the. ownerships for now with the palm of your. heavily armed and dangerous the u.s. government is shelling out big bucks for bullet hollow point bullets to be exact i think pentagon is not behind the purchase next we'll tell you why the department of homeland security needs one hundred fifty million rounds of ammunition your mission is simple mr obama with one last elections to create unchecked flexibility we conservatives have since this republican presidential campaign is one for the history books with more money spent than any other letters she has some of the men behind the money. and while we follow the money flow with the british government

wants the right to monitor well everything from cell phones to e-mail text messages even online shopping habits so in anything private anymore. good evening it is monday april second it's eight pm in washington d.c. i'm christine for you're watching our team. well the u.s. department of homeland security along with u.s. immigrations and customs enforcement have placed a large and rather interesting order they've ordered four hundred fifty million rounds of ammunition to be made and delivered to them over the next five years at the company alliance texas terms are eighty k. was awarded the contract to manufacture forty caliber ammunition high performance bullets apparently these bullets quote provide optimum penetration for terminal performance that refers to the way the tip of the bullet passes through various and

expands all the while staying in place so it doesn't get ruined so this is interesting because this is not the pentagon making the order for the military this is dea agents and ice and to give you a little perspective here there are only three hundred eleven million people living in the entire country so it begs the question why such a massive order well for that and more i was joined by radio host and filmmaker jason burma's jason is also the director of invisible empire a new world order to find i asked him why the d.h. as it needs those four hundred fifty million hollow point bullets and here's his take. well that is the real question and why does the department of homeland security even exist in the first place let us not forget this is a department that was created in the wake of nine eleven really in the spirit of hitler's own deutschland security and over the place the past decade plus they've been given more and more power and alarmingly the president has made some pretty

crazy power grabs in self in the last few months of course the n.d.a. and the subsequent bill where they can declare martial law under any emergency and have a kind of super eminent domain a land grab well if you're going to do this and you're going to have a department like homeland security and force these types of things unfortunately you're going to have to arm them and for them purchasing four hundred fifty million hollow point bullets their intentions seem very clear to me it's not only to intimidate the american people but to use force when necessary if they right now a lot of people are saying of course there are tons of discussions on this. especially going on online and a lot of it was saying hey you know what this is needed for training purposes department homeland security have a lot of you know different department under its umbrella if an embrace and customs enforcement i can say and that's what they're saying i think this needs to be used

for practicing so what about that argument. well argument is very thin indeed especially when you're talking about hollow point bullets and not regular ammunition when they're clear cut case is to again penetrate the target ok so if this were just for you know shooting at a range or training purposes number one it wouldn't be this type of lethal ammunition and number two it would be four hundred and fifty million rounds literally around a round and a half for every man woman and child in the united states i'm wondering days and i mean do you think there's a larger discussion to be had here certainly i've done a couple stories i know this past november black friday saw the most gun sales ever and that's continuing we are continuing to see very high gun sales in the u.s. and we've already seen the da also hiring armed security guards to protect federal buildings there are some people who say you know this is another sign that the u.s.

government is preparing for some sort of massive civil unrest what he said about. well i think it's been incrementally done again over the last decade plus but really accelerated in the last few years through g h s through fusion centers through what we go through at the airport then infringing on more and more of our rights and now this is been almost become acceptable behavior by a totally illegitimate department we should abolish the department of homeland security and keep the protection of the homeland under the f.b.i. under state troopers and under the u.s. military and the national guard when necessary that's of the national guard is for taking that i mean you're certainly there's a lot of people who do share your opinion that the department of homeland security should not be in existence but there are a whole lot more people who sign you know this is a department that was formed interest in response to nine eleven you know people say another an eleven has not happened so that apartment of homeland security must

