party friend if this skull and achieves independence will you allow the people of scotland to vote on whether to stay in the european union and ask our labor party friend why not let the people of scotland vote on their and why not let the people of the united kingdom as a whole vote on that why should laws be made in brussels that apply to people in the united kingdom or in scotland if it's independent when the people of scotland in the united kingdom have never consented to surrender their sovereignty to a bunch of bureaucrats in brussels ok i can if you want to go you want to answer one of those questions or both is a completely separate deby i mean some of the things that have been mentioned here are complete annoyances simulate to please i've been in politics thirty three years six to sixteen of those in the late to do it is in of never had a single person come to me ask me for a lot to beating forward and seems to think i should be a focus of a political party i joined the s.n.p. because i want to go on to an equal nation among a lot of the c.n.a. to nations on unequal police and the european union in terms of related health

boards were brought in a couple years ago i don't know where the professor's been and i don't know if he's keeping in touch but talk about central planning. a new political party in the uki is in favor of central planning as he puts it all the countries all the political parties are active in parliament and westminster and indeed holyrood actually believe in the mixed economy to one degree or another so i think that professor is completely out of touch with the viewpoint on these issues in terms of the european union i think it's preposterous to suggest that if you're in europe somehow you know independent france notably did not send troops to iraq and independent scotland if we'd been in power would not have done so that's real independence not having nuclear weapons on your soil or the decision not to have them is real independence having control over taxation your social security system pain sions you know that is independence of having a role in the world i mean does he see the sleep. seriously think we're going to

suggest all places have somebody to police commissioner as well goldman gave up i think people who is this guy going to go and we're you know well you know william if you listen to it william here what about when it was how i asked the reverse question here is when you know you themselves are not so wound up about this issue i mean obviously the scots are but there's a lot of it i wouldn't say indifference but it's not an issue that you have fire in your belly about or maybe i'm wrong ok i mean the average englishman is not overly worried about scotland staying in the united kingdom. i think there is a sense in england of more particular english identity when i attended a really interesting discussion which the institute for public policy research organized into this the same lost last week but i think there is great support for the united kingdom staying together still in terms of the e.u. i mean i must disagree i mean i think there are. three and a half million jobs that depend on us having a positive relationship with the e.u. one of the benefits that we have of being part of britain is that our relationship

with the e.u. is stable and secure there is a great legal that it will in one hundred people with. an independent scotland game with an independent is going to magically state it would have to rebut it with an independent counsel appointed how it would have to be a member of the european union. exception process and why it's already in it there's a huge difference it's already you've got about it already in the year a lot of you look at. a work on the hard very hard and book of scottish independence by joseph martin's he expresses doubt if you look at over here is how it was one of the s.n.p. his favorite economists well i'm surprised you're one of the first ministers favorite color missy relies on him to back a bit ahead of you time line of innocent and that's always said this alleged time easy i mentioned i've never had it i've never seen it ok well this is completely. stage of you by and you can become saluted by a copy today of kenneth wood well if it's

a good name the it in for some part of the european union all right croatia is showing up to go into the single currency as part of his conditions for entry latvia is joining the euro we had already seen that is the possibility we're not in the possibility they're going through a recession process you lose the u.k. octo and in principle in the end you have to say not as being part of the year i don't think i'll be in scotland ok david what do you think about. ok i'll go to you can i get the scottish people vote on this but aren't you already in the how do you know they're. already in the european union why would they have to re reply they are there for a vote that the scottish people devore voted on that professor baines rense a very good as a law when i was a law professor was a voluntary scholarship in criticizing the concept cross of the trust of emotion decide which is the city editor he's a u.s.c. prisoners of war can rule people without their consent for their supposed that own good why are the scottish people good enough to vote on whether they're going to be ruled from london why don't they have the right to vote on whether they're going to

be ruled from brussels nobody has ever asked them to vote on their what are rightly these are issues and you did a. poll and the it was one nine hundred seventy five and you know these issues are decided it. was parties who stand for their parties and who want to take britain out of the european union and they are humiliated to every single general election that happens so i think the vast majority of the british people want to stay within the european union we do have to reform the e.u. look you're right it does have become more democratic we have to look at strange thing there were some people in the room how is this going to relate to any pieces that one can of go ahead jump in with scholar needs of voice so needs a voice in the european you know it's preposterous but luxembourg which is aligned as it through is able to send someone to the council of ministers to talk about stretching and scotland is a huge fishing industry and yet we're not going to be presented and to suggest really that scotland would be an exception to the scene we can use you can see any

