well all eyes are on good mo this past weekend. and for others accused of plotting nine eleven or rain to guantanamo bay now it was supposed to be a fairly quick arraignment on the military base and of lasting almost thirteen hours and this marathon hearing if you will was extended because of the defendant's peaceful protests see the accused didn't wear the translator headphones that were provided for them forcing the translator to speak over open speakers also one defender refused to enter the courtroom on his own he had to be brought in and handcuffed to the chair and on a few occasions throughout the day the hearing was paused when the defendants

prayed and also did not answer questions from military judge colonel james pole his lawyer said that was because he believes that the military commission process is unfair and one of the defense attorneys cheryl bormann also caused a stir when she showed up wearing a cop and called on other females in the courtroom to do the same out of respect for the defendants ok s.m. on the other defendants took the opportunity to protest the conditions where they were detained as well as the fact that they were facing a military commission rather than a civilian court as the obama administration originally had hoped for and reports also say the wall actually waived his right to be read all of his charges the other four defendants asked that all eighty seven pages of their charges be read which extended the hearing by two hours defense lawyer david nevin also spoke out against the questionable military commission system where he echoed the fear that constitutional rights wouldn't be extended to k.s. and his alleged coconspirators but the military commission wasn't the only reason for the protest the men also wanted to shed light on the torture practices that

thus far nobody has been held accountable for all five defendants were held in black sites or cia prisons before they were brought to get nevin reminded the commission the case that was water boarded by the cia one hundred eighty three times and another defendant interrupted the arraignment to remove his shirt and showed scars left from his treatment and want. now despite tensions in the courtroom the judge did do his best to respect the wishes of the defendants by using correct pronunciation and agreeing to read off all of the charges at their request but those who were watching the arraignment through close circuit television the family members of nine eleven victims when they saw the defendants behavior is offensive and disingenuous and the next time that these men will return to the commission it's going to be june twelfth and many suspect that even then this case is going to be years in the making but all the conflicts in the torture practices of the military commission versus civilian courts make this case anything but easy when the government used enhanced interrogation techniques it nullified

the information so that it couldn't rightfully be used in a court and the battle between civilian courts and military commissions is also nothing new if you remember eric holder began in new york but then when the severe backlash came down from the media eventually from congress the whole process had to be stopped and everybody had to start from scratch and the truth is this is going to go on for a long time and i don't think anybody out there is going to be satisfied by the results now some of that is obvious for the families the friends of victims of nine eleven nothing is ever going to fill that void a death sentence for it might give those family members a sense of justice but it could also give him a sense of martyrdom now this could have been handled differently we didn't have to torture we didn't have to create secret prisons or detain people in guantanamo bay outside of our borders and our laws and we definitely didn't have to create a outrage over bringing terrorist suspects into our civilian courts which has been done many many times before this was bungled by our response and no military commission is going to fix that now. now we've made plenty of fun on this show of

a non issues that many conservatives like to fear monger about the fabricated threats of death panels shari'a law creeping into the u.s. or a liberal education indoctrinating your children and turning them gay but it turns out that there might be a reason that voters t.v. and radio audiences average people. actually buy into it a recent study from researchers at university college of london discovered that greater conservatism was associated with increased volume of the right on the dollar that's part of your brain structure that's activated during state of fear and anxiety so looking at the various threats that are floating around out there the growing alarm is of the success of right wing media like fox news are republicans more susceptible to fear the liberals joining me to discuss it as joshua holland senior writer and editor at alter net josh thanks for joining us tonight and let me tell me you know why don't you start by telling me a little bit more about this research. thanks for having me yeah there's an

increasingly room body of research that suggests that liberals and conservatives are just about it by philosophical differences or policy preferences but actually have different cognitive styles different ways of interpretating the world around them and there are you mention the study of the physical study of the enlarged i mean which is the fight or flight structure of the brain that kind of shuts down rational thought and tells you when you encounter a lion that you better get out of there very quickly there's also been studies where they showed liberals and conservatives none political images some of which were disturbing and frightening and others we were comforting and nine and they tracked where people's eyes went and they found that conservatives went quickly to the threatening images and then lingered on them longer so this is this is apparently a difference on average between more liberal and more conservative people this is kind of fear response what do you think that that really means you know if we're

going to break it down and say you respond more to fear you're more easily afraid do you think i mean the republicans or i guess we don't necessarily need to say one party or the other but that conservatives are. are more simple minded are they stupid. well you know i mean that's not what the research says they're not crazy and they're not stupid these are normal variation so if you think about it in terms of like human height we wouldn't say that somebody who is sixty two is abnormally tall or someone who is five five is abnormally short there is a range of normal responses and it just so happens that this data suggests that all other things being equal conservatives are more likely to take to deal with these responses in this way on average than liberals the other part of this of course is that when you bring in the conservative media one of the things that i did with the with this piece that i wrote recently is i try to just walk a mile in my ideological opponents shoes and it's remarkable the kind of.