be doing its job. here how do you reconcile those arguments how do you try to convince people that the t.h.s. is useless or well unfortunately many of those terror plots that you're talking about that have been stopped by d h s and other departments were actually manufactured by those departments in the first place and then when they want to say you know united states citizens might rise up and kill police officers let's look at the hutaree militia they've now gone through two separate trials where two separate judges have acquitted them in a full yet the fear mongering still continues and the memos still continue that are targeting american citizens libertarians ron paul supporters people who believe in god and beyond it literally targeting just about every single american citizen that lives here under one guys or the other i know there's also been some talk of a connection between a d.n.a. test and a lot of the police forces in this country and i know that when we saw the occupy

wall street crackdown some of those major crackdowns in new york city. there's been some talk that d.h. has agents were involved and they've been involved in infiltrating occupy movements around the country do you think this is legitimate and if so what's going on here i absolutely think it's legitimate i think it's gone beyond the occupy movement i thought you know you saw some of that stuff in some of the past g. twenty s. in pittsburgh and other places and i think you're going to still see the evolution of v.h.s. unless we stop this monster that's why we have people like no politician telling us that we're going to have d.h. esprit of set our local wal-mart and our local stores at these telescreens to be worried about terrorism and spy on their neighbors and that's why these memos are leaking again and again and again because people who are not only in these departments but work with this department are leaking this to the public because they know it's out of control and wrong what about this most recent protests that we started talking about with these four hundred fifty million rounds of ammunition

that kind of rare very harsh. having seen anywhere i just took occasion for for this because i haven't i haven't seen anything that sort of outlined exactly what this is going to. absolutely not when are we supposed to turn lethal force on american citizens the answer is never not even in riots even in countries like greece the current economic turmoil and have full blown riots going on it seems every other month where they're throwing molotov cocktails at riot police they're not using feel intentions they're not using lethal force so why is it ok to bring it to this country the answer it is not ok to bring it to this country and we should not be using lethal force again against what really essentially our political dissidents. all right certainly an interesting discussion to be had a lot of people still sort of unaware that this is going on can't really wrap their head around the fact that these kinds of purchases are being made not by the u.s.

military i mean that most people can understand but by the department of homeland security certainly interesting stuff jason burma's director of invisible empire a new world order to find all right guys it is now april and in this election year this is the time when i got to start to get behind it when the gloves come off and he's campaign starts pulling out its big guns were already starting to see some more creative and visual ads and attacks launched like for example last week after president obama and outgoing russian president dmitry medvedev accidentally had a private conversation with their microphones on now the group american crossroads wasted no time using it to his hack obama your mission is simple mr obama. to the actions to give let's ability to since in the early. to meet the will transfer the information. to. its president. the treatment store transferred. out of the.

arts american crossroads was founded you may remember by karl rove and it's funded by another number of people including harold simmons simmons is an eighty year old billionaire who more or less copyrighted the phrase quote obama is the most dangerous american alive also behind the american crossroads a money machine is bob kerrey another eighty year old billionaire from texas who was the mastermind behind another very effective political ad the swift boat campaign back in two thousand and four designed to discredit the democratic presidential nominee john kerry. john kerry has not been and he lacks the capacity to lead the church you could not count on chalk you're on snow working he trade all his shipmates he lied before the senate john kerry betrayed the man and women he served with and vietnam he does on his country most certainly did. these types of

ads are certain to dominate the airwaves and there are a few reasons for this the most significant of course the citizens united case in which the supreme court i can two thousand and ten ruled that corporations are people and their political expenditures therefore cannot be restricted by government as a result we've seen a few dozen people play a major role in who sinks and who swims in this election cycle and when you take a close look at many of those people are actually pretty similar we showed you the other two there's the koch brothers and of course in particular david koch a seventy one year old man with a hand in several organizations including americans for prosperity and freedom works the koch brothers a doling out of money is simply too much to count and some of that is of course of course i want to fund the tea party its message and many of those conservative republican candidates who went on to win elections in two thousand and ten because brothers have championed the cause of less government and a whole lot of people are still unsure just how much power they have it seems on

