activism for rangers continue as government forces people the pressure on peaceful protesters appealing for democracy. but the violence goes largely unreported we'll talk about new evidence that shows why the us in n.s.a. should perhaps stand for spying. plus a military plane in a passenger train leave from california at the same time if plane eighty five at five hundred miles an hour in trains he travels at an average speed of one hundred miles an hour who will get there first the answer it doesn't matter because train read doesn't exist all our taxpayer money is going to fund plane also you want a trillion dollars. in the year two thousand to build was accused of assault to

your ex girlfriend but there were no charges filed because bill's underwood anger management counseling looks like there might be a witch hunt on our hands as prosecutors officially charge the u.s. soldier accused of massacring seven hundred civilians but what's really going to be going on trial one to range the soldier or the entire. good afternoon it's friday march twenty third four pm in washington d.c. i'm christine frizz out and watching our team let's begin this afternoon by taking a look at who's looking at you or may potentially be we told you earlier in the week about a report by wired magazine that outlined the details of a spy center in a small town called bluffdale utah and its purpose is to intercept analyze and

store vast swaths of the world's communications from international foreign and domestic networks and the article states that the n.s.a. has turn. and its surveillance apparatus on the u.s. and its citizens including dropping the eavesdropping of domestic phone calls and the intercepting of domestic e-mails and this week there was a rare occurrence the n.s.a. chief actually testified in front of congress and took questions about the n.s.a. ability both legally and physically to spy on u.s. citizens while dancing around some of the facts general keith alexander for the most part denied that this is happening but there is evidence that shows otherwise and many people who believe otherwise one of those people is trevor tim an activist with the electronic frontier foundation he's in san francisco to help us sift through some of this. hey there trevor do you have a reason to believe that the n.s.a. is in fact spying on u.s. citizens. well we've actually known for quite

a few years that this is going on the story first emerged in the new york times in two thousand and five when they first revealed that the bush administration had been instituting this massive warrantless wiretapping program basically skirting the law and skirting the fourth amendment of the constitution since then many other news organizations have reported from usa today the new yorker the los angeles times and more evidence has come out that the n.s.a. has these wiretapping centers and is monitoring centers located throughout the country and then in the world in the country's largest telecom companies like eighteen temporizing and they're sucking up all of the communication whether it's overseas or u.s. citizens now the n.s.a. will claim that they only go after overseas non-u.s. to who are suspected of terrorism but the evidence so far as shown that not the case and they're actually sucking up massive amounts of communications from

innocent americans and basic who are trying to catalog the whole internet life like something from the hearing that took place earlier in this week just to get a sense of some of the concerns that are out there. if dick cheney were elected president and wanted to train and incessantly waterboard every american who sent an e-mail making fun of these well known hunting mishaps. what i'd like to know is does the n.s.a. have the technological capacity to identify those cheney sure's based upon the content of their e-mails yes or no no. so general alexander goes on to explain that assuming those e-mails are in the united states the n.s.a. does not have the ability to do that in the u.s. the n.s.a. would have to go through the f.b.i. to get a warrant to fucking responsibility here or to retire but between the lines of i

obviously this is a fake scenario that this congressman was was sort of making up for the sake of argument but. the denials and denials there at this hearing i would think was actually two interesting things about his denial first they've been denying especially that they've been doing this for years but what makes this really absurd is that they actually have secret definitions of a few words that make these denials very easy it's kind of funny to think that they have a top secret document that actually gives them definitions of important report as well definitions like intercepts and collects what they mean by that is what normal people like you and i or anybody else would think intercept is correct is if they're if they're moderate senators are collecting our e-mails and storing in their data centers in the n.s.a. facility like in utah that's correct thing but under their definition they only thing correcting is something that is processed into what they call intelligible

form for humans so these scanners that they have can scan for keywords for e-mail and then send it back to humans and they don't they don't count it as collecting until it gets to the human person so you're saying they sort of have a whole different kind of language that it's ok to use and even though the rest of us think they mean something different they actually understand each other just within the n.s.a. perhaps. but that's why it's so hard to question them because you can say are you collecting people do you know and they'll say no when and when they're using their secret definition of the word collect and when everybody else has interpreted correct as the regular definition now the most interesting part is that later on after the clip that you showed hank johnson asked if they just had the ability to do this not whether they're actually doing it and that's where the it's really interesting because keith alexander actually said that they don't even have the ability and you know we know. with actual proof and evidence that that's not true

