that you are putting national security at risk or being traitor well i got to say so for you know i got it from the iraq's also going to give credit and so for the senior leaders in my chain of command in particular has said nothing bad is going to happen to you because of this you're not going to be you know your clearances are going to be taken away you continue your job every day so so for everything's been good to go no where that continues on you know after shows like this come out and whatnot is going to be another matter but just so far they've done pretty good so what's your guess. that was tuesday fast forward today which is thursday and b.c. is pentagon correspondent jim acosta reporting at the pentagon has launched an investigation into davis' report so i was just saying the same gave same game play itself out over and over again a war on whistleblowers or anybody who speaks critically of the d.o.d. or other government agencies joining me to discuss this is former state department official peter van buren author of we meant well how i helped lose the battle for the hearts and minds of the iraqi people and retired lieutenant colonel anthony

shaffer senior fellow for the center for advanced defense studies and packed america he's also the author of the book operation dark heart additionally pentagon and military officials claim it two years ago while he was stationed in joe i'm sorry this is a quote that is going to be later i just kept going are you guys thank you for joining both and both of you have you know i can hear you can you hear me tony. tony can you hear us tonight our i think we're working our audio issue here with tony but peter you and tony both of you have had to deal with the consequences of speaking out right and you wrote a book about this and you had a blog where you linked to a wiki leaks piece and they went after him with full force do you think that lieutenant colonel davis should have seen this coming that he should have expected and i asked him two days ago i had a feeling that's what happened to you but at this point so we just get used to it it's very sad to say that yes lieutenant colonel davis should have expected that all of us go into these things with good intentions none of us are people that are

setting out to the anger of the government or destroy the government or harm the government quite the opposite all of us are patriots people who have served the united states in various forms for all of our careers who see something wrong and want to speak out about it and so enter into the process a tad naive believing in fact that the constitution protects protections that the united states constantly talks about and advertises overseas apply to us as well now tony i'm curious too because apparently danny didn't even know that this investigation had been launched until we saw something like this reported in the press so how do you think we should properly read that you know i mean might there not even be an investigation and there's whispers to scare him or why i think an investigation is coming that that's a typical response to this sort of thing as is as you were just talking about there that's what everybody goes into this with the best in the tensions and you you know matthew and i matthew and i have worked with danny and and we told him what to expect so he's going into this with his eyes wide open and we hope for the best

we're all hoping for the best but what he's had to say the truth is not popular in many circles that one of the first things i learned about d.c. is this is the champ the truth is the goetia will and people don't like people going against that victim but at the same time you have seen this on a classified report that he submitted which the pentagon has allowed to be released . that and a is that warranted for an investigation just because he wants to give his an his opinion it's not like this is not a wiki leaks of bradley manning scenario where all this information was put out on the internet and it was classified. what exactly is it other than they just don't like what he has to say well that's the bottom line like my book which with your classification of you twice it's just that they don't like what he has to say i know his research i know his sourcing i know he gave a classified report to congress he followed every rule he called people in it and us advised him on how to do it properly so i know a lot and he's done everything by the book yet it doesn't really matter because it

is his content not the method of his delivery the content of their after so you're going to see the worst of duty come out and the worst of some of the folks who are literally thinking with their ego not their head that includes a senior generals who are leading this war and i think that's what we're going to see a lot of retaliation from that's very senior level and you know the thing is i think that. not like it's right but people might expect the military to actively pursue somebody that wants to discredit that and what it is that the generals are saying about the wars abroad right because they have so much power and so much influence now but peter you know from your experience that it's not just the d.o.d. it's not just the pentagon that does this you know it's spans across it's a state department i mean do you think that it's all inclusive at this point this is obviously a u.s. government wide policy not something that's unique to the state department or any other government agency or the d.o.d. from one nine hundred seventeen until two thousand and eight the united states government used the espionage act only three times against its own employees for

