alleged taliban members to burning korans is it possible to win over a population without taking the time to try to understand that. we will suffer a catastrophic cyber attack the clock is ticking and total calamity is just a click away at cyber terrorism to the laundry list of american fears while americans focus on foreign threats are hacktivists the real danger some believe that new york could eventually be on iran's hit list we have to assume that hezbollah will be the proxy for rent that will carry out the attack and speaking of fears media outlets have their sights and their rhetoric pointed toward iran but something is missing in all this static like the cold hard facts old boy.

it's tuesday february twenty first seven pm in washington d.c. i'm liz wahl in or watching r t. well thousands of afghans in rage today after reports surface of americans burning korans at the baghran base air base in afghanistan the report suggests that the books were taken from taliban prisoners after they were suspected of using them to send messages to each other now thousands of protesters are demonstrating outside of the base where it got violent protesters threw rocks burned tires am smashed nearby buildings. now u.s. officials including defense secretary leon panetta are condemning the acts and even issued an apology today but with get a nother humiliating humiliating reported military behavior abroad is this really the way to win the hearts and minds of people overseas earlier i spoke to r.t. blogger and former u.s. marine jake delhomme very tough about all this take a listen. this cannot be seen as an isolated incident this needs to be seen in the

broader context of the united states having a p.r. problem with the islamic world since one thousand fifty three the us has been engaged in the series of affairs in the middle east that has not been done well for arabs persians or in this case afghans and the general movement within the islamic world to reject a lot of american. political ideas as well as activity and in this situation if you can imagine just if the u.s. did everything right and the qur'an were disposed of the proper way and everything was done well it doesn't matter because for the afghans the rumor mill is what dictates everything so if one person said look the americans destroyed a bunch of korans they're going to remember back a few months ago when terry jones did it and that so even if we did a right they're going to remember of that wacko back in last year when you know i

westboro and jerry jones so it's a broad it's a broader p.r. problem and the problem we have is it's not going to go away as certainly this would be a p.r. problem because it is not making troops there look very good at all and we should mention though that defense secretary leon panetta has condemned the act and vowed to take measures to prevent something like this from happening again but jake has the damage already been done. yeah i mean the damage was done the damage was done. a long time ago when the israeli state was established in the treatment of palestinians thus far has been bad the damage was done when the us did a bunch of. things regarding governments aronne supporting saddam hussein in the one nine hundred eighty s. and supporting khadafi and mubarak and a bunch of corrupt regimes in the damage was even further done when we invaded iraq

in two thousand and three on the sara lee now again the afghan situation's a little bit different but it can't be seen isolated muslims have a trans national identity and they see any behavior towards by the west against the koran or against their face as. a unified movement against muslims and honestly stateside here in the us in the u.k. now but back in the u.s. a lot of domestic policy hasn't been well for the muslims either you know there is the peter king hearings on muslim radicalization were you know keith ellison was crying when muslims see that and they get tormented by the fact that they walk around they don't feel like society is on their side at home in the u.s. and abroad. i feel like this conversation is a little bit repetitive because i was talking to you about something another embarrassing act by the u.s. military just not too long ago if you recall that video that resurfaced

a marine on the bodies of dad taliban so again what is going on here how does this all you know in the big picture shape opinion of our troops overseas. well specifically in afghanistan. of the marines being the marines and of the marines on the afghan the burning of the koran the incident now and others just general treatment of afghans day to day throughout the counterinsurgency effort in afghans they're in favor of international support for they're not in favor of a lot of this kind of anti afghan anti muslim behavior which that they see as. an identity crisis that's occurring right now it's as if it says this is their afghan idea that is being taken from them from a foreign occupier and i'll tell you the the americans that are serving over there the soldiers the guys on the ground these are these are good people that have real

