welcome to the low nischelle we'll get the real headlines with none of the mersey are going to live in washington d.c. now we have some great guests for you tonight first we're getting an update on the case of two christopher the environmental activist who is serving jail time for bidding on a land auction to take a stand he had an appeal hearing today and so we're going to get all the updates then stephen clemens joins us to talk afghanistan the latest plot and yemen and european elections and how they just might affect u.s. foreign policy and then jacob apple bomb is going to fill us in on his latest projects to fight the web and on imedi and expose censorship and surveillance but of course we're going to get a few updates on wiki leaks as well where you have all of that morphy tonight

including a dose of happy hour but first let's take a look at the mainstream media decided to miss. well today there is still one big giant story that is dominating the headlines the airwaves and of course the cable networks. this one nancy pelosi saying this is a great day for america why now because the announcement that's reverberating throughout america today mr obama becomes the first sitting president to endorse the right of gay couples to marry saying he arrived at the decision after what he calls an evolution the president says i do and the nations says what now the president announces his support for same sex marriage saying his change of heart came after years of consultation with friends staff first and notably his wife and daughter president obama stirs up a national debate over same sex marriages

a lot of reaction this morning after president obama made history as the first sitting president to publicly support gay marriage everyone is trying to figure out what the political consequences will be for president obama your reaction coming in to the president publicly speaking out in support of same sex marriage a rapper happening already grafter president obama's endorsement of same sex marriage new fallout today after president obama's evolution on the issue of same sex marriage president said his decision was personal but he made it clear it's not for political gain. now you hear me say this often but i agree that this is a big deal and it deserves all the attention that it's getting and you sure there are a lot of twists and turns and factors to discuss things we brought up on our show last night there clearly is political motivation behind the timing of this announcement before the election before a big fundraiser at george clooney sales that happens to be happening tonight how do i wish the president would have always just come out always supported gay marriage instead of slowly evolving to accept the politically of course and is

there still a big problem when as the president said you think that it should be left up to the states to deal with well of course just like what happened in north carolina the other night it's a civil rights issue and so things like this should be left up to every individual state to decide it should be countrywide policy right like the constitution the bill of rights the grants us all of those rights of the government can't encroach upon the. how do you do something like that well that's a whole different discussions to be had and of course there's the way that fox and many others on the right have taken this news which has been completely comical their only ammo is the claim of the president is waging another war and this time it's a war in traditional marriage but overall the fact that this is the first sitting president to announce his support for gay marriage it's a big deal as a stance as long overdue incredibly welcome and i personally wish everybody else there every else out there felt the same way so all lot of our viewers wrote to us that this is just a distraction technique that this was something that you know so that nobody would

talk about the economy or foreign policy well yes you have a point and i agree with you somewhat but today i do think that the story deserves coverage so i also want to give the mainstream media a bit of a pass because we all know that the rest of the time they will always continue to miss. now a few weeks ago we first told you about the story of environmental activist tim de christopher and late two thousand and eight he crashed a bush administration bureau of land management oil drilling rights auction with the intention of disrupting it but because bush administration oversight was so busy officials offered to sign him in as a bitter he then proceeded to win the drilling rights to fourteen parcels of land for one point eight million dollars and because of it got in trouble with the law

and all those activists network peaceful uprising started raising money to pay for this bit and all the oil company executives have never gone to prison for bringing bids or bouncing checks to christopher was sentenced to two years in prison in two thousand and ten and his conviction and sentence have been denounced by activists and observers especially since this option was eventually nullified by the obama administration but about two months ago christopher suffered another injustice when he was thrown into isolation allegedly because he wrote a letter threatening to start a campaign against one of his donors a corporate executive who is plotting to move jobs overseas and so this is where it gets particularly intriguing rolling stones jeff goodell reported that a guard told the christopher that he was being moved because an anonymous congressperson complained about the letter to the bureau of prisons and after the news broke there was some public outcry to christopher was then released back into the prisons general population and we appealed to you to get in touch with your lawmakers to see if they had reached out to the bureau of prisons so we could try to figure out which congress person actually had