whistle blowing since two thousand and eight the obama administration is pursuing six prosecutions currently against its own employees for whistle blowing this is not something that's being made up in one department or one office it's something that's crossing the government and it starts in the white house. you say it starts in the white house right and you could say that this is the administration that promised transparency one point we've heard president obama praised also blowers for you know the need for whistleblowers to show us fraud waste and abuse but at this point has it just become part of the culture it's become part of the culture to lash out at people who do we so blow who tell the truth i don't even like to term whistle blowing we're simply telling the truth from our own experience what's happening the people of the united states don't know what goes on inside the box of government unless those of us on the inside share that with them and we shared honestly objectively and we share with the best of intentions to improve things but what happens is the lashing out the investigations the removal of sere curative

clearances the rumors the way the jobs the room careers are ruined and through prosecutions people are rendered financially destitute just trying to defend themselves against these accusations are we're going to get into that some of the perhaps the extra legal means to that you mentioned the first i also want to talk about the role that maybe the press plays in this as i mentioned the first place where i saw this report was from and we see these pentagon correspondent jim acosta and there is this line at the end of the piece that really got a lot of criticism i'm going to read it for you says additionally pentagon and military officials claim that two years ago while he was stationed in germany davis wrote a letter to petraeus advising petraeus on how to fight and win a war against iran the officials say davis also asked petraeus to help him skip a rank and get promoted to brigadier general so he could help shape the strategy for a war against iran tony i mean how do you see that right what does that have to do and where did that come from is that a smear job well let me let me answer that question direct as my own experience

when i was doing most was employing an able danger which had to do with three nine eleven intelligence regarding. the nine eleven attacks they were coming down on me because they claim that i did save convoy operations in afghanistan so how do you i'm sure you've come where operations in a combat zone. that's how loony they get so they will put out there anything they can they think will do discredit the individual making the statement this is typical of them i would expect more to come in some point in the very near future but said the media to you know talk to anonymous officials and put this kind of stuff into the story rather than perhaps i don't know asking danny about it himself let me let me get into real quick when i was on with wolf blitzer when i was doing my whistleblower and he looked across at me he c.n.n. decided to not run with what the pentagon told him so all said look this is what they told me five things a pentagon told them about me all of which were patently untrue so at least i know c.n.n. at the time said we're not buying into it so yeah i think the media should probably

practice and common sense about what they put out there because frankly so what if you know what he jokingly said to try to say what you know which would prevent what we had a time so i can help you plan so for could want. peter i do have a comment on that in my own case the state department has audited all of my travel vouchers back to two thousand and eight they've looked into my credit report and you can be sure i'm going to be very careful with my taxes this year but let's make it easier let's stipulate i'm a lousy human being i mean to baby psychic cats and all those other things please tell me what's wrong tell me what's wrong with what i've said tell me what in my book is not accurate let me know what tony said about able danger that's not true forget about us as people because that's not relevant that's just the government's attempt to smear the messenger instead focus on the message and if i could say something to the media it would be that pick apart the message not the person and so i want to talk about you know you wrote about the obama administration's war on whistleblowers today i'm assuming probably before this announcement came out about

the investigation too and you spoke about the fact that now they have really tried to pursue you in every way that they can to hit you in every way they can not just their legal circumstances can you elaborate that for us an hour and a half after my article was published this morning i was called into the state department to discuss that and answer why i was talking about this that's an example of how quick things can happen and i spent this morning to finding myself inside of the department of state what happens is that it can be difficult sometimes to prosecute people it may involve telling the truth which is something the government wants to avoid altogether and admitting that tony was right when he exposed able danger or a lieutenant colonel davis has spoken the truth so they don't want to prosecute for those reasons other times they don't want to have the documents revealed through discovery or through a court process so it becomes much easier to destroy the person as an individual we saw that most explicitly in the case of thomas drake whose life was ruined and particularly with bradley manning who spent two years in custody without yet the

