tonight on r t the national security agency sure does someone's best interest in mind when it spies on american citizens but it's not the doors of mine i'll tell you about some of the more shady practices of this government agency. and secret surveillance isn't the only reason you should watch what you say these days one of the correctness is also being taken to the extreme in a country where a simple time slip could cost you your career it is time for americans to grow bigger skin. 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 the tragedy that may put the entire war on trial and the massacre of seventeen afghan civilians was more than one to ranged soldier that's now this case has the potential to blow holes in u.s. intervention all together we'll show you why. good evening it's friday march twenty third seven pm in washington d.c. i'm christine for watching our team. let's begin this evening by taking a look at who is looking at you or maybe attention levy 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 that's swaths of the world's communications from international foreign and domestic networks the article states that the n.s.a. has turned its surveillance apparatus on u.s.

citizens including the eavesdropping of domestic phone calls and the intercepting aftermath e-mails and this week there was a rare occurrence the n.s.a. chief actually testified in front of congress and to questions about the n.s.a. ability both legally and physically to spy on u.s. citizens while dancing around the facts general keith alexander for the most part deny that this is happening but there is evidence that shows otherwise and many people who believe otherwise one of those people is trevor tam an activist with the electronic frontier foundation i spoke with him a little earlier and asked him if you believe that the n.s.a. is indeed spying on u.s. citizens here's his response well we've actually known for quite a few years that this is going on this 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 on it from usa today to the new yorker or to the los angeles times and more evidence has come out that the n.s.a. has these wiretapping centers which is monitoring centers located throughout the country and then in the world in the country's largest telecom companies late eighteenth she and her eyes and they're sucking up all of the communications whether it's overseas or u.s. citizens now the n.s.a. walkway and they only go after overseas non-u.s. . who are suspected of terrorism but evidence so far is not the case and they're actually sucking up massive amounts of communications and it's an american base that we try to be or into let me play 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. you. presume to. what every american who soon email

me confront is well known mishaps. the. technological capacity to identify. the point of. e-mails your son. you know. 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 sort of to flouting responsibility here and i want to read between the lines obviously this is a fake scenario that this congressman was it was sort of making up for the sake of argument but. denials and denials there at this hearing what do you think. it was actually two interesting things about his denial first they've been denying

essential 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 pampered reported as well definitions like intercepts and collects what they mean by that is for what normal people like you and i or anybody else with think is intercept is correct is there or if they're monitoring centers or collecting our e-mails and storing in their data centers in the n.s.a. facility like in utah that's collecting but under their definition they only thing collecting is something that is processed into what they call intelligible form for humans so these scanners that they have can scan 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 we just within the n.s.a. perhaps. right that's why it's so hard to question them because you can say are you collecting people the males in the us and they'll say no when and when they're using their secret definition of the word collect and when everybody else is interpreting correct as the regular definition now the most interesting part is that later on after the clip that you showed. john from the ask that they just had the ability to do this not whether they're actually doing it and that's where it's really interesting because he fell xander actually said that they don't even have the ability and you know we know. with factual proof and evidence that that's not true whistleblower neymar klein came to the staff in two thousand and six and gave us detail blueprints and evidence that there's a room in a t.n.t. 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 there and there are 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 domestic 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 why why you said trevor i mean i guess it depends on what the definition of ability is do they have the legal ability no does that mean that they don't have the physical ability that could be something different i think it's important to take hone in on like he said the meaning of these words let me talk about something else something that changed just as of yesterday the 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 subject 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 now eric holder is saying that now we can hold a four hundred eighty or i'm sorry five years and not only that but they can share between agencies so that you so this was meant to stop terrorism like a lot of other laws and the counterterrorism center the national counterterrorism center has access with information but it can also be spread throughout other agency 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 count was 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 of 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 part of a pattern where the u.s. government is still using terrorism as kind of a scare tactic to pass laws that otherwise would obviously skirt the constitution certainly we will occupy our eyes on it seems like every couple days something new comes out related to this conference hand and activist with the electronic frontier foundation joining us from san francisco all right well it's no secret there is often a fine line between crossing the line and speaking the truth and the game of politics most people err on the side of political correctness but for comedians well sometimes the truth is the best ingredient for laughter and sometimes being ironic

can be funny as well take the case of robert de niro he was at a democratic fundraiser this week along with the first lady michelle obama and while introducing her he said that he said calista gingrich karen santorum and romney and you really think our country is ready for a white first lady. a lot of people found this funny that they weren't offended even ann romney said she laughed at her joke but apparently close to gingrich didn't find it so funny her husband called the remarks inexcusable and divisive i know you quite well know you have a great sense of humor did you really feel offended by robert de niro or was it just a chance to watch a democrat. i really think the use of resources and democrats is just as well as the use of racism where republicans and i really think it's wrong to use racial references. are it's a robert de niro actually did apologize michelle obama's office called the joke inappropriate so what's going on here is this just politics or is this yet another

