welcome to the ilona show we'll get the real headlines with none of the mercy are coming live to washington d.c. now it's in our host a panel looking at a number of foreign policy issues out there from the g twenty to congressional letters about iran it seems like everybody including the media are out for blood then the n.s.a. says that they can't let us know how many americans have spied on because it would violate our privacy to tell us how despite this ridiculous argument house committee reauthorized pfizer today and the rio plus twenty conference is going on in brazil but thanks distractions like the global economy and

a lack of desire to commit it just looks like the stage is set for yet another failed environmental conference we're going to have all of that morphia tonight including a dose of happy hour but first let's take a look what the mainstream media decided to miss. so despite covering some world affairs that are going on the mainstream media is still devoting a considerable amount of time to the presidential race and that's despite the fact that there really isn't all that much to talk about so what do they do well they create a story out of a no on story. so much for romney rubio take has there been some reports this morning that former senator marco rubio who is of course just on everybody's short list from b.p. hasn't been vetted yet by the romney campaign he has not been asked to fill out papers to be vetted as a vice presidential candidate he is not currently being vetted not in contention rubio has not been asked to complete any questionnaires or turned over financial

statements could be a strong indication he didn't make the cut now rubio senate office and top political adviser had no comment brand new report it says that mitt romney is not vetting senator marco rubio for vice president senator rubio kind of discounting whether or not he is in the running supporter state of florida senator who is cuban american would appeal to hispanic voters florida is also a key battleground state. all right so all we know is that there's one report out there this is that rubio is being vetted so this prospect of rubio not being the vice president is now the biggest story of the day was anybody else out there sensing a little bit of deja vu haven't we been through this media but now as a book for over someone else who would not be vice president well the answer is yes yes we have. we await a major announcement from new jersey governor chris christie republicans unhappy with the current lineup of candidates had urged christie to jump in the speculation

is swirling after christie scheduled a surprise news conference i've been told that the new jersey governor did seriously reconsider getting in over the last two weeks the guessing game has gone on for months will he or won't he he's been dodging questions for days on whether he'll launch a run for the white house we're awaiting a news conference a statement from the new jersey governor chris christie. that's right it was just months ago that we had to listen to chris christie give a news conference about how he wouldn't be vice president we had to watch every channel call the breaking news go live to the news conference as it was the biggest announcement of the century and so now you're seriously going to make us live there all of us again all over again with marco rubio i'm not sure i can take any more speculation on a nonevent but the sides that there are quite a few other stories out there that i'd say are pretty big of the mainstream media is once again passing by let's start with something that quite honestly is kind of odd that they're not covering in the past few hours there's been

a remarkable update in the case of julian assange worried about extradition to sweden today sought asylum at the ecuadorian embassy in london and he asked for protection under the united nations human rights declaration and the ecuadorian government said that they are currently considering that request so this move boils down to the fact that assigns hasn't been charged any crime in sweden supporters are concerned the extradition to stockholm would eventually lead to charges in the united states where a grand jury is reportedly considering charges against him over wiki leaks publications so if they do decide to charge a song and the case of put the first amendment itself on trial any media outlet worth its weight in salt regularly solicits and discloses classified information so all american media outlets should be closely scrutinizing this case not to mention how do you try somebody who isn't even a us citizen under the espionage act this. shows you how far somebody like a song will go to avoid the u.s. even though technically they can't offer an argument that he's done something

criminal but you know they'll find a way to twist and turn and use a lot of broad wording but even though we all know how the mainstream media feels about us on why is it that months ago when he was in the news for alleged sex crimes they were all over it he graced every t.v. screen character assassination pieces were in everywhere so it's not like they don't know who the guy is and what it comes to this development they turn a blind eye maybe they'll pick it up later tonight maybe tomorrow but for now radio silence and since i'm still up here let me just take a second to highlight what i was originally going to point out tonight before the sausage news broke not a non-story about someone not doing something but something that actually involves life and death and we'll get further into this later this week but let me just direct you to two reports that are out there the first comes in the united nations where un special rapporteur on extrajudicial some merry or arbitrary executions once the obama administration to justify its policy of killing rather than capturing wants them to clear up how it is that a policy of targeted killing complies with international law and human rights i