good intentions but however due to the nature of war due to the bad situations that they're put in all kinds of unexpected behaviors and with p.t.s.d. with bad diplomatic skills and bad cultural training as well you know you see this kind of stuff happen and. we should be we should know this isn't going to be the last time we're going to see something like this because i are going to show you this probably wasn't done on purpose this was probably an accident but something like this is going to happen again it's only going to make the hearts in the minds campaign in afghanistan and globally basically untenable and lastly really quickly this is all happening as the u.s. prepares to leave afghanistan and for a good relationship with the afghan people to what extent are events like these going to hinder that that process and that relationship. well i think the afghans

are going to be happy once the us leaves i think the taliban's going to be happy when the us leaves i think pakistan is going to be happy when the u.s. leaves i mean americans are going to have the u.s. when the u.s. does so with overall what happens in the side of afghanistan is going to be at the base of the afghans and this particular incident is probably not going to make a big difference on things but i do think that people remember this stuff whether it's occurring virally through you tube or you know communications or even rumors so again the u.s. has a p.r. problem with the islamic world and that we need to change what we do right jake thank you for coming on the show pleasure to have you on as always i was a former u.s. marine at our team blogger jake so. cyber war is what the pentagon is now calling the fifth domain of warfare u.s. lawmakers are pushing for more power over the internet in the name of cyber

security but as time went by political hackers have joined forces with the occupy wall street movement are these loosely cavanagh's shows us how protecting free speech and the internet are growing increasingly at odds. cyber war is the next pearl harbor some dismiss it as hype but in congress it's a clear and present danger we will suffer a catastrophic cyber attack the clock is ticking and in the pentagon wrote keystrokes could now be met with real weapons the pentagon now considers cyber attacks acts of war a cyber attack could merit a military response bombs for bits so to speak. they say that the threat will come from foreign shores. an invisible enemy that lurks abroad but in this year at the protest that enemy has a familiar face and a presence right here at home alone. we are anonymous

a leaderless hacker movement with a political purpose together we stand against the new testament i don't govern and joining forces with occupy wall street to fight corporations banks and governments return for. their freedom of the power of the people cyber protesters or cyber terrorists for the u.s. government there may not be much of a difference there's a deep insinuation that dissent is somehow connected to or accessory to terrorism and that's a really horrifying prospect a horrifying prospect that is now reality if you're an american citizen and you betray your country you're going to be held in military custody and you're going to be questioned about what you know you're not going to be given a lawyer and freedom of speech and the internet may soon follow right now china the government can disconnect parts of its internet in the case of war we need to have to pushing the u.s. down the road to tyranny says retired army colonel lawrence wilkerson i don't think they're doing this based on their fear of terrorists. i really think they're doing

this based on their ultimate fear of the occupy wall street movements in this country the face of a freedom fighter or a terrorist here in the u.s. the line between the two is growing increasingly blurred obscured by fear and the fog of cyber war you see catherine of r.t. washington. larry spoke with david c. ben journalist and host of the show on how potential cyber warfare could affect the rights of every day u.s. citizens take a listen. i think the term cyber terrorism is a real misnomer it's something to get the sheeple behind this ridiculous idea that you fight hackers with physical force with drones that drop bombs and with hit squads that literally come into your apartment and could potentially execute you in the middle of the night it's such a ridiculous response to what amounts to defacing government agency websites if you take down a government agencies website that is not terrorism you're not killing anybody

you're not harming anybody you're creating an inconvenience to be sure and it's definitely a criminal activity but it is not terrorism and the same applies to you know leaked documents that surface online on some of these download networks that we're we're seeing around the world things like bittorrent that's not terrorism that's getting information out there and i think the government is terrified of the facts getting out to the average person that's what they're really afraid of here. now this fear is mostly aimed toward foreign hacker is but is there a risk that the hackers right here at home can face similar consequences. i think there is a fear and i think what we're seeing with groups like anonymous and organizations like wiki leaks and the various occupy protests that are popping up around the world is that these movements are transnational if you have an email account or. whatever not a well instant messenger you can be in touch with somebody in africa or in europe