whistleblower neymar klein came to in two thousand and six and gave us detail blueprints and evidence that there's a room in a c.n.c. down the street in san francisco actually that holds a secret wiretapping room the n.s.a. is sucking up all these communications later on usa today came out with an article explaining that actually all telecom companies have similar situations set up in their in their companies and that the n.s.a. was collecting all sorts of communications whether was u.s. citizens or overseas and they could have easily set this up so where they only got overseas communications but they purposely went to all of these companies and even some in the middle of us where obviously it's just a mess the mess the communications and they are now we think transferring when this data center utah is finished they're going to transfer all this information stored on their servers for data mining in the future well going on while what you said

trevor i mean i guess it depends on what the definition of ability is do they have the legal ability know does that mean that they don't have the physical ability that could be something different i think it's important that they kind of hone in on like you said the meaning of these words let me talk about something else something that changed just as of yesterday u.s. attorney general eric holder gave the national counterterrorism center license to retain america's data for up to five years even if the subjects in question are not suspected of having ties to terrorism now of course it's not totally clear what the n.p.c. has access to and what it doesn't but i'm wondering what you've discovered sort of in your research that this could all mean. yeah this is really disturbing because as it stands now that the government can hold private information for one hundred eighty days and now eric holder is saying that now we can order four hundred eighty or i'm sorry five years and not only that but they can share between agencies so that so this was meant to stop terrorism like a lot of other laws and the counterterrorism center the national counterterrorism

center has access to information but can also be spread throughout other agencies and everybody's going to have access to it so it's just another massive privacy violation in the name of stopping terrorism we've seen this countless times where the u.s. government is using terrorism as an excuse to invade people's privacy you know this warrantless wiretapping situation is one of these new guidelines or another and the patriot act which was obviously passed under the guise of stopping terrorism and up being used ninety nine percent of the time for crimes that have nothing to do with terrorism that may be minor crimes like drug crimes or targeting innocent people so it's just for the pattern where the u.s. government is still using terrorism as kind of a scare tactic to pass these laws that otherwise would obviously skirt the constitution certainly we will occupy our eyes on things like every couple days something new comes out related to this time for ten and activists with the electronic frontier foundation joining us from san francisco travis. well take

a look now at the power you have when you pay to play this is washington after all it's hard not to notice the power of lobbyists in this town but with the economy still trying to keep its head above water. you've got to do is look around and see that we are living in a time where things have had to be cut and the money isn't there the projects funded by that money often go away as well but there are some exceptions to this rule so we wanted to take a look at some specific programs and talk about why some continue to move forward and some are dead on arrival so first there's a lockheed martin and more specifically the f. thirty five program being developed for the pentagon. because as you see there are nearly one trillion dollars to develop purchase and support this through twenty fifty unfortunately there are already more than a billion dollars over the budget and the government has agreed to cover six hundred seventy two billion dollars of that hoops mistake and lockheed martin will

cover the us. there's this project on high speed rail in california the estimated cost ranges between thirty billion and one hundred billion depending on who you ask and despite this project being in the works for years as of now it's . still a train to nowhere so why is one of these projects going forward and the other well into railed well i want to talk more about that with someone very familiar with the defense industry michael o'brien a former contractor for the department of defense worked in iraq he also wrote the book america's failure in iraq michael let's start with this example of this after thirty five which by the way i think has been in the works since the one nine hundred ninety s. it was supposed to be up and ready and going by i think twenty ten now they're projecting it won't be doing anything at least until it's twenty eighteen so that's still in the works it's still happening and then let's compare this to this high

speed rail which would be a revenue generator would help a whole lot of people out and could be built for a fraction of the cost of the f. thirty five not certainly. in some ways these are different ball games here but they're stupid major projects that one's going forward and one's not and we think about that well they are totally different one is that one is a quote defense program and the other one is strictly defense the transportation program the the f. thirty five. this might actually be the very same program that when there was the big fight going on in the ninety's secretary defense at the time cheney actually made a comment i think it's the same program what i'm not one hundred percent made a comment that he was going to have the torture contracting officer or any of the you procurement cancelled which of course he has no right to do contracting officer cannot be told what to do by anybody the president even the person in the united states much less the secretary of defense this particular contract is very likely

would hold a cost plus contracts. very technical weapon systems like the like the thirty five hour a cost plus contract is one we are. competitors the one that gets awarded by the procurement. is paid directly for all of the costs incurred for the development in the manufacture of the a weapon system plus their overhead and their profit so if you want a contract like this and i'm very sure this would be a cost plus contract as opposed to a firm fixed price contract where they when the procurement and the government says we're going to pay x. amount for each unit and that's that well they can't do it for something like this because technology and prices and the cost for making it change over time from the time it contracts awarded until delivery delivery of the first unit the problem is