many fronts to be limitless and it seems they of course will stop at nothing to see that president obama is defeated i think the one thing a lot of people will be watching is to see what this man does eighty one year old george soros he gave thirty million dollars back in two thousand and four two thousand and six and two thousand and eight to democrats and also a big time donor to obama's two thousand and eight presidential campaign if he gives again and how much something people are wondering and if so he will be up against quite a few other donors who a lot of people right now believe will be supporting mitt romney one of the biggest donors so far to the program the super pac restore our future is this man frank vandersloot sixty three years old now he's made a name for himself as being staunchly anti gay and very conservative. yes this is fun let's keep going on this follow the money monday foster friess seventy two years old today his super pac is the red white and blue fund which is really held

to keep rick santorum in the race to become the republican nominee then there is a las vegas casino mogul sheldon adelson he's seventy eight years old his super pac is called winning the future reading our future and in his mind at least for a while he hoped newt gingrich would be a big leader in that future he's been the single single largest contributor to gingrich and also a major backer of israel so as we said these wealthy candidate backers that they look a lot alike they all have a whole lot of money most of them are in their sixty's or seventy's and they seem to feel entitled even though let's face it these are older gentlemen they won't be around for the next several decades but still they plan to see that the legacy they leave is a strong foundation for the continuation of their ideologies all right you may have noticed i have left one candidate out so far i haven't mentioned ron paul he's of course still in the race and he hasn't significant financial backing from this man peter teal peter thiel is just forty four years old he was born in germany he made

a fortune as an early investor in facebook he's also the founder of pay pal he's given about two point six million dollars to the ron paul supporter supporting super pac endorse liberty and he looks a little different and he's also very different in other ways peter thiel is openly gay is given to a lot of other organizations that you may have never heard of like in the foozle a foundation that seeks to expand the human lifespan to one thousand years he's not your typical money man then again ron paul is not your typical presidential candidate. so jean there is now there's a new proposed law in the u.k. that's making some waves there and it looks like it may pass it would give one of britain's national security agencies the power to monitor all phone calls texts e-mails and online activities all in the name of quote investigating serious crime and terrorism to protect the public and this is interesting because it means internet companies would be required to install kind of

a special kind of hardware that would give the agency the ability to access who an individual or group is in contact with how long they've been in contact with them and how frequently now they would still need to get a warrant to gain access to the content of the e-mails and phone calls but still this is causing quite a stir there so is this law up copycat of the u.s. patriot act aaron swartz the inner and executive director of demand progress joined us earlier to give us his take. i mean it's very similar like the patriot act there's not a lot of details in the proposal and like the patriot act it's going to allow the government to put these boxes in the law then make full copies of all the internet traffic that's going back and forth in the british government servers and so another thing with the patriot act is they say they're only using it to look at who you're talking to and where the data is coming from but the fact is once you put these boxes in once the government gets a copy of everything you're visiting on the internet every e-mail you're sending who knows what they're doing with it and we've seen in the u.s.

but the government has all these classified programs to make other uses of the data that they refused to disclose exactly what they are and they know that there was a similar proposal and britain back in two thousand and six that there was so much opposition that it was candor so i'm wondering i mean why do you think you know they changed why are they bringing this back up what's different now. yeah i mean it's interesting that the patriot act they had to wait for a major terrorist attack before they could push through this sort of thing in the united states but i think what's happening is you know the government in britain has shifted previously it was under the labor party and so left wing activists and people on the left who protested it were able to have some influence now we have this sort of conservative and liberal coalition whose support levels are already extremely low they're probably figure they can't alienate anybody else so they might as well push through their wish list of civil liberties trampling all it's. just going off what you said i mean it's that it took nine eleven to sort of push to the patriot act here let's not forget about lasted for ten years and that was

reinstated as law here so i guess i'm just wondering i mean what do you think is there some sort of international opinion that the patriot act is a fact and a really good. well i think there's an international opinion among governments everywhere that it's nice to spy on your citizens i mean who doesn't like the power to listen in on people's emails to look at what web pages people visit every government loves the ability to do that and so what we see is you know these authoritarian forces with in every government looking for opportunities where they can increase their power and increase the scope of what they can look at and pass laws like this one now it's hard to say of course not and i don't have a crystal ball but i'm wondering i just want to get your take on this is obviously a cause that you believe and i mean what are some of the ways in which this can backfire what are some of the most detrimental ways that this can harm the citizens of you know the great great britain and the united states. but i think you know

