china for asians ruled the day. the site leaked classified or highly sensitive information. and what appears to be a broader administration effort from prosecuting whistleblowers to protecting patriotic leakers line behind a political power play and downright treason is more blurry than ever before coming up why ask a former whistleblower why some leaks are considered heroes while others condemned as villains. and a drone is a very very powerful way of snooping on behavior and i don't want them monitoring every every bit of my behavior just days after a drone crashed on maryland's eastern shore senator rand paul is rallying against their domestic use this quickly as he makes the point the kentucky senator started backpedaling why is the drone conversation in the u.s.

so taboo we are concerned about the latest information we have that they are attached helicopters on the way from russia to syria which will escalate the conflict by dramatic spreading rhetoric without confirming facts hillary clinton is quick to point her finger at russia for the ongoing civil unrest in syria harsh words are more effective when they're true fact checker statement in just a few. wednesday june thirteenth seven pm in washington d.c. i'm having martin you're watching r t. so liked of leaking facts to foster a myth that obama is a no holds barred superhero taking out terrorists to save the world anonymous government sources have been leaking stories in the press that bolster the president's image of being tough on terror despite the compromise of national

security. this administration has been blatantly political on all nations security issues that i've been driving up and so. i think it's very clear that these leaks came from the white house people within the white house itself i don't think it's ever good to expose your allies to. their programs and their systems being offered to the united states in the new york times and i think this is the most devastating for our national security dianne feinstein to a great credit to said it lives and put at risk all at the same time his administration has come down harder on whistleblowers who leak inconvenient truths than any other previous administration combined so where is the line between political plower powerplays and treason to talk more about this i was joined earlier by peter van buren author of we meant well how i helped lose the battle for the hearts and minds of the iraqi people. the obama white house has been almost

unprecedented in leaking information that makes itself look good of course politicians do like to do that in leaking information it papers you is not unique to obama i think what's unique here are two things first the secrecy of these infor of this information the stuxnet worm the things that are going on in iran this the raid that killed bin ladin information came out in those instances that was beyond top secret and was known to very few people that's something new coupled with obama's aggressive persecution of whistleblowers his use of the espionage act that's the other side of this story and that's the other thing that's unique in this case even george bush understood an accommodation between the needs of a pre-press and the needs of government secrecy obama has taken it a step further here and it is interesting that he leaked these to try to bolster his image i mean it just seems like stuxnet that the leak of stocks that knowing

that it was the us working in concert with israel i mean pretty much created a blueprint for cyber terrorism around the world i think that government talent retaliation absolutely in may of two thousand and eleven the pentagon announced that it would consider a cyber attack against the united states an act of war the same as if a bomb destroyed a building a cyber attack that took out an electrical grid or get damaged would be considered an act of war the president then a year later turns around in the pages of the new york times frankly admits that the united states has committed an act of war against iran practically challenging them to come out and fight it's almost the same as george bush back in the early days of the iraq war saying you know you come get us and that didn't work out very well so so the stocks that admittance and also this kill list and the drone war for the extent of this expanse of drone killing machine world why do you think that that's just the administration saying you know we're really strong and are and

we're. we're fighting terror in a good way i mean look at what we're doing i just to me it looks bad i don't know this is this is the sad part about all this is that in fact this does appeal to the majority of american voters obama's ratings go up he watches the polls very carefully they put out the super mation that he practically does these things himself with his bloody hands and his popularity goes up what's going on now is something that it's almost impossible for us to find historical precedent in the united states has been hiding information not from the people overseas who might threaten us or or use that information against us but from the american people there's certainly no secrecy about a drone war in yemen or pakistan the people there are subjected to the pointy end of the missiles all the time the iranians certainly knew they were under attack from a very sophisticated anime that almost exclusively would point to the united states and or israel so this information was being kept secret from who from us the

american people and is being released now who incidentally in the run up to a contested election to make obama look like superman superman with blood on his hands and somehow that now appeals to american voters well said peter i wanted to get your opinion on just why why is there such an uproar about these leaks now and where obama's been already prosecuting low level whistleblowers for the last three plus years why this why is everyone up in arms about this now and kind of something we've known about. i think there's two things first is is the good thing slash bad thing that this is reaching a certain critical mass what started out a year or so ago with what seemed like a bit of wrangling over the murder and of osama bin laden has grown over the course of this year in into almost as i said unprecedented levels of highly classified leaking that's brought it out the other of course is that sadly like so many things

in america this is quickly devolved into partisan politics the republicans rather than talking lucidly about the damage to the united states that this information being leaked might be doing instead of choosing to make it into another political football one of the themes that i've written about in my latest column on tom dispatch is in fact how we should not be mistaken this is not a political football this is about a president who believes that he alone determines right from wrong he alone can decide what information may damage the united states and what information he needs to brag about for his own purposes just as he alone apparently decides who lives and who dies under america's drones pittard the cia has come out and said that these leaks threaten national security do you agree with that yes i do what happens in the in the cloak and dagger world. let's just pretend for now that it's all for it's all for the benefits all for the good of the united states oftentimes has to

