welcome to the ilona show where you'll get the real headlines with none of the mercy or can live out of washington d.c. now tonight we're going to host a tuesday hangover panel with retired colonel tony shaffer and bruce fein drone strikes the kill list syria the plight of veterans and uproar over chris his comments on terrorism and war glorification are all on the list then today is two years since bradley manning was arrested so we're going to get some updates on his case including the defense's arguments for the prosecution isn't handing over evidence which they're required to by law were not all of that and more for you and

i including a dose of happy hour but first take a look at what the mainstream media decided to. well it's not like we didn't already know that this was going to happen but the mainstream media is all over mitt romney about to get enough delegates to officially become the republican nominee. long primary fight mitt romney is about to drop the presume to part of his title one year after launching his presidential campaign mitt romney expected to pass the delegate threshold today to go from presumptive nominee to the magically in the hands presumptive nominee big day for mitt romney barring some major surprise voters in texas pushing him past the finish line in the race for republican delegates tonight texas will almost certainly give mitt romney the delegates he needs to become the republican nominee for president mitt romney has not won sixty six delegates the magic number needed to clinch the

nomination is one thousand one hundred forty four it's not exactly a nail biter at this point but after today's texas republican primary mitt romney is all but certain to have the one thousand. one hundred forty four delegates needed to officially clinch the g.o.p. nomination romney needs just fifty eight of texas' one hundred fifty five delegates to clinch the nomination texas holds its primary today and the lone star state has one hundred and fifty two delegates up for grabs mitt romney is expected to cross that magic number of eleven hundred forty four delegates hundred fifty five delegates up for grabs there that should put him over the top. now like i said it's not like we did nardi know this was coming and it's not like the campaigning has been subdued or muted up until this point because it hasn't but i guess now you can say the real battle for the white house has begun so the thing that i wanted to point out today well it could play a very important role in this election and yet for some reason despite their nonstop twenty four hour campaign obsessive news cycle the mainstream media doesn't

really seem to have an interest in it just like the contested election in two thousand thousands of eligible voters in florida could be taken off the rolls this year now we have to give credit to think progress for really trying to get all of the details together on this story we want to help you spread the word help them spread the word is the last year florida governor rick scott numerous tool time honoree well he had another brilliant idea he ordered the secretary of state to identify and remove non u.s. citizens from the revote or rules which are if i make sense right although voter fraud isn't really a widespread problem here in the u.s. i guess that if you have the proper information why not be safe rather than sorry the problem is florida doesn't have the proper information her brownie he was at the time scott's secretary of state well he had to go through the d.m.v. which doesn't contain updated citizenship information and so that created a list of one hundred eighty two thousand people that kurt browning thought had so

many flaws that he didn't actually want to release this list but then he resigned and then genius rick scott decided to put it out there anyway and guess what the errors are come. out think progress of pain data from certain florida counties they found that in miami dade county alone more than six hundred people were flagged as non-citizens already nearly four hundred have proven that they are in fact citizens and should be on the list the twelve hundred other people in this one county well they haven't responded yet which could mean that there are many more wrongly targeted voters who just aren't responding and a study by the miami herald found that hispanic democratic independent minded voters are the most likely to be targeted so this is like a big problem to you because it sure does to me here you have a state which is going to be very very close in november a state which could have a large influence on the overall outcome of the national election and thousands of voters probably the ones who are going to vote for mitt romney they could be disenfranchised it happened in two thousand why couldn't it happen again that is

a national scandal if you ask me that is a break freaking deal and yet the mainstream media which pretends to care so much about this election well they'd rather focus on the mindless banter of the campaign ads who's attacking whom or this week that incredibly important details like this just another thing that they choose to miss. all right so we missed our monday hangover since we're off memorial day so let's call today our tuesday hangover panel because it was a long weekend right now we've got a lot to discuss tonight and we're going to break it into two different blocks first another look at the drone strikes and the obama administration's policy of killing rather than capturing the new york times to get a detailed look at the president's kill list and the mindset behind it he makes the final decisions that he gets around counting civilian casualties by considering all military age males in a strike zone as combatants and there's the push for military intervention in syria

