but the n.b.a. clearly you know is a major roadblock in this passage really was that there were attempts to close guantanamo now if it was not. sentenced to life what was once a powerful tool in the war on terror continues to drain drill holes in america's credibility we'll tell you why the new defense bill may have just put the nail in the coffin on this freedom and made want on monday a permanent fixture. good evening it's wednesday january eleventh four pm here in washington d.c. . and of course you're watching our t.v. . well as of last night two men have emerged at the forefront of the republican race to the white house mitt romney and of course ron paul now the mainstream press seemed taken aback completely taken aback as the seventy six year old texas congressman emerged to be

a serious threat not just to the establishment republican establishment but to the race to the white house now while polls surging popularity may be news to some that's not necessarily the case for those who have been tuned into this network take a look there is no doubt in my mind that the majority is on our side we represent the maturity of the american people are what i hear is proof through them are great and pro-american. right so we've been covering the candidate and his message back since two thousand and eight but at that time his ideas were mostly dismissed as fringe out of touch with reality but in two thousand and twelve today's day and age it seems like a different narrative is in fact emerging one where issues like civil liberties ending america's numerous conflicts abroad and at home corruption on wall street and k. street are suddenly not so crazy after all so although the political establishment and the mainstream media will still likely continue to dismiss them as a fringe candidate we did want to talk about what ron paul surge means and what it

says about this country and what's changed and certainly doesn't seem to be wrong paul so is it us well let's see if my next guest can give us some ideas matt welch is the editor in chief of reason magazine he's also the co-author of the book the declaration of independence how libertarian politics can fix what's wrong with america all right matt will break it down for us what's behind the surge why now. i think the first thing to recognize is how much of the surge is then mitt romney has got about the same amount of votes as two thousand and eight in iowa basically the same number in new hampshire percentage points more awful triple his vote in new hampshire and even more for the vote in ohio i think what's going on august lee's that's and then we've got a financial crisis a lot of which was predicted by people like wrong paul and his kind of school austrian economics which votes very heavily on the federal reserve and government

created bubbles and what damage they could do when they collapsed real estate bubble has since collapsed and we've seen the damage done since then and we've also seen in these sort of bailout economics bipartisan bailout economics that the kind of which the mitt romney and everybody else has supported this transfer. of money from everyday taxpayers to watch street bankers and then let it be connected and this is infuriating people a lot of them the right and wrong poll about the only guy out there who has a coherent kind of articulation against that but a plus war i mean wars are not any more often than work or they're less popular than ever in the abbos guy who is out of the democrats he's out of step with republicans he's the only major presidential candidate out there who is talking about bringing the true ending the drug war and heading off to africa we're seeing by drastically reducing government encroaching into our lives so i'm going to try

now man i want to bring in the whole element of the youth vote into this discussion i mean we have seventy six year old congressman whose biggest base consists of young voters many of whom weren't even born when he first ran for president back in one thousand nine hundred eighty eight and the sort of energy that the fan base that he has among those younger supporters i mean it reminds me of a beatle mania or even obama back in zero eight and i want to play you a quick sound bite of sort of illustrating that let's let's let's play that. i believe it is only about our liberty. i believe that by god i mean here is a man who had been a con independent living in congress i was in my personal political career now he took a whopping forty seven percent of the youth vote in new hampshire forty eight percent in iowa i mean that is ron paul in two thousand and twelve what obama was to the youth vote back in zero eight not quite but there's definitely some

commonality there and i was talking on and all this question today with some of these younger than i am and people and. you know or people who in their twenty's they have not been adults at a time and work towards you know eleven years now and plus after nine eleven people are really sick of that and there's something to be said about a god who is completely on barn there is not an old kid or consultant driven about the ron paul campaign it's anyone who watches speech last night and that's attractive to young people they look at often this is the regardless of whether you agree with everything in that model to get anyone really agrees with every or you think the whole the but on the i'm on the on the water issue i'm sorry to interrupt you there is there any sense or any indication that the former obama supporters are switching over to ron paul or is that a separate sort of group. actually jump or more likely to be independent than ever and you think what. i have i think we had

a little bit of a technical glitch there hopefully will bring you be able to bring matt welch for you there but that was editor in chief of reason magazine matt welch talking about the surprising surge in support for ron paul he took second place in the new hampshire primary and of course a lot of responsibility behind that is the youth vote which is seemingly turning out for him in droves now you don't have to go to a ron paul rally to hear about the problem of corruption on wall street on k. street and within the halls of congress and moneys on do influence in politics is precisely what gave birth to the occupy wall street movement and all the protests may not actually be changing policy yet they are forcing the question of whether this country stands for the best government or the best government that money can buy well that happens to be the name of an excellent documentary by filmmaker francis gone east so let's turn to our early studio and hear from the man himself