the kind of terrifying narratives that their daily luged with on it on a daily basis you know if you think about the president being a kenyan usurper if you think about fema camps you know this is a common fear that there's that there's going to be a round up of conservative activists after the election they'll be put in concentration camps these things are not just coming from the fringe from e-mail forwarded by your you know crazy uncle these are things that you can see glenn beck say on television you can see them coming from elected officials like michele bachmann so they have a glean of reality and if you're predisposed to having that fear center be activated i think that's a powerful mix but then we have to ask you know it was interesting about that i think about that if you want to talk about fox news specifically is that they beat

out all the other cable networks right all their competitors when it comes to their audiences their one of them whenever it's that's actually making a profit they have a model that is incredibly successful for them and so are people i mean why do people come back are they drawn to that area they see it on t.v. and they say i want to feel that again. well there is a chicken and egg thing here which comes first it may be that people who are predisposed to seeing the world in these stark black and white you know good versus equal people terms are attracted to what fox is giving rather than fox catering to that mindset i think that's impossible to unravel it's but as you say it's something that fox is come up on that's a very successful model and it's not just fox if you look at the conservative blogs i mean the the sheer the sheer terror given on a daily basis is impressive if you believe that stuff but though is that why you think you know from a more left wing perspective we haven't seen anybody be able to replicate the fox

news model successfully as much as m s n b c might try to be more of a liberal talking head they're not fox fox is more successful. right that's true you know the fox model relies on a lot of different things certainly not something that you can reduce to fear mongering i mean they eat they understand very well that the line between news and entertainment is a blurry well and they offer a lot of you know a lot of entertaining stories for lack of a better word they're good at the presentation of t.v. news. but there's certainly a tribal aspect to the fact of viewership and if you look at various studies they show that although liberals and conservatives both consume media that tends to confirm their beliefs that's much more the case with conservatives who are much less likely to look at other media as well you know liberals may watch m s n b c

but they're also going to check in with c.n.n. and even fox much more readily than conservatives are going to veer away from their around their own media i guess i one more thing to ask is you know you and i have made fun of some of the things you said i said of what these fears consist of you know and i clued death panels in the creeping sharia law into all of that and those are fake fears to me but then personally some of the stuff that i cover all the time you know if you want to talk about the erosion of our civil liberties since nine eleven if you want to talk about this growing surveillance state i was just talking about the f.b.i. trying to force tech companies to put a backdoor so that they can get into your communications there is scary stuff out there that's happening and it's real but that's not really what we're seeing come from the conservative press. well i think you hit the nail on the head there are a lot of real concerns specially when you look at civil liberties in the post nine eleven world and they're not the ones that are featured in the conservative media i

mean they're just not focusing on the real threats that we face and instead they're looking at you know un treaties threatening our gun ownership and things like. which there's no there's no there there i mean that's not substantial substantial civil civil liberties concerns are josh i want to thank you for joining us and i guess the moral of the story is that if you're you know trying to be a successful news organization then you can play upon people's fears and have it be more conservative and make the fears up. or. are we taking one more break but up next it's time for our top line award but because this line by and on happy hour is the future just one giant i. i

. losers.

the people of the united states and their friends and allies will not live at the mercy of an outlaw regime that threatens the peace with weapons of mass murder is a regime as an actor program to acquire and develop nuclear weapons and let there be no doubt about we know for a fact there are limits there. this we're just being carried out into the direction of dr david kay respected scientist and former u.n. inspector was leading the weapons search in iraq we are determined to take this apart we have a tremendous a group of dedicated american men and women involved in this with the best assets of the intelligence community can provide. data cheney is not going to be done with this for quite some time david kay wants more time and he says it could take another six to nine months to make a definitive finding ministration is asking congress for hundreds of millions more

six hundred million dollars to fund a continuing search we have not yet found shiny pointy things that i would call a weapon before we can draw from conclusions we need to let the iraq survey group complete its work. we were all wrong probably in my judgment. that is most disturbing. sometimes the true patriot takes the unpopular course but helps the country of wooden stakes and even if they come this way at the same time patriotism is the last refuge of scoundrels and i think these are scoundrels they have no argument now they have no defense for what they do the country is in a terrible international security situation but i think it's perilous so they're attacking the patriotism of others.