instances professor sale down through that caribbean twenty five years ago. william guy had any you ought to look you ought to look at what the head of the scottish fisherman's federation betty armstrong has been saying in the last twenty four hours he has said that he was warned and filed that scotland going independent would mean that we would have fewer votes in the european council to discuss fisheries much as estonia you've got the fishing industry worried about our lack of influence on the european your voice and the more we all seem to be able to install the united kingdom through the usa i think it was going to wales when the tories win a tory saying it is up to you but i jolly this all the fashion industry for will you remember. jimmy jimmy here well gentlemen we're. just glad you're here union is signing up to the common fisheries policy i want to go i shouldn't anymore so i don't want to talk about an issue any more i want to talk

about an official of the european union david bang go to you ok we have this issue with scotland we have an issue also in belgium where we have. a fragile state to say the least here what is the future we're going to see more states with with what we see as the european union and we are going to fragment even more and is that a good idea but maybe it is a good idea because it might be more democratic as you pointed out well but putting aside whether we say split belgium in half and then we can divide antwerpen in half again to sort of recreate the previous division of germany able to a belgian version i think the e.u. has some long some short term stability problems because greece among others. it was well known to the euro krauts that the greece find great financial figures when greek came into the e.u. were absolute frauds and that the greek system was not sustainable and then finally the rest of the world has found that out and now you have the question about whether they're going to try to force ultimately the european central bank and the

taxpayers of scotland and germany and the rest of the europe to bail out this praful get your responsible great government that has led the country to ruin so i'm surprised that both jane are so determined at how they're going to keep scotland in the european union one way or another when this is an institution which in its free trade side has been very good i would say for all of europe but is based on lies and fraud about the financial conditions of these welfare countries like greece which exist only because the workers in other countries have to work even harder so they can bail out the government workers in greece but i'm going to we're almost out of time we're almost out of time but if i want to go do you keep you informed people will the referendum in two thousand and fourteen and will scotland be in the us i think ninety seven independence has been

forty seven independence referendum. forty five forty two have been been won by the party of independence because people want to vote for something positive and something negative of the five that were lost in montenegro and malta vote for independence subsequently a few years later i believe twenty years from no wonder all the fuss was about the fifty one members the united nations and one thousand nine. hundred ninety three we want to go into one hundred ninety fourth and clear out all the will be a chair in the general assembly for you many thanks to my guest today in denver edinburgh and in london and thanks to our viewers for watching us here r.t. see you next time and remember crossfire.

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welcome the low to show where you get the real headlines with none of them are safe regular live in washington d.c. now tonight we're going to take a look at what countries could be planning next in regards to syria as u.s. lawmakers say that they're working on other options after u.n. security council resolution was vetoed by china and russia over the weekend scott horton is going to join us but a new report from the bureau of investigative journalism shows damning evidence that u.s. drone strikes in pakistan target those who go to help after an initial strike and even target civilians at funerals so how much longer will the u.s.

government allow the cia to keep their data secret we're going to speak to marcy wheeler about the reactions to this report and you know to some very politically tinge as during the super bowl this year we're going to talk about the insane amounts of money that are pouring in from all sides to fuel political debate in this country was that we have all that and more fit a night including a dozen happy hour but first take a look at the mainstream media has decided to miss. well this monday there is no shortage of big news going on around the world americans to be tried in egypt the u.s. closing its embassy in damascus and continuing rhetoric heating up over iran now for once it's been one of those days where the mainstream media has actually chosen to give ample airtime to real news rather than just the typical partisan tit for tat i don't mean the campaign stories were completely absent but just for once they weren't the only thing that the mainstream media shone a light on. the u.s.

closes its embassy in syria and is recommending that all u.s. citizens leave the country immediately there are all americans not to even consider travel to syria because they say they simply cannot guarantee anybody security in that country hundreds killed in the streets of syria as the government tries to crush a revolution there this latest deadly bombardment comes on the heels of the weekend strike which killed about two hundred people at the syrian government we're told the state department saying has refused to address its security concerns and one of those major concerns was the possibility of some type of al qaida action in egypt plans to send forty four people including some americans to trial meanwhile egypt's military led government plans to put one thousand americans on trial for allegedly using foreign funds to create unrest in the country or iranian regime is never going to come to the negotiating table in good faith and they're not going to

stop their nuclear weapons program i think the only answer is some kind of regime change. now in light of these stories and the international ramifications of the actions of state and non-state actors in the case of the americans arrested in egypt there's another really big story today the mainstream media unfortunately has chosen to ignore the in talking about international relationships and perceptions and talking about the deaths of innocent civilians what we see the mainstream media doing today picking and choosing when those civilian deaths matter where to lay down their moral judgments is here this weekend a report was released by the bureau of investigative journalism or british organization that we've spoken about before on this show and they've been trying to work with human rights activists journalists civilians in pakistan to get more information on how many civilian deaths u.s. drone strikes of really caused let's not forget the cia's drone program is secret therefore they don't release any figures or statistics and it wasn't until last week that the president even acknowledged it existed public. and he finally did