which just got a whole lot stronger after a massacre in houla where more than one hundred people were killed including many children kofi anon met with bashar al assad today in a continuing effort for a diplomatic resolution with the six point plan and in our second half will discuss the plight of veterans of our wars in iraq and afghanistan today and some comments over the weekend by chris hayes that caused an uproar so here to discuss this with me is bruce fein former deputy attorney general under president ronald reagan and chairman of the american freedom agenda and retired lieutenant colonel anthony shaffer senior national security advisor with the task force on national and homeland security and author of the book operation dark heart gentlemen thank you for joining me today oh man we have a lot to talk about but you know it's interesting too because we talk about these topics all the time here on the show and so you see the new york times actually do a very detailed look at this kill is that the obama administration's policy how

well he came in right promising that he wanted to close guantanamo bay this is a black mark on our record we outlawed torture we can no longer have secret cia black sites prisons but then you have this president very much wants to be in charge wants to put people choose who specifically gets put on this kill list he goes through kind of flash cards that have their. biographies on it and he makes the decision on his own but how is that supposed to make us feel i mean is that supposed to look like he's a he's a strong leader because he's sitting there and taking all the responsibility on his own shoulders well i think the point of that is a subtext to remarks is why did the column appear because it doesn't seem like it was leaks i think the obama administration felt proud of this to show the president that he's tough and therefore defeat romney's attacks that he's too weak but this really is not a kill this it's a murder list he is assassinating people who aren't even within the scope of the authorization to use military force that congress passed in the wake of nine eleven

which limits the universe of people to be targeted those who are implicated in the nine eleven abominations and moreover the idea that a single man in the executive branch based upon only executive branch information could decide who lives and who dies and say that is due process of law the founding fathers described that combination of power as the very definition of tyranny the very reason why the united states is an independent nation separate from great bit britain and it's appalling to me to see this is the signature of the united states the president in the oval office plots murder and that is what it is he is authorizing the killing of people who are not part of any authorized war and there's even worse i think that tony can elaborate there's no military objective involved that makes it a war crime let me let me get that report first off this is waterboarding waterboarding was bad what is this i mean this is

a permanent deprival of our civil liberties in a way that waterboarding never could even come close to secondly militarily i spent a great deal of time in the field looking at the secondary and tertiary order effects of if you kill someone what happens to the network president obama is not qualified as an intelligence officer of any magnitude to understand the second and third order effects of two. anyone this is a military decision this is the twenty first century equivalent of l.b.j. with rice paddies in his office it's insane and it's not getting us anywhere militarily as bruce points out the authorities not they're more important from our perspective the military value is not there you're creating another layer of anybodies by this whole idea that if well if you're in a room with a bad guy you must be bad you're creating enemies they don't have to be there so therefore this whole premise is false and i've got to tell you one of the quick point i've been on facebook with my friends today one of a. close friend of mine who does a lot of things with cindy sheehan he's telling me oh well you know i said i'm appalled the left is not up in arms about this. war where you know we protest this

last year i said why don't you would soon be out of the white house right now you want to bush is far from the white house right now doing everything you can to point out the fallacy of this produce project and there's no way that that's a very good question because you do still have you know some people that are really dedicated to this that are part of the anti-war movement that somehow it's just completely faded away and we only talk about this all the time that when it comes to the obama administration i guess that oh it's ok because it's this president that's doing it right it's ok because he's the one he's a liberal democrat in the in the voice sounds a little bit better than george w.'s more gruffness and less polished vocabulary but to add to what tony is said and to the assassination or the murder at least it's also revealed in the story not deny that the president knowingly authorized the assassination of someone who was believed al qaeda on the on good evidence knowing his wife and his child would be vaporized and without flinching and i also

know that let me bring in another detail then you know in that case because what we have we found out about this story we find out that in order to make it seem like there aren't as many civilian casualties we kind of skirt around and say that any any man that might be of age could be a possible enemy and less than who they're innocent at the same time right we have continuing drone strikes in pakistan just over the weekend they say that yesterday they killed twelve. militants on saturday there was another drone strike where a bakery was hit because suspected members of al qaeda happened to visit the bakery so now anybody that my own a bakery rate or any kind of shop that you're just unlucky enough to have it frequented by somebody that the u.s. might have is a target that's just that's justified. it's justified that you now can be killed yes if that's exactly what's it's totally up to the discretion of the president and who's going to go into court records as well this is a national security matter in the president's assert state secrets to justify dismissing the case so there's nobody to review or second guess the president what is the one value and he ran in his new role to we did