so that's what the government is worried about i don't think they're going to respect borders all that much when it comes to cyber terrorism if there's a threat they're going to label it as terrorism and are going to go after it and speaking of anonymous the national security agency now says that the hacktivist group well in a couple of years be able. to hack into u.s. power grids which could disrupt power anonymous today responded to this on twitter let's take a look at some other tweets they said you know the n.s.a. director warns that anonymous could soon cause limited power outages. and you know their response is this is fear mongering at its best second sleep there why would anonymous shut off a power grid there are people on life support other vital services that rely on it try again n.s.a. and that is with the hashtags fear mongering and another tweet there the n.s.a. is reprehensible fear mongering and attempts to discredit anonymous are transparent

and the baseless. now i'm not i mean. not to mention the fact that why would they cut off their power that's how they stay in touch with their followers through e-mail exactly and so far anonymous has been used like to make political purpose is to make political statements why than what they target civilians where is the motivation there. it does seem like fear mongering to me i don't know the specifics of what the n.s.a. was saying but i think whatever you shut down information sharing whatever you shut down whenever you threaten. activists groups whether they be electronic or people out in the street protesting something if you threaten with a military response and physical violence on the part of the government i don't think that's acceptable we're seeing them labelled these sorts of groups as cyber terrorism and we're seeing when somebody gets off their computer and they go out

into the street and become part of a peaceful protests like what happened in oakland california recently met with less than lethal shotgun bullets from police and tear gas and other chemical agents so the government is definitely cracking down and i think this whole cyber terrorism thing is just one more aspect of that now is this an example that a line that is a blurring between line protester and online terrorists. well i think here's the thing the government has always had some control over you know television media and radio media but with the internet there is no control it's kind of anarchic if you think about it and it's totally democratic also if something has merit rises to the top and people find out about it even if those truths are inconvenient and in response we're seeing all kinds of legislation to crack down on this we saw. the same guys introducing h.r. nine hundred eighty one

a surveillance bill i think that is trying to dismantle the internet basically they don't want to remain this international free thing where people can transfer information and people can. organize so i think they're doing everything in their power to stop the internet in its current form and you know as you just mentioned we are seeing law for example the national defense authorization act that passed recently which congress and congress also tried to push through the sopa bell and that's aimed at gaining control over the ensor nat now we have these new fears for over a cyber war and the wake of all this what does it mean for the fundamental rights and civil civil liberties for u.s. citizens. well liz this is all just icing on the cake and it was the big thing and that's already been signed into law. now of flying a large portion of our bill of rights for american citizens and at this point they just want to censor the internet and control the internet so that protests against

. and against some other government injustices don't go mainstream and when you turn on t.v. right now on some of the other networks what you see instead of seeing information about and or information about you know so but h.r. nine hundred eighty one and people asking why don't we investigate people like representative lamar smith who wrote sopa and some of these other damaging bills instead of seeing that on the news you're seeing like three hour feeds of whitney houston's funeral a person's funeral instead of seeing the funeral of our democracy and that's just the whole thing is weird i don't really understand what's happening here i certainly don't know either david pleasure to have you on the show as always i was a journalist and host of the d.l. show david seaman. and keeping up on this issue of cyber security twitter is being called to the stand prosecutors in new york believe one man's tweets could be considered disorderly conduct now the man was accused he was one of hundreds

accused of. being one of the protesters there in the occupy wall street movement over there on the brooklyn bridge back in october protesters say they were practicing their right to free speech police say they were blocking traffic earlier today we spoke with the man whose tweets are causing all this controversy malcolm harris. well when i saw the email i thought it was a scam of some sort of these scammers use requests for twitter passwords all the time but when i looked a little closer i saw it was it was a legitimate subpoenas forwarded to me i was shocked surprised it was hilarious and only a little bit scary at the same time and why are tweets being called to testify well i was part of the group along with over seven hundred other people arrested on the brooklyn bridge as part of an action and beginning of october wall street. i

