today on our t.v. just because they report it doesn't mean it's true american viewers are taking the head and staying away from network news outlets will find out where they're turning to to get their daily dose of headlines plus it's happening in vegas but libertarians sure hope it will stay there the largest national gathering of freedom loving thinkers is meeting in sin city celebrating innovation and open mindedness will find out what new ideas are coming out of freedom. and then the manchurian candidate meets the u.s. military a shocking new report reveals that the department of defense is using psychedelic drugs to interrogate. is this shocking reality of the future of warfare.

it's thursday july twelfth four pm here in washington d.c. i'm liz wahl and you're watching our t.v. . a losing faith in the media americans confidence in television news has hit a new low that's according to a recent gallup poll these days only twenty one percent of americans have confidence in the news that's a forty six percent drop since one thousand nine hundred three and confidence in newspapers not much better and though the poll shows confidence has hit a new low that poll was taken before this happens. the individual mandate has been ruled unconstitutional justices have just got it both the centerpiece provisions of the obama health care law if in fact that's the final word on the individual mandate there could be a little bit more complicated like getting conflicting information we're getting

inflicting information as you say there's been some confusion there are conflicting reports coming in from inside this supreme court so let's let's i'm drawing any final conclusions are still trying to figure this out the cautious with those we're trying to do the best we can right now as we sort through it and we need it later a lower third actually may not be correct take several minutes as a reading through this again i we are reading now that the entire law has been held that's right the major news outlets got a major story wrong so it's likely that this debacle will bring that confidence level down even lower and when it comes to fair and accurate reporting journalist happened to sources to help tell the story but what happens when you don't accurately disclose who your sources are well that that's exactly what happened when the news outlets reported on the supreme court's decision on obamacare they wanted to get the take of a small business owner you know just your run of the mill small business owner and

they all happened to find the same guy. because of the increasing health care legislation coming down the line in things like regulatory burdens is really making it making it that much for difficult for me to make a decision to increase and expand my business without a day although it's something that we're ready to expand and at this point would all do is either hold all from a higher part time employees and in form of instead of full time employees we've seen increased regulation of health care we don't know where it stands where it's going to lead to what was supposed to help small businesses but it's so narrowly targeted it's not going to be of any help to my company. well as the blog balloon juice first pointed out throughout his various appearances joe oliver was called a small business owner but what they didn't tell you was that this man also happens to be part of the national federation of independent businesses it's a right wing pro corporate lobbying group and they were also

a plaintiff in the supreme court challenge to obamacare but in all these reports no mention of his lobbying ties so it turns out he's not so random but in fact using the media as a platform to further the lobbying groups interest we say if you want to interview him that's fine just let your audience know who he is so all this could provide clues as to why americans are losing faith in the fourth estate so where people turn to instead it looks like citizen journalists could be giving the mass news networks a run for their money r.t. correspondent. has the story. venning goodness statics round the clock operations a product always being exported america's mainstream news industry generates power and profits but it seems partisan reporting and frequent gaffes may have made many americans turn away from the big broadcasters a recent gallup poll shows an all time low of only twenty percent of the public trusting the news many say this means

citizen journalism is becoming a big game changer and the amazing thing about training citizens to be really good pundits is that they they have a wealth of information that journalists just don't have when you help them connect what they know are exposed to their experience with a big picture. political event it's very powerful what's that journalist and best selling author and i only wolf not only supports citizen journalism she and business partner lisa thomas have built a nonpartisan training ground for it it's called daily klout dot com we're not just teaching people to vent we're training people to write rigorous shapely opinion pieces which are eight hundred words long and also to source their assertions we also teach them how to link what they're exposing are calling for with

action steps. daily klout also features a legislative search engine that monitors and explains bills making their way to capitol hill a tool allowing everyday people to hold federal state and corporate leaders accountable when america's fourth estate fails to i think the mainstream media has become about entertainment. and also concerned who holds the purse strings if the mainstream media is controlled by large corporate interests they're going they're beholden to them but this website is independently financed giving tens of thousands of citizens the freedom. you report on topics many news networks are accused of suppressing i think one of the best ways you can judge the state of democracy is an approach. and i think if you think of the situation where the citizens of the country are actually bypassing the mainstream media i think that says a lot of the stage of democracy critics however argue that only properly educated