think we all know that will be waiting a very long time for those answers and if the us ever does decide to give the un an answer which it won't don't expect it to be a truthful one and so this brings us to the second report put together by justin elliott a pro publica it highlights how the obama administration's figures on civilian casualties from drone strikes don't add up and this time instead of going to news reports local reports comparing those with official administration statements well it just it compared the administrator in against the administration so their own words at different times and guess what the figures still don't add up so if you need any more proof that you're being lied to all the time there it is and yet again things like this mainstream media chooses to miss. all right so let's continue on with the number of foreign policy stories we have

today a group of forty four senators house republicans have democrats have sent a letter to the president urging him to take an even tougher stance on iran and make it clear that a credible military option exists bipartisanship is the key word there then we still have the serious situations playing out as president obama and president putin released a joint statement after a bilateral meeting at the g. twenty i was david included in agreement that there should be a to say sion of hostilities in syria but no mention of assad by name the media however they're more focused on a cold war like rendition of the relationship between obama and. very chilly meetings some say between president obama and russian president vladimir putin striking body language if you will where the two of them pretty stone faced was it just who has a reputation of being stone faced with some of these things but president obama little eye contact was made but it was cold in russia you haven't seen how chilly it can get in mexico case in point take a look at the body language between president obama and the russian president

vladimir putin and president obama coming off what seemed to be a tense meeting with russian president vladimir putin media reports described their demeanor as chilly like a cold moscow winter body language is any indication obama unlike president george w. bush was able to get a sense of putin's soul some serious tension between the two leaders russia is sending warships to syria so the question is on a scale of one to ten how much should we worry about russia. all right so what do you make of these fear mongering distraction techniques or joining me to disguise it as mark at manas forbes contributor and jack rice former cia officer and criminal defense attorney general i want to thank you both for joining me tonight before we get into this just because the news is fairly new jack i just want to get your take on julian assange or going to the ecuadorian embassy. yeah you know you were absolutely right before it's amazing how people were just about this guy when you could put sex underneath it but when it comes to something like this now all of

a sudden nobody knows who it is this is really part of the problem that we have regularly when we're not actually addressing issues it's just we sort of scratch the surface for the latest and greatest and then we move on ignoring what the reality of it is that's my perception so this isn't how do we look at these clues about how chilly it is like a moscow winter when you're actually in los cabos in mexico what do you think of those clips i mean we slow ahead the first time putin met bush they got along great they were you know everything but high five and we saw what happened in the relationship to tear it to the worst it had been since the cold war so i mean we've seen demonstrably it has absolutely no bearing how the first initial meetings whether they're smiling or frowning it just doesn't matter there's a lot deeper structural things that are going to go on are going to influence this and whether you know they laugh to others jokes or they were looking to others as it really doesn't matter no how many times we can see how america and american presidents and russian presidents interact and it just it's not it doesn't doesn't matter what i mean i guess i wish i had my body language expert to bring into this

you know and spend an hour discussing this today but you know back to this bilateral meeting back to the statement on syria i mean i'm kind of you know from the u.s. political stance who do you think that this kind of helps out because if you look at the administration they don't seem like they're eager to get involved militarily at all and so you could say that that if russia stalling it's good for them because then they don't actually have to take any kind of action then you could say that for them john mccain's of the blind and those that want to get more involved want to actively arm the syrian rebels does this make more room for their case for some unilateral action jack pointed out well i think this is a perfect example of a really simplistic approach to a very complicated answer me not yours but typically what we're seeing in the media it's nice and easy. to come back and talk about who the cold war is back re give big never took place and everything beyond since the fall of the berlin wall is

irrelevant because it's still alive and well this is far more complex than that especially when you even look at it the domestic situation here in the united states the fact that we see the likes of john mccain saying let's roll on in there on the one side and a far more nuanced approach coming out of the white house i guess the real problem that we face in syria more than anything else is that we have such a disaster of if the history of foreign policy in the region every time we act like we care about them and that we're there for democracy and freedom it feels far more like an invasion we're not just talking about iraq now let's take a closer look at what we've done to deal with and with the iranians are willing to support the saudis our willingness to support mubarak egypt for so long so every time we talk about saying we want to do something very positive the problem is we've done so many negative things again and again and again that it comes directly against it and cuts directly against the credibility that the united states has in the region and i've seen this directly from people i know in most of those