was charged with disorderly conduct which is the lowest of the low violations you can be charged with in new york state. they apparently subpoenaed my electronic information pursuant to that charge try and prove that i was conducting myself disorderly and how far back either are they requesting or twee it's how much information are they asking for they're going back to september fifteenth which is actually two days before the first. post occupy wall street real action happens the operations of cutting park on seventeenth and could you tell us maybe what you were tweeting during this time frame if you believe any of your tweets could be considered disorderly conduct. i don't think anything in the sort of the conduct statute allows for tweeting i actually don't remember what i was saying and

since they're far enough back i don't have access to them through twitter. i don't think there's anything there that they would find of interest but apparently they do now this is essentially a traffic take at a you call a politically motivated traffic take and why well the prosecution of seven hundred people on the brooklyn bridge there are there is there are. actually as they go over the brooklyn bridge sherry runs whatever all the time and no one arrests them. what they arrested seven hundred people there was for was disorderly conduct. is an act of civil disobedience and that's why it's politically charged now there were hundreds of people like our arrested that day. any other cases that you know of of prosecutors trying to get twitter information from political activists. so far mine is the only one i know of connected with the

bridge and now do you think but do you think that this is the beginning of twitter being used more so in the courtroom well oakley the beginning of the end we when the motion already twitter's been subpoenaed for more online related but wall street activities in boston when there's been a wordpress subpoena in plano texas so clearly law enforcement using whatever tools are at their disposal or they may feel are at their disposal hopefully we're going to able to show through this trial that our electronic communications are not one of those tools now this as. prosecutors are trying to are saying that they need this information to see if they can go ahead with charges as to whether or not you did. and you did engage in this disruption but you think that there could be more to this what do you think are the greater implications of

them trying to extract people's twitter information there or their tweets and investigations. we have seems like they could be aiming for some sort of chilling effect where they're trying to prevent protestors or activists from using these effective forms of electronic organization or just if they're going to use them anyway just go fishing through them for anything that might be of use and jenning up new charges which is not the proper use for the trial for a subpoena as has been issued and why do you what is not proper about this. earlier it's proper not as ultimately for a judge to decide but the scope the scope of the requests running from the fifteenth of september through the fifteenth of december as well as much longer than the electronic subpoenas they've been issued for other aka wall street online activities it looks like a fishing expedition to be honest and what punishment are retribution could you

expect if your tweets were indeed found to form to be part of this disruption well that once again would have the judge would have decided that guilty of disorderly conduct the tweets are just supposed to be evidence supporting that charge. to be honest i haven't even looked up what the consequences are for disorderly conduct i'm not particularly worried i'm not facing jail time of any sort and i think i mean now are you going to be watching what you tweet more often in the wake of all this but no i think i'll be doing exactly the opposite think that's the only way you stop any sort of chilling effect that this could have on the electronic communication. sounds like you are unstoppable when it comes to twitter that was malcolm harris writer an editor for the new inquiry. well here in

the u.s. there's been a lot of fear over iran and its nuclear program that's because a lot of fear mongering rhetoric has been heating up the airwaves recently this despite ta military leaders saying iran does not have a nuclear bomb and has not decided to pursue making one georgetown university journalism professor chris chambers during the earlier today in studio to discuss this very issue. well it's not necessarily agree ment it's more of what what's being covered and what isn't particularly the three broadcast networks in the cable giants fox and the cent b. c c n n most of the analysis and even the analysis on the right wing is pretty much taking place within the internet or new sites or on the internet presence of magazines and newspapers that's where you have to go to get the details but with with mainstream media and i'm here i mean television no i mean what it is is they're not they don't do nuance terribly well they do the fear factor kind of