a hand in this how it turns out that christopher himself isn't sure how he ended up in isolation prison guards have also told him now that a congressman did not have anything to do with it however patrick shea one of his lawyers and a former director explained on up with chris hayes how this might have happened. bureau of prisons has an algorithm that reads all the e-mails in a certain words or phrases or i say then that's evaluated in what i was director of the girls land management if i wanted to do something but i didn't want to coming from i so i would have one of the staff called one of our former staff people who worked on the hill either for a congressperson the or the committee and say you know if you asked director shay this question then you know we are able to do something. now whatever happened some of you did get back to us and we can report that every lawmaker that we've spoken to said they had nothing to do with this case staffers representatives to chew

sheila jackson lee hank johnson jason chaffetz all on the house judiciary committee and pete stark said that they have not spoken to the bureau of prisons about to christopher and congressman jim matheson and rob bishop who represent to christopher's home state of utah in addition to chavis also said the same that's according to the salt lake tribune and staffers for utah senators orrin hatch and mike lee also reported no involvement so obviously there are a whole mess of other congresspeople still out there and we're not sure whether or not any of them were involved if you do get in touch with somebody have some information to share even alice at ts producer at g. mail dot com but today there is a new development into christopher's case the lawyers are seeking to overturn his conviction and oral arguments started this morning in the tenth circuit u.s. court of appeals in denver at the heart of the appeals the fact of the judge who sentenced to christopher to prison wouldn't allow him to bring up his intent the key aspect of how the criminal justice system is supposed to deal with people accused of crimes so joining me to discuss this entire case is actually anderson

co-founder of peaceful uprising and jeff goodell contributing editor at rolling stone and author of the book big coal the dirty secret behind america's energy future john i want to thank you both for joining me tonight and jeff can you start by just telling us what happened today at this appeal hearing if there's anything i mean anything new any updates why it is that they would like to christopher testify . well i don't have the latest news and i think that that might be a better question for your other guest i was at he was there at the scene there was an. hi there no i actually wasn't there but i've been in contact with people who were all day long running social media support so i just got off the phone with tim's power of attorney don schneider who gave me the lowdown on what went down inside the hearing today so what do you have for is what you hear well of apparently every each side had only fifteen minutes to present their case and tim's legal defense team wanted to focus on the fact that the. the jury wasn't allowed to

hear tim's reasons for why he doing what he did and that was a little bit frustrating because the panel kept bringing it back to technicalities and stuff normal people like myself and most anyone who isn't a lawyer can really understand it saying did you prove or did you object sleep enough to the fact that tim wasn't allowed to mention that the action in question was in fact illegal in the first place that do you did you object to the fact that he wasn't able to explain his motives and and to use the necessity defense and so that's what i that's what i hear coming out of it and that's that's about it for what i know and i will thank you you know for for giving us the update here than jeff and that's. you know what do you think about this case overall we point out the hypocrisy before as we just did the about the fact that people have not been

charged criminally when they have rigged bid that these kinds of auctions before you know do you think that it is politically motivated for why they went after to christopher. oh absolutely i mean i think it's totally transparent in that sense and that's what's so outrageous about it you know he messed with the system and with the powers that be and you know just like fourth grade teachers to student now didn't spank a mere make him an example for the classroom that's basically what has happened to him. he's gotten singled out for this but i think what's happened is that sort of messed with. the wrong guy because to me is turned out to be credibly or to kill an incredibly forceful and principled person i think what's most compelling about him and his carries to the sort of the remarks that he's made and making it very clear that this is not a traditional kind of environmentalist argument about simply about clean water and . you know climate risk but it's very much deeper about the corruption of our

political system and the degree to which it's controlled by fossil fuel interests and very much now i guess you could say that he's become a victim of it right when it comes to the justice that's been served on him actually i know that you're friends with him and so in the in the communication that you have had with them what he do this again now knowing the consequences. oh sure i tim is out to make as much of a difference as he can and he stated publicly that he believes that civil disobedience will be in his future he doesn't know exactly what that will intel and i think that that just goes to show what is so inspiring about the story and what we've seen such a huge response is that tim didn't know what he was going to do when he showed up that option he just knew that the the mainstream environmental movement in the climb movement didn't seem to be acting as though we were in the crisis that we're in and with the implications of climate change and and what's at stake here and it was that impulse to drive him to just walk into the room in the first place and be

