welcome to the alone show we'll get the real headlines with none of the mercy or come alive in washington d.c. now it's not going to speak for whistleblower peter van buren just got a germination notice from the state department for charges like leaking wiki leaks and using poor judgment when speaking about hillary clinton's we're going to get all the details then three in ten young americans l. live with their parents we're going to see what doctors aside from the economy are playing a role in what some are calling the going nowhere generation and thanks to

a boy request we get a glimpse into f.b.i. surveillance of environmental and animal rights activists over the last decade let's just say that they're targeting people for no good reason so we have all that morphy tonight including a dose of happy hour but first take a look at the mainstream media has decided to miss. it so if you were watching the mainstream media today there was one really big political news story for the release of a documentary about the obama administration. last night the obama campaign released this documentary called the road that we've traveled seventeen minute documentary campaign from here it's a white house bio pic if you want to call it that most notable in the film is the defense of the health care bill domestic accomplishments include the auto bailout his health care overhaul and the stimulus which is all part of this seventeen minute video there is a seventeen minute documentary that's coming out the traveled to the president

there is being successes are being touted the film focuses on the president's republican critics in the tea party become somewhat of a scapegoat this is again this is not about movies and fantasy land you know this is about real people's lives is it smart is it slick is it both is it going to fire up the base and when that came out i thought to myself this is something you normally see left in the summer right before an election and they are basically saying look we've got we've come a long way we have a long way to go but let's not forget in this day of instant messaging and instant everything let's not forget of the successes that have been achieved docu ganda aggressively part documentary with a piece of propaganda. i mean i think that's a pretty good indicator of where our mainstream media is priorities interests lie when they're more discussing a movie that talks about the obama administration's policies and the administration's policies in general that of course they're more interested in the responses to the movie or the democrats are saying what the republicans are saying

this is an election year it's a campaign gimmick and clearly the film is that you create this sort of light but what happens if we only focus on that left versus right democrat versus republican world we miss some of the biggest issues that should worry us all that have nothing to do with your political ideology what you think of the role of government should be i'm talking about the basic values that are trying to the constitution i'm talking about are civil liberties an issue that of course this movie doesn't touch considering that having a former constitutional law professor as president one that's resulted in such a massive shredding of the paper that he's supposed to be so familiar. it's probably not a great selling point or a cheap it but anyway let me highlight two other political stories out there for you today that didn't make it into the mainstream media some of the chuck grassley asked at a recent speech for the full legal memo the obama administration used to justify killing on we're all lucky in that drone strike in yemen without any due process and i'm happy to know that senator grassley also found the attorney general speech the other week to be complete b.s. and this is what he said is that if the attorney general's going to justify

targeted killings based on robust congressional oversight he needs to follow through make these documents available to congress not just give us the cliff notes in a speech to lawsuits and personally i couldn't agree more example the two senators ron wyden i'm argued all over in the letters to attorney general eric holder once again expressing their concern over secret interpretation of a portion of the patriot act that they warned about last year that they warned would make american stunned to see how this administration is carrying it out now they're not going down without a fight either and this time they even said that this operation is not as crucial to national security as executive branch officials have maintained executive branch officials maintain so let's thank them for that as well and once again these are issues that clearly didn't make it into the movie these are the issues that will make it into the partisan fighting that we see play out in the mainstream media these are moves to counter some very serious offenses by this is ministration of the mainstream media just chooses to miss.

well today let's revisit the story of peter van buren state department employee whistleblower and after the show anger has been civil now for twenty four years but he came under fire for writing a critical book on the iraq reconstruction effort while still working for the state department a book which he submitted for your review follow the rules which the state department rejected too after the review period passed based on passages of data and to contain it classified information out that point that you're in a strip of a security clearance ban from his time from the state department headquarters and transferred to another shop last week he received a terminations notice based on a charges those charges include linking to weaker leaks on his blog failing to clear each blog post and using bad judgment for criticizing hillary clinton and michele bachmann but is this just another example of the government retaliating and going after whistleblowers here discuss it with me is peter van buren foreign

service officer and author of the book we meant well how i helped lose the battle for hearts and minds of the iraqi people and just on radek national security and human rights director of the government accountability project nation's leading with the organization and i thank you both for joining us tonight and for starters peter did you know this was coming or was this a shock to you it was something that i expected i expected the state department would increase their retaliation against me up to the point of firing me seeking to fire me so it wasn't unsurprising but it was still quite a surprise if you look at obama documentary i wonder if we also feature that he's more whistleblowers into jail than any of his predecessors under the espionage act that may not be in the documentary but it may certainly be something voters want to think about this fall also good point so in that sense we do think you're being unfairly targeted absolutely by a book was approved by the department of state and more importantly the constitution of the united states protects free speech with the state department is