chance to defend himself for an alleged action yeah they will go after you financially let's also not forget john kiriakou whose wife was then fired from the cia while he was on maternity leave thank you she was also a cia analyst there well so in that case you guys. is there any other recourse is there still somewhere to go or does it become this this whistleblower's club where everybody is has to stick together and back each other up well there are as asians i look to and i work with tom divine over. their medical ability project daniel bryan over at the project on government oversight. tom fenton and the guys over at the judicial watch i work with them constantly trying basically behind the scenes to put the truth out there so there are good good guys and gals in this town but it's an uphill battle and you've got to work with the media because the media can be a great ally i think you guys do a great deal of gathering accurate information and it's really this this this

teamwork that's going to be critical to getting the truth out there is you know we talk about you know that the truth is the truth or find out why what you're saying isn't correct don't come after us as you know as people really want to look at what we're saying and that's the key here and you guys are so important that process i think senator i got to wrap it up any last where it's the most important place for all of us is now the office of the special counsel the part of the u.s. government that exists primarily to preserve the rights of whistleblowers and my case is going to be going to them against the department of state and hopefully we'll get a chance to tell our side identified thank you both so much for joining us tonight thank you thank you. hard time for a break and when we return we'll have a glimmer of hope as the u.s. military moves one step closer to denver equality and as the current primary system makes sense to anybody out there really doesn't to me as we're going to discuss alternatives with david sirota we come back.

you know sometimes you see a story and it seems so for like 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 harpur welcome to the big picture.

the official. from the. omission now in. the news today volunteers once again flared up. these are the images the world has been seeing from the streets of canada. operations throughout the day.

the skies over. the mine will come down. so much steel choirs will be singing. well tonight we have a glimmer of hope for all the women who want to defend the u.s. so for years there's been an argument that females who do serve in the military don't have the same rights that men do longstanding combat exclusion policy kept females from being assigned to ground combat units which are considered to be the most dangerous roles in battle but since the u.s. has been engaged in war for ten years in afghanistan and iraq for eight women have been call to take jobs as medics and teligent officers because of the changing way that our wars are fought on men technically aren't in combat it doesn't mean that they're not actually in it but they haven't been losing their lives so should they get the exact same training something that genevieve chase american women's veterans brought up with us last year. i think the most important thing to two that we need to discuss at this point is whether a panel or whether pundits or whether people back here talking about the issue

should talk about what should happen downrange commanders downrange should decide who goes out with that many everybody should be trained. genevieve joins the many female soldiers who say the restrictions placed on them affects their ability to be promoted and keeps them from taking advantages of new opportunities within the military but looks like the defense department has listen the pentagon has announced today that it will recommend to congress that women can serve closer to the front line all the d.o.d. isn't suggesting that women serve with the infantry they do think that it's acceptable to formally assign women to battalions that might not seem all that significant to you or i but for those who serve they understand the big difference between being attached to a battalion and being assigned to one now the military says that these changes will have the biggest effect on females who serve in the army and the marine corps and it could create as many as fourteen thousand job opportunities for them now those that are opposed to women holding a larger role say that allowing them to be assigned

a battalion won't help america's national security and of course we do have to warn you that now this has been presented to congress they still have the option to delay or block the change but for the two hundred thousand women that are in active duty roles this announcement is a step in the right direction and to me that's a glimmer of hope. now this woman here is. a malaysian born stanford university doctoral student and mother she's also on her way to pushing u.s. courts one step closer towards defining the legal limits of the u.s. flight watch list it's all thanks to an appeal court ruling appeal court ruling in her favor on wednesday now in two thousand and five while trying to fly to san francisco international airport to a stanford sponsored conference in malaysia to present a research paper she was handcuffed and detained for two hours by airport authorities during that time they called everybody from the local police to the department of homeland security to try to get more information and she was eventually allowed to leave with zero explanation but was last too late to present