that this thing is so expensive very lightly because scuse me because the air force's changed it so many times all these changes orders are jacking up the price but when you think about why the air force and other units of the military have the ability to change and take as much time as they need i think it's hard to deny that at least in part there is an aspect of lobbying involved i want to take a look here we have the money that basically shows that muscle flex by lockheed martin basically says that since one thousand eight i like it martin has spent more than twenty three million dollars on campaign financing they've spent more than one hundred twenty five and a half million on lobbying and they've also received more than twenty million dollars in earmarks now i know michael this should not be shocking but it still is . i mean what do you think no lobbyist no dice this is this is an example par

excellence or excellence of the military industrial complex which are worried about it i think in my book. you just showed the numbers money talks. when and one of the fence contractor spends that kind of money they are buying votes they are they are bought they are paying for politicians to vote in favor of this particular weapon system no matter how long it takes they're how much it costs now and the thing about it is the a moment ago i was talking a little bit in the details in the weeds so to speak about the the mechanism the contract a vehicle a cost plus contract but it lets you get a back up why is the your car if being billed at all doesn't matter what type of contract why is this aircraft being built and now if now of course of course the proponents of the year career after going to say we've got to have this weapon

system we've got to have it to fight you know in the new millennium do we write that you have already question of the most amazing air capabilities in the world is there nobody can touch us you already know but right now right now i'm not an air force guy i was an army guy but i would venture to say nobody could even come close to our capability in the air. probably for decades to come now this weapon says i mean you know that you take a look at it here it's beautiful and if i was going to be a pilot of one of those i'd be all for it let's build it let's let's but let's build this thing but there's our country need it and the thing is you know i on my website i've mentioned the department of defense it needs to be told what it really is it's the department of war it's the war department and a weapon system like this is really it's

a it's an office of kate it gives us an office of capability there's nothing wrong with having more fence of capability but what is the real need for this and it's the military industrial complex it's the lobbyists the money that you showed up on the screen a moment ago and they are going if they spend that kind of money for campaigns and for lobbying they are going to get what they want but those are things there and maybe we've already answered this question because of that money but it seems to me that there should be some competition i mean lockheed will soon be the only company in the united states that builds fighter planes for the pro-gun we'll have in the us running this is a very educated a very innovative country with a lot of smart people why is there not why are there not five or six other defense car contracting companies competing with lucky thank who are actually going to get this done on time we're actually not going to go over budget that's not happening now because what happens is companies get bought out by other companies the entire

issue of the. you know the you know monopoly you know no monopolies you just said if this is going to be a it's looking towards being a monopoly for this particular type of product that the government buys put the answer is is the money the money that you showed up on the show on the screen right money talks and the politicians that are are. should be saying the asking the same question that you're. well if they get money for their real watching him pain money they're not going to ask questions yeah it's really interesting to me and of course lockheed martin just one of many companies but it's really interesting that they're sort of corporate motto is we never forget who were working for and based on those commercials you often think oh they're working for me the taxpayer they're working for the military it seems perhaps if what you say is true that there may be working for the executives and those people that sit on their boards that they were at a time that michael o'brien author of america's failure in iraq well another major

story this week of the latest in the massacre in afghanistan incident allegedly carried out by a single soldier staff sergeant robert bales has now been officially charged with seventeen counts of premeditated murder in a shooting rampage in southern afghanistan bales was also charged with six counts of attempted murder and six counts of assault and if you've been watching the news coverage you'd know this story has widely been about sergeant bales himself who he is what he was doing before this happened and what may have set him off this is the robert bales most people who knew him described a man always smiling this boy smiled he'd been through a lot sergeant robert bales the u.s. army soldier accused of killing sixteen afghan civilians he was once accused the ripping off an ohio couple to the tune of over a million dollars in the year two thousand two bills was accused of assaulting an ex girlfriend but there were no charges filed because bills underwent anger

management counseling bills it was why you held on to a condo that you saluted they were treating it as a real property we drove over to the neighborhood earlier today the place is under foreclosure. all right so this is a story of course a lot of people find awfully difficult to wrap their heads around there's a big part of it though and not to being widely discussed the fact that this is and the fact is this is not a simple story of a single soldier who had had enough this is also a story of the actual impact of war the horrors and more importantly the casualties created on both sides of the battlefield so we thought we broaden this story and talk about some of the other aspects that again are not being talked about so i've got the assistant editor for antiwar dot com here in studio is there and i know you wrote a little bit about this you wrote that there's been an effort to rationalize this unprovoked slaughter and even in some cases paint sergeant bales as the victim what we're referring to well it throughout the media we've heard justifications for