it's an enormous threat to privacy both on a on a big scale with the government looking over everyone's shoulder but also in a small one you know the fact is just technically to make these sort of things happen they are making copies of everyone's e-mails copies of everyone's internet traffic all it takes is one rogue government employee or a road person who set up the equipment you know they can start spying on their girlfriends they can you know there's all sorts of myths behavior that can get into even at the small level and you can imagine higher levels of government you know imagine nixon was president i'm sure he would be using this kind of stuff to track his political enemies to dig up dirt about them and we comparison information to the press and you know there's organizations like yours aaron and quite a few others but the bottom line is we still haven't seen a lot of people really openly oppose the patriot act here and it looks to me and great britain that this law is going to pass there so what do you think is the reason that a lot of people are not standing up and saying wait a minute this is a very bad thing. well you know i think part of it is certainly the mainstream

media you know the patriot act did not get a lot of discussion it was rushed through without a debate and even when it came up for renewal ten years later like you said the media still didn't cover it as a story you know it occasionally gets discussed here and there is a sort of excess of the bush administration but there's been very little ongoing coverage of exactly what it does and what it means and so people just don't know how much it's trampling on their rights and they don't know when they can take action to stop it you know these moments like patriot act renewal or like this bill going on in the u.k. they receive coverage on networks like this point but you know the vast majority of the mainstream media is too busy hacking into voice mails and things like that to cover these important civil liberties stories all it seems are that interesting now because like you said i can see why a lot of top government officials might enjoy that power but when you talk about the media media mainstream or alternative you'd think that the mainstream media would have a stake would have a reason to make this you know a lead story and why do you think they have it. both in britain we saw they do have

a stake in their state is on the wrong side i mean there's been enormous revelations about british media paying off the cops in order to spy on people to hack their phones to have their voice mails to get this data you know if you're paying off the cops and are able to look at this stuff who wouldn't want to have more data to be able to bribe the cops and by i'm sure there's a whole bunch of british newspaper and television reporters who are just eager to write the stories they will be able to write once they're able to get everyone's email subject lines well it is an interesting topic we like to bring it up as much as possible here keep this story alive because it is an important one that affects every citizen in this country and certainly a lot of those citizens in great britain where this will most likely path aaron swartz a founder and executive director of demand progress thanks so much. i'd move on to syria now where syrian president bashar al assad has agreed to a peace plan with an april tenth deadline for a un supervised cease fire that's said to include the withdrawal of soldiers and

heavy weapons from cities as well as the allowance and delivery of humanitarian aid this will only work however if the rebels put down their weapons as well and that may be difficult especially if they get outside additional support over the weekend several world leaders met in istanbul turkey to try to work out a plan to deal with syria part of that plan involves redefining or at least blurring the line between lethal and non lethal weapons to be sent in as aid to the syrian rebels the united states are joined by dozens of arab countries have come up with a plan to pay some of the rebels salaries and also purchase and send in high tech communications equipment to assist the rebels obviously remember russia and china blocked the u.n. security council proposal to intervene in syria militarily but the group that calls itself the friends of syria coalition is still hoping to have an influence in what happens inside syria for a more in-depth person to person active i spoke with middle east analysts

a modified and asked his opinion about the rebels possibly earning salaries on the message and maybe sending take a listen. for the result. and the agreements reached istanbul during the friends of syria conference. sends a little bit of mixed signals the first mixing signal is that there is too. mean streams of ideas one supporting arming the syrian rebels and the other one supporting. the syrian rebels with non-lethal equipment and that is low united states where some of our lives. the. how would the qatari weighty initiative whom are going to be facing the bill for paying the salaries for the city and the rebels. on the first

examining for it's positive as it will provide an incentive for the syrian soldiers to defect union army and join the. liberation of the syrian free syrian army which is consisting of you have the forces on the u.s. administration is reluctant to provide arming the rebels until a proper vetting process would be taking place i think that's an important point i think a lot of people wonder as we did with the situation in libya and lot of people wonder who are the rebels and how do we figure that out when you start sending even when we're not talking about weapons we're just talking about communication equipment we're talking about sunday night vision goggles and how can it be determined that these are going to end up in the right people hands. this is the million dollar question christine nobody concrete. u.s.