francis welcome back to the program the best money the government pardon me that money can buy we had you on i guess over a year ago to talk about the role of politics and money what's changed since then in your view. well it's got a lot worse and in fact i'm revising my film to reflect that because the decision by the supreme court in january last year in the citizens united case has opened the floodgates to a complete torrent of corporate money and this is corporate money which is not accounted for it's not limited and it's already beginning to distort the process and we could see that in the caucuses and we're going to see much more in the rest of the run up to the actual presidential election where you'll see it again as well now one of the things that has also changed since we last spoke to us of course the the rise of the art by wall street movement what's your reaction to that and do you

see this as a potential force in and potentially starting to sort of if not change the narrative the start of some changes in this money politics relationship that seems to be getting more and more complex. no i'm afraid i don't i think that they're a very unfocused group and that when they went to wall street they should have gone to k. street if you don't like what the banks are doing it's perfectly legal you then you have to get the law changed and the only way you're going to get the law changed if you is if you bring some pressure on the people for whom we vote and of course there you run into an enormous problem with lobbying campaign finance because the only people who can change the law is not the electors it's it's not going to be the supreme court in spite of the citizens united decision i'm sure that will be overturned somehow it's the five hundred thirty five people we can vote for and they have a vested interest in keeping things exactly the way they are they don't want to change the system well on that point the occupiers are can be heading down to

washington d.c. on january seventeenth will be covering that for you see if they raise any more attention to the issue but you know it's not necessarily the money itself that's the problem here right i mean it's part of the issue is who is giving it to the candidates and what exactly we expecting in return so talk a little bit more about about that i mean it's not about campaign. donations right it's about corporations lobbyist vested interest to expect some sort of a return on that and those types of investments break that down for us. i'm afraid i have to disagree with you slightly because what you're talking about is the issue of transparency whether we know who is giving the money it really doesn't matter the fact of the citizens united ruling was swept away completely we still have a totally rotten and corrupt system which we've created so if we if individuals are giving money let's just say you know we weren't in a recession and individuals were giving these millions and millions and thousands

of dollars in the weren't those limits wouldn't there not necessarily be a problem with that because then congress would be responsive to the people as opposed to say i don't know goldman sachs or some lobbying firm that has some vested interest in some i don't know airplane military airplane part well how about newt gingrich's friend who's got a vested interest in newt gingrich who's given him three hundred fifty million dollars to try and rescue his hopes in south carolina or jeffrey katzenberg who last year you know the c.e.o. of. dream works animation who last year gave obama's super pac two million dollars i don't think we want to live in a country in which you know the desires and wishes of see those and multi millionaires and billionaires are controlling the way we live well i would agree with you there but it's easy to sort of you know give lip service to the ideal of getting money out of politics but for example buddy roemer the former louisiana governor has made that the central primary key point of his campaign and he's

barely a blip on the national radar how do you actually go about implementing this. well this is where you run into difficulty with the constitution because you have a situation in which the elected members want things to stay the way they are and the rest of us are beginning to want to change them now the only way to change this is going to be to amend the constitution in some way to have a constitutional amendment which is a huge thing to do and trying to amend the constitution you know has many many distinguished failures in its past like the equal rights amendment which is still never been ratified so i think that that is the only way to change it is to get the constitution amended and people are very reluctant to get into that well and do you even get the sense that regular people i mean folks are worried about the financial crisis right now they're worried about you know putting food on the table and keeping jobs getting jobs is this even an issue that's resonating with the american

people. no i don't think it is but i don't think it's resonating with them because i think they actually don't know about it before i started to research my film and i flattered myself that i was fairly well informed politically and i didn't realize that lobbyists can write and do write the speeches that are made in congress they write the laws very frequently the exact wording of the clauses which govern our lives i think if people knew about that they certainly wouldn't like it and they'd want to do something about it the difficulty is we've created a system where if you're a cynical person who just likes being in power or if you're an idealist who believes that you can do something good for your country and you want to get elected and stay elected the only way you can do it is by having money to spend on your campaign so the people we despise and the people we admire in congress all are subservient to the system they have no choice many of them in fact don't

like it and i think that if a grassroots movement like the occupy movement focused on getting this is you changed it might well be that you'd find a significant number of our elected representatives who would be sympathetic to it all right well let's see let's see if they're listening fortunately a dire analysis but that's the reality and hopefully hopefully films like yours will perhaps begin to at least open that conversation thank you so much for the time that was filmmaker francis making thanks. now it was supposed to be a short term fix simply a place to keep prisoners captured as part of the so-called global war on terror now ten years ago today the first twenty detainees arrived at the guantanamo bay prison since then the u.s. base in cuba has seen more than seven hundred people come through its doors and today one hundred seventy one detainees remain there now even though more than half of them have been fully cleared for release by the u.s. government if you will see home any time soon and we've heard president obama say