offered a better paddle and that sort of impulse to take things to another step and to continue sort of fighting and to experience that freedom that comes along with acting in accordance with your values i think is what speaks to activists so clearly and he's now the kind of person that kind of did this and hoped for you know a lot of attention he didn't know if he would anyone would have it back but people came out of the woodworks so i think that's also a lesson for other activists that there's plenty of room to take in polls of actions and to decide inside yourself you're ready to do something. boulder why i think there are a couple of different levels here right i mean on one hand you could say that he's become this a folk hero for the environmental activist movement and in a sense the government's actions here are backfiring against that because look at how big his name is getting but getting big within this particular community you know jeff why don't you think that it's a bigger story that we see you know written up in every newspaper all over the t.v. channels you know you said that you couldn't believe that people weren't out

protesting in the streets over something like this that was such a sham case well i think there's a number of reasons for that one is that you know the sort of public attention on energy and environmental issues is so low in general it's hard to get any kind of attention you know unless even when they're blowing off the tops of mountains that have you know the arctic is melting at a. rapid pace i mean any kind of coverage of environmental stuff it's just sort of hard for the american media to deal with and i also think that it speaks to you know the fact that there's many sort of miscarriages of justice in this kinds of things happening in america this is not a sort of singular case i think it matters to us who are paying attention to this and i think that tim is doing a good job and the other activists we're working with have been broadening this out but i think that's what really has to happen with this environmental movement now is to make it a broader social justice movement and make it matter to people who don't simply

care about you know the price of gas and what happens to drilling in national parks now jeff as i mentioned to you know you have a report of the originally that the tim had heard from one of the guards that it was a congress member behind putting him in isolation and now he's hearing different things from guards like maybe it wasn't a congress member that was behind it we've had you know our viewers try to help us take part in calling these offices getting answers from them and there is no answer and i don't know do you have an educated guess as to where you think this might be leading. no one who knows to may never find out nobody else might ever find out a clearly something have it i mean clearly it the idea that he wrote this e-mail that was then picked up in this sort of threat if you want to exaggerate you call that a jew or politically organized against this company your daughter who had actually given him money for his defense that was construed as some kind of dangerous

political activity bad that's the important point to me was thrown into this confinement because of that and whether we either never understand the mechanisms of it or who was actually behind it you know who knows but the point is that this happened now the absurdity of one word perhaps doing so actually you know i want you to jump in here to give me your take on that as well as i just want to hear you know what it is that your group is still doing obviously just because tim is in jail doesn't mean that you're sitting quiet. right now and i want to go back to the first point. and it's just one reason why shows like yours or some clinton because you are getting the story out and you know there were people in the streets but we didn't get the type of coverage you would have thought we occupied illegally at the steps of the courthouse in solitude for three days with song and street theater and and you know. it like invention we thought it would get so i guess we can just keep pushing on things like this and with regards to the email i think that the important thing here is that it could have been any member of congress that the way

our electoral system is set up it's quite truck from the get go and only a certain amount of corruption is a can it is necessary for people to actually get elected to office so it could have been anyone but what they were doing is silencing ten that's what's been going on this entire time he was speaking out and he was talking about what happened in that auction and that he embarrassed oil industry in the u.s. government because they were trying to pull a backroom deal he exposed that they got angry because they were embarrassed and they did the only thing they know how to deal with. just throw the book at him kept back firing because of the way he handled it he refused to apologize they then sent him to prison because that's the only tool they had at their disposal and then when he was in prison they threw him in prison again they threw him in the hole because of you know it's an absurd reason the reason they gave with this e-mail and the threat of doubts that's ridiculous i've been talking to ten for the last you know the entire time he's been in there and they could have used any any number of things but the bureau of prisons congress the system is geared towards protecting

the status quo and the status quo is geared towards making money for corporations and not highlighting the needs of the people living in this country or are making sure that our democracy works effectively or that our justice system works spectacle so that it's good to keep coming back to that what it to say what it to say that they want sounds and so so passionately for and i think that's that we have to we need something larger than the rule of law that we may have to take the law into our own hands if we're going to address the serious issues of climate change and the last class they asked me about a peaceful uprising is doing well actually i hate to be rare but where were really short on time now and i got i got to wrap it up but you know we're going to keep following the case up label talking again and we'll get more updates on what it is the peaceful uprising is doing what i want to thank you and jeff so much for joining us tonight thank you very much. i have next on the shelf he left to sign on for ten more years in afghanistan like me american public actually stomach and my commitment to the one hundred. block of american power continues.