her were so she was also not let back into the country as a visa had been revoked so it would have submitted the form of the t.s.a. to have her name removed from the list so they obliged but they never confirmed that she had originally been on it but she was in down there she then she sued the t.s.a. and came up with nothing she then sue the f.b.i. much of that case was thrown out and a court of appeals from the ninth circuit revived the case in two thousand and eight it was quite a long journey but the d.o.j. has argued that by voluntarily leaving the country even him forfeited her right to make constitutional claims under the first and fifth amendment but yesterday an appeals court disagreed and the majority opinion said that at this point litigation no court has attempted to determine the merits of either hims claims under the first and fifth amendments the parties have not briefed whether her placement on a terror watch list violates the rights to freedom of association equal protection and due process not only have those things not been ruled out of the courts in

regards to abraham situation but they have been ruled on by the courts at all there is a huge a gray area when it comes to terror watch lists and no fly lists for example how long can somebody be handcuffed and attain for investigative purposes is being on a watch list warrant arrest there's also no way of knowing how or why a person is on the no fly list or. who exactly put them on it so we do know through years of court battles that abraham was put on the list by a contractor who was working for the department of homeland security now these questions become all the more important when one looks at the number of people on these lists off to mistakenly the associated press just reported to us last week that the number of people on the no fly list doubled within the last year doubled and yet we still have no real answers as to the process for getting put on the legal limits of detention once on that list or how to properly clear your name once you've been placed on it so the secrecy is seemingly endless and so here's to hoping at this ruling does break some of that down.

our guys it's time for show and tell on tonight's program now earlier this week we spoke to chris hedges about the effect of the quote black bloc on the occupy wall street movement and we showed our viewers thoughts last night in the show so we decided to skip tonight's responses since they're basically all the same responses i moved straight on to a new question earlier in the show we spoke about the twenty six billion dollar housing settlement between the government and the five big banks so who do you think won the day banks or american homeowners let us know it think on facebook twitter and you too and in those years fans just might make it on their. well this campaign season is reminded many of us of just how complicated and seemingly illogical our presidential elections can be for example why is i with the first caucus in the nation and you have to the first primary the two states aren't exactly what you would call representative of the country as a whole then rick santorum won in three states earlier this week more questions

came up what's the point if you don't actually win anything colorado minnesota congresses are non-binding missouri's primary allocates no delegates and then you really have to ask why is the person that wins the seat in the executive branch the one that gets the most votes so there's a movement in this country to enact a national popular vote plan faces fierce republican opposition because it just makes sense joining me to discuss this day it's a row to talk radio host and author of back to our future how the one nine hundred eighty s. explain the world that we live in now david thanks so much for joining us tonight and i guess that we're going to start you know broadly let's admit it our system is or our entire electoral process is really really confusing sometimes i try to explain it to other people i know to live in other countries and i find myself getting confused just you know within my own explanation so this doesn't really feel like a democracy does it it feels like it doesn't even feel like a republican democracy it feels like a convoluted system that seems to be designed to make sure that the winner of all

the votes of the most votes doesn't actually win and the biggest crime against the concept of democracy in america has always been the electoral college which guarantees the possibility that a president can be elected without winning the most votes and that's not only undemocratic it doesn't comport even with the notion of republican small or republican democracy representative democracy is still supposed to be a democracy where the majority it's the biggest amount of say in our elections also we've seen a movement in recent years to a national popular vote plan that a number of states have looked in. q but there is fierce republican opposition on this and you know you wrote about this a while back to when you said that you were just getting letters from commenters there as really they are just mean as a you decided to address some of the constant arguments that we hear against a national popular vote so i want to go through some of them with you you know

often we hear that it's unconstitutional but he say that well it's nonsense of the constitution and deliberately says that each state can decide how to apportion their own lectures if you believe in federalism if you believe in so-called states' rights then you believe that a state should have the right to say that its electors go in the way they decided for them to go many states right now decide that winner takes all that the winner of the popular vote within the state gets all of the electoral college votes some states say that the electoral college votes in their state are awarded proportionally that if you which is some part of the vote in the state you can get some part of the electoral college votes with the national popular vote plan proposes it at the state level it says and the states that have signed on to said we're not going to apportion our electoral college votes to the winner of the national popular as u.v. to the part of the popular vote in our state we're going to apportion our electoral

