welcome to the lower show where you get the real headlines with none of the mercy or come alive out of 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 see when 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. one man's people oh so you 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 in the nation's 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 marriage is 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 of 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 it 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 my. 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 to 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 it's a stance that's 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 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 rigging 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 now 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. the bureau of prisons has an algorithm that reads all the emails of

a certain words or phrases or i say then that's a value weighted in but i was director of the girls and management if i wanted to do something but i didn't want to come in for my 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 to really and say you know if you have struck this question then you know we were able to do something. and 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 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 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 less at ts producer g.-mail dot com but today there is a new development into christopher's case as lawyers are seeking to overturn his conviction and oral arguments started this morning of 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. they at this appeal hearing if there is anything anything new any updates why it is that they would like to christopher

testify. right and have the latest news and i think that that might be a better question for your other guests that was the key was there at the scene there was a very. 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 doing schneider who gave me the lowdown on what went down inside the hearing today so what do you have for as what you hear well of apparently 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 his 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 ferociously 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 about it for what i know and i will thank you you know for for giving us the update you with and 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 did that these kinds of actions before you know do you think that it was it is politically motivated for why they went after to christopher. oh absolutely and 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 out in spanking new 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 a sort of mess with the wrong guy because to me turned out to be incredibly or to an incredibly forceful and principled person i think what's most compelling about him and just very soused some 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 risks but something much deeper about the corruption of our political system and the degree to which it's controlled by the fossil fuel interests and very much now i guess you could say that he's become a victim 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 had to

is out to make as much of a difference as he can and he stated publicly that. believes that civil disobedience will be in his future he doesn't know exactly what that will entail and i think that that just goes to show what is so inspiring about the story and how he seemed 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 that drove 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 his 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 impulsive actions and to decide inside yourself you're ready to do something bold or 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 backfiring against that because look at how big his name is getting by 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 do 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 who are working with him in 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 you know you have a report of the originally that that tim had heard from one of the guards that was a congress member behind. putting him in isolation 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 make them find out nobody else might ever find out a clearly something happened to me clearly 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 two or politically organize 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 that 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 quote. just one reason why shows like yours are so important 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 the tension 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. they actually get elected to office so it could have been anyone but what they were doing is silencing tim 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 do which is throw the book at him kept back firing because of the way he handled it he refused to apologize dave vengefully 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 fixedly so that it's good to keep coming back to that what it to say what it to say that they want to sound seems 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 lastly ask me about a peaceful uprising is doing well actually i'm to be rated but we're 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 shell he left to sign on for ten more years in afghanistan like me american public actually family and my commitment to the one hundred.

the issue is that so much. a lot of people are really. putting in french voters appear to be moving to the left while greece is leaning to the right which is causing the collapse of the political. well everybody says that this election is going to be about the economy that 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 but 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 lot of the words he 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 in the decade after two thousand and 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 for joining us tonight 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 who are a especially just last week the president was in kabul and he was giving this speech the 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 about how many numbers you know how many figure is inflame people from 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 and 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 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 this basically trying to hold up another another country going to say 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 tying 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 this 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 the united states but between both political parties with the white house that i mean that's a good point right i mean is 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 yeah 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 particularly in 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 afghan onet 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 is up election basically a month from now so he can't veer to the right or center too quickly he's got to stay somewhat in his progress. 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

a sure thing it does seem to say right now he's already got a lot of invitations to come to the white house and hang out at the obama as he might get some some pressure from this is what i had to do so 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 so 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 that 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 you have any doubt as to how do you know that here i want to ask you to write these and i think it's important that 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 get me started 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 are continuing to operate. they're going before 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 this al qaeda is if you have a bunch of extreme extremists who 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 protection 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 director 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 innocents 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 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 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 we negotiate sort of a coalition of the willing of of of countries not blowing the whistle per se but we have not going to create a. new corpus of law that says what are we going to deal with with this she be shades of gray areas we're not really at war with a nation but we are at war with transnational network of the day how does it work they have a lot of questions and also one of the rights of

a billion already internationally a lot of questions seem to be answered price and you know other people are going to start using drones eventually until it's time to you know it's not just going to be us forever you want to thank you so much i'm going to take you very much. so to come tonight your privacy on the internet of being threatened every day we're going to talk to a developer who's working tirelessly to keep here and i'm going to be a lot. is he. the.

united nations or is it all parties in syria to implement kofi of. the latest bombings is a terrorist act dozens were killed hundreds injured. and search and rescue teams have reached the site were russian airliner crashed wednesday morning with forty five passengers aboard fighting no signs of survivors among the wreckage. jailed russian businessman victor boot talks with our team from his new york prison saying his case is politically motivated and talking of his disappointment with the u.s. justice system. part two of the a lot of show next stay with us here on our.