and experienced journalists should be intrusted with understanding the rigors and ethics involved in news reporting but even then. there is no guarantee the public will receive facts this is premature justices have struck down the individual mandate ruled unconstitutional the direct blow to the president i would say it's a direct blow to his democratic party the individual mandate has been struck down it has been struck down no it has not. stopped. us mass media still maintains and stronger and wider reach that citizen journalism but it no longer holds the power to determine what the public is the baby doing or even reporting about very important party new york. well it's the event of the year for libertarians freedom fast happening now in las vegas thousands of libertarians

are in the city for the event which features freedom loving speakers debates forums and activity as here are some of the issues on the agenda wall street on trial that the two thousand and twelve presidential elections the us health care debate global economic recovery and the occupy wall street movement and these are of course topics we cover in depth here at r t so freedom fest is just more is more than just a big protest against big government it comes at a time when many americans think our fundamental freedoms are under attack and. i want to put an end to this erosion of liberty to talk about the event and the libertarian movement i'm joined now by matt welch he is the editor in chief for reason magazine matt welcome so i know it's over one hundred degrees over there in las vegas but it's not stopping those freedom lovers from getting together as. well thankfully counselors in the air conditioning. joy as though the very big

funny kind of crazy. events here in a lot of free market libertarian organizations and a lot of financial investment. products which money to believe that things are all on the road together in a room. and it's of on them interesting and. now all of this comes at a time where a lot of libertarians and a lot of people think that. certain freedoms are under attack i mean this is after the end i was signed into law we're seeing a number of internet bills pieces of legislation that aims to crack down on internet privacy and freedoms on the internet maybe talk about the significance of the timing of this event. well they've been having it every year for a while but this noticeable kind of jumps in and activity and then human

juice in it here precisely because of how you laid it out i mean what libertarians frequently say and i think that we're right is that yes the two major parties in this country are different in this wouldn't sell themselves differently but once they're in power and exercising power there's a commonality and that commonality is almost always opposite in the direction that libertarians want libertarians want to shrink the size and scope of government in all aspects of our lives of us are and and people who are in power now george w. bush certainly did not increase in size govern by sixty percent of the promise certainly has not and their ability to to get into areas drone strikes against american citizens for crying out loud you know once they're in power their supporters forget whatever principle that they had before and they kind of look the other way so libertarians have a pretty consistent critique against that world and so rally together and indeed

the climate and i think becoming a more attractive the slow minority message but it's a more attractive message in america where now we have to be like forty percent of americans don't have a natural sense of identity that either the democratic or republican party and so they're out looking for something that's different and i think the ideas behind that are tearing at the maybe more than the party let's say offer that kind of different way of looking at the world that resonates more strongly with where they're headed when do you think it's fair to say that the libertarian movement is a is a growing movement in the last oh certainly the end of the two sharable thrust of the surveys every four years they came out of the political type ology here the five five or six or seven and a category americans for the first time in spring of this year they identified a category as libertarian which they said were on nine percent of the topic. lation difference of studies that bear with others is done with canada you know between ten and fourteen fifteen percent something like that but it's on the grow it's

a label that really hasn't been named by you know the responsibility of governments we're not pissed off but libertarians for what they've done that was because you really haven't done all that much to anybody and in general on the issues that people are frustrated with because they don't seem to be getting any headway stuff like opposing war in the war on drugs opposing bailouts and bailout economics that come with it. are the libertarians have been talking about this book for decades of so that stuff tends to become more and more popular as americans become increasingly frustrated with the logjam. so you think the reason part of the reason for this growing libertarian movement is that people think they need to sack of all things government whether it's a government bailout or increased government regulation. and also the way we talk about governments i mean the two parties are really kind of. distressingly but now in the way we talk about politics over the weekend democrats want to spend their

whole on talking about mitt romney at a swiss bank account one and that's relevant to something you know and republicans two months ago were seriously wasting an entire news cycle talking about how once upon a time rock obama needed dog in indonesia you know really we have some problems in this country and all that sort of a turn off when politicians and when people talk about politics he railing on these really trivial matters you trust people often so they're looking for people who talk about it in a different way even if they might not themselves be totally anti-government but the the the number of people in america who say the government is trying to do too much and is trying to impose itself on our culture too much that number is this growing and growing at a very rapid now ron paul of course has become has been talking about all these things and has get into a huge following a very loyal passionate following

a lot of his followers are young and so i mean do you think it's kind of become cool to be a libertarian bandstands sure i mean a lot of a lot of more republican the way that people was speak about the city early jonah goldberg from the national review was a libertarian just a way to look cool when you're in college. certainly you know republicans not the way who i think in any setting my own biases coming through but you know young people speech you libertarians are put forget that people under a certain age they just grew up under the internet which is basically one of the greatest libertarian experiments that what you hear you are day after day participating in this thing where ninety nine point nine something nine percent of the activity is untouched by government really it's just people communicating with one another and talking and buying stuff or not buying stuff or. rick rolling one another i mean you just place and active place where people exercise their freedom those demonstration projects the people the marinating their whole lives is an

