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tv   [untitled]    April 18, 2012 7:00pm-7:30pm EDT

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tonight an r.t.a. another day another war and another scandal u.s. troops are posing and were caught posing with the bodies of dead afghans is this an isolated incident or just the reality of war is going to be a symbol of just how desensitized our forces have become. and all your most private most personal information is just a click away and looks like big brother lost the power to browse through your online life at will but hacktivists and clips of us are going to stand idly by going to explain a scary little bill called cispa and why we should care about this week. group because the more you would seem out of line squeezing the water from a single raindrop conserve natural resources toss hearing from the department. that
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sounds pretty good to me but maybe the question it should be what do you know companies are trying to do but how they're trying to do it pulling farmers buying off politicians and genetically modifying what we eat are some of the charges explain why this may be the food fight for your life. good evening it's wednesday april eighteenth seven pm here in washington d.c. i'm lucy craft and you're watching our t.v. . we begin today with yet another military scandal out of of ghana stan involving the soldiers and photos and descriptions yet again now today's revelations come from the l.a. times which published grisly images of u.s. troops from the eighty second airborne division posing sometimes grinning next to the remains of afghan insurgents now the photos are from twenty ten but it does seem like almost every single month a new scandal emerges that involves u.s.
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soldiers committing an atrocity or another in the field of war marines urinating on corpses koran burnings shooting sprees the military response in this latest scandal seems to place the blame on the press now the pentagon in response to this made the usual noises about how it doesn't represent the conduct of the military as a whole and then issue the usual warnings about how the release of these images jeopardizes u.s. lives by leaving a bad impression on the quote mine but local afghans you know because local afghans have such a favorable view of america after a decade of war the night raids torture civilian killings and so forth now these acts these photographs were despicable but the discussion in the media in the pentagon the reaction in the mainstream misses the point which is that america is at war and for more than a decade soldiers were sent over and over again to foreign lands to do exactly what they're trained to do to fight and to kill and a generation of american men and women have fought died lost limbs watch friends
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die all in the name of war and those who come back often come home with scars build seen and unseen let me run through some of the statistics for you an american soldier dies every day and a half on average in iraq or afghanistan u.s. veterans kill themselves at a rate of one every eighty minutes and more than six thousand five hundred u.s. veterans suicides are logged every single year and that's more than the entire number of soldiers killed in iraq and afghanistan combine since those wars began now we can debate about the role of the media or the effect. these photos on local afghans that were blue in the face but we need to stop treating them as isolated incidents and admit that this is what war is now earlier i spoke to somebody who has seen the effects of war firsthand retired u.s. marine jake gilberto served both in iraq and afghanistan and here says take. company keep in mind here there's two distinctly different things occurring i think
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that these most recent pictures the peeing on the corpses and the burning of the korans as well as the incident with robert bales is a broad list of things that have happened in every single war and i think that the viewers of this program would be wise and american people would be wise to know that the behavior as bad as it has been this is not as nearly as bad as it has been in previous wars when we and the afghans were engaged in the one nine hundred eighty s. they had a lot of bad behavior when the americans were engaged in vietnam the vietnamese had bad behavior the nazis in world war two the war brings about the worst of human behavior and i would say the things i've seen worst i haven't been when i was in the military in serve in the military but as a civilian working in places like israel and lebanon and afghanistan seeing that we hate seeing what goes on to civilians on the civilian side it's much worse than it is on the military side for instance every bomb that's dropped there are so
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innocent civilians that get killed that brings up all sorts of problems for the society at large and then that the soldiers that are engaged in war as well the dehumanization process that takes place the psychological damage church can only take that for so long and we're seeing at this point i think within the u.s. ranks a breaking shattering of discipline and i think there needs to be some general rethinking about this whole thing about open ended war and these men and women are coming home eventually i mean how should we be concerned about their ability to readjust their pets this is right a decade of war has done to our men and women in arms there is no doubt that those who enter the civilian life coming from the military have the hardest psychological challenge to enter back into civilian life i mean not only serve four years in the marines so many regard my service as nothing compared to some of the people that have been doing it for that much law. longer but even for as only serving four years i can say that it's so hard for us in turkey late back into civilian society