i got is it's time for tonight's tool time award and tonight the award goes to general stanley mcchrystal for being unable to live in a world where he's held accountable and for pushing for ever increasing secrecy now as you might remember general mcchrystal has had a history of difficulty with being taken to task for what he sets most notably he and his staff got into hot water in the summer of two thousand and ten for criticizing senior obama administration officials in a report that was published by rolling stone's michael hastings now that article not only made senior administration officials look bad showing rifts between the military and the civilian leadership it also looked into the failures of counterinsurgency and how obama's campaign promises a victory in afghanistan seemed increasingly a reasonable well hastings piece quickly led to the general's dismissal take a look at what he had to say in january about the reaction to his reporting and how it upset people for daring to hold

a high ranking general to account. i did not realize how bad the relationship between the president and the pentagon had been and i think what that meant was this was president obama reasserting his control of the pentagon i was also surprised by the media's response it was it was a portion of the media the pentagon media the nest security media there was still this really intense you know hatred among among a few of my colleagues and i think the sort of insight i had or what i kind of realized was that the pentagon press corps is just that they're the press corps for the pentagon and i know that sounds overstated well they serve the pentagon and they're scared to hurt the feeling that we're getting to step on the toes of the. well after mcchrystal was relieved of his command he was hired by yale university to teach a graduate course and mcchrystal transparency issues didn't end there you see a two thousand and ten documentary about pat tillman the professional football player turned soldier who was killed reignited interest in the crystals role the pentagon covering pentagon cover up surrounding his death now instead of pressuring

recruits to be more open about the tillman case and the role that he played with torture squads in iraq while he was commander of jaison yale establishment organ sat on their hands the yale college democrats with through their sponsorship of the tillman story screening when it emerged that the general would join the school's faculty and stanko then the president of the college democrats made a statement that would make any hack blush he said quote the yale college democrats do not attack war heroes who do not attack members of the faculty so good thing to one of america's most revered universities is incredibly bold when it comes to thinking critically and challenging author already right and mcchrystal itself didn't exactly complain that the democrats timidly shied away from screening that talking entry but guess what ladies and gentlemen it actually gets worse yesterday the new york times published a profile on the mcchrystal yele experience thus far and buried beneath fluffy anecdotes about how he's been embraced real hard hitting adversarial journalism

coming from the times that was the real meat of the story one of the feeds into the narrative of mcchrystal in the school completely issuing transparency the article states that all of his classes are wait for it off the record because the general quote wanders into addict about sensitive operations in iraq and afghanistan you have got to be kidding me right i mean perhaps it's not surprising this is the university the broad american a skull and bones after all but it is embarrassing that an academic institution one that should be a shining example of open this is allowing a former general to hold off the record lectures but these anecdotes are safe enough. students to hear in a lecture i highly doubt that anyone else hearing about them is going to cause a national security threat if anything in my just embarrassing few people which is the usual reason for government secrecy not to mention that if you are really divulging sensitive information to a classroom full of students why would that warrant best a geisha oh that's right because we go after whistleblowers who try to expose fraud

waste and abuse and not those in power but it's funny if the times also didn't pick up on that little bit of hypocrisy and they're challenging to say kindly profile of the general novak we decided it would be fun to reach out to michael hastings today see what he had to say about this whole thing and he gave us the following quote he said i love the new york times and i'm glad they're doing their part in the campaign to rehabilitate general mcchrystal image but despite the embarrassment that yale is making of itself here for allowing this and the new york times for how they're covering this at the end of the day mcchrystal is the real tailor of this cloak of secrecy in the story i think that maybe the general just petrified of having his insights made public just like he was burned in the past after making boneheaded statements about pat tillman and joe bite me biden mcchrystal is probably afraid the now he could make some very controversial statements that might affect his career or even if they happen to be intelligent or insightful instead mcchrystal takes the career of flying the one demand silence and obedience the sort

that has led us into pointless and seemingly endless wars over the last decade and so for that's the general winter nights tool time award. are you guys in time for happy hour and join me this evening alone or show producer earth both of them with jenny churchill and family i the gang. and they have you here with me. all right let's start with a little journalism discussion shall we everyone's wondering where to go next especially the newspapers like people say if they're dying model here is. from the washington post who actually was speaking i think giving a ted talk about this a little while back so what does the future of news hold. operate more to more simple promise which is that. the news products of the future will be designed

social from the ground up that they will be inherently personalized and that no single publisher can satisfy the content needs of any news consumer. well turns out there's a report out there basically saying that all the washington post people got together held a nice little secret meeting where there is talking about what the newspaper could do next and one of the newspapers failing miserably right there a failed economic model they're losing a lot of money and so one of their solutions was just to create more slideshows yeah i don't understand how you know copying off of the model of other websites who are successful a slide shows like the business insider is a good model you know for really innovating and taking things in the next level i think are just copying something that's already been done but it's working so if you copy it i mean people who like to click it's a sad state of affairs for journalism right that's not what you would think that one of the top newspapers in the country has to do but it does it clearly sense to me to go and do what other people are already doing i would think that what you