trying to terminate me for calling it bad judgment is in fact core political speech of the very basis of the first amendment the right of people in america to criticize their own government would like to point all through the office twenty four years ago it was to the constitution particular clinton. testing can you walk us through you know some of these charges things like that using poor judgment our bad judgment of their languages towards hillary clinton well it's ridiculous i mean clearly this is about the book which the state department pre-cleared by default because they let a thirty day time period or apps and didn't realize their mistake and it's about peter's clocks now unfortunately for the state department the f. bomb is the first amendment and they it's a dirty word and they have studiously avoided throughout each of their italia tory actions taken against heater fan pier and they've studiously avoided mentioning

that first and then that which clearly precipitates all of this it is a prior restraint to require him and in actual impossibility to be able to pre-clear every. tweet and facebook update but this blog is as far as i understand it and an authorized blog right is the way that people describe it is that normal there are a bunch of other state department employees that all have blogs and do they not get their blog posts cleared before they write want to read their hundreds of state department blogs this is the era of the internet and many of our young people were coming on board i've lived their life on the internet they don't know without it all these hundreds of blogs in fact the state department chooses to link on its careers website to about twenty or thirty of them and never expects pre-clearance on any of those things because those blogs so you things that the state department likes it's dissenting speech but they don't like and they bring out their guns prior restraint so what is it that you said that was so bad about hillary clinton i wish i had more conversations about this school in the news in this week than i've

ever thought of before this is at the time that more cut off he was murdered. over his death she said on camera and it's on my website if anyone would like to see it we came we saw he died in that she started laughing. to me that was one of the most on diplomatically things i've ever heard a u.s. official do laugh at the death of a foreigner however vile a man he was but simply not what one does and so by using words that some people might find offensive to describe the secretary i was trying to draw a contrast between an act of laughing at someone's death and naughty words that we've all heard before and asking the question truly which of these is more seen in the state department's view party talk is more obscene than laughing over the death of world leaders and tessa i've read it from a legal perspective and i've seen you say this too that you think that if you worked at a private company and there with them it came off as insubordination and five go

ahead fiery you have the right to do that but you think that it's different if you work for the federal government yes it's definitely different and i think most government employees would be appropriately outraged if they found out the government and their it in c. was monitoring their internet activity during their private time on their personal home computer it's outrageous and they've admitted to it that we are monitoring you twenty four thousand now in a private corporation make a priory yet the same thing you had the president fired general stanley mcchrystal right because of things that he said that were then written in a rolling stone article what's different about government from private companies is that you don't really have a choice with government you can go for some of the people but most of the folks in government including myself were never voted for more importantly with private companies you could take your business elsewhere if you don't like the way they do business if people inside the government don't tell you the people about what we're

doing you have no way to know if i didn't write a book about the waste and mismanagement in iraq who could tell you that who would tell you that and that places a different obligation on government employees an obligation that president obama in two thousand and eight said. was something that was really important to the federal employees speak out it's funny how we strangers call we don't we don't remember that statement don't we when he believes that whistleblowers really play a very important role in exposing raised fraud and abuse so i also read to you that there was a report done by an investigation this is national council and you think about might have something to do with the timing here well the office of special counsel recently decided we filed the complaint with them and they decided to refer for investigation and prosecution and it was only after that that the state department proposed the removal of mr van buren so that's awfully suspect and then as part of that proposal we found out that the state department's internal office of

investigation has been investigating not the state department's first amendment violation against my client her brother mr van buren himself are you. do you have any regrets or do you wish that you hadn't written this book had written this blog said what you did and then you couldn't in jeopardy right now in the short term in the short term this is been a lot more difficult than i ever anticipated i did not expect the full force of the united states government all its electronic tools in its nastiness to come after me because i wrote a book i thought the american government was stronger than that that they were afraid of words that the state department organization i probably worked out for twenty four years was not going to stoop to these mccarthy like tactics yet at the end of the day i don't regret what i did i did what i did because it was important for people to understand what was going on in iraq so that americans can understand why things went wrong there so that they can judge why things are going wrong in afghanistan and other places i felt that i was uniquely placed to tell that story

and at the end of the day i chose to take the hits and make the sacrifices to tell that story i think you know you are there twenty four years at the mat you've been to both iraq and afghanistan obviously and so i want to get your take on what you think is happening right now right out into afghanistan ok you haven't been to afghanistan what's your take on the way that people are looking at this war effort in the way that we're suddenly seeing the opinions change right there and people that for years have been saying we need to get out of afghanistan that this war is not working that counterinsurgency has failed and unfortunately do you think that it took a horrible event like this this shooting of civilians to really change the tide it's unfortunate that it does require a horrific tragedy like what did occur in afghanistan but sometimes it does need a bit of a shock to get people to change their thinking sometimes you have to say dirty words to get people to realize what's going on sometimes you have to bring to their attention a horrible massacre to reveal number one but our time in afghanistan eleven years

and counting has been too long with very few results and to draw attention to the fact that the system is breaking down when soldiers commit. violence like this a sign of discipline breaking down of command structure breaking down indicates that there are internal problems that have come about after so many years of war and i thank you both for joining us and i will be sure to follow your case to see to see how progress is in your battle versus state department thinks maybe thank you very much. our time five first break that evening but we come back with a look at almost six months of the occupy movement through the eyes of the fire and then are the youth of america simply going nowhere fast the young turks an aspiring about factors contributing to young americans stay at home folks.