what he was asked a question about at the google plus hangout there we heard the president say that the u.s. drone campaign in pakistan is a targeted focused effort he also downplayed civilian casualties and told those listening to the drone program has not caused a huge number of them if we can check the figures how are we to know how can we counter his words and so let's get back to this damning report report by the bureau of investigative journalism they have some numbers to offer they found that since obama took office three years ago between two hundred eighty two and five hundred and thirty five civilians have been credibly reported as killed including more than sixty children but it gets even worse than that where you have to question if civilians were killed by accident or on purpose so what they found is the cia's drone campaign in pakistan has killed at least fifty civilians who had gone to help rescue victims as an after an initial drone strike those that run to help were hit and a follow up attack investigation also found more than twenty civilians have been killed

in deliberate strikes on funerals and mourners and one example after a high ranking militant had been killed in a strike his funeral was considered bait to get another done fortunately that funeral was attended by almost five thousand people so in order to get one target the cia chose to put the lives of innocent civilians at risk which resulted in many deaths so this kind of information should make anybody out there sick to their stomach this kind of information should make every journalist in america call for more accountability over the secrecy of the cia's drone program to stop if it's being done in our name then we need a lot more transparency if we choose to cover government crackdowns in other countries show honest concern for the deaths of civilians we need to also care about the blood that's on our government's hands so while the mainstream media spent the day covering some real news in syria and in egypt we have to ask why they allow the secrecy of our drone program to continue to refuse to ask questions about it especially when an investigation like this comes out but for some reason when it

comes to the damage caused by our own government's drone program that's where they chose to miss. all right so let's talk more about this report from the bureau of investigative journalism could it finally put more pressure on the obama administration to force the cia to disclose more details or is the media doing a really good job of making sure that this goes by without much fear i mentioned at the top of the show that this report wasn't even touched by the mainstream cable channels now there was a report in the new york times this morning but the spin put out by an anonymous u.s. official in that article may show us just what the administration's strategy is going to be the quote reads as follows one must wonder why an effort that is so carefully gone after terrorists who plot to kill civilians has been subjected to so much misinformation let's be under no illusions there are a number of elements who would like nothing more than to malign these efforts and

help al qaeda succeed so now if you question the drone program that make you a terrorist sympathizer joining me to discuss this is marcy wheeler blogger at empty real dot net marcy thanks so much for joining us tonight before we get into the new york times and you know what the officials are saying here let's just go back to the reports and this investigation of the details that revealed you know how to how damning and damaging do you think that something like that is. but i think one of the things that's most damning about it is that they actually went and they named the civilians that they say have been killed by american strikes so what they've done is really increase the quality of information that's out there about these strikes as compared to what the cia gives us which is nothing or obama's quote the other day which was you know plus or the cia claiming nobody has died or maybe just a few people have died i mean what they've got is really very specific information and and one of the things that i found really important about the report was when they went to see whether people were being killed if they went to rescue people

they said we started with fifteen attacks ten we found credible five we found not to be credible so it's not like they're going in rubber stamping stories of u.s. retaliation against civilians trying to help people who've been hit by a drone i mean they're going in and checking and trying to find evidence for it and as compared to what we get from the government it's much which are in data now when you say credible reports that's one of the interesting things here too is that there have been little tidbits out there right in i guess you can say the new york times or any other newspapers and by other media organizations before they've never put them all together like this. yes actually one of the things that they quote in the report is job the war of who in his book on the triple agent this was the bombing in khost talked in specific about the the funeral drone targeting that you just mentioned and he had incredible sources for that book so to then say that you know this funeral targeting practice is made up by by the bureau of investigative

journalism is nonsense because nobody is at the same time questioning where it's reporting so you know it is credible work has done some of this before we had david wrote it in the new york times who was held captive by the taliban talking about drone strikes but you're right nobody's putting it together in a database with actual dates and numbers and names attached to each attack and i think that's where we really need to get to force the government to give us that same kind of data also in that sense that we do you think of this is finally something that might turn the tide you know or change the tide a little bit that we we hear a bomb of finally acknowledging this publicly which i think you could say was a big move but now if you have more reports if you have more investigations done by the bureau of this to get of journalism or by others can it finally force them to be more transparent and to disclose more details about it. well you know be administration is sort of kind of saying they're going to release more information about the anwar locky drone strike which was in yemen. so they are beginning to