would want to do if you're losing revenue is to go do something different something other people are already doing as opposed to copying like fun for. profit colleges that group of students right which is also raising revenue i believe i mean. and i wonder is are newspapers really becoming obsolete or are these sort of executives with their big salaries you know how necessary are they and you look at a lot of struggling industries a lot of times what grows out of them is the co-operative model and you have to wonder at what point you know or all of these reporters going to band together and say you do we really need you know all these editors with parachutes and all the rest i know the new york times executives me an obscene amount of money but i don't really have the right. slideshows work i really don't know and it's really sad because the washington post as investigative journalism they get awards and they're saying awards don't matter clicks on a slide show matter and i don't get the whole side show thing i hate them like i

don't want to click through a third one time was right on a lot of the to the right like we're going from little zero to concur dash and i don't need to be surprised that kim snags i do put it on. there have to be really i'll do a little like briana looked in every outfit slideshow no because i love her ok let's. go to the next story. cows right they've gotten some black before for their flatulence and how it could to our to our environment take a look. the e.p.a. is now acting on claims from scientists that gas from cows is seriously contributing to global warming the environmental protection agency is now reportedly considering a tax on belching bovines. well when i hear about dinosaurs. turns out that this is a new report from british scientists and they said that basically the dinosaurs

they also warmed the planets to all the gas. plants and all they meant it. total of five hundred twenty million tonnes per year of global methane which is they say the level comparable to the total given off today by animals and industrial activity so they make part of their way to extension so the dinosaurs farted a lot. no wonder they you know all their names and. i've heard of another theory though i've heard another theory that. climate change caused all these plants like ferns to die out around the time of the dinosaurs and actually constipation because of these plants disappearing like the dinosaur extinctions so i mean make up your mind sciences it just all comes back to the colon apparently they turned but i think what's important here is actually that this once and for all proves that the creation museum in kentucky is wrong because if dinosaurs were actually fighting that much adam and eve would not have been that close to them hanging out so i just want to point that out all right but i noticed

a good point. let's move on to another way in which joe biden vice president made some comments and. well get into everyone's reacting to this about gay marriage take a look. who do you love and will you be loyal to the person you love and that's who people are finding out what what all marriages. were whether their marriages of lesbians or gay men or heterosexuals. now we also then saw a treasury secretary arnie duncan come out and say that he also supports same sex marriage now in one hand this is one of those moments where we would be like liver of hope public officials including somebody as high up as the vice president are saying that they support gay marriage but then to me it's always frustrating because you realize how far behind we still are that this is like the biggest deal ever that the vice president would dare say that he supports gay marriage and that

the white house is scrambling shouted like whoa whoa he's not really going away from obama's stance they agree on this and it's all just kind of ridiculous and i have to say i used to say you know shut who's letting him talk because of all of his gaffes but the more he talks the more i have liked him and i think they need to get him out more with obama's campaign he's the realist thing in this town going right now i think i would if i gave marriage with. threats when he tells. houses and not fly. like a terrorist and all that but you know i mean i think what it really comes down to is it's election season and you know i mean this is sort of the obama administration in my opinion just dangling a bit of hope a morsel that maybe their second term they're going to be more i mean you know i mean did they close guantanamo they certainly didn't but they're going to be on any other donors right now and that's definitely something that they're looking forward to but that's why it's just so messed up right because these are these are people

civil rights is actually that we're talking about as a campaign strategy and i think that's really how biden and feels and whether it was a coincidence that he said it now or not or a strategy i. i think that when he was saying that it was one hundred percent genuine and that's how he feels which is that i mean personally i think that obama probably feels the same way but he's just too much of a was to say it for political purposes and it's funny because the vice president's office basically came out and said this is not a policy stance this is just how i personally feel so you know covering all their pledges like the other job i did that nothing by you said no policy stance you have to accept all right i got to wrap it up but thank you for joining me this evening that is it for tonight's show thanks for tuning in ad make sure they come back tomorrow the atlantic's conor friedersdorf can be joining us and meantime don't forget to become a fan of the ilona show on facebook and follow us on twitter and if you missed any of tonight's show or any other night you can always catch it on the dot com slash the alone a show coming up next is a. wealthy

british soil some time to. market why not. find out what's really happening to the global economy with mike's cancer were no holds barred look at the global financial headlines tune in to kaiser report on our. world. science technology innovation all the latest developments from around russia we've got the future covered.

dimitri medvedev was voted in as prime minister of russia lawmakers and will know for a new government. and. president putin has already ushered in his. political join me in a few moments for all the latest. riot police moved in. with key opposition leaders. to the streets protesting against return to office. a un envoy to syria kofi annan blames damascus for the ongoing violence warning syria is slipping into civil war. in the meantime the syrian ambassador to the united nations says a number of regional powers are sponsoring terror in syria to undermine kofi annan cease fire plan i'll be back with more.