multiple times that he would close down this infamous prison but three years into the presidency get remains open for business correspondent christine first reports . promises made i've said repeatedly that i intend to close guantanamo and i will follow through on that promise is broken it is the ministration policy to try to close guantanamo we have certainly run into opposition the problem is he doesn't have a plan to do that or at least what to do with terror suspects they are suspects like murat kurnaz captured in pakistan in two thousand and one while working for an ngo that helps young people get off drugs he was sent to guantanamo and tortured for five years i got water water. after i had seen a couple things got the couple a couple people got killed in front of me some of them they got just keep on his happy until he died and so the other one who was hanging on saying until he forced

to confess he was a member of al qaeda and he told them time and time again he was not it was freezing call it was during winter time and i had no clothes on so i was hanging there for many days when the interrogator came he pulled me back down. and. i was going to sign on every time when i said no he just made like this and. it's stories like this that draw fears condemnation even from within this country when one of the most powerful liberal democracies is battling with hypocrisy in promoting you know illegal practices and abusing human rights that undermines the cause of human rights everywhere on the planet it is this hypocrisy that others say leads us enemies to more action not less i think the number one recruiting tool for zawahiri and bin laden before he was killed was gone tama and colonel morris davis former prosecutor at guantanamo bay resigned after being ordered to use information

obtained during torture he said he was hopeful things would change under president obama he didn't just embrace the bush policies he kissed him on the lips and ran with them many believe the prospect of closing guantanamo bay will now be much more difficult thanks to the passage of the national defense authorization act by congress it was signed into law by president obama on december thirty first now within our bill provisions that allow the military to indefinitely detain anyone it considers to be a terrorism suspect without charge or trial and with this increased leniency no doubt increased space to hold those prisoners will be needed but the end clearly you know is a major roadblock in this passage really was the death knell for attempts to close guantanamo and i think we're stuck with a president obama will forever be known as the president who signed indefinite detention without charge or trial into law even applying it to american citizens no

person and military uniform ever. volunteer the rooms are listed on to the military for the purpose of taking action against american citizens it's to protect american citizens protecting american citizens the reason given for guantanamo bay in the first place but ten years later it is having the opposite effect still the once temporary solution now looking more and more like a permanent fixture in washington christine for zero r.t. . now is of course a somber universe anniversary the guantanamo bay prison opening but it raises a lot more issues about this society and where we are as a country and where we're going as a country that like to bring up with our next guest bring into this conversation jason leopold he's the lead investigative reporter for truth out dot org and jason you know i have been looking through sort of the old clips of having on the program and we always love having you won but it seems like time after time we have these

are questions with you on one guantanamo anniversary or another and very little changes in terms of the actual discourse or debate so instead of doing the stereotypical regular you know obama failed to fulfill his promise of closing that prison segment and i don't want to absolve the president from failing to fulfill that promise let's talk a little bit more about what guantanamo's existence means for this country and how in my view at least it seems like it's almost been normalized among us as a society. what's your take that's exactly right in fact it's it's it's very sad that the public more or less this tune guantanamo out has tuned out. widespread human rights abuses that continue to take place in guantanamo i tried to impress this upon people time and again indefinite detention which your reporter spoke about in that segment is a human rights abuse it is an issue and abuse that we condemn other

governments for however what's happening now is that we have come to accept indefinite detention we have accepted the fear mongering. that is taking place in the floors of congress by democrats and republicans is just normal course of. doing business if you will in washington and so kuantan m o truly does represent the normalization and as you mentioned of what we will see going forward i think that people are willing to accept it now it doesn't affect them let's face it they look at this as an issue that they do not need to be concerned about because they still see the majority of people there as terrorists even though we have seen evidence surface over the years that the vast majority

were in fact innocent but i also think that it's important to state that we have a number of a number which is we have tens of thousands of people in prisons in the united states as well who are. being tortured in psychologically with solitary confinement that that's not something that we find ourselves very concerned about of either well it's easy and almost you know sadly. annabelle in some ways that people wouldn't really be concerned about something that they don't see that's not in their everyday lives it doesn't really affect them right there and then but i think the problem to me it seems and i'd like to get your take on this is that we are slowly step by step trending towards a situation where more and more of these laws these normalized behaviors are now essentially applying to u.s. citizens or at least legally there is the opening for for us citizens to get caught

