welcome to the show or if the real headlines with none of them are safe and alive in washington d.c. now it's never going to take a look at who's the biggest baddest arms dealer of all big de groot or our own government then michelle alexander joins us to talk about our massive incarceration system and the role that race plates just one shocking statistic out there there are more african-american men under correctional control today and were enslaved and eight hundred fifty and despite a weak economy a number of patents expiring big pharma is still making the big bucks so we're

going to talk about how consumers are manipulated and always coming back for more medication or not all that morphine and i including a dose of happy hour but first let's take a look at a story that deserves your attention so you know i would like to start the show with a special segment and this story involves congressional overreach and what you can do to help shed light on it and started again in december of two thousand and eight the bush administration's bureau of land management rushed to do one last favor for their friends in the oil and gas industry and they held an auction to sell oil and gas drilling rights thousands of acres of federal land and sites are located in fragile ecosystems near breathtaking scenery like a parcel of land near arches in kenya lands national parks and you talk and evil is to say environmentalists or please so an activist named tim de christopher and behind bars for trying to stop that sketchy option he walked into the auction with the intent of disrupting it in protest but because oversight was so lax he managed

to sign in as a possible bitter bitter number seventy so what happened next why don't we have freelance journalist and filmmaker dennis trainer jr explain. christopher bid on one twenty two thousand acres using one point eight million dollars he didn't have one point eight million dollars you now have one point eight dollars he had zero dollars he was trying to draw attention to what the department of interior has later described as an illegal sale you heard me correctly department of interior has reviewed these cases and found that over the one hundred sixteen portions of the auction that they only about twenty percent were actually illegal the orchestrators in the deal makers who put these illegal sales together are they facing criminal charges. so you can see where he was going to christopher was charged with two felony counts one for violating the federal on shore oil and gas leasing reform act and a second for making false statements that are that he and his supporters actually plan to raise the money to finance that protest bit and in that of the oil

executives who rig b.l.m. auctions often don't get prison sentences at all the last allied christopher was given to your sentence in her long president california and he was slapped with a ten thousand dollars fine and he might get out after his case is heard by a federal appeals court in may but one month ago the bitter seventy story took the starting turn he went to christopher found out that a major corporate donor to his defense fund was planning on moving jobs overseas he had a crisis of conscience so he sent an e-mail on march fifth to the person who manages his finances and it contains the following message so if they are saving money by screwing their workers i can't in good conscience accept some of that money the first thing i'm going to do is send a letter to their owners about why this step bothers me this letter will include a threat to wage a campaign against them if they don't reverse course and keep the plants open so this sounds so like an issue for the christopher and his activist networks to be concerned with right or rolling stone reported last week that because of that

letter possibly because he used the word threat to christopher was put in isolation her long special housing you. and here's the kicker the bureau of prisons did this reportedly at the request of an anonymous congressman and isolation is no joke human rights groups have said that the experience can be considered tantamount to torture and here is what a staff attorney from the center for constitutional rights had to say that isolation. bill are being cut off physically from their families in a way is that just sort of from their legitimate purpose whatsoever this is deeply upsetting the only two. clients who are incarcerated but also deeply destructive to their children and their status is to their loved ones. now to christopher's case he was given little exercise little fresh air and minimal contact with the outside world and his lawyer patrick shea said that his clients mental state started to visibly worse and after just three weeks now thankfully for christopher the new spark of public outcry fishel integrated him back into the

general prison population and i took shape told us tim would still be in isolation but for a free press now prisoners in the federal system are thrown in isolation without due process all the time this time what's disturbing about it is that it happened to christopher because of one angry congressman ideally we think the public should know which congressperson was the brains behind this idea so this is where you the viewers come into the story get in touch with your member of congress staff and ask on the record whether or not they contacted the bureau of prisons about you christopher's letter it made it as if they implored the bureau to implement retaliatory measures such as isolation now we're going to document responses we're going to try to narrow this down for you and of course talking to all four hundred thirty five members of congress is a monumental task so it would really be helpful if the voters with the representatives on the house judiciary subcommittee on crime terrorism and homeland security you guys would get involved i think that's

