welcome to the lower show where you get the real headlines with none of them are so you can live in washington d.c. now if i were going to take a look at who is the biggest baddest arms dealer from all people like victor boots 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 than were in slaves and eight in fifteen 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 we're going to all of that and more 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 a story began 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 on thousands of acres of federal land and all sites are located in fragile ecosystems near breathtaking scenery like a parcel of land near arches and canyonlands national parks and you talk and evil is a say environmentalist's or please so an activist named tim de christopher and the 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 eight so what happened next why don't we have freelance journalist and filmmaker dennis trainer jr explain. christopher bid on twenty one twenty two fouls an acre is using one point eight million dollars he didn't have one point eight million dollars you know 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 of the one hundred sixteen auction that day only about twenty percent were actually illegal the orchestrators and 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 on for violating the federal onshore oil and gas leasing reform act and a second for making false statements out in that are that he and his supporters actually planned to raise the money to finance that protest bit and it didn't

matter the oil executives who rig b.l.m. auctions often don't get prison sentences that are the last july to christopher was going to hear a 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 one month ago the bitter seventy story took a disturbing 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 that if they are saving money by screwing their workers i can't in good conscious 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 to chris over and his activists 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 and 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 can't amount to torture and here is what a staff attorney from the center for constitutional rights had to say about isolation. or being cut off physically from their families in ways that just serve no legitimate purpose whatsoever this is deeply upsetting the only two. clients who are incarcerated but also deeply destructive to their children and to their spouses 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 said that his clients and mental state started to visibly worsen after just three weeks now thankfully for christopher the new sparked

a public outcry fishel integrated him back into the general prison population and kaiser chait 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 of 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 to christopher's letter if they did ask if they implored the bureau to implement retaliatory measures such as isolation now we're going to document the 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 would be representatives on the house judiciary subcommittee on crime terrorism and homeland security if you guys would get involved he was the 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. the whim of an elected official and 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 on 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 a federal district court in manhattan federal prosecutors were asking for a life sentence while 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 fart 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 fark but even though he was found not guilty twice by thai courts the u.s. was able to get an extra guided to new york and it's a case that bears 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 us government itself is the biggest arms dealer in the world joining me to discuss it is scott horton and 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 a life in prison sentence for twenty five years but overall is this a case you 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 and that happened to mr boats and

b. 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 that he 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 governor dealing with terrorists here he was dealing with u.s. government representatives and i think this case raises as you a great many others we've done a whole series of articles of cards looking at the counterterrorism prosecution the sting operations. i think what we see consistently and then it is that the

department of justice is very very good it's paging highly reactive poll stings where they have people come in and impersonating. islamic terrorists or and they in this case product and other groups and frankly a number of people who would serve the have raised the same question which is why isn't the department of justice dedicating the same level of resources to actually this rock being terrorist activity in the united states or abroad the fact that what we see is a lot of sting operations and not real leopards to bust up terrorism well and let me let me address you very much because so many of the sting operations that you talk about to be seen recently afaik in place at least within the u.s. and so then what kind of legal questions does it bring as we. thinking of how this went down of the arm twisting that went on when it came to convincing to tie government despite the fact he was found not guilty there were two times to actually get him extradited to the u.s.

of course russia was fighting against that when it comes to international law has a chaka you know absolutely or a small series of an african press going to the basic premise of law internationally has been for me signs that when the laws subject to a principle of strict territoriality that is a you of defrauding crimes in the project get them within your own territory and of course this is something about a russian merchant operating out of thailand and other countries making sales and the colombia. really is hardly a basis for a claim of any connection to the united states or its united states acting as a sort of global policeman as it were and in fact the united states even. fictionalizing the crime because it's not actually any dealing with a terrorist group it was dealing with actors provided by the department of justice

so i figured out well in fact some of the problems u.s. was facing throughout was getting cooperation from foreign nations like we don't promote wiki really able. rock aeration from thailand was essentially stored it the thailand was told that assistance programs and united states would be shut down unless they turned over to the groups now how do we think of 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 armed getting into the wrong hands into the hands of bad guys but then you know who is it that decides because you could say that the u.s. government is probably the biggest arms dealer in the world we've 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 the mujahedeen because we're fighting the soviets but then give a couple years and that flips around you know it isn't just what's in the government's interest. well i do 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 eastern bloc throughout the cold war and the end of the cold war the us pressed into their shoes and basically became the dominant role arms market markets here and there very little competition and one cynical way of viewing 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 questions about labeling them a terrorist organization they're more like direct traffic there's most people study them but they're very nasty group of people they engage in kidnappings and the fascinations right unless they made a living hell out of iran be a force is a strong international interest in limiting the sales and dealing with it but