people calling what you said for free and fair elections. and we're still reporting from there so. you can hear behind me loud explosions. you know sometimes you see a story in the scene so you think you understand it and then you do them something

else here's some other part of it and realized everything you saw. i'm sorry is a big issue. here on the show we've been covering the occupy movement and they want from

a conception in new york city is a comedy part it's transformation and to movement less about mass protest and more about targeted actions buying pro quo zhorzh closing down bank branches on the eve of the six month anniversary of the occupy protests we'd like to take some time to reflect on how this new one is a vault from the point of an occupier who's been to make pearson square a lot several months archies pristine for south and following twenty four year old john northam here in d.c. so here's a look at the movement there his eyes. every gaps of free will has been told it's a global the say ship before it's up and make sure the soulfire meet just separation we first met joe northam in the early stages of the occupy wall street movement i've been out here since october second degree a little bit just the whole. hell of a corruption of the old i suppose really incestuous relationship that they got a lot of. like that stuff it was possible multiple atrocity told

why a former children's mental health counselor jools position was cut and he was left without a job and instead found a place and a person here. this is the come like a full time job you know i mean a full time job you don't get paid for course but you know if you love something or not that's how. you know you just stay on the hospital and stay he did. as the air cooled. and the rain and snow and freezing temperatures came. this is the rule supplement that we just wrecked did to protect us from the outside conditions and those conditions not all thanks to mother nature every night or something and there's always some fights there's always some kind of drama happening as a lot of the rada i swear the police have been telling the junkies about drugs as a group they want to get us while they hang out go to macpherson. big fierce and square one of the longest lasting occupations ended up becoming

a microcosm of society itself with similar issues from cleanliness to crime still joel and many others here remained undeterred today is january the third two thousand and twelve year the revolution is about to call it. it is close to. maybe twenty six twenty seven degrees outside but it wasn't the cold but these addiction notices that were posted on the occupiers. hence setting off a firestorm of both anger and support and the construction of this tent of dreams. most people did end up leaving joel included i guess something that maybe stopped would be a was the way. that was and that was i mean they have infrared helicopters flying around at night you know having like little thermal vision on the tides to make sure the people are in the tent sleeping but even police crackdowns have not meant the end of occupy wall street and this is my fears and square today nearly six

months after the occupy wall street movement began a few tense remain but it's largely symbolic though and the others say the occupation aspect of this movement is simply one chapter of a longer story many more still yet to be written. work for them the desire for radical change and a newfound belief that it can actually be achieved is strong enough not to be subdued in the brought it here was that feeling that something was incredibly was with society in the system in general and everything that we you know are you know should be you know actually against this human beings and. i forgot. there was actually something that we can do about it in washington christine for is now r t. according to a pew research center report released yesterday three and ten young people are now living with their parents have the highest rate since the one nine hundred fifty s.

but it's not just about moving out of her parents' house it's about being flexible to move to another city maybe even another state according to the census bureau the likelihood of twenty somethings that moving to another state has dropped over forty percent since the one nine hundred eighty s. now some clearly point to the recession high levels of unemployment the housing crisis as the reasons why but in an op ed in the new york times last week taught in victoria bucholtz this generation or go nowhere generation ask if young people just become too risk averse to sedentary to happy at home checking facebook and i find an increasing number of teens not bothering to get their driver's license or the popularity of the word random pointing out the idea that kids who grow up during tough economic times and believe that luck plays a bigger role in their success so which one is it is a combination of all of the above and what will the consequences feet joined me to discuss this and despairing co-host of the young turks and thanks so much for joining us tonight and i mean you and i have spoken about this before but it's an issue that isn't going to go away and it's important right because it's an entire

generation that we're talking about it's our generation i know that i know a lot of people that are still living at home with their parents or have moved back in after college to you. absolutely i mean look no one in our generation is excited about living at home with their parents but a lot of people in our generation don't really have much of a choice you know i was lucky enough to go to an affordable college pay out of pocket how did student aid to pay for it but a lot of people that i went to college with weren't so lucky so they have no choice but to move back home after they graduate a lot of cases after they get a masters degree move back home and save up enough money to pay off their student loan debt and. and find a place to live so i don't think that this has to do with laziness or complacency this really has to do with these horrible economic situation but what's interesting is you know when you read this new york times article on the situation. you'll see that. forty percent of young people i'm sorry yeah they were forty percent less