a congressional panel responsible for prisoner oversight so maybe after enough calls the panel itself will start asking some questions after all being thrown into isolation. at the whim of an elected official that is not how our justice system is supposed to work so if you want to get involved check out our facebook page for tips on how to ask the right questions who the members on the subcommittee are and once you receive a response and the track of the answers and keep you posted so check our facebook page for additional details get in touch and stay tuned. now picture booth was sentenced to twenty five years in prison today by federal district court in manhattan but prosecutors were asking for a life sentence well the defense has been trying to get the judge to throw out his conviction calling him a political prisoner who stepped into a vindictive u.s. government sting operation of who was convicted of conspiring to sell millions of dollars of weapons including surface to air missiles conspiring to kill u.s. nationals conspiring to kill u.s. officers and employees and conspiring to provide material support to for the

revolutionary armed forces of colombia which are on the u.s. list of terrorist organizations who was arrested in thailand in a sting operation where informants posed as representatives of art but even though he was found not guilty twice by thai courts the u.s. was able to get him extradited to new york and it's a case that there is not only political and legal questions of jurisdiction but also begs the question as to how selective the government is when it comes to arms trafficking especially considering that the u.s. government itself is the biggest arms dealer in the world joining me to discuss it is scott horton of there on legal and national security matters for harper's magazine scott thanks so much for joining us and what are your overall thoughts on this case here so we found out that he did not get the life in prison sentence the twenty five years but overall is this a case he would call fair. well i think it raised a lot of issues obviously i just go back to your in your last segment you were talking about prisoners being held in isolation then that happened to.

be we know that he was held in solitary confinement and we know that the judge judge sheindlin learned about this and was very angry about it actually ordered to be released into the general prison population the justice department played this case from beginning to end with a very heavy handed they treated him as if he were a terrorist as if he were playing a principal role with a terrorist organization and it's clear that the judge thought that that was overreaching in fact that that bordered on being ludicrous and back to the vendor dealing with terrorists here he was dealing with u.s. government representatives and i think this case raises as do a great many others we've done a whole series of articles of part of prison looking at the counterterrorism prosecution developing sting operations. and i think what we see consistently and then is that the department of justice is very very good staging highly the actor

paul spain where they have people come in and impersonating islamic terrorists or and they in this case barak and other groups and frankly a number of people who would certainly have raised the same question which is not only isn't paid to frighten the justice dedicating the same level of resources to actually disrupting terrorist activities in the united states or abroad back to what we see as a lot of sting operations and not real efforts to bust out terrorism well and then let me let me an iraqi friend i know because so many of the sting operations that you talk about the scenery for me african plays at least within the u.s. for them what kind of legal questions to bring out and we. you aren't thinking of how this went down of the arm twisting that went on when it came to convincing the thai government despite the fact he was found not guilty there are two times to actually get him extradited to the us of course russia was fighting against this

when it comes to international law has a chalk up bill absolutely erase all series of international legal precedent to the basic premise of law internationally has been from ancient times that the law is subject to a principle of strict territoriality that is a you have the frying crimes and you prosecute the rescue and then we in your own territory and of course this is something about a russian merchant operating out of time and other countries making sales and the colombia. really is hardly a basis for a claim of any connection to the united states so it's united states acting as a sort of global policeman as it were and in fact the united states even. fictionalizing be quite right if this is not actually in the dealing with a terrorist group it was him dealing with actors providing rather partment justice

so it's a very doubtful in fact some of the problems u.s. was facing throughout was getting cooperation from poorer nations promote what he really able so that cooperation from thailand was essentially extorted that thailand was told that assistance programs the united states would be shut down unless they turned over to. now having taken this in the grand scheme of things you know i'm sure that most people out there would agree that we don't really want weapons you don't want arms getting into the wrong hands of the hands of bad guys but then you know who is it that decides right because you could say that the u.s. government is probably the biggest i'm still around the world we just had the biggest sale of u.s. weapons in history to saudi arabia for sixty billion dollars last year and you know and so how does who gets to decide and went before was ok to sell weapons to them which is hitting because he was fighting the soviets but then you have a couple here is that flips around you know is it just what's in the government's interest. well you can say the u.s.