things that are so bad. might actually be time revolution. and it turns out that there are very good solid votes for him greedy and. you know sometimes you see a story and it seems so for you think you understand it and then you glimpse something else you hear or see some other part of it and realize everything you thought you knew you don't know i'm sorry welcome to the big picture. here is what i. like and they alone if ill will get the real headline with none of

them are the problem with the mainstream media today is that they're completely disconnected from the viewers and 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 in t.v. . welcome to the capital account i'm lauren lyster.

well everybody says that this election is going to be about the economy makes sense right a lot of sense but it doesn't mean that americans are free of opinion when it comes to foreign policy and in fact a number of polls this week show a less than enthused populace when it comes to the war in afghanistan yesterday and a.p.g. have cable show that support for the war has hit a new low and is on par with support for the vietnam war in the early one nine hundred seventy s. only twenty seven percent of americans say that they backed the war effort and sixty six percent opposed the war and yeah the war is winding down for the president did also just sign a strategic pact with homemade karzai to commit is for another ten years and people don't like that much either a mob of the thirty ip people show that sixty three percent of respondents disapproved of the description of that deal that's going to include a u.s. troop presence and millions of dollars in monetary support for afghan forces and the decade after twenty fourteen so here to talk about this latest polling the

recent plot coming from yemen and what a socialist president in france might mean for us is steve clemons senior fellow and founder of the american strategy program at the new america foundation and washington editor editor at large for the atlantic so you think so much we're going to be. ok so i just named off a couple of those polls right there and there's a lot of stuff but can you blame people to you ray is specially just last week the president was in kabul and he was giving this speech that did have a rather celebrate torie tone to it saying i'm the guy that's going to end this the war started here it's going to end here but then he signed this deal we saw don't have any real details on how many numbers you know how many figures inflame people for being a little frustrated but i think you know the interesting thing is happened a while back and support for the war the white house which of course is occupied democrat nonetheless sort of depended upon conservative republicans to be supportive of the war and an interesting thing happened around the times of the debt ceiling debate anti-tax crusader grover norquist went on t.v.

over and over and over again jon stewart show cold air and kept telling americans we're spending one hundred twenty billion dollars a year in. afghanistan in afghanistan only has a fourteen billion dollar your g.d.p. this is why are we doing that and he educated republicans that would normally be in favor of these things this is a lousy deal and you saw support for the war among conservatives collapse and that is really what has happened and so the white house is facing that not only were liberals and progressives predictably against the war but conservatives were now against the war everyone's tired of the war and now people are facing hard choices as they see teachers being laid off policemen being laid off and they see us basically trying to hold up another another country you would see this is where you know yes we did see suddenly republican consensus shift and it was ok for them to be against the war in afghanistan but at the same time if you look at what the republicans are doing in congress right now if you look at the budgets that they're trying to pass just today in the house in fact they voted on it and what they did is they voted to cut social programs everything in order to keep defense from being

gutted any more they took all of that money only for social programs that help the poor so they're not back convince no i mean i congressman and the public are different things so i think the public when you go out and poll them are very tired of entangling alliances in tangling. activities of the united states beyond its borders it doesn't mean we need to withdraw everything but i think your point about this open door issue about what comes next in afghanistan is really important because it's a big question mark we don't know what it means we don't know what the status of forces arrangement for our soldiers would be treated in afghanistan would work out in iraq of course it didn't and so every soldier came out of iraq because we could get a deal and that may be exactly what happens in afghanistan no one saying that what do you think. i think the they are fifty fifty to tell you the truth because what afghanistan leader following karzai is going to become an advocate for ongoing u.s. forces inside afghanistan i think it's questionable because it may make them look like a puppet of american interest may look them may make them look illegitimate in the

eyes of the afghan public we don't know how that will play out so what president obama has done is put a. railroad track to something but it may never come about so that question mark is going to be negotiated not only between afghanistan and united states but between both political parties with the white house that i mean that's a good point right i mean if this is for ten years longer than it's going to be other presidents and no matter what happens when you are the dollars are coming down a lot well you know but part of that is you know what's going to happen at the upcoming nato summit is trying to get other nato allies to also agree to reach into their wallets and keep funding training of afghan forces for the next couple of years and so this is where i think that some of these elections that we've seen are interesting for taking literally and france with a lot of the kind of president i don't know when you have a socialist president do you think that that's going to affect how much they're going to want to cooperate when it comes to afghanistan is it in a pickle because you know he's the new fresh breeze in french politics a french public that is tired of the austerity programs that were talked about by