be kept secret an awful lot of espionage type things work because people don't know they're happening what goes on when we're bragging about them is oftentimes exposing people to danger who willingly help the united states and it also sets off a lot of wannabes out there who say well america can say they can do this and maybe we'll do this lastly as we talked earlier it's a challenge it's a taunt it's standing up and saying to everyone out there up you want to get us here we are you come get us. that doesn't work very well and it doesn't make for good politics and it certainly doesn't portray the image of america that's a bit home will shows a bit of humility the kind of things that are really necessary for america to regain its status in the world and the discussion of national security here we have bradley manning you know the d.o.j. is currently withholding two hundred fifty thousand documents to his defense and really there has been no charge of him actually compromising national security but

i want to play this this clip from the crack of obama talking about bradley manning . we don't even do it. so there's obama saying you know he broke the law he's guilty without the trial without really any proof that he did compromise national security and you have these very me says from from anonymous officials that do compromise national security what do you think about that absolutely and that's what makes this whole smell so bad is the hypocrisy that that's inherent in it bradley manning's if he was the one that released all those cables the government has still not shown what damage if any has actually taken place the state department fought tooth and nail that its internal study of the so-called damage from we can expect not be released to manage attorneys luckily the judge last week did say that the state department

had to hand that over to manning's attorneys and we all look forward to the possibility that some of that information will be shared with us in the public but when you expose sources when you expose methods when you declare that you've committed an act of war against iran i think it's difficult to say those things don't harm america and don't put america and americans at risk. i very interesting point peter and as someone who's been working and reporting on the administration for a long time i know that you yourself have been the target of a lot of things and i wanted to just ask your opinion how you think reporting has changed over the last two administrations it seems like during the clinton astray and there were a lot a lot of leaks in the bush administration i know things are more tightly managed but now it just seems like there is no investigation it's just the reprinting of press releases given to reporters from the government we know that the l.a. times sat on the photos on the new york times sat on wiretapping for so long i mean

we just your opinion on how things have changed really in the investigative journalism world well two things have happened one is that an awful lot of people have just given up and that's the point you made quite eloquently just there they simply wait for the government to hand them something whether it's a leak or a press release or a statement in they reprint it and it makes things very easy it's kind of cut and paste journalism the other thing that's happened however is for the people who are still working very very hard out there to do investigative journalism to create jefferson's informed citizenry their jobs are becoming increasingly criminalised if everything about national security is classified now as it has as it is becoming under the obama administration then any reporting about national security has to by definition cross the line into class by territory and thus become essentially illegal and will evolve the administration with its aggressive whistle blowing

prosecutions and it's over classifications is actually seeking in my mind. to get rid of investigative journalism to punish journalists to scare away the ones that are scare a hole in to prosecute the ones that need to be prosecuted at the same time stomping on sources to the point where it's only going to be the government telling us what it wants us to know and keeping hold of what it doesn't want us to know and that is not a very good place for democracy to be and you have a personal experience with this sceptically if you could just elaborate on what happened to you and also the linking to just that already declassified document on on wiki leaks and what happened there absolutely i have become a whistleblower in the process of telling americans through my book we missed wealth how the united states failed in the reconstruction of iraq my book unlike some of these other things contains no classified material and in fact recounts many of the things that i saw witnessed and participated in while i was in iraq all

in one classified format that doesn't make it any less damaging and it doesn't make it any less clear to america that the state department lied to them about iraq and has participated in waste fraud and mismanagement they are in return for by providing a super mission to the american public the department of state is in the final stages of separating me firing me terminating me kicking me out making the retiree i don't know which one i will end up being but forcing me out because speaking the truth now in washington is a very very dangerous thing they can't really come up with enough excuses to fire me so they've made a few up one of them is claiming that a link on my blog not only a link on my blog to a document elsewhere on the internet but the state department privately says this class like publicly won't confirm constitutes me mishandling information such that i'm no longer entitled to a security clearance here i'm sorry we're running out of time but basically you

know you're just linked to an already declassified document i'm so trying to use that to down and thanks so much for coming on and for sharing your opinion on this period end of year and author of we meant well i helped lose the battle for the hearts and minds of the iraqi people. robot drones at the stop at future of america just days after forty four foot unmanned surveillance drone crashing the shores of maryland senator rand paul is proposing legislation that would curb their domestic use it's called the preserving freedom from unwarranted surveillance act of two thousand and twelve great well the someone's trying to stop the surveillance state from expanding into the sky but wait does this bill really do anything at all to halt their use to explore this issue and more i was joined earlier by jefferson morely staff writer for salon dot com and author of the book snow storm in august washington city francis scott key and the forgotten race right of eight hundred thirty five i think that those exceptions could be broad but i think that the the