a lot about this last week where it kind of started coming out that now yes the military has a lot less involvement and now john brennan is the one that's going to be making this is the decisions before it's passed on to the president and you know we are twenty around is maybe you should start calling him the death star is john brennan someone that should be getting that kind of information i mean he at least personally has more in tell you should dress up like the grim reaper every day when he goes to the white house really i mean with the big scales and everything the bottom line here is that there's no value to having the white house control this level of destructive force more importantly the size the loss of life is going to say this is going to tell in software is the loss of intelligence we are creating a vacuum by the fact that we're not capturing people anymore i've talked to several folks no one can remember the last time someone was brought to guantanamo as much as it may be something we don't want to deal with regarding the the legal path forward the corpus issue if we don't capture these folks alive they're not going to talk and therefore i argue that we don't know what damage if any damage at all to

the networks because as we've learned from grabbing bin ladin he was in touch with everybody they just weren't listening to him but he had a network that networks will exist in some form and they know that we listen to their telephone calls we know they follow him begin imagery and so they do a lot of things by courier the only way you get inside the what's going on within the network is capturing these folks and finding out what is what it is and how much you can relate. i couldn't glean from all the from all of the detainees that were at guantanamo bay from the people that were of waterboarding i mean i've spoken to countless interrogators there have been congressional reports put together about this that have said that those methods actually didn't work and didn't get us the information that we needed well i understand but i want to point out an additional element here and that is when it's clear that we don't make any pretense of attempting capture we're committing a war crime we if the other side would shoot any american without attempting capture that's a war crime been prosecuted their way from the beginning of the law of war and then and it's clear that that's exactly what we're about when you set aside we're giving an example do you really do you know one or the other type no no no we didn't we're

on that let me let me ask you something really quick to is is there supposed to be a choice that either we only kill people or we capture them and then we have to do it through secret prisons in guantanamo to bring i made extraordinary rendition or is there going to be done legally and lawfully i believe there is a role for drones on the battlefield rare it should be the exception rather than the rule capture and some process of figuring out if the guy was really a terrorist and giving the due process is still key to our process to what we stand for let me be clear up this issue regarding interrogation there was the argument is enhanced interrogation did not work other interrogation in my book we break a guy in three days using normal every day psychological tricks to get the guy to talk ali soufan in his book talks about the fact that the f.b.i. the folks i've dealt with were actually got great intelligence work broke down was if you tortured someone for every twenty percent accurate intelligence you had eighty percent you had to sort through which was false that's where the issue came

we need to capture people is what we stand for and frankly it's the intelligence we need to get inside this network and you can do it in a legal way we've had experience under the foreign intelligence surveillance act for over thirty years before we can intercept a phone conversation e-mail that traverses the americans or american continent we need to go to a judge who based upon evidence file. some cause to believe that someone is an agent of a foreign power and that it worked for over thirty years why it is seems a little bit i don't think you just don't get abused by either who is very well but it steals right is delayed but it was still in place and it was circumvented by the previous administration as well but finally they did amend the law and come back within the feis the statute think of this auditee that the president needs a warrant to intercept your e-mail or phone conversation but he can kill you on his say so a lot of close report what we have to take a break and we're going to continue we still have a lot of time we come back but i mean it in the meantime this is what are you know formal constitutional law professor president thinks is ok all right so we've got

to take a quick break don't go anywhere because our very special tuesday hangover panel is not over and coming up we'll also delve into chris hayes as roic hornet's nest and we'll talk about the plight of our veterans when they return home. it's part of american power continuing. things that are. by the time revolution. every one of you are very good. you know sometimes you see a story and it seems so 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 trying hard workers a big if. you're a good. book and they loan a film they'll get a 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. we're back with our panel for part two yesterday was memorial day we saw the usual outpouring of respect for the troops all those who have served those who have fallen but if we truly respect our troops how can we help those that are returned from our latest wars in iraq and afghanistan because the outlook right now isn't a pretty one the unemployment rate amongst vets was at seven point six percent in the early months of two thousand and twelve it's a drop from twelve point one percent in two thousand and eleven but it's high nonetheless the department of housing and urban development and veterans affairs as to make it over sixty three sixty seven thousand veterans are homeless on any given night and over the course of