sarkozy tired of have ghana standard and so france has already said it's going to begin withdrawing its forces from afghanistan earlier than the two thousand and fourteen drawdown date that others that subscribe to so he's on track for that but the problem is he wants to maintain a strategic dialogue a relationship and not scare the system at the same time what no one's talking about is he's facing national assembly elections in france in june so his party's up election basically a month from now so he can't do the right or center too quickly he's got to stay somewhat in his progressive left stance and that means both on the economy on on basically saying these wars are crippling not extending power that he's got to basically hold the line where the pride of a lot of asterisk saying it does seem to see it right when he's already got a lot of invitations to come to the white house and hang out the obama's you know he might get some some pressure from this seducer i want to i want to talk about this plot from getting with the double agent that it was working for us and the

saudis and that in fact that there would have been a plot because it was. our guy that we knew that was going to do it the whole time i mean these details keep getting very complicated and twisted but what's your take on the entire thing what we know is that there's an organization out there that wants to blow up planes and it wants to basically send a tremor of fear through very large complex systems that many people around the world depend on and that's why you blow up planes it's not that you're killing just people on the plane you're trying to keep everyone off planes and disrupt financial systems and economic systems so i think we probably have a lot of people out there hanging on the edges of nefarious networks so they can get sucked up into this and we can identify how they make decisions who's important it was very interesting and very much noticed by the media that just a few weeks ago david petraeus now the director of the cia asked for extended authority to continue a very active drone campaign so i noticed that here i want to ask you to write him

i went to the door in that i happened around the same time no not at all so i think we've known a lot about what was going on and i think that we're tying together a couple of strands of things one we're still continuing to take the intelligence that came out of the about about campaign compound where osama bin laden was taken enormous intelligence came out of that and we're now linking people in and ties and of course we blew up we did successfully kill all locky in yemen and i think we're going to continue to operate on that front give me a start on the process and i don't think you know i don't agree that i don't think it's happening all i'm saying is that is their action plan and they're continuing to operate very and they're going to go at it so you know let me just say this also in this a.b.c. interview obviously everyone is focusing on the gay marriage announcement but what the president said when asked about you know what happened here is he said i don't think it should be any surprise essentially that there are still people that are trying to plan terror plots coming from yemen is that i've been very clear that even with the death of osama bin ladin even as we can as al qaeda is if you have a bunch of extreme and extremists are adamant about trying to kill civilians then

we're going to have to maintain a constant vigilance and create a whole series of layers of her. action and barriers but i just feel like there is no acknowledgement that you know our policies might have something to do with this it's not just maybe random extremists want to go out and kill civilians but our policies in yemen have also killed civilians including in these drone strikes and we don't take any responsibility for it because we don't officially even talk about the drone program and it's just never in the dialogue that we've started now talking about officially the talk when they were going about a about a week ago they finally admitted at a program here so they want to you or it is ridiculous that we have at the new america foundation where i'm a senior fellow and as you said many directed the american strategy program has been tracking who's been killed by drone attacks for a long time and it is a very very high number of innocence that have been killed in these attacks and so that what does that do that generates blowback that generates anger that generates

frustration among other people and and but they're also on the positive side many al qaeda and affiliated networks that have been disrupted now we do know one of the things i'm very disappointed in the obama administration is they have not gone out and said we have gray areas of law today gray areas of authority we're operating across sovereign lines with very very legitimate you know the tools of legitimacy from the u.s. congress and the and i would say the american public and we have not gone out to the rest of the world and said let's review go she is sort of a coalition of the willing of of of countries not blowing the whistle per se but we have not gone out and created a new corpus of law that says what are we going to deal with with the shades of gray areas we're not really at war with a nation but we are at war which means national networks that they how does it work they have a lot of questions and also one of the rights of the internationally a lot of questions seem to be answered for us and you know other people are going to start using drones eventually until it's time you know it's not just going to be us forever steve i want to thank you so much and i think you very much.