countries that i didn't and what is it's not fair to say if the u.s. isn't doing anything right now about syria conflict right. also helping to facilitate arms deals from saudi arabia and from qatar that are passed through turkey as well as you know all kinds of intelligence operations i think it's pretty hard to believe that any of the other countries that are our allies the saudis the turks people like that would take the step of arming the rebels or giving intelligence like that without without our having okayed it and i think that's that's pretty that's transferred really i think even today at a certain point the state department really something pushing back against that the people like john mccain are accuse them of doing nothing saying whoa hold on wait we're just all the only thing i do is give them weapons or giving them kind of information in some kind of intelligence and vice and stuff like that so i think they are deliberately trying to show that they're not completely hands off because in the domestic little thing that would make them look really weak if they were if they did we're doing nothing whatsoever there's. wash their hands been set up on other people to meet and deal with and that's just not how you know it's not feasible let's also not forget this is an election because i had to act now i agree

in particular turkey is the place that really crosses hysteria in ways that others don't and they would absolutely not be doing this without the absolute support of the united states the u.s. doesn't want to clearly step in the the europeans don't particularly want to step in but it seems clear that we're providing logistical support probably some intelligence support and we certainly don't appear to have any soldiers on the ground but from an intelligence perspective i suspect that we'll just probably others in the region who are providing some of the other support and eaters questions of the saudi arabia got or others providing actual military support in terms of weaponry that's not clear out there but my guess is that we're not simply sitting back and simply saying well you know fight it out but i don't think we're anywhere near done this is a much more difficult situation than what we have seen even with the libyans because we still can't seem to differentiate between who the good guys are quote

unquote and who the bad guys are so in that sense if it keeps playing out right if we keep seeing international attention on this issue is this something that becomes an election issue as well because we are in the middle of an election year right you never know when these leaders are meeting right now the g. twenty as they can be the same guys meeting you know after november is it going to be putin and the romney who thinks that russia is the number one geopolitical foe i think it's i mean it i guess a little depends on what happens i mean if there is a massive overview of the side gets overthrown tomorrow pretentiously by november it'll it'll it'll go away but i think absolutely that this will factor into the republican image of obama as we can as equivocating in his defense of democracy i don't think that's really true again i think there's quite a lot more going on it's quite a bit more complicated situation than a matter of obama kind of going hands off about how to be present and i'm sure there's all kinds of campaign ads and slogans that they can have showing all the horrible. things are happening in syria and so it was brought obama's fault only he had. intervened you know done airstrikes whatever it is going to void i don't think

that's true but that's what will say so i want to move on to iran to you before we wrap things up here in the sense that we could have i don't know it seemed like things that maybe calm down for a little while because at first we saw this in the forefront and everybody was really beating the war drums and they kind of quieted down this shows you obviously that isn't the case there's still a lot of pressure being put on the president put on this administration behind the scenes and guess what it's bipartisan right we have twenty two democratic senators and twenty two republican senators and so. in that sense you know we've spoken so many times about how this resembles the buildup to iraq does it just become a lot easier to even try to sell iran are we just going to see that kind of consensus we're going to see another c.n.n. like scale of one to ten how quickly do we need to invade iran. when i first wrote a letter to sort of sorry go ahead. no i'm actually afraid that it is because what we have seen is the israelis in particular have been very clear on this issue and that causes political problems in the united states to stand against that issue so

it increases pressure in ways that i don't know if it's really necessary yet i keep feeling the pressure i'm seeing from various groups of people i know around the world were talking about this it almost appears that they're creating some sort of an emergency feel when in fact it's not necessary i think the u.s. has been pretty clear in the fact that the iranians are now within about two years of actually creating an actual weapon let alone a delivery system itself and let alone that this is a much more complex issue than going into iraq or any place else we're talking about a country that's three times the size of iraq has three times the population so far more sophisticated have connections with hezbollah who have connections with hamas reaches into europe reaches into the u.s. in ways that iraq has never done it for the u.s. to simply say oh let's just take care of this would be ridiculous foolish it best but sometimes the a great seem to be running things you know to me well definitely you know any last word because i got to wrap it up here michael if i was i was surprised as i have

the sound of that so i don't have a letter i think it would be two thirds you know even higher and it's scary stuff i mean it's getting now and hopefully like i said even the of the media and everybody doesn't fall into the same. repetition as this is the consensus and this has to be done as we saw with iraq i think about for joining me tonight. thank you thanks. i just i had a salad instead of i read it and let's go to the n.s.a. the agency that's usually all about spying is suddenly saying we want to protect your privacy well it's plain without their shorts after the break.