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learning basic things humor jokes cultural norms the kinds of things we would say in the military we would never say in the civilian world. and also it's being able to parse out how to be critical of policies for war and then also how to be able to support our brothers and then be able to reflect on this entire political nightmare known as the war on terror or the long war with whatever you want to use that but that's not the issue here because whether we're talking about you know chinese troops you know soviet troops in afghanistan american troops the war is ugly and war does you terrible things and i'm sure that these photos don't even represent the slightest half of what could potentially goes on in the field but the problem is that we as a country here unfortunately have been engaged not just in afghanistan but in iraq and yemen and libya and all of these other countries and you know we have a society that for example movies video games all of the sort of you sense
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a type of gun engages us in this perspective that you know kill or be tell you now that you know. it's interesting you know america america and all reality starts out as an idea the idea of the constitution these ideas that are a spouse by the founders when we start having a nation that is tolerant of torture work political class here that's tolerant of open ended war or. a society that's removed from what our soldiers are doing abroad when you start to have those sorts of side of breakdowns america lose its identity so what were the founders in to support it isn't there anymore. in regard to have we lost our way. america fortunately for for better or for worse has forgotten its identity we have capitulated into a new to a new generation where the nation that the founders identified doesn't exist anymore and the society at large is engaged in what our soldiers are doing abroad
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and washington seems to be so broken that no one knows what they're doing they're so far removed from the day to day crisis is that's occurring in cleveland ohio or seattle or wherever else and not what's worst of all that the people that are in seattle in cleveland are removed from what our troops are going through in kabul and and baghdad. everywhere else you know but the thing is the military doesn't consist of ten thousand people and we're talking you know if you can find veterans an active service medic cetera millions of people millions millions of americans right and you're almost pitting these two separate cultures you know the society our society that's removed from all this warfare and a society that's been forced and exposed to these horrors could there be a potential some sort of clash or or some sort of difficulty in readjusting down the line well maybe that's the case but i think even a bigger crisis in the sea when the draft existed before nine hundred seventy six the nation was forced to engage in what what washington decided we were forced to
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because the draft was there to keep us in check with the draft ending in one nine hundred seventy six there is no way that the nations force to be engaging more so it's easier to go to war it's easier to stay at war and it's almost impossible to end the wars whatever a war is once it gets started we still have troops in bosnia we still have troops bases if you will in iraq maybe not uniformed soldiers but we still have this thing in afghanistan going for better or for worse i don't really care what the nation's opinion is about the war because reprise entirely different opinions but the nation needs to be involved in gage in what we're doing and it's not engaged because they're not it's not forced to and it's only one incident like this come out that we haven't paid attention to this now jake i want to have sort of a more personal question again you served in both conflicts i know it's not necessarily as long as some of our men are and one and half but you've seen this firsthand i also know that you've gotten to korea and theology let's turn to religion i'm curious i mean has what you see on the ground. forced to towards
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a more of a spiritual path i guess to try to the over what you've experience i think that i think that religion faith whether it's muslim christianity doesn't matter has a way of unifying people as a way of connecting and see that there is a creator who connected painkillers from my point of view and that i find human rights abuses the own untolerable in any way shape or form and religion has been a form of therapy for me i think and so certainly for me it's fundamentally changed with life and i think a lot of soldiers are certain veterans are coming back from these wars are turning to it just as well as what they did before people can say religion is a reason for wars and maybe that's the case but religion is also a profound way of peace and reconciliation and saw this with martin luther king saw this with gandhi that sort of thing so. yeah religion religion means
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a lot to me you know perhaps when you don't have the option to turn to the v.a. or at the pentagon for help when you return spiritual help my team what are some folks that jake i really want to thank you for spending time with us and sharing your personal experience thank you let me thank you take the lead character retired u.s. marine archie. well from war to cyber war first there was act on them sopa pipa and now suspect her for having a hard time keeping tabs on the latest cyber acronyms let me simplify for you. these are legislative efforts in the name of either cyber security or copyright infringement that have the potential to do one very scary thing which is the story freedom and privacy as we know it now the latest interoperation of the worst privacy nightmare is the cyber intelligence sharing and protection act of twenty eleven system for short and may not sound very scary but the bill that effectively allow u.s. companies to spy on your emails social networking posts and other online activities and pass that information along to the u.s. government now that's if something the right to go or post online is deemed to be