there's also a lot of suspicion about the way the united states goes about it about the basic fairness and equity and i look at the justice department right now well it's pretty it's pursuing this case and voicing outrage at the same time senior justice department officials were approving operation fast and furious which resulted in the sale of very powerful semiautomatic weapons to drug traffickers just like the park across the border and mexico and that actually resulted in deaths of american personnel i like the fiction with which the booth was charged and brought the american reaction to that our age no not even an apology for what happened it seems to have been viewed as a legitimate tactic for the justice department has been i guess you could say outrageous coming from the right wing on that one had been hearing one of a domestic political part of being a fan then you know then talking about this issue how many. weapons there are out

there scott i want to thank you so much for joining us tonight great to be with you lead are coming up after the break are black men are disenfranchised today that in the year the fifth amendment was ratified we're going to take a shot xander author of the new jim crow about the system that keeps millions of americans outside the democratic process. illegal. download the official ulti allocation joy so knowing called talk from the i choose option. like. video on demand keys mind roll calls. and r.s.s. feeds now in the palm of your. machine on the call. me is at least. a.

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yesterday senior pentagon official signed off on a new trial for alleged nine eleven mastermind khalid sheikh mohammed now 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 are 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 in a reign of the five men will be held at good mon 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. that prosecutors from both the department of justice and the department defense you have to thoroughly studying the case here to me best venue for prosecution was in federal court. now obama and holder fully believed one hundred percent that the men should be tried in civilian court and even there michael bloomberg expressed his support for that move not only to bloomberg say the 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 were murdered but then the media stepped in. the obama administration says it's only fitting that the man who claims he had masterminded the september eleventh attacks just visited new york city fleet shaikh

muhammad and his coconspirators in the nine eleven attack will enjoy the protections of the american criminal justice system the controversy and decision to bring five nine eleven suspects to american soil to face trial for. drug running and service we have a civilian trial this is the most reckless dangerous and irresponsible decision that he has made want crime to attack you giving them a platform where they can preach to lease of terrorism into the united states shaikh mohammad the mastermind of the nine eleven attacks. on the u.s. soil conditions responsible for up to new york for trial just blocks from the world trade center close recovered. hate america from industry straight. from war. five of them are giving them a plan for propaganda vehicles within our borders. now by the end of two thousand and ten congress decided to join has blocked the transfer of get mody trainees to

the u.s. for any reason putting the purpose of standing trial and they passed actual legislation to keep chaos them from coming to the states and it didn't take long after that for mayor bloomberg to cave. 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 one tonne of detainees to trial in the united states regardless of the venue i have to deal with the situation as i thought. you know if we're lucky we made the determination that 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 end in military commission thanks to a mainstream media all too willing to play into a fake controversy and give it to you 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 the lonny 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 terribly 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 suddenly made it seem like it's not good enough for trying terrorists like you can't handle it literate 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 skirt the system and the truth is that care isn't trials can go by it successfully unnoticed in our civilian courts and how the hell are they going to keep people scared and so that is why it has them will be facing a military commission next month and that's why the fight to try him in our civilian court system is officially that. 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 as 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 eight hundred 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 felon disenfranchisement disenfranchisement laws than eight hundred seventy the year that 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 properly addressed a criminal justice system in which racism in many respects is still prevalent joining me to discuss it is michelle alexander civil rights advocate and author of the book the new jim crow mass incarceration in the age of colorblindness michelle 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 predominantly white 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 a racially segregated it why. and so this cycle and system of mass incarceration happens outside of the 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 i'm 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

a new cast like system has emerged thanks to the war on drugs and they get 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 that bill largely ignored swept into our criminal justice system branded criminals and problems and then stripped of their very rights and closely won in a civil rights movement like the right to vote the right to serve on juries the right to be free of legal discrimination well then let me bring out to you know yeah if you look back on it if this is tough on crime this war on drugs that really is why it started 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 but 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 a grand republican party strategy known as the southern strategy of using racially coded get tough appeals on issues of crime and welfare to appeal to who are 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 it didn't mean they all promised to get tough and 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 nine hundred eighty two it was an attempt to make good on campaign promises to get tough a group of people who had been defined not so slightly in the media in political discourse as black and brown we'll see who 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 fair is you know something that can be drawn it to say that if crime rates are at historic lows to have something to do with historically high prison populations well no actually you know sociologists and criminologists today now that 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 we lost audio for a minute there but we're here 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 you think that fits into what it is that you write about because that's clearly been dominating the news cycle lately. yes what 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 stocking again black men because of the way he looked in 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

to question 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 you know 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 whom 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 wrist searched if you would as a suspect without any evidence of no 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 and it's 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 any 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 rights that because they are stopped france searched it grossly disproportionate rates they are incarcerated grocery to support 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 tonight 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 white neighborhoods get to make as they're trotting out the crowd and of course you know that being.