you know how sometimes you see a story and it seems so for langley you think you understand it and then you glimpse something else and you hear or see some other part of it and realized everything you thought you knew you don't know i'm tom harpur welcome to the big picture. on. the news today violence is once again flared up the film these are the images the world has been seeing from the streets of canada. giant corporations are rooted a clue. hard

time for you said it i read it right take time to respond to our brilliant and engaging viewer comments from facebook twitter and you tube because when you've got

something to say i listen and last night we had a bit of a different show very interview have you so we had to hold our common responses until tonight so here you go and the first comments on your first are tool time award last week it was given a northrop grumman then a seat one that said on you tube alone and you're still missing the big picture the freedom that you are currently enjoying to speak your mind without fear of arrest or punishment has been guaranteed by the arsenal for freedom provided by northrop grumman and i'm assuming you're being sarcastic this time around but you bring up an argument we often hear being made by the biggest war profiteers the thanks to them we are safe at their weapons bring us peace obvious a disagree with that all unfortunately don't think that while the world is entirely free of military conflict isn't it better to devote your resources to pursuing that than to prepare to aiding and less war and now to go back to the original story of the revolving door between north and capitol hill well that brings up the key issue as to who you should believe to members of congress really believe certain policies and contracts

will keep us safe are they doing it because they can and because it leads to more profits and favors for that when it comes to northrup i'm going to go with the latter now for our next comment clueless in chicago had this to say about our immigration panel on you tube as a hispanic i feel to all dream act supporters i'm with you on passing a resolution via useless congress i am with you that you are americans but not like this as quickly as the president gave the sanctuary another will take it away and this is one of the elements we discussed in our panel on friday when it comes to the president's new immigration policy at the end of the day an executive order is not going to relieve us of the need for comprehensive immigration reform and now i hope that even if mitt romney were to win he wouldn't overturn this order just reminds us of the perilous position that so many of these kids are in process a. if the will be deported from the only home you've ever known it's not a solution and now we got a ton of responses surprise surprise regarding our attack of eva jain a story and you guys came up with some great movie lines yourselves as well as some good arguments damien seventy five said on you tube you can't say the word but the

t.s.a. could touch it what a bunch of hypocrites and michael hastings tweeted this to us alone on the show goes on an epic the word rant not really safe for work though i guess that's the problem and finally john jeremiah smith had this to say on facebook referencing the alone to show vagina monologues god damn that was asking as stumping in your face contradict confrontational i loved who wrote that pulitzer now or have you guys enjoyed that segment believe me we did too we had a lot of fun piecing it together brainstorming on how to give it is the right touch of humor when it comes to the writing some think are brilliant producer christine for that and that all right to my rantings and i but thanks for your comments as always and i'll be back with more later in the week. now in case you're worried that your government is spying on you without telling you or telling anyone for that matter and yet congress was for some reason still cool with that one fortunately you'd be right you see today the house judiciary committee approved

a reauthorization of the amendments act it gives the government broad powers to spy on the communications of americans as long as one of the parties is reasonably believed to be outside of the united states now the vote isn't final still has to go for full votes but the timing is also especially disturbing because just yesterday senators ron wyden and mark udall said that they received a response from the national security agency whom they had asked for a number a simple number of how many persons inside the u.s. have been spied on by the n.s.a. and the n.s.a. responded with perhaps the most ridiculous argument that i have ever heard they said they can't tell the two senators because telling them would violate your privacy so since when does the n.s.a. care about privacy well joining me to discuss that is aaron swartz executive director of demand progress aaron nice to have you back on the show tonight and i guess first let me just ask you do you find this is absurd and as disturbing as i do that this whole argument of theirs that really it's all for your privacy. well