is the biggest arms merchant in the world i bar and fact the u.s. basically competed neck and neck with the east bloc throughout the cold war and into the cold war the us stepped into their shoes and basically became the dominant robel arms market markets here and there's very little competition and one cynical way of doing this is to say this is the united states edging out a competitor but on the other hand there is a strong local interest in controlling and limiting these arms sales and particularly to terrorist organizations i mean you know i mean i have a questions about labeling them a terrorist organization they're more like direct traffic there is going to most people especially them but they're very nasty group of people they engage in kidnappings in the fascinations right and left they made a living hell out of colombia and so of course is a strong international interest and living the sale and dealing with it but there's

also a lot of suspicion about the way the united states goes about it about basic fairness and equity and that look at the justice department right now well it's why it's pursuing this case and voicing outrage at the same time junior justice department officials were approving operation fast and furious which resulted in the sale of a very powerful sending automatic weapons to drug traffickers just like the fark crossed the border and mexico and actually resulted in deaths of american personnel the fiction with which mr booth was charged and what the american reaction to back outrage no not even an apology for what happened it seems to have been viewed as a legitimate tactic by the justice department but i've been i guess you could say outrageous coming from the right wing on that when it's been turned into more of a domestic political party thing affair than you know than talking about this issue you have how many. weapons there are out there scott i want to thank you so much

for joining us tonight. if you. are coming up after the break are black men are disenfranchised today and they hear the fifth amendment was ratified part of the vandar author of the new jim crow about the system that millions of americans. process. and the. other part of it and realize that everything. is a big. mystery

. but in the alone or so we'll get the real headlines with none of them are the problem with the mainstream media today is that they're completely disconnected from the viewers from what actually matters to those viewers and so that's why young people just don't watch t.v. anymore if they want news they go online and read it but we're trying to take those stories that people actually care about and transfer them back to t.v. . is the state. russian channel it's kind of like.

russia today has an extremely confrontational stance when it comes to us. yesterday senior pentagon official signed off on a new trial for alleged nine eleven mastermind khalid sheikh muhammad and the trial is going to be in front of a military commission after over a decade he and four others who were accused of planning the september eleventh attacks and once again charged with murder in violation of the law of war attacking civilians hijacking aircraft and terrorism all of which are punishable by the death penalty now to rayna for the five men will be held at get money next month but it's been a long and winding road to get there so they were originally charged in a military commission back in two thousand and eight when the obama administration

came to washington they put it on hold because they wanted the suspects to face trial at the scene of the crime in a federal civilian court. working across it was from both the department of justice and the department of defense and you have to thoroughly studying the case to me the best venue for prosecution was in federal court. alabama holder fully believed one hundred percent that the men should be tried in civilian court and even mayor michael bloomberg expressed his support for that move not only to bloomberg say that a city's police force could handle the security but also said the following that it is fitting that nine eleven suspects face justice near the world trade center site where so many new yorkers are murdered but then the media stopped in. the obama administration says it's only fitting that the man who claims he had masterminded the september eleventh attacks face justice in new york city fleet shaikh muhammad and his coconspirators in the attack will enjoy the protections of