problem paul is going to have with this legislation is that this apparently and i think it was just reading the law myself this apparently excludes the military use of the military's use of drones in domestic airspace and that is going to be a huge problem for the pentagon because the pentagon is actually one of the leading forces behind this drive to integrate drones into the domestic air space the military wants to bring drones home from the battlefield and use them for training at home and in my reading of rand paul's legislation there is no room for that so i think on a political level he's going to have a tremendous problem with that from the pentagon. yeah dede do you think that he has a lot of support as the bill stands or do you think that there is a lot of lobbying effort from defense to push this you know to not push this through well i think we're i think we're early on i think that the recent coverage

of drones in domestic airspace in the last two months is driving public opinion on this and civil libertarians on the left and right are trying to come up with a response but i don't know that something like paul's legislation and there's a companion bill in the house can get through given the strength of the domestic drone industry especially in the house. trevor's and you know i think there's sort of a cognitive dissonance between the people living in this country and the fact that there are already are drones flying around in the sky as we know one just crashed why do you think it was that there already was a surveillance drone flying in domestic areas. the drone that crashed was not i see no evidence that that was a surveillance drone that was a navy drum i think they were training the pilots to handle that aircraft and we don't know what happened i just talked to the navy today and they say the investigation is still going on but i think that that incident points that if the

military succeeds in getting this legislation through which would bring many more military drones into the united states you would have literally thousands more. unmanned aviation vehicles in the in the united states airspace that were solely controlled by the military now the military will say existing law covers this there's nothing to worry about but i think that the capacity of this new technology for surveillance is what's driving the type of opposition that you see in the halls bill doing that people should be worried about this drone crashing in that there is a risk for other unmanned drones to be crashing. once they are enemy. yeah i mean there's going to be a much greater risk of crashes because there are going to be many more of drones like this the military plans to bring home from the from the afghanistan and other

battle zones probably about five hundred predator of these of these predator or global hawk drones the global hawk is the one that crashed so right now and the navy only has five of those craft that they are using when you bring home five hundred more you're going to have more of a risk of more of the risk of crashes now. the people in the military say well drones are very safe there are not that many crashes these are these trainings conducted in which restricted areas where there is and where there isn't a danger to people even if they do crash but i would note in the case in salisbury maryland earlier this week after the crash they had to they had to seal that area off from boaters so there could have been boaters in the area where that drone crashed so i think that a lot more attention to detail is needed here both on the safety and the privacy from the divers and i want to show you a map really quickly of the amount of drone bases that already exist in the u.s.

as you can see there pretty much covering the united states we already know that and the trainee state and local governments and twenty four universities are already authorized to fly them do you i mean is it at this point where he is except drone surveillance as an inevitability of the surveillance state well i mean. the drones that are being deployed by the universities for example they're not being used for surveillance there they're typically being used for. weather observation. observation and the police departments i wouldn't i don't by my count there's not there's not twenty more than twenty i think there's about a dozen law enforcement agencies that have received permission to fly and i've talked to representatives of those and those police departments almost uniformly disclaim any interest in surveillance how reason know that howard doesn't know they're not

just going to blink at least surveil people. we don't know that and that and i think that's why especially united states we have very weak privacy legislation that at the national level and and so we really are vulnerable to. the possible abuse of this also our laws governing surveillance our laws that were developed around helicopter surveillance primarily and the drone is just a very different and much more powerful technique and our laws and our judges haven't really addressed the the privacy problems that are created by drones so i think that the law is lagging behind the technology right now as i wouldn't say it's hopeless. this is part of the problems can be addressed. by that but we don't have the structure to do it yet but isn't this kind of the same rhetoric as we heard with you know post patriot act and pretty much the post

nine eleven mentality for not doing anything wrong there's nothing to worry about and you have to admit that drones and you know the unlimited amount of drones surveilling the skies does create sort of a chilling effect in this country. well right and i think that's why we need that's why we need the protections written into the law before we have widespread adoption of this i just i don't see the signs of domestic law enforcement using this for surveillance right now that capacity is there but i don't see any sign that that capacity has been exercised in that way and what do you do you think that there is really a chance for accurate privacy provisions to be implemented in the legislation i mean lots of countries lots of countries have much more effective privacy protections than the united states do so effective a strong privacy protection at the national level is probably the most important solution or a second solution which some of the you know it's