example that political incorrectness will be shunned in this society develop as a political comedian and as our studios in new york to talk more about this already and there are few days after all the apologizing bill maher wrote an op ed in the new york times telling people to stop apologizing he says i don't want to live in a country where no one ever says anything that offends anyone that's why here we have canada he said that's not us we think is that us. i think there are too many insincere apologies i think there are too many people asking for apologies and i think that at this point we're stifling comedy i'm a comedian you know i wrote an article for c.n.n. dot com earlier this week called stop the war on comedy and that's what this is going to do is joke let's be honest who would be offended by that of the new rich who is sailing in the republican party killing his own party the supporter and trying to get some media coverage but that's all it is in the hyper partisan world that we're in and the media cycle twenty four hours meeting new news new gingrich

says if he gets the media for about five minutes that's it but it's not just for it's not just the g.o.p. candidate you know there was also the incident a few weeks ago with rush limbaugh who by the way is a known offender and the call was heated to pull advertising money from his show after he called the georgetown grad student a slut after she testified before congress and birth control should be made more accessible what do you think it is do you think there's a difference because she's a private citizen or is this just another good excuse to get people to turn against rush limbaugh what's going on with that. well hi i think it might be a combination but let's be honest a comedy about people in power should be completely accepted you have to have comedians great leeway when they talk about a person who's running for president who's a governor who's a senator we cannot allow to stifle political comedy because that is in effect pull the expression it's a way that expressing our views and having a discussion political discourse when rush limbaugh attacks a private citizen even our libel laws in america do not protect public figures like

they do a private citizen there's the sort of all difference in our legal system and so rush limbaugh's thing was so out of he's not a comedian but nothing do with comedy and let's be honest we all know the difference when somebody's being funny and playful and somebody demonizing and spewing hate simply spewing hate and even republicans came out against that coming in then as they began to gather leggins they sort of launching a counterattack against bill maher and louis c.k. and iraq and the oil and take that distract us from rush limbaugh i wish the conversation stayed with rush limbaugh and what he had said to me it's all an attempt by some on the far right not even mainstream right on the far right to get away from rush limbaugh so we attack the left that's all we do to cloud the issue how is it for you dean i mean you're comedian i'm wondering if you can gauge how often you know what generates the most laughs is it when you're a theme for nearly a thousand things i find less funny and how many are things that are a little bit offensive but they're true. well i think audiences when they're watching you in

a comedy club they know when you're being the human izing and hateful they understand instantly and reno was comedians we've gone too far the audience starts laughing or don't laugh at all or actually get angry at you see it one on one when you're on t.v. you know the audience is doing and i see them comedy club sometimes people like little comedy but they don't agree with it sometimes they don't laugh and that's life in america we have to protect political comedy it's always going to be the visit because there's an opinion and you're not always going to agree with the opinion and if we stifle that it affects freedom of expression you know enough to be on in a comedy called the new yorker hear so much worse things that were still in those set of louis c.k. but when you're not famous like most comics in new york and they're really television not famous shit they can say anything it's famous people held to a different standard that's part of this i'm wondering if you think i mean and clearly a comedy comedian on a stage in a comedy club is different than yes you know this whole political sphere that we live in here in washington especially but do you think things have changed though or has it always been have the us always been overly politically correct or have

things gotten worse in the wake of sort of this more bipartisan era that we live in earth not bipartisan more partisan era that it was the opposite a hyper partisan exactly i agree with you i think in some ways dealing with political comedy it has gotten worse but look at our history ninety in the sixty's lenny bruce the comedian was arrested in new york the blues sitting in a blue state for cursing too much at a comedy club in the village of those days of change will evolve to the point where we can say almost anything you know people were offended by comments by louis c.k. and bill maher about sarah palin they may have been offensive words were there about a political figure somebody in power we must give comedians leeway same thing if someone's on the right attacking a democratic candidate or the president and saying hateful things you know what it's about the policy or about the person in power we have we need more leeway if it's just demonizing homophobic racist comments and a woman comments. and they have nothing do with someone in power demonizing somebody outside of power there are consequences and you to deal with it and if you

can overcome it good for you and if you can't you know you make you lay in the big you make you're going to be hateful and spew hate is the answer for it and what do you think are the results to live in a society where it where people are overly politically correct where people get offended so easily or at least pretend to i mean do you think some people lose out about ray there's a little there is a fear of a chilling effect there perhaps people want to speak their mind on certain issues but again i have great confidence in the audiences in the american people they know the difference between someone who's being hateful and being playful we all know the difference unfortunate newt gingrich in this case just insert himself into a situation to get some press he doesn't care about the issues in law mitt romney's wife had no problem she laughed at the joke she thought was funny it's a funny joke where was the hate that where was the demonizing anyone with a plane and any whatsoever you all knew cambridge on t.v. literally right now or before i was on watching him saying the reason people think president obama is a muslim is because he acts like