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quote a cyber security threat information so what is a cyber security threat right is it an online plot for example to take down the pentagon is it downloading brianna's latest album was from pirate bay but it encrypted your e-mails or using a service that lets you browse the internet anonymously could for example entail posting your political views on facebook or sending us our casting e-mail to a friend i mean the answer isn't the problem is that we don't know the bill is written so broadly that almost any online activity could be deemed a threat and that has the potential to hurt everyone from whistleblowers to destroying journalism to silencing free speech not to mention eroding the basic premises of democracy now this legislation is coming up for a vote in the house next monday but there's no shortage of scary sounding bills on the hill that stand any chance of becoming law so should we actually genuinely worry about cispa well they've seen has been covering the issue for
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a while and here is his take. well for one reason you should care because it stands a very good chance of becoming law has more than one hundred co-sponsors in congress and on light sopo which had a huge online outrage from the public and tech companies alike this one actually has the support of key type companies with sopo which failed there was a petition that was linked from the home page of google and major web properties including reddit and we could pedia went dark to protest it they're probably not going to do that this time around asis pose a very real threat and at this point it very well could become law within a matter of it within a very short period of time and the white house has expressed concerns but don't let that reassure you too much because they also expressed concerns about n.d.a. and then obama signed it into law on new year's eve now they've expressed concerns about other bills that have been become law yeah i'm glad you mentioned the the white house issue because there's been a lot of articles sort of thing well the white house has come out against this but
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i mean if an n.s.a. flack is their equivalent of the big guns to oppose legislation i don't really think that we can sleep soundly but. you know let's focus on this issue of sort of activists gathering behind or against our in favor of why is it that facebook for example google why have these companies not come out against this what's in it for them in this legislation. well i think whatever you're gathering data that's a potential business model i think it's a sleazy business model but you can sell i mean you can sell that to the government and make money off of it so it's a revenue stream and furthermore i think these big tech companies love the litigation immunity that the government or other agencies or even companies you know a private security company can seize your information under system and we're talking about very private information the websites you visit the searches you make if you're doing research on a personal medical condition if you're sending private e-mails to your spouse your
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girlfriend or anybody else these are emails that could be seen by a number of people and that litigation munity protects these companies from being sued so i think they like that aspect also i think internet users individuals hate this for the same reason there's really no recourse if your information is abused i mean i don't argue that this is a bill that is designed for abuse that litigation immunity is completely absurd so congress you're saying that congress is intentionally trying to screw over american freedoms of speech privacy and information. it's been a legislative twilight zone really sense it was signs that it was signed into law we saw that and then we saw a bill that literally criminalizes certain forms of peaceful protests that was signed into law and then we saw sopa which was breathtaking in its scope and its audacity and the extent that it goes against everything america stands for and that only failed not really because of public opposition i think it failed because big
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tech companies were against it this time around we the tech companies don't have our backs so it's up to the american people to speak out and for people that i've spoken to online it really sounds like when you contact your member of congress and you say you know i don't want to start this is not something we asked for this is not something that's good for the internet it's not good for the economy it's not good for our privacy obviously when you contact these numbers of congress their response is something that approaches a detached an easement they don't really care what you think at this point so it's definitely i mean it freaks a lot of people out and with good reason you know that they might not care what the average joe thinks but i guess money talks and we do also have the addition of this horrid essentially defense contractor a lobbyist on the hill pushing for this legislation talking a little bit on the bat. that's exactly right this is not a bill that the american people asked for they didn't say hey government we need more regulation over the internet the internet works pretty well this is something
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that was pushed by for profit spying companies and it was pushed by a handful of tech companies and it's totally counter to what would be in the best interests of the american people in nearly every possible way and we've seen this time and time again where congress are supposedly elected officials are no longer representing their needs they could be focusing on a number of issues that would help the average person far more what about increasing you know transparency and liquidity in financial markets what about bringing people back to work any of these things have be a better use of their time then these crazy spying bills that make us look like a joke on the world stage that we're attacking the internet one of the areas where america excels and innovate so why are we trying to destroy this it makes zero sense to essentially shooting ourselves in the foot i think that's a good point you make there but really briefly for those who aren't necessarily tech savvy you know that the average american men say well you know i'm not going