it's good to see you again i think this one really is pretty funny it's even funnier if you read the actual letter they sent the senators when they said we thought about your request the whole n.s.a. leadership discussed it and we decided it would be a serious privacy invasion to answer it i mean just like the notion of the n.s.a. leaders getting in a room and trying to come up desperately with some reason that in have to turn over this data and coming across the notion of oh oh oh it's private it's just a letter that's what one of their other arguments though was that you know they just don't have the capacity to even find that number right now and so if they did dedicated their precious resources to trying to figure out that number it would take away those resources from you know these these spying missions that there are so dedicated to but it isn't that the whole point if you're going to have a big agency you should in there be accountability there should in that you know should the some of the resources be devoted to that well i mean i think it does answer the question to some extent but the answers all were spying on so many people we can't possibly even count them then that's an awful lot of people tells

you a lot right there but yeah it is shocking to think that accountability is so lax that they don't even have sort of basic statistics about how big this spying program is really one thing that they said look you know we know the number of telephones were spying on we don't know exactly how many people that corresponds to but they just came back and said we can't give you a number at all that's i mean the scariest weapon is well that's scary and what's scarier is that then you have you know committees in the house that are still choosing to reauthorize fison without having any of this information so when we look at somebody like senator ron wyden is the kind of a civil liberties champion in this case you know he's already used percy's year old maneuver so that when it goes to the senate they have to debate it on the floor and can't just vote. so there's no question that ron lyden has been a champion on this all along and you know there was a similar time where he tried to get data out of the government asking them which laws they were using to authorize their spying program and the government said oh

the legal opinions we're using to legalize the spying program are also classified so we can't even tell you which laws we're using to spy on you use it in who's like as a senator i need to know which laws you're using so i can reform them and he's been fighting on that issue with the whole sort of others where you know he's very much alone why isn't that something like this and i mean i would like to hope that maybe if we opened it up for debate on the senate floor and had some good sound bites coming out then they would be played on the news and then people would pay attention but they don't you know and so how do you contrast that with something like sopa and pipa that was also going on within congressional hearing rooms places where the public doesn't normally direct their attention and yet that didn't get us excited because you know you can't touch our internet but i guess touch all my communications via phone or whatnot. well i think part of the trouble is with soap and people there was the sort of horror moment right there was a moment where you know the internet was pretty much on censored and then there was

a day where congress was holding a vote on whether to censor it and so all the energy could be focused on that kind of crucial moment the problem with the spying programs it's the sort of long slow expansion you know going back to the nixon administration right obviously became big after nine eleven under george w. bush and obama has continued to expand it with problems of slowly growing worse and worse but there's never been this moment you can point to say ok we need to galvanize opposition today because today is when it matters and so that's mattered for a long time it will continue to matter for a long time and i'm in it for the mix and hard to rally against now you know in light of all of this i want to talk about a report that google released this week which is their annual transparency report where they tell you how many times governments go to them you know to ask for google user account information to be handed over turns out that the u.s. sought user data from google more than six thousand times just in the last six months of last year and i was more than any other country surveyed now that they

didn't survey iran they didn't survey china but still that's a really big bump but so i'm curious what you think of google's methods here right on one hand they want to tell us that governments are asking for this information but they won't tell us how many times they comply with these orders and so i response to thank them are we still supposed to be scared that all of these decisions are basically up to a few executives at tech firms. yeah i mean google has trumpeted their transparency program quite a bit and said you know we're the only company that's releasing this kind of data you should be so proud of us and the fact is you know it's not the not verbs that are really important what's important is whether google complies with the requests or not how hard they fight when the requests are legal and how much they apply the most restrictive rules versus the most expensive ones so there are some countries with really restrictive regulations really privacy invasive regulations and school will follow those or do they follow the laws in the jurisdictions that are most privacy protecting you know protects freedom of speech the most and so when you

always see in these companies is this kind of trade off you know google says in their response on this report that look we have employees in all these different countries we have to abide by their local laws because otherwise our employees will get arrested and the fact is you know what are those employees doing there they're selling out so really we have a trade off between a company which is trying to profit by selling as many ads as they can against this sort of fundamental piece of internet infrastructure that people a lot of them for their discussion is their communication and meeting with their friends and so it means that because the company is trying to make so much money the most restrictive governments end up controlling a key part of all of our lives one with you there why don't more from google and thanks so much for joining us tonight. and many. are coming up next we have shell intel and i want everyone's focused on the g. twenty summit there's also environmental conference underway in rio is anything going to get accomplished you have what's happening in brazil in the attack.