recognize that they're beginning to suffer religion i'm a see issue here i think one of the other things that's going on is david petraeus has actually been less gung ho about targeting then leon panetta ahead of him before him with the cia and so one of the you're beginning to see interesting leaks coming out of the cia as well because david petraeus isn't giving the counterterrorism center kind of carte blanche to go bomb whoever they want to bomb so we're getting leaks anyway and this report i think is an important part of it but i have read the quote that you raised you know were al qaeda sympathizers if we asked pakistani journalists and locals to help put names to the people who've been hit me strikes. you know that they're obviously trying to push back and ensure there won't be any independent checking of their records in you know possibly in anticipation of them becoming slightly more transparent with it so it's really

important to have that independent reporting out there i had to read that just seems ludicrous and i was assuming that you probably agree i hope that you agree that now you have anonymous of course officials because they can't come out on the record because the program is supposed to be secret coming out and making this argument the now if you actually want to get the details of what the us government is doing that makes you an al qaeda sympathizer when when when will people stop trying to apply this logic or stop trying to use this logic because much of the same thing you know in the build up to the war with iraq to write that if you by any means question the idea as to whether or not we should go to war there than you were unpatriotic or you might be sympathizing with you know we saw a lot of reports about the possibility of al qaeda being there or with saddam hussein. well the other thing about it is the perfect metaphor for the drone campaign right so you've got this very powerful government officials going anonymously to attack independent journal. and it's you know it's it's very

parallel to the kind of dissociation and distance that we bring to the drone strike and also kind of the the. designed ignorance about what happens on the ground i mean so i think they're very parallel and you know leon panetta has also been on the record recently about about drone strikes so it's not like officials aren't being allowed to go make on the record comment so you really have to wonder why the new york times let that go in an anonymous but do you think that they should or that they should not have but i don't think that you know in glenn greenwald pointed out today that it doesn't get to the new york times policy on anonymous sourcing which goes back of course there depakote leading up to iraq or basically says you can't make you cannot quote officials making attacks on people. under the veil of anonymity you either paraphrase them if it's so important you need to get it in but you don't allow them to actually quote something at the same time as

you're giving them anonymity so courting the new york times rules they should have done it but it's also i mean it's so it's if this is all about information symmetry right the government knows what they've been doing with from they've got videos of what they've been doing with drones a couple of journalists go in and fact check it and independently research it and all of a sudden you've got the government you know trying to hide behind this felicity christie again and you know we at the press should not be encouraging that kind of behavior because it just encourages more secrecy. you know i couldn't agree with you more there too and you know as i started the show open here was that for once i actually see the cable media out there doing some real news it's not all just fluff today and there is a lot of news going on in the world but you know if we're going to be covering syria our if we wanted to cover libya and bahrain anywhere i think we also have to take into account what's happening to innocent civilians by our own government. and

i mean to be fair it is really hard to cover this stuff in the pakistani tribal lands and i think that's what the administration is counting on it's you know it's easier it's still very dangerous to being egypt and even more dangerous to be in syria right now but there's almost nobody in the pakistani tribal lands who's been able to cover this a number of pakistani journalists have been killed for doing so and so there are i think really relying on how difficult it is to access these places to ensure that the story doesn't get out our marcell thanks so much for joining us tonight and you know it's a report that definitely i think needs a lot more people to pay attention to but it's good that somebody finally compiled all that thanks. are there still much more to come tonight occupy d.c. was a victim from the square this weekend so explain how it happened and what the future holds for the account and also talk about syria save us announced its spending its embassy operations in the country but horton lifetime that's.

the same. people calling what you said for free and fair elections. and we're still reporting from the clinton as you can hear behind me loud explosions. i mean.

you know sometimes you see a story and it seems so you think you understand it and then you glimpse something else hears you some other part of it and realize that everything you thought you knew you don't know i'm sorry is a big. move

back are the words echoed by d.c. park police on saturday as they finally advanced on the occupy d.c. encampment been almost a week since word was let out at the occupy branches in d.c. macpherson square and freedom plaza were going to be evicted and our early saturday morning cops got the word that february fourth would be the day of starting as early as five am the police came through the camp explaining that the tent of dreams that had been erected over the statue of macpherson square had to be taken down i was there for part of the morning and early afternoon on saturday and saw it began as a pretty peaceful calm environment where police slowly began to overtake one part of the park after another but then they started to remove the tents in an effort to enforce a new policy of no enclosed tents on the parks premises many of the occupiers fled to one of the.