a muslim i mean look at the man who is spewing hate calling have others for a joke that was not he thought that you know gingrich to me is a paradox and a fraud frankly i think that's a really good comparison and we thought you'd be a good person to talk about this and you really write and we really appreciate your insight political comedian dean obeidallah in our new york studios thanks for. let's take a look now at the power you have when you pay to play this is washington after all it's not hard to notice the power of lobbyists in this town but with the economy still trying to keep its head above water i have to do is look around to see that we are living in a time where things have to be cut and when 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 want to take a look at some specific programs and talk about why some are moving forward and some are dead on arrival all right let's talk about lockheed martin and more specifically the f. thirty five program being developed by the pentagon. the cost of this program.

nearly one trillion dollars to develop purchase and support through the year two thousand and fifty unfortunately there are already more than a billion dollars over budget and guess who's going to pay for some of that the government they've agreed to cover six hundred seventy two billion of that mistake and lockheed will cover the rest and then there's this project high speed rail in california the estimated cost ranges between thirty billion and one hundred building billion depending on who you ask and it's by this project being in the works for years as of now still a train going nowhere so why is one of these projects moving forward while the other is frankly. well we talked about this with someone very familiar with the defense industry michael o'brian he's a former contractor with the department of defense in iraq he also wrote the book america's failure in iraq and here's his take. well they are totally different one is it one is a quote defense program and the other one is a strictly defense transportation program. the the f.

thirty five. this might actually be the very same program that when there was a 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 but i'm not one hundred percent made a comment that he was going to have the talking contracting officer and have the procurement cancelled which of course he has no right to do contracting with us or 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 what's holding a cost plus contract. very technical weapon systems like the thirty five are a cost plus contract is one where. competitors the one that gets awarded the the the 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 will be over here 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 likely because it's easy because the air force has changed it so many times all these change orders or more jacking up the price but when you think about why the air force another unit of the military have the ability to change and take much time as they need to 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 this shows that since i've made i lockheed martin spent more than twenty three million dollars on campaign financing they've spent more than one hundred twenty five a half million on lobbying and they've also received more than twenty million dollars and earmarks now i know michael this should not be stocking 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 right about it in my book. you just showed the numbers money talks. we want to defense contractor stands that kind of money they are buying boots they are they are bought they are a pain for politicians to vote in favor of. this particular

weapon system and that was michael o'brien author of america's failure in iraq. another major story this week the latest in the massacre in the afghanistan incident allegedly carried out by a single shooter a staff sergeant roger robert bales is now going to personally 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 know the story has widely been about sergeant bales himself who he is what he was doing before the shooting and what may have set him off the robert bales most people who knew him described a man always smiling despite that smile 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 feels it is why you've held onto a condo that you saluted they were treating it as a real property we drove over to that neighborhood earlier today that place is under foreclosure. all right course this is a story many people find awfully difficult to wrap their heads around but by focusing on sergeant bales there's a big part not to being discussed the fact that 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 what about the horror of war and more importantly the casualties created on both sides of the battlefield so we thought we broaden the story and talk about some of the other aspects not being widely discussed for that and more i spoke to john glaser the assistant editor for antiwar dot com here's a take. well as throughout the media we've heard. justifications for bill's apparent rampage 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 that commit these kinds of crimes simply don't receive that kind of sympathy it was 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 is an extended effort to try and paint him as as a generally a good man who's crime can be excused by using it 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 that 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 in the 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 i say automatic praise that society is pressured to give to soldiers regardless and irrespective of their actual behavior i think it's 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 and there's something else too 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 or soldiers were just following orders to the afghan people it might be a little different for this is 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. 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 will becomes you know what to

say about a society that idolizes in that assizes. a commitment to kill on the orders of politicians in washington 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 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 room soldier rather than focus and we're treating our g.i.'s in general and with that 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 in the dust settles. these soldiers in their military trials trying to get off easy happened with these a 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 it was more people were killed and not only for i just found out the person that sort of lived that i think his punishment was reduced in rank and zero jail time right and the rest of it he was the leader of it and the other eight that were involved were not even convicted. and i know other cases of course we broke at antiwar dot com when it was released by wiki leaks. but

in two thousand and six there was a house raid in iraq and u.s. soldiers summarily executed entire family including infants hands tied behind their back shot in the head and although the un special rapporteur for summary executions productivity tension the bush administration. no charges were ever brought no home no ability 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 tired even as young children in this country. we really appreciate you being here john glaser assistant editor for antiwar dot com and that's going to do it for this hour but for more on the stories we covered go to youtube dot com slash r.t. america or check out our web archie dot com slash usa there you'll find stories we don't always have time to get you on air today our intrepid web team wrote an article about the more than twenty.