bills apparent rim page and you know they go through things like he might have had a concussion he was having trouble at home or he was stressed from the amount of war but you know people that are outside outside of the u.s. military to commit these kinds of crimes simply don't receive that kind of sympathy . up in the new york times about how he's you know he's a true good man but he has problems and so on and so forth there's an extended effort to try and paint him as as a generally good man who whose crime can be excused by using that is well. the military in this country in america many countries around the world receive sort of an elevated status of sort of automatic indiscriminate praise and it's a result also of just in the recent history of over a decade of war where soldiers are thought that they can do no harm. but you know

that obviously really isn't the case the military as a whole is just a collective of people there are good people and bad people. but there are certain facts that are just left out of the conversation about the military i mean numerous government studies from the government accountability office to the pentagon and from the sexual abuse is rampant military. and i think secretary of defense leon panetta estimated last year just in two thousand and eleven as many as nine hundred thousand cases of sexual assault or rape happened in the military of course the majority of those go unreported but you're right that's not talked about at all no because it gets in the way of this as they say automatic praise that society is pressured to give to soldiers regardless and irrespective of their actual behavior i think it's interesting because of course rape and sexual assault or not you know outside of the military is looked upon as one of the most heinous things that can

happen but there's something else when we talk about war as as individuals as a public as media. when it's seventeen or twenty seven or fifty seven people are killed in for example an attack by an i.e.d. an improvised explosive device that's almost never even mentioned even if the majority of those victims are children. because usually a soldier of soldiers were just following orders to the afghan people it might be a little different for this it's yet seventeen more people who were killed by you know the people that have been occupying their country for a decade now but why is it that there's not more of an effort to talk about the actual cost of war and not wait until it's simply one rogue soldier. well of course this is the big question i mean. the question really becomes if we're talking about the military in the larger sort of problem that we have about not being able to self analyze and be self criticizing the question really becomes you

know what do you say about a society that idolizes and fetishizing is. a commitment to kill on the orders of politicians in washington and that's that's not that's a strange thing to admire except it's widespread throughout this culture i think that's probably a good point let's talk about this case itself certainly once it's underway it's going to bring to light a lot of different things and perhaps more discussions like the one we're having right here i want to play something that the attorney for robert bales said just the other day. i think that this case is more political than legal and i'm used to legal things on the political things so i think there will be an effort to try to paint him as a rube soldier rather than focus on how we're treating our g.i.'s in general and whether we should be over there to begin with what do you think i mean do you think this case will perhaps have the. you know other impact of actually

having the media and others talk about war. well yes and i think it to some extent it already has had that effect but at this point we can really only cross our fingers i mean there are many atrocities that have been committed comparable to this one in the past in iraq and afghanistan that get papered over after the controversy settles and the dust settles these soldiers in their military trials trying to get off easy it happened with the massacre in iraq some people might have looked at that and said oh this might change the politics of it might make people turn against the war but i think people were killed in the early for i guess i'm not the person that sort of led that i think his punishment was there were two thousand brain can zero jail time right and the rest of he was the leader of it and the other eight that were involved were not even convicted. another case of course

we broke it at antiwar dot com when it was released by wiki leaks. but in two thousand and six there was a house raid in iraq. u.s. soldiers summarily executed entire family including inference hands tied behind their back shot in the head and although the u.n. special repertoire for summary executions brought it to the attention the bush administration. and no charges were ever brought no accountability no justice and this is this is the problem that we've been talking about i mean the military can do no wrong it seems and that's that's the real tragedy here and that is something that we seem to be i type even as young children in this country. we really appreciate you being a time place or it's an editor for antiwar tux. well coming up next the capital account so let's check in with laura lister to see what from your gender today lauren happy friday every friday christine you know it was just going to be a fun friday and then we got this amazing least scandalous news that

a congressional panel has found that john ok the former c.e.o. of and the global the bankrupt firm that still customer money he made that order for that customer money to be used sent to j.p. morgan to cover a shortage and that account two hundred million bucks he gave instructions and self that's a big deal not just for one case not just for those customers but for the u.s. financial system and the way it is viewed by everyone in it everyone abroad it's a big deal we did talk about the implications of this case with jim rogers when i spoke with a minute interview last night which we will show to all of our audience and we will also have an opportunity to debunk the theories that ben bernanke he. espoused to college students asleep all right well as we know jim rogers always has a lot of good stuff to say a very opinionated guy i'm sure that's an interesting interview there so if you are stay tuned for us here that's going to do it but for more on the stories we covered

go to youtube dot com slash r t america or check out our website or if you dot com slash usa and you can follow me on twitter at christine for example. for. a. few. asked. me to leave. the.

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