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to send out terrorist sounding e-mails i'm not going to google for terror threats information i'm not planning cyber attacks could average americans who don't do bad things care about the smell. you really have to ask yourself even if you know terrorists or whatever and by the way so put they used you know we're stopping online piracy is the red herring this time around they've pretty much doubled down they're saying now we're using this to stop cyber terrorists whatever the hell that is. so for the average person you have to ask yourself do you want strangers that you know nothing about people in local police departments people privately run security companies do you want them to be poring through years of your e-mails every single google search you make late at night and that is going to go there if you want all these private things being in the hands of strangers and then having absolutely no accountability no to turn around and use that information in the worst way possible you can then you can even get a lawyer and sue them because they have litigation in unity it is certainly scary
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and if you do want to figure out a way to get in touch with your congressmen or the electronic freedom foundation a.c.l.u. do you have a ways to go and do that thank you so much for clarifying us on the issue david seaman journalist and the host of the d.l. show ireland many european countries the idea of genetically modified food is as important to say euthanasia and india's farmer crisis farmer suicide crisis has been blamed on the increased use of g.m. crops and the paul nothing approach that protests have broken out recently after monsanto seeds were forced on that country's farmers and it's not just one song to oversee it's in taiwan a country that has a vested political interest in friendly ties with the u.s. the mere mention of a u.s. beef additive called wrapped up i mean is enough to send thousands of farmers eeriest onto the streets to protest our products but what about here at home and why aren't we americans as outraged about what we eat to even know what's in our products so that's the question i posed to christopher d.
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he is the author of the book diet planet and here's his thoughts on america's stand and yet your most. well i think actually the movement against g m o's in general and also for label and in the us is actually quite i'm active in by brant and you'll see comments posted u.s.d.a. to the government. in the millions there's actually very widespread concern across the us about the spread of china and i modify prudence for instance but eighty different cities across the country have tried or towns have tried to ban g m o's within their locality and the state of vermont had a ban on g.m.o. . you know they continue the corporations continue to got all this news in court but you know the reality is that what people are up against a large but of course system in congress and president save either party is very
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closely tied to the agribusiness complex which includes months and so and other big companies like syngenta and the ponds and other big corporations that control most of our scenes and so it's very difficult to get. people in the federal level in the national level to pay attention but there's actually very well it's pretty concern across the u.s. about this issue there may be a growing concern about the issue but the problem with the u.s. is that this is something that's already in place that we're fighting to overturn so i'm curious about the divide how is it that this country sort of sausage is for a four month answer and some other type companies to sort of spread and operate the way they do whereas other countries have been able to block. yeah i mean unfortunately since g.m.o. product g m a p s began to roll out in about one thousand nine hundred six. they really just took over like wildfire and the government they started agriculture
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would routinely just ok a month sanch on other corporations applications to expand use of these seeds and so for instance we now see ninety four percent of the soy crops in america are g.m.o. and it's somewhere between sixty and seventy five percent depending on the crop for cotton and corn last year the obama administration gives a to stand this and should be just sugar beets and alfalfa they have you know g.m.o. wheat in the pipeline so there's a lot of you know part of the reason is and phenomenal level of corporate power over government policy noted state which stems from the fact that these companies have such control over the market so that so for instance someone sent to. you know along with two other companies control house of the world's seed supply so you know and then we see it especially carphone us with those crops that i just mentioned
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you know that's one phantom more powerful than the u.s. government. i don't think we should pretend that they are i don't think i don't think that we need to overly demonize them just to see that what they what they're doing is what any other company would do and i think we have to be clear about that and at the not just an evil company the food industry what the agra business and then district frankly do. and they try to turn a profit nature becoming biggest possible in control as much of the market as they can and once they do their part if you're right for country politics and the we'll regulatory process and so it doesn't seem to matter which political party we have both president bush and president obama have been roughly equally friendly with g.m.o. industry you know and the danger is not just you know. that we don't know what's in our food and the fact that there are allergens that have been introduced into our