administration is obviously reluctant to proceed. in spite of pressures exhibited. domestically republicans in the senate. nobody wants to see you see mistakes done in afghanistan in the eighty's or who is arming assisting the libyan rebels as it turned out to be the slimmest groups and the administration is not going to fall into go trip especially during an election year and i think it's really important to talk about sort of some other aspects here throughout the last year this conflict in syria which has claimed the lives potentially at least of nine thousand people it's been portrayed in in sort of a simple manner it's been sort of you know i thought of the evil dictator and those rising up against him but i think it's really important to point out that this has really become a sectarian conflict a war between religious groups with sunni muslims in syria in the majority but of

course president assad is a shiite so so many sunnis now view this violence as a campaign to sort of squeeze them out of their homes and their villages and i know the new york times did a recent article about this last week the writer and bernard said this she said they said they felt threatened as sunis and several said that they saw the military give out rifles to residents of neighboring alawite villages members of the same heterodox muslims such as mr assad and that their neighbors then opened fire on them. so i guess i just want you to talk a little bit about. this is a little more complex than just those who support assad and those who don't. it is very complex but other than the sectarian the differences the ethnic differences the other whites are different then the sunnis will have an arabic background syria is. of ethnic groups you have the arabs you have. could

you have assure people. and you have the sherpas who have. roots. this all makes this may launch makes it difficult to separate. who's who as far as this experience i don't think that it is security and but those who have started. the opposition in syria were predominantly belonging to the muslim brotherhood the american administration is playing it very very careful in syria the are with principles of freedom democracy and human rights for the syrian people but the have their concerns that if when and if they will supply weapons to the rebels it might be used against them exactly as happened in afghanistan when the support group. history made it

and we ended up with september eleventh nobody wants to see that anymore as far as the. saudis the rich oil states paying salaries for the opposition. as it earlier it's going to present an incentive which supposed to present a situation new situation on the ground. the syrian foreign minister have kofi annan yesterday a letter stating that they are ready to suspend all military activities and was draw from the civilian centers. by april thirds. there is no trust in credibility for. we have to wait for this week to see where it's going to. experience conflict partially true but it's not because of the conflict in

syria i think that's a growing good point there's a whole lot of different elements going on here a lot of layers to kill back and of course that is difficult for western countries to really understand exactly what's going on when they talk about getting involved militarily or not middle east analyst ahmed forty we do appreciate you joining us and giving your insight here. and the big picture is coming up at nine pm eastern host tom hartman will bring you all the latest about the ongoing struggle over the wisconsin state of course is the battleground over union right now remember a little over a year ago governor scott walker signed a measure taking away most collective bargaining rights for public workers last week a federal judge ruled that this is a union law violates a number of rights today more than a million signatures have been collected to help governor walker recalled from office and tonight tom will sit down with the communications director of the democratic party of wisconsin find out what's still being fought for and what's to

come that will be all new at the top of the hour. and that's going to do it for now for us but for more on the stories we covered go to you tube dot com slash r t america and just because the show stops doesn't mean news does check out the website r.t. dot com slash usa for the latest information on all the stories we covered and a few we didn't get to take a look at this law enforcement officials are getting a little frisky this week that's because the supreme court ruled that they have the right to strip search anyone they arrest whether the person is detained for unpaid parking tickets or a serial killer want to find out how far these officials are taking it go to our web site for all the details and i want to hear from you leave me your comments your feedback and story suggestions and of course you can follow me on twitter at christine for for now i hope you have a great night.