intuitive understanding that in that sense markets and freedom works and so even if you know young people voted for obama in huge numbers in the c. thousand data for democrats office it's not alarming but young people skew much more libertarian and much more independent than the rest of the population so i think there's a generation of them brought up in this pretty libertarian private universe that we have the question is how do we foist those insights into the public discussion and the problem. and you know a lot of libertarians there are a lot of them are young a lot of them are also frustrated especially with the way that they don't think ron paul got his fair share of media coverage and now they're frustrated over the libertarian presidential candidate candidate gary johnson and they're planning to stage a protest outside of they had corridors at the c.n.n. headquarters because they're saying it why are you not even mentioning him that

that they're frustrated that he is not getting any coverage at all i mean what do you think do you think libertarians get a fair share and news mainstream news that lasts i think in particular has gotten a bad deal he ran for the republican party nomination before the drop. and there were a couple of specific incidences where c.n.n. was organizing the state and he pretty much qualified under any conditions you want when they didn't have to go on and there's something kind of unseemly of you news organizations making these arbitrary decisions you know that you have to cross the fifty percent threshold to get on with the base so yeah good on them i think libertarian is probably more libertarian and certainly in terms of why this sort of your thoughts about your show is probably over represented by. live experience people are aware of us but in terms of of where they exist in the application of politics for sure they are not taken seriously as seriously as on the. right just

want to ask you one more question there matter so we see that this movement is growing where do you expect it to go in the future. libertarianism you know i think as it's applied to politics i would guess that it goes towards more single issue rather than single politicians single candidate or single party it's not about the twenty twelve election for say it's about legalizing marijuana which is something that's going to get on the ballot in washington a lot of which could be the first step finally on doing the program this integral want just like alcohol prohibition was ended by kind of a statewide revolt so i think people will gravitate towards individual actions of a troll more than let's have this thing called libertarianism but grow and have enough never little members there i think it's you know if it's a philosophy that people find some bits that they like and some bit that they're

a little bit freaked out by on a ad hoc basis using these insights to attack the worse the problem in the public sphere i think that's where we see things. very interesting that thanks so much for coming on the show that was not well to the editor in chief for reason magazine thank you. drugging detainee's with mind altering mad sounds like a line out of a movie right well it happens all the time in hollywood. just fine just. driving around. it's a bond sometimes. it's nice. but

it turns out that's not a far cry from what happens in real life at a partner defense report reveals that the government is doing just that the report which was made public thanks to a freedom of information act request shows that prisoners in military custody were forced to take powerful mind altering drugs it's yet another questionable interrogation practice revealed that goes on at one time obey and other secret military prisons around the world so what are the implications of this and our mind altering drugs just altering us intelligence to dig deeper into this i'm joined now by jason leopold he's the lead investigative reporter for truthout dot org welcome to you said so i know you are one of those that filed this freedom of information act request to the government tell us more about these chemical restraints as they're called. we don't know much about them i just want to point out that my colleague jeffrey kaye originally filed this freedom of information act request two years ago the report makes clear that chemical restraints were used on

uncooperative detainees at that word uncooperative is in the report we don't know exactly what that means we don't know what those chemical restraints are but one thing that's very important to point out here is that these drugs these psychoactive. anti-psychotic medications that were given to these detainees and those detainees were interrogated while they were on those medications the government report the pentagon watchdog report says that it could produce unreliable information so the detainees are on this medication who knows what they're being asked what they're admitting to the government is saying that that could lead to unreliable information in the d.c. circuit the system that set up there now is that everything of detainees says in a v is in their heaviest corpus case is presumed to be true so the burden falls upon

the detainees to prove that it's not true that's that's must be very troubling to learn for these lawyers to have learned this. new word on what exactly this medication is and how it does impact and whoever it's being used on psychologically . sure well you know in the report it does state how doll which is a very powerful anti-psychotic medication the can even will lead to permanent nerve damage but there's a very long list of side effects. the report names that medication as the only medication that they identify that was summoned tain these were injected with or at least one detainee was injected with there's no other mention of any other medication that would take. a good look but you have to take a good look at their medical records which again has been very difficult if not impossible for certainly the public in the the attorneys to get in fact when