the american criminal justice system controversy and decision to bring five nine eleven suspects to american soil to face trial for. drug running of service without a civilian trial this is the most reckless interest in the irresponsible decision that he has me walk right through track innocence and giving them a platform where they can preach to lease of terrorists into the united states how we in shaikh mohammad the mastermind of the nine eleven attacks in terrorists on the u.s. military commissions responsible for up to new york for trial just blocks from the world trade center close work robert. hate america from industry straight. from war. with them are giving them a platform propaganda vehicles within our borders. now by the end of two thousand and ten congress decided to join has kerry and blocked the transfer of get most of

us for any reason couldn't the purpose of standing trial and they passed actual legislation to keep them from coming to the states and then it didn't take long after that for mayor bloomberg ok. hope is that the attorney general. and the president decided to change their mind. so as one politician after another succumbed to the media drumbeat eric holder reluctantly changed his stance on where chaos and the four others would be tried. unfortunately since i made that decision members of congress have intervened and in polls restrictions blocking the administration from bringing any guantanamo detainees to the united states regardless of the venue i have to deal with the situation as i thought. you know if you look to me determinations of these cases should be brought to the military commission. and here we are today with word that will be charged again and all

litigation will have to start from the beginning to in a military commission thanks to a mainstream media all too willing to play into a fake controversy giddy to use the twenty four hour news cycle to deliver peter king's fear mongering for days and days on end now all of that is despite the fact that other guantanamo detainees like ahmed ghailani have since been sent to new york for a civilian trial and guess what nobody even cared about it was a typical trial and a typical day in new york and in fact two hundred forty individuals have gone through our civilian courts who were sent to prison after being convicted of terrorist related crimes and those were all after nine eleven on the contrary six people have been convicted on terror related charges in military commissions so the point is that we have a civilian court system that's been around for more than two hundred years and yet political and media pressure has something made it seem like it's not good enough for trying terrorists like you can't handle it the truth is that there are those that want this to go on far away from public view the truth is that many of these people have been tortured our government's own treatment of them would mean that evidence or statements obtained under those circumstances wouldn't count so they

want to try and support the system and the truth is it carries in trials can go by it successfully unnoticed in our civilian courts but how the hell are they going to keep people scared and so that is why chaos that will be facing a military commission next month and that's why the fight to try him in our civilian court system is officially tacked. now we often talk about the mass incarceration system here and in fact the us now is the largest known prison population in the world but if that wasn't serving enough we also have to be honest about who it is that's targeted and affected most by a tough on crime mentality our guest tonight with the shocking statistic into the spotlight and there are more african-americans under correctional control today in prison or jail on probation or parole than were enslaved in eighteen fifty a decade before the civil war began the results of entering into the correctional system are long lasting creating a second class of citizens were stripped of their voting rights excluded from

juries legally discriminated against in employment housing access to education and public benefits and in fact as our guest also points out as of two thousand and four more african-american men were disenfranchised due to fellow disenfranchised disenfranchisement laws than eight hundred seventy the year the fifteenth amendment was ratified prohibiting laws that explicitly deny the right to vote on the basis of race so to time the u.s. has its first black president i would properly address a criminal justice system in which racism in many respects as prevalent joining me to discuss it is michelle alexander civil rights advocate and author of the book the new jim crow mass incarceration and the age of colorblindness michel i want to thank you so much for joining us tonight and you know you've gotten a lot of attention for this book and rightly so right how can it not get a lot of attention especially when you put statistics out there like that but what do you think took so long for people to really start talking about this issue for it to become something that's more acceptable in the media. well i think many of us

have been more or less lulled to sleep about the true nature of mass incarceration in america after all prisons are out of sight out of mind most prisons are located in predominately areas that's where most new prison construction has occurred and those who cycle in and out of our prisons and jails are typically folks who are living in racially segregated get it why communities and so this cycle and system of mass incarceration happens outside of conscious awareness of you know most mainstream white americans in particular who rarely have any contact with the criminal justice system today you know today the whites only signs are gone black folks are no longer relegated to the back of the bus and are free to eat in any restaurant but the reality is that in new cast like system has emerged thanks to