likely to move out of their state or out of their city after midnight by the one nine hundred eighty s. and what's interesting about that is that was obviously before the recession that was before the economy hit the tank and people are wondering well what's going on here why are people russ likely to do it and the article doesn't really focus on the internet and how more and more people are getting jobs on the internet now they don't necessarily need to move out of their hometowns or move to another state in order to work another thing is the fact that you know you're seeing more urban and urbanization in several different areas so example of that is this town fernando valley where i live right so compared to los angeles it's a much smaller area it's in the los angeles county but it's considered like a small town but what's interesting is i can just drive to los angeles to work so i don't necessarily need to move out of my county so it's really interesting because i think this article looks at this whole you know kids staying in the area that

they grew up in in a very simplistic way they don't take into account a lot of different elements. well you know but what about how about the idea you know you mentioned of course a lot of people probably can maybe find ways to work from home if their work has to do with the internet but what about the idea that people are moving from let's say with a thirteen percent of the emirate to a place like north dakota with only a three percent unemployment rate i mean is it just because it's horrific. i think that plays a huge role i mean i know that it's kind of funny to say that but who really wants to move to north dakota i'm not trying to say north dakota is a bad place but most people are not willing to move to locations like that just for work and also keep in mind like north dakota has the population of washington d.c. north dakota isn't going to save us from the economic crisis or the huge financial burden that people in our generation have right now thanks to student loan debt there needs to be a better solution to the problem so and also people be

a little how expensive it is to move to another state and moving to north dakota is also going to be a financial burden just because the cost of housing alone and also people from small towns necessarily don't have enough money saved up to relocate to a big city like los angeles or new york i can speak from experience last year i was considering a move to new york you know to further my career and i was like yeah that's not going to happen i just do not have the money to pay for rent in a five hundred square foot apartment so i think a lot of people in our generation really feel that and they still the financial burden of edge you know the education that they pursued and it's a lot trickier to get up and move today than it was let's say forty years ago i mean it here it also do you think that we have to take into account the housing bubble and the crash and what happened you know maybe it seemed easier to move from one place to another because it was also easier to to get a house and to get

a mortgage and then to put other things on your mortgage and you had to leave the notion of more money however bubble like and faith that was. yeah i mean the housing bubble has a lot to do with that i mean when you really think about it are banks really going to loan any type of money or any amount of money to someone who just graduated college has a lot of student loans and doesn't have a really great job if they're not going to get the loan for that and then also keep in mind that even renting is expensive and out of reach for a lot of people you know in our age group so i can totally understand why they wouldn't move and a lot of young people right now are looking to the internet so find work you know silicon valley you know is there an online company that they can get involved with and maybe later on if they create or save enough money to do so they would move to san francisco and maybe work for an online company that way i know from speaking to a lot of college students that they're looking for other ways you know non

conventional ways of making money right now because they're looking to see that the job market just doesn't make sense right now for them you know right now people who have a tremendous amount of experience are having a hard time getting employed so if they're having a hard time college students or people in our generation are not going to get hired by these companies they need to cry a different way to work and in a lot of cases they look to the internet and they don't see a reason to move away yeah unfortunately you know if you look at certain statistics out there it will just show you that every step of the way now this generation is going to be affected by this they're going to have earned fifteen percent less than counterparts that would have graduated there entered the workforce not during a recession but i think we also have to ask one more element here which i thought was interesting that they brought out in this new york times piece which is that if you think about these generations that you and having to enter the workforce during a recession there is this element of luck that they think that luck plays more of

a role than just genuine hard work and take on that. i completely agree with that i definitely do i mean look at the people who get awarded in our country right now there are people who work on wall street it's celebrities who were able to enter the entertainment industry because they have family members who work their luck has a huge huge role in success in this country and it's really unfortunate it has to do with connections it has to do with being in the right place in the right time so i don't blame these kids for being discouraged and also keep in mind that we no longer have this great american dream in this country where you go to school and you work really hard you get a great job i mean it's still possible but it's becoming more and more out of reach because a lot of people who get rewarded in this country with great jobs are people who have the connections for it and at this point even affordable education is out of reach so it's really a really big problem and it's hard to shake these kids out of you know discouraged

mentality that they have right now but i definitely can relate so that and i totally understand what they're going through now it's definitely disheartening but i guess everyone's going to have to figure out a way out of it together and i thank so much for joining us tonight thank you. i will take another quick break but we have backed obama cares more about foreign leaders children's statement on rick santorum is website and some articles i've worked and the f.b.i. is working hard to keep you safe environmentalist's and radical feminists are going to be gawkers john called. people calling like you said for free and fair elections.