college votes to the winner of the national popular vote no matter what happens inside our state now you can be for or against that plan but the notion that it's unconstitutional is preposterous the constitution says that each state is allowed to decide how to question their about their own electoral college votes now in a sense to me as you know if you are running to be the president the united states' right to be in charge of the executive branch that's the highest position that we have in this country so why wouldn't it be you know why wouldn't everybody get a say why would certain votes count more than other votes but they also bring up that there's constantly this argument that's made over not democracy this is a republic. and that also is an argument for all of the national popular vote but here's the thing a republic means a representative democracy that we don't all vote each of us on every single bill for instance that's before the congress or every single bill before our before our state legislature we both are representatives to go vote on those issues on behalf

of us. that principle is not in conflict with the notion that the winner of the elections to represent us should be the winner of most of the votes that are cast the majority of the votes that are cast so the whole notion that the electoral college being made to make sure that the winner of the popular vote wins the election the idea that it's against republican democracy just misunderstands the very definition of what a republican democracy it's also all of this seems to make a lot of sense what you're saying so when is it that you think that republicans are are really afraid of that. well i think they're afraid of the idea that the smaller states can't control the election the problem with with their fear of course is that smaller states right now don't really control the election in fact if you look at where the presidential candidates go right now they already go to the biggest states they already go there's one eight nine ten eleven twelve swing

states that are basically the battleground for the election and that's where the presidential the so-called national action happens so i think there's a lot of his perceptions out there among republicans i also think frankly that republicans fear the will of the people i think that there's just a basic fear that if the majority of the population gets with what it wants it wouldn't be so good for a party that represents such a narrow small economic interests right and that's one of the things you have to think about because we always hear about you know the coastal areas they always hear about urban centers and how they're mostly liberal but i guess why if more people you know live there and actually feel that way that means that a majority of americans actually feel that way but what do you think the chances are that we might actually get this national popular vote plan come in actually i think there's a real chance i mean you got one hundred seventy some. electoral college votes then are now signed on to the national popular vote plan that is. states representing

about one hundred seventy plus electoral college votes have signed on sending that if an electoral college majority of states sides onto this plan it will go into action so all it really needs is a few more states to side under this and it will be a reality i think it's going to be a reality i think the arguments against this are pathetic i think they're undemocratic i think they're frankly un-american i think this is going to be a reality i think it's a matter of when not you know. definitely would be quite a good and interesting change there thanks so much for joining us tonight thank you . i just ahead on tonight's show the g.o.p. is turning this whole debate around contraceptives into an all out war and if you're the party darlings are really using strong words against president obama's right to have. an unhappy hour we'll get that story about incest that we told you so much about yesterday and the steve jobs f.b.i. file has been released so we're looking at some of the details.

you know sometimes you see a story and it seems so 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 harpur welcome to the big picture. mission of free cretaceous free in-store charges free. range month free. three stooges free. download free blogging plug in video for your media projects a free media dog r.t. dot com. wealthy british soil the sun. is no time to write in the

fine. markets why not. come to. 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 into cars a report on our. guys it's time for tonight's tool time war and tonight we're looking at the grand old party still less you've been completely tuned out from the news this week you're probably aware of the utter hysteria surrounding the obama administration's decision to require catholic run institutions not churches but institutions to

provide an option for birth control within its health care coverage and i say hysteria that my actually be an understatement as the republicans saw an opportunity to clear an obama war led war on religion and they have rallied of the troops with a gusto usually reserved for hating on poor black people take for example senator marco rubio the darling of c pac the federal government does not have the power to force religious organizations to pay for things that that organization thinks she's . now i was standing in the crowd at sea back this morning while rubio was speaking and let me just say that his line about religious freedom that was by far the most applauded line of the entire speech standing ovation whoops hollers the whole nine yards and while the line with the hits it also just wasn't true hoops with the the health department's decision only requires of the option of contraception exist there is no mention of females being required to take any sort of contraception or for organizations to pay for it is that i have.