shows very well and this is a great item for fear you know and what you have here is is people ginning up coverage of of new people understand nukes people understand military exercises in the gulf people understand us responding to it and then. calling the military exercises god's vengeance that gets people crazy what we aren't talking about are the you know the assassinations the cove or covert war the drones if cetera and the intrigue that might be going on with israel they don't do that particularly well and that's the devil in the details that could get us into trouble so it sounds like and reporting things in a very important events on the surface that they're kind of just regurgitating are reflecting what is being sad by us and politicians by the g.o.p. presidential candidates and not really showing the whole picture you know i think the difference what you have with with between iran now and iraq iraq

twenty years ago and iraq in two thousand and three is that you don't have an administration that is purposely manipulating news and the information flow to create you know a result here you you have an administration that is probably stumbling around trying to find it. the way and how to deal with this problem and it is a problem but it is not a crisis and then the media the corporate media coming in primarily t.v. networks and chipping at the edge of the story which is the fear factor and you know here's a situation where ironically you might want the administration not to control the flow of information but the stand up and say look look let's let's get a message out here that this is important and this is somewhat scary but this is not the giant following bogeyman that everybody is creating and you know we are not pawns of israel we are looking at you know the the situation carefully there is you

know you saw leon panetta you saw the chief of staff and then but what happens they get up and say this at a hearing and then the what is the mainstream media cover right wing attacks on that position or israel ginning up kind of a war footing you know these guys are the experts these guys are giving the testimony before congress and that's a message that's lost so i think you know maybe the irony is in two thousand and twelve maybe the administration needs to create a message they're not controlling it as they did under the bush administration that a kind of go along with this there is new concerns that iran may be plotting an attack in new york city this is according to them and likely to terrorism experts so in response government buildings jewish synagogues jewish community centers they have been placed on high alert which means they get extra protection of that but the u.s. secretary of defense janet says that there is no specific threat so is this being

blown out of proportion well i don't i'm trying to figure out how the new york city police department has its own you know intelligence arm that. they've had some problems in the past with their p.r. and their approach to dealing with muslims and the dealing with you know credible threats their intelligence comes from. the federal government they've worked well in the past here this seems to be something that's there's something fishy about this story and it's not iran you know iran is not so stupid as to even with a quote proxy unquote of hezbollah attacked the united states directly and you know even there are those in israel who even say that so i don't know where this where this comes from in this could be something that's a little fishy or something internal that is feeding frenzy on purpose so you know we don't really know you know and iran has maintained that their nuclear program as for peaceful purposes we even have as you mentioned before a top u.s.

military leaders confirming that iran does not have a nuclear bomb and hasn't been confirmed that they are pursuing a nuclear bomb why that is there is so much of this warmongering of rhetoric when it comes to iran well i mean you have to have a symbol of fear you have a you have a presidential campaign now that is definitely a soap opera. worst you know just fun to watch at best people are searching for issues and tag issues and red meat issues that they can feed to their constituency on the one hand on the other hand you do have an issue in the gulf you do have a nation that is definitely. jumping around and wants to be a great power again in iran and they see nuclear power as a way to do that none certainly nuclear weapons but nuclear power as a symbol so you have fanatics in that country that look at it as a as

a way of building themselves up and it feeds the fanatics over here that's great t.v. you don't need analysis for that but i mean two thousand and seven we all thought the through john bolton and dick cheney that iran was going to be attacked it wasn't in two thousand and ten we all thought iran was going to be attacked and it was now it's a little different because you have that layer of presidential. campaign you have candidates shooting their mouths off without really not understanding the facts to feed red meat to their constituents so you have you have an administration that again is trying to find a course in a message so when all those things are in play you know that's time to worry chris pleasure to have you on the thank you so much of that was christopher chambers journalism professor at georgetown university that's going to do it for now but far more of the stories we covered you can head on over to our to dot com slash usa can also check out or you to pay to see you tube dot com slash arts america and follow me on to.