the war on drugs and the get tough movement millions of people overwhelmingly poor folks of color have been swept into our criminal justice system primarily for nonviolent drug related offenses the very sorts of crimes that occur with roughly equal frequency in middle class white neighborhoods and on college campuses but go largely ignored swept into our criminal justice system branded criminals and problems and then stripped of their very right supposedly won in the civil rights movement like a right to vote the right to serve on juries the right to be free of legal discrimination well then i'm going to bring out to you know yeah if you look back on it it's tough on crime this war on drugs that really is why what started it right where is what got us to where we are today in terms of the numbers and in terms of the figures if you look at it by you know you've also mentioned that if you look at historians political scientists all say that trying to get the working class white over to the republican party also may have something to do with it. yes

absolutely you know numerous historians and political scientists have now documented that the war on drugs was part of graham's republican party strategy known as the southern strategy i've using racially coded get tough appeals on issues of crime and welfare to appeal to poor and working class whites particularly in the south who were anxious about resentful of fearful of many of the gains of african-americans in the civil rights movement and pollsters and political strategists found that bailed promises to get tough on a group of people not so subtly defined by race could be enormously successful in persuading poor working class whites to defect from the democratic new deal coalition and joined the republican party in droves as part of the effort the strategic effort to flip the south from blue from democratic to red to republican

so when president ronald reagan declared his drug war in one thousand eight. hundred eight good campaign promises to get tough a group of people who had been defined not so subtly in the media in political discourse as black and brown will feel they are you know these people still very much no politician wants to look like they don't want to be tough on crime and get crime rates are at historic lows but do you think a bear is you know something that can be drawn it to say that if crime rates are at historic lows does that have something to do with historically high prison populations well no actually you know sociologists and criminologists today now and acknowledge that there is very little correlation between crime rates and incarceration rates our prison population has quintupled in.

i think we may have lost michelle they're going to oh i think she's back. michelle are still there we lost you. for a minute there but we're you know we're running out of time and so i just want to before we have to hit our next break get to talking to you about the trayvon martin case and i just want to know what you think about it how do you think that fits into what it is that you write about because that's clearly been dominating the news cycle lately. yes well you know i think in many ways the mentality of george zimmerman reflects the mentality of many in law enforcement today you know it's easy to demonize george zimmerman for what he did by merely stopping young black men because of the way he looked and being in the wrong neighborhood well. you know that mentality of viewing young black men as a problem who need to be dealt with harshly who need to be interrogated and stopped and questioned that is the mentality that dominates you know most law enforcement

agencies today if george zimmerman had had you know a badge with his gun we wouldn't even know trayvon martin's name today the new york police department reported that in one year alone in two thousand and ten the n.y.p.d. stopped and frisked more than six hundred thousand people more than eighty percent of them were black and latino and in only a tiny fraction of those stops and searches or any kind of suspect description or investigation into a criminal case so we have hundreds of thousands of young black and brown men being stopped frist searched viewed as a suspect without any evidence of criminal activity without any reasonable suspicion or probable cause greatly increasing the odds that a young black man will get caught with a little marijuana in his pocket or get caught doing something wrong and wind up in prison for the very kinds of mistakes that occur on college campuses excedrin get

ignored i mean studies have consistently shown now for decades that contrary to popular belief people of color are no more likely to use or sell illegal drugs than whites because they are stopped france searched it grossly disproportionate rates they are incarcerated grossly disproportionate rates in fact in some states eighty to ninety percent of all drug offenders sent. prison have been african-american and once locked up you are permanently locked out of many categories of employment opt out of public housing in some states the night even food stamps to survive so for the rest of your life you're relegated to a permanent second class status for making the same kinds of mistakes that young people in middle class right neighborhoods get to make as they're trotting off to college and of course you know that being part of the problem too is that if you have no voice how do you get more.