subtlety and that sort of timeframe maybe

a news magazine can do it so i mean i'll tell you i think i talk to people in d.c. and c.b.s. i mean they have reporters who work for them who have a very subtle understanding of these issues but we rarely see that reflected in the reporting that is broadcast on the evening news it's definitely true and you know i think it could be more important for people as they talk about the protester how the world is changing to really take a look at how it's happening in different places scott i want to thank you so much for joining us tonight great to be with you. still to come tonight close the spacing up more fallout all that that my fiancee reality show and what seems like our status meant as chosen drones as the future of war fighting machine only rarely here it's about the victims so we can look at a little acknowledge the casualties of the war after the break.

internal mere military mechanisms do not work to bring justice or accountability. i have every right to know what my government should do if you want to know why i pay taxes. i would characterize obama as a charismatic version of american exceptionalism. you know sometimes you see a story and it seems so silly you think you understand it and then you glimpse something else you hear or see some other part of it and realized everything you thought you knew you don't know i'm tom are welcome to the big picture. if.

you take out like malcolm laurie mr. peter still believes the repetition of. what a test nobody seems to know. that never appropriate the face but hardly argument that they're being overly dramatic.

well earlier this week we told you about the florida family association a little known christian television watchdog group which called for companies to pull their advertisements from a new show on the learning channel a part series called all-american muslim shows the rest of the world how the u.s. is muslim community in dearborn michigan lives and enjoys being american just like the rest of us. we live our lives like everybody else that's in law enforcement for nineteen years require much like the country music. i really am american there's no ifs ands or buts about it. now despite the theme of the reality show the florida family association thinks that all american muslim is merely propaganda that would encourage americans to overlook muslims radical views tried to sharia law because how dare anybody point out the fact that not all muslims are terrorists and that you can be faithful to

a religion and still be faithful to america and so they put the pressure on so according to the f f a's web page sixty five companies including lowe's pulled their advertising in some form or another from a recent episode of the show all the most companies out there said that was misleading not entirely true but lowe's admit it that it pulled their ad because of issues raised by quote a broad spectrum of customers which we called b.s. on earlier in the week because if they were actually listen to a broad spectrum and not a bigoted minority they would have made that decision now they also said that they were just one of dozens of companies to pull the ad so basically their excuse was everybody was doing it well the home improvement stores had an influx of feedback now over this move and it looks like lowe's might be facing even more fallout from it which i admit gives me a little bit of hope for where the world is heading and there are still people out there who refuse to play the fear game so now there are calls to boycott the whole improvement chain like this one from the star ledger editorial board which explains incredibly low said it was best to respectfully defer to that complaint and pulled

its ads for as long as lowe's continues to defer to discrimination let's boycott this chain now the call for boycotting the store is also been echoed by celebrities and russell simmons has taken the protest a step further in a tweet simmons wrote just purchased remaining spots for all american muslim next week the show is not sold out keep your money lows and we will raise now so loud scuse me keep your money woes and we will keep our it's our fall out is also hit the florida family association. reports say the conservative christian groups website was hacked and defaced by a person associated with anonymous and the hacker not only impaired the site but also obtained information from donors or we should know that the hackers vowed not to release that donor information the hacker also said anonymous will not stand for hate and divisive vitriol to be spread across the country and whenever we can we will stop it you manage to use your power to influence lows to follow you into racist stupor and they too will answer for that last time we checked the f.f.a. his web page has recovered fully from the attack but only time is going to tell how

much lowe's is going to suffer from this boycott and i say personally let them suffer. now the majority of our political and military class yvonne braced drone warfare as the future from their cheers for the strikes that killed strike that killed on were a lock in yemen and the same congratulatory tone that we hear every time a taliban commander is said to have been killed in pakistan and their willingness to appropriate money towards buying and building and developing many many more of that but what we rarely see are questions asked about the legality and the ethics or the morality of using unmanned aerial vehicles to kill from afar in other countries based on what could be faulty intelligence all with the push of a button and what we see even less of the often devastating results of civilian deaths now human rights groups are launching a broad based campaign to legally challenge drone use and courts in pakistan europe and the u.s. and it's a joint effort by the british based group reprieve and their pakistani partners the foundation for fundamental rights and one of their first targets is the u.s.

ambassador to pakistan cameron munter questioning his role in authorizing a drone strike or two young boys ages twelve and sixteen were killed so let's hear more about this joining me to discuss it is clive stafford smith the founder of reprieve clive i want to thank you so much for joining us tonight and you know you have been you're a human rights activist this is what you do and so you fought also for the rights of one ton of a detainee you know not to have people be detained indefinitely without any court of law there but unfortunately that's still going on guantanamo is still open we still have indefinite detention why have you now switched your focus to drones. well i haven't given up on grant i don't know we've still got a lot of work to do there obviously because we have a minor battle completely but i do think we've come a long way a bit one thing that president obama said is he supposed to quintuple know and unfortunately the consequence of that is that the new policy is to basically take no prisoners so if you start firing these drone missiles that people you make just