up in this web of the sort of lack of do right and due process talk a little bit about where where you see that going and how actual americans not just those who are already in prison and possibly dealing with. you know isolated detention and why not talk about how this could actually impact americans if these kinds of laws continue to sort of be implemented and take place. sure well you first of all you need to go back to immediately after nine eleven i mean look at the patriot act that's a law that's a law that does affect u.s. citizens we have seen evidence in the. whistleblower case involving the cia in which journalists have found their communications being monitored. the patriot act is a very important example because first of all congress continues to reauthorize it

and nobody makes any noise about it and. the laws continue to change in such a way that. people of the public are truly just willing to accept it but the reason that they're willing to accept it and i think that this is really important is that. it comes down to politics it comes down to a certain segment of the public does not want to criticize the obama administration or democrats for fear of. giving power if you will to republicans there's this this nonsense that's constantly communicated your only answer interest you there you really think that partisan politics would be the thing that's preventing people who actually do understand these developments from speaking out i mean that sounds shocking to me absolutely i absolutely see that i believe it and i have. experienced it i can tell you that oftentimes when

i will write a story about civil liberties issues that are critical of the ministration critical of policies that are being implemented that further where we're civil liberties are further eroded. as a result there's criticism by individuals on social networking platforms such as twitter for example who directly communicate with me and say that you realize that this will result in newt gingrich getting elected something ridiculous such as that and while it does seem i started in trouble there you brought up newt gingrich and we're just running out of time and actually want to bring up a separate sort of point of discussion into this conversation now earlier you talked about sort of the hypocrisy issue that's raised by guantanamo we often criticize other countries for torture for indefinite detention for behaviors that

we ourselves commit when it comes to the issue of iran and targeted assassinations for example seems like there is a little bit of a double speak there too and i want to play you two sound bites from our. g.o.p. white house contenders let's take a listen. well there have been scientists turning up did in russia and in iran there have been computer viruses there have been problems at their facility i hope that the united states has been involved with maximum covert operations. to block in this room the iranian program we wouldn't be looting taking out their scientists including breaking up their systems all of that covertly all of a deniable. now yeah these are two guys with two points of views but you can't deny the fact that they they do speak out for some segment of this population to say that we hope that this country would be behind our target of that the nations abroad i mean what what's your take of that look this is

a game that this is part and parcel of what unfolded after nine eleven certainly if it goes back to years years before. the what happened on nine eleven but. this is basically the way the far right conservative see us foreign policy sasa targeted assassinations drone strikes nothing is truly off limits and the rule of law means nothing to these people and i want to very briefly i'm almost out of time what's your prediction if we're talking here ten years down the line where does the country going to be. well first of all i don't think one ton of mobile clothes think kuantan a will remain open i think that will start to see if laws. are implemented down the road that will. further strengthen if you will the police state which sort of seems like where you know where we're leaning toward and it's very

troubling and i think that people need to keep an eye on the reauthorization of these laws particularly the patriot act will write something all right well it's hard to keep an eye on when these things happen seemingly behind closed doors and very quickly and just for a point of reference it took us ten years to bring the first responders bill into effect and of course this and a passage was signed very quickly and passed very quickly jason thank you so much for the work you do and for taking the time to speak with us today thank you pleasure all right well unfortunately that is going to do it for us this hour but make to make sure to stay tuned in to our five pm show victory for occupy wall street's so-called proverbial ground zero the barricades are down and the protesters are back in downtown new york of course our tea has been there since the movement began and we will bring you the very latest on the we occupation of zuccotti park in the meanwhile for more on the stories that you've seen today as always you can go to our website r t dot com slash r t america or you tube page

it's youtube dot com also slash america and of course don't forget to follow me on twitter as well it's at lucy cough and feel free to get in touch with me and let me know what you thought of these stories or any other stories that you may have seen here up next the capital account with lorne lester. culture is that so much i mean if you can which of course is why on in terms of unity in the republican party presidential contenders are falling over themselves in their support of israel is this a reflection of gross ignorance of history in the israel. you know sometimes you see a story and it seems so for lengthly you think you understand it and then you glimpse something else and you hear or see some other part of it and realize that everything you thought you knew you don't know i'm tom harkin welcome to the big picture.

on. morning news today violence is once again flared up. these are the images cobol has been seeing from the streets of canada ashton china operations are all today. which.

good afternoon and welcome to capital and i'm more in the store here in washington d.c. of course we know mitt romney won the new hampshire primaries he is the biggest recipient of wall street contributions so far this presidential election year so maybe obama is trying to catch up he has to chicago reportedly tonight for a fundraiser at the hole of a former bear stearns exact meanwhile his treasury secretary timothy geithner is in china to talk currency controls with beijing we are here in d.c. to ask if uncle shit sam should really want a cease fire to what many of called.