a palette it's our are pursuing is is area specific prohibitions against surveillance and i think there in seattle which is one city that is thinking about adopting drones they're also talking about adopting of meanness of law in order to ensure that privacy is protected and i think those are the two real solutions to what the problem now is very specific local legislation to control specific use of . drones by a police department and then also national privacy protection on a bridge on a much broader level it's much broader than just drones right now we don't have either of those that's what we need i mean it seems great yeah we should we should implement privacy protections and it just seems like in a state of national security where privacy is so rooted in this country it just doesn't seem like the push for them is really there i mean i could be wrong let's hope they're right jefferson i want to get your pen in really quickly on just drone warfare in general it seems like right now. there's two options either invade and

occupy countries or use drone warfare abroad do you see a third alternative here or is this really just the way things are going to be in this is certainly. drone war is going to be the preferred mode of the us military intervening so the question is. since there's very little appetite for big ground invasion big ground interventions like we had in iraq and afghanistan if we're going to pursue a policy of intervention it's going to be via drones but the replications of that the implications of that i don't think have been thought through very well because we are imagining that this is a low cost policy for ourselves but in the two countries where drone war has been most intensive in the obama years yemen and pakistan both countries are notably more unstable and more anti-american now than they were when the drone war began so

we're seeing the negative effects of drone war already in the countries where it's practiced most intensively that's a warning sign for the future very interesting point thanks so much for joining us that link up your son morley staff writer for salon dot com and author of the book snow storm in august washington city francis scott key and the forgotten race riot at eighteen thirty five. do you ever wonder how the police and military know that the rubber bullets are safe to fire into a crowd of protesters or those loud piercing sound cannon they use to break up demonstrations won't cause damage well they pay humans to be guinea pigs yep you heard me right in a warehouse building in morris county new jersey residents make sure when you don't lose an hour to be abused you might get hit with the tongs or fired at with rubber bullets but i guess in this economy have jobs a job right but let's examine this a little bit closer last october an iraq veteran was hit by a police projectile in oakland well taking part in the occupy wall street protest

we've played this footage before but take another look at your marriage what's your . scuttles and suffered a fractured skull and brain swelling after being shot he's still recovering i wonder if those new jersey residents understand the dangers of having the army fire rubber bullets or projectiles at them and again this is just for a measly twenty dollars an hour and that's not forget another occupy protest in california where law enforcement went overboard remember this from u.c. davis. after seeing that i wonder what would make people agree to be pepper sprayed and how many times for twenty dollars an hour after all the pepper spray most police agencies use these days is military grade zero but that's right it's just a food product anyway so in conclusion have we as a society decided that twenty dollars an hour is the going rate to be abused look i

know unemployment is high right now but where's the dignity and self-respect of these volunteers who sign up and just remember the army makes you feel a consent forms acknowledging that you may sustain permanent and serious injury or injury and even death luckily so far that's not happened all the way that we may never know considering that these volunteers are now not allowed to speak. to the press. check your facts before pointing fingers hillary clinton caused an uproar lately after she accused russia of sending weapons to attack syria to escalate their civil war and response russian's foreign minister a lot longer of stated that russia is in compliance with international law and is merely fulfilling previous defense obligations so who is right to cut through the rhetoric or to zone with the coughing up when a top u.n. official may have a labeled the crisis in syria a full scale civil war but according to the u.s. secretary of state russia could be to blame for the escalating crisis secretary of

state hillary clinton raised some eyebrows and caused quite a diplomatic stir on tuesday when she claimed that russian attack helicopters were on their way to damascus take a look. we have confronted the russians about stopping their continued arms shipments to to syria. they have from time to time said that we shouldn't worry everything they're shipping is unrelated to their actions internally that peyton li untrue and we are concerned about the latest information we have that there are attack helicopters on the way from russia to syria. now the secretary of state's comments raise some eyebrows among those in the white house and even stumped the pentagon's own spokesman when asked about details in terms of what helicopters the secretary of

state was referring to captain john kirby at the pentagon while the famed some surprise take a look. can you provide any details as to what kind of helicopters where they live or how are they being delivered. i have not seen reporting that indicates. that the russians are providing attack helicopters to the syrians i have just not seen that. well while washington was left to sort out the diplomatic mess that had begun over the secretary of state's comments the russian foreign minister sergei lavrov just missed the assertion explaining yet again that the long standing military relationship between damascus in syria right now consists of fulfilling old contracts all of which comply with international law that include defensive systems not offensive capabilities of an interesting point however a russian firm that does make my seventeen attack helicopters does have

a rather willing client been this business is booming and that's because the pentagon is actually turning to that farm to buy attack helicopters sports war in afghanistan so rather confusing situation but we will continue to follow it as it unfolds and as our to correspondent with the caffeine up now does it for now for more of the stories we covered go to youtube dot com slash r t america or check out our website r.t. dot com slash usa and you can also always follow me on twitter at abby martin capital count is up next we'll see you right back here and a half hour. r t is the state run english speaking russian channel it's kind of like. russia today has an extremely confrontational stance when it comes to us.