as many mistakes as we made in quantum or believe you may have been or many times we've made a lot but now we're actually kill him people instead of holding you know in a go or close current quantum advantage now one of the things they're starting with here as i mentioned is going after the u.s. ambassador to pakistan of our drone strike where two young boys were killed one twelve and sixteen years old and you actually you know one of the as a boy so has this become a personal issue for you know can you tell us the story about them. well it is personal and minute very important issue i think but it's also a very personal one for me now because we had a meeting on the twenty eighth of october there in islamabad and we're invited a whole bunch of people who come from go to the region this was the first time these guys met weston's now and so you know we were talking with them and amongst those eighty people who was this kid characters' eighty's and terek was only sixteen years old i met in my shoes and one of the people with me spent

a lot of time three days later it was dear them has been hit by a drone strike and frankly there's only one way that really could have happened and that's that some informant was being paid by our government mostly curious manner notwithstanding a slightly british accent i apologize for that that our government would have tanked his car and then fired a missile said no it's just so certainly wrong and it has made it through personal millions. and you know we just showed a picture there those were the wrong pictures those weren't the two young boys that we are speaking about just now but you have been working with somebody that's been on the ground trying to collect all of this evidence because it's so hard to get the evidence of the drone strikes and what results and unfortunately those photos that we just showed which you know let's bring them up again are there are groups that they're horrible to look at but do you think that that kind of stuff needs to be out there for americans to realize what's really happening what the results of

you know somebody firing or pushing a button from thousands of miles away is i think we do need to understand is that showed on the left was killed or just the twenty third two thousand and ten which is when the cia base killing many innocent people that they were only killing most small of the militants that was one of the three year olds that. worked we managed to gather up from a target truck you star news we've got the miss so far to kill that channel and i think they're very much brings its current you know them to be used. to kill not when he said you know me so militants that all sort of you can see the missile that it's not on the tube. but tell us more about why it is that we see so few of these pictures so few of these images why there are so many more people out there trying to document what tron warfare really means. i mean i want to go to prison respond

to do it myself but the most tells me that my little boy has the roach for a father and she don't want me to get killed or me tips it's very very hard to go to you as a journalist couldn't go that i do have a slightly devious plan to get up there myself and not so much but kind of some not to go into the public i don't want to forewarn the cia represent the next missile but i think it's really important to us as americans that we get to see the reality of what's happening there's only if you can see reduced can you really make sensible judgments about whether it's from him so tell us how exactly it is that you're planning on bringing legal challenges i know that you're not only going after the u.s. ambassador to pakistan do you want to bring other challenges in europe in the united states when for starters the cia doesn't even acknowledge their drone program publicly it's completely secret as you mentioned it's very hard to see the evidence of the damage that's done do you think they haven't

a chance of winning any of these legal battles or is it just about bringing attention to the subject oh no we're going to let me know because frankly we're going on is just plain wrong guy let me tell you about a few of them a beginning with cameron munter he's not actually the bad guy the department of state here are not the bad guys the people who are committing these terrible acts or really the cia now but munter has been put in this ridiculous position where he is our ambassador to pakistan and still basically say you know you know now i'm stuck with thumbs down on each of these strikes can you imagine if the pakistani ambassador to washington d.c. sherry rehman was required to say you know you don't know killing people in texas. i mean she would be assassinated or she wasn't prosecuted for the death penalty in texas itself and so what we're doing that particular instance is just idiotic it's

making the state department's job absolutely impossible so you know that as a gay she will win because we're mr mintz is doing is is totally illegal under any interpretation of the law but you can't take this all too seriously i do plan a few other strategies that are more fair than a court of public opinion and so for example here in britain there's a corporation that's making a lot of money off making parts of the predator drone and i'm getting a drone via turn folk one hundred fifty thousand dollars on the internet money to get on and i'm going to room those people because if they think they can fly these things overhead and round and round over people night and day and then kill terrorizing them in the meantime then they need to experience just a little jealous of what's going on selves and none for missiles that mushed i'm just going to take pictures up and the whole time because this is a brave new world that we need to worry about because in texas there's a police department just outside system that's already using drones that they say

they can work in months news chases does that you are not censor we need to be thinking through carefully so well i'm happy to hear that you will not be using missiles on your own but i think that brings up a really important point here is that we're not the only ones out there with drone technology the united states now iran has captured a u.s. drone which not surprisingly at all when the president asked for it back they said no so do you think that this is something that's going to come back to haunt us we're setting a horrible dangerous precedent that other countries of allah. oh you're absolutely right and what i'm pressing for there is really an international agreement where we have a big discussion about what's happening and then we come up with rules about how this is done because like many things that are going on in the world out there we as americans are going to need protection against this very very soon we're not the only country that has weaponless burns in the least fifty countries now with drones that are not nice that we could leave weaponized if we wanted to as i said are you

know off by one myself. so this is a problem that's come true manda secrets each wants us and we have been watching as we can now and we need to have a group of great discussion about where we want our stuff you can get our clive i want to thank you so much for joining us tonight and i couldn't agree with you more in that sense about the fact that there needs to be discussion about this which is why we bring it up on the show constantly and you know i want to see these legal challenges succeed thanks so much thanks very much the it all coming up in the sound up hearing you said it i read it and then the president did another iraq war victory lap this time in your interest in north carolina but what legacy is the left behind in that country to try to get some perspective from a war that after the break. the law. was.