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food system it's also as you mentioned earlier the control over farmers ability to survive and produce the crops they want to produce and so even if farmers may start off liking you know a month into production and they link in with it. they're suddenly completely unable to control their fate and so money started talking i mean it sounds like a drug pusher essentially you know you have an allergy before where you know some donald started putting crack and and their burgers and hooking customers on their specific burgers and they also happen to sue anyone i want to you know burger king for a for an alternative i mean that would be gang drug warfare. so yeah i mean in the first decade dmoz in the u.s. money and so sued over twenty three hundred farmers claiming that they had stolen their seat when in actuality many farmers have found there are again it crops were non g.m.o. crops to be polluted by the seeds flowing through the wind and yet month pentode
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will turn around and sue them anyway even though these farmers don't want those crops and you know and again the very technology of g.m. owes it's very troubling because the whole point of it it's been on replicating not reproduce so he'd have to go to the company to get their cd and you have to go to the same company for the test. that will be used to eradicate the rest of the pests on the other in the weeds unrest and for these crops are not just they're not good for the environment they are there they enable the use of more pesticides in many cases and they're also a real threat to both farmers and biodiversity by wiping out taking over other crops and chris before we run out of time i'm sorry that's really you know. it sounds kind of bad right but what what is the actual effect of g.m.o. foods and human people i mean there's. i think there's an alternate article that said that month answer doesn't even serve it's own product and it's happened i
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don't know how true that is but should the average american be concerned about health effects from channels well absolutely i mean the studies are still being done but there are a number of studies showing again that they introduced by crossing different you'd be introduced to the states. and some people are very allergic to certain things and when you don't label. enough to do. g.m.o. what was the. merging into this never had that before so that's just one example of how you know the rest you know again there's a lot of scientific study being done. on the bio diversity berman. stuff and certainly labeling very least but even that's not enough because we still don't know what's in the well it seems like a battle of the american people versus goliath although i don't really know if that's the political system or the companies or who's really the goliath in this
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case but i do appreciate you taking the time to speak with us that's christopher to call up the author of the blog for a sad fact. well yesterday hundreds of americans gathered in florida maryland virginia and washington d.c. in order to mark a nother historic mormons in america's space program but this one wasn't greeted with as much excitement for the future as astrology from the past the discovery shuttle strapped to a plane flew over the skies traveling to its final resting place here in washington d.c. in the smithsonian museum and for many this was a sad moment for some spectators even by two eighteen years for a member of the great feats of this orbiter accomplished now it was the very first shuttle of the family to be deployed and i made some thirty nine trips to space listen to sara lee the shuttle itself that the people were missing about or feeling that i must tell jack about when you look up in the sky it's for many it was a concern about the future of america's space program and more importantly the question of whether we still have
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a space program that really counts for something we have a clip from the c.b.s. news affiliate here in washington d.c. and the reporter as you'll see is speaking to a former astronaut who actually flew in a discovery shuttle long ago and here's her advice to some younger want to be astronauts maybe advice or even an aspiring actor not that he russian but. well you heard it here if you want to be an astronaut kids dream big and learn russian and. and we were all this was of course that in jest there is a hint of truth in the statement at the moment u.s. astronauts do have to pay russia around sixty three million dollars per seat in order to reach the assess the international space station and last year the chinese launched more rockets into space than the u.s. and all of this is happening on asses suffering deep budget cuts because it seems that president kennedy's dreams of reaching the moon first have been achieved but the government's focus is now planted firmly on issues back here on earth and in
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the meanwhile private space companies are taking over space that says that it will blast into the orbiter in its orbit or into space as early as april thirtieth in the attempts to reach the i assess so is the u.s. comfortable in taking a backseat to space in space exploration apparently whether we want to or not the answer is. well that does it for now and just because the show socks isn't in the news has to as well for morning stories we've covered you can go door to dot com check out our youtube slash youtube channel that's huge dot com slash r t america there you'll find a lot of interesting stories including articles on everything that we've covered today a few more stories the didn't necessarily make it on air like for example stripping away our freedoms now there's been a lot of reports coming out lately about unhappy americans who say that their privacy has been violated but the t.s.a. the transit security administration. almost airport patrons.

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