a year approximately twice that many experience homelessness forty five percent of new veterans are now seeking disability benefits which eventually could cost up to one trillion dollars and p.t.s.d. rates for those who fought in iraq and afghanistan range from eleven to twenty percent of troops and according to the v.a. eighteen military veterans commit suicide every day here again to discuss this with me is bruce fein and anthony shaffer are gentlemen let's continue this i want to get into these statistics and what it really means to respect our troops how we can really help them but first i want to start with something that caused an uproar over the weekend this was on chris hayes show on m.s.n. b.c. and this is a long discussion that was had right but there was one particular clip that the really got a lot of people angry so let's take a listen to that. i think it's interesting because he's i think very difficult to talk about the war dead in the fall and without invoking valor without invoking the words heroes and. why do i feel so comfortable about the word hero i feel

comfortable uncomfortable with the word hero because it seems to me that it is so rhetorical proximate to justifications for more war. and i don't want to. obviously desecrate or disrespect the memory of anyone that's that's fallen and obviously there are individual circumstances in which there is genuine tremendous heroism you know gun fire rescue told soldiers and things like that but it seems to me that we we marshal this word in a way that is problematic but maybe i'm wrong about that. so this caused quite an uproar especially a lot of people on the right wing were attacking i think that and coulter tried to call him a woman or something chris hayes afterwards issued an apology because one of the things is always that if you haven't been on a battlefield you have you have no say that's it when some people were saying a lot of people thought this was disrespectful for the troops i want to hear your responses well i think it was disrespectful for the troops in this context these are people who serve the united states of america they're complying with the orders

of their superiors this is not on its face. or ordering an invasion of the lan or being an armed guard or things of that sort and the i don't think that we should dismiss the idea that at some point there could be an obligation for someone serving in the military to decide this is so tyrannical in this so illegal i can't do that i don't think we're in that situation at present but i think that we do as a country. to those who are willing to risk that last full measure of devotion but is there a way that i mean let's say that chris would have worded it perhaps a little differently you know is there something to be said for the fact that there is. respect for troops that because of that you can actually have honest discussions about wars about why they're dying about you know what exactly it is that they're fighting for out there because it's such a sensitive topic that immediately you get this you're not

a patriot reaction i think there's a duality here first we talked about before and previous wars vietnam war two there was a perception of the fact the world is together you know there was a draft there's no draft now so there's a perception sometimes folks are expendable which i think i resent and frankly i think that's where i was going with this because the idea is these people volunteer what's the big deal it is a big deal anybody who signs up who takes the oath of office who is willing to put their life on the line in my judgment is putting themselves outside themselves for a greater cause that is to me in my judgment a very important act of selflessness if you go further to as bruce said as lincoln first said the battle at the gettysburg that if you give the last full measure of devotion you are a hero no matter the consequence of the larger political construct and this is his comment is like you know like if you're an accident victim if you're walking across the cross walk in your proximity of the car hitting you you're going to be blamed because you're in a crosswalk it's insane so there's clearly a hearing about i don't know what i think of that's where he was going with it. but

some people out there are expendable i think there is this question of you know if you if you say that every you you stop asking what exactly it is that they're fighting for and what they're being here i don't right no way but we've had wars in the past where there was a common goal a common cause but i had now you don't see that i don't have the soldiers themselves coming back and asking ok great acts of heroism individually we don't even know why we done it and then that's what john kerry said and when he was coming back from vietnam who's going to explain the last soldier die in vietnam what you died for and you're finding some of the most articulate spokesman against the war those who served and i don't see any can consistency at all with defending free speech because part of why they're risking the last full measure of motion so we can criticize the war we can criticize the pres. we can't send don't send any men and women over there it isn't worth it and so i think the two are easily separable one the here wisdom of the individual willing to risk his life for someone else's liberty and other and in alternate basket as a matter of policy you shouldn't be sending them there whatsoever there's nothing

in the national security of the u.s. that's at stake and this goes directly to president obama's comments which i took offense to for he said we will never put our children in harm's way without a clear reason to do so and if we do so we will give them the best technology are you kidding me you know on the first point we don't know what the mission in afghanistan except to get the heck out we're moving out which is probably the right answer but the way he's doing it is going to create more problems in the long run than actually dealing with some of the root causes with that said than technology you know we don't give the kids that they don't get too technical here but the you have these on the battlefield you get folks on the front line doesn't know what's being seen up there we've not integrated things to the level to help our folks so this is the things are not as good as it should be and we have not determined if it's in our best interest to have these kids going forward based on the current policy and see what i like about this entire scenario though is that at least this sparked a lot of discussion out there you know and that's partly why i think what the media is for i think that's a journalist therefore and maybe people didn't like the way that chris said what he

had to say but at least you're seeing somebody on cable networks you know what i like to call the mainstream media try to spark certain interesting discussions like this that i think need to be had in the country so i want to move on in that sense to that if we want to talk about really having respect for the troops and really caring about them all the statistics that i just named off when it comes to unemployment homelessness even when it comes to disability benefits right this is one of the things too is that we have more men and women that are coming back who have survived and yet now you have almost half of them who have up to nine elements i believe and that's much more than in all of our previous wars and that might cost a trillion dollars so what do we do about that because you also have these budget cuts you have the sequestration which they. i promise when i actually affect veterans but i'm curious as to whether someone's going to be willing to give up a treasured weapons project to make sure that veterans get what they deserve absolutely and i think also it shows you this effort to run war on the cheap you

know the politicians don't want to pay for all the mayhem in the shattering of life that they called on our side oh well we'll just slow down the disability benefits payment that's wrong if you're not willing to pay for it you should know authorize the war in the first instance because they never would have suffered that injury if congress didn't authorize the money and congress didn't authorize the power and it's a disgrace that members of congress would permit veterans to be treated by their own government in such a slipshod fashion when they are responsible for their plight but veterans have lobbying organizations in the hope but nowhere near the scope or ability of the law keep part of a boeing of these other companies so in the end you're going to see a huge amount of effort by these companies to maintain you know patty murray in seattle washington and you've got to me in pennsylvania do you really think are going to go against boeing who is one of the big providers of jobs so you've got there's no i you know i there's a donation center so we returned here to the other thing i was at walter reed was going to want to bring to you today and in the first thirty minutes i saw six kids without double amputees this is bad is going to get worse and we owe it to the

people who gave these life changing sacrifices the ability to recover their lives and i mean this is what i'm afraid of other groups not sure this completely we're worried about the government short changing them based on the fact that we owe it to him and no one even accounted for and i don't think you're not the only ones now i want to just go back i want to do this in the first half but got to talk about syria. if anything i think that you hear a much louder chorus out there now saying that there has to be some kind of intervention something has to happen let me just read you something from james travers writing in foreign policy and he said the time is coming to talk about diplomacy has failed or perhaps is very nearly come for the world to stop hiding behind kofi annan skirts we gave diplomacy a chance now we must accept that diplomacy has failed. belt but is there a plan now there isn't a plan and this is this this idea that no matter what you do it can't make it worse yes it can be worse if you know people shut their eyes to what the situation is libya now is no paradise if you're

a black and you're an immigrant there you're sitting being tortured being detained having no life whatsoever you've got really the rule of the gun there and so that's why this idea of moral superiority go in if it's bad because we can never make it worse know what you can make it worse and you repeatedly make it worse and then shut your eyes and then walk away from a country that you've destroyed now the reason why is because we're human beings and we focus on the shore i say oh these people are in plight he says there's lots of horrible things that happen in life but which are smart people know i can only make it worse and we need to desist always syrian people need to decide their own fate even if it results in some terrible things happening it's not our moral course sponsibility we didn't create the problem i don't feel that way when the images of this massacre where there are dead children that were killed and they think of regime change as what could happen so be it and who cares about you know what happens that i don't see the same way it is a little bit daylight between us on this look i i believe we should establish always begin with the end in mind what do we want to achieve there and i think for

better or for worse lebanon is a good model to look at lebanon with your fifteen years of civil war they went through a lot of you know that the syrian troops just left there in two thousand and five but now there are a functioning republic for better or for worse they're functioning and may not be ideal but it's functioning you know by the way we have worked there during that entire time we learned our lesson early reagan missed ration to not be there part of it we have that influence through any number of diplomatic channels i think we should be active here i think we should be supporting the turks on this i think we should be working with the saudis and try to get the arab league involved because otherwise ah you know i think that involvement in trying to do something is better than nothing bruce i think we should let you know that you've got to be honest and lay it out in a way that nobody did in libya and just say that the goal here is to get assad out and it's very strange guys we got to get a break and i have to wrap it up but thank you both for joining me tonight thank you. all right coming up probably manning from behind bars for two years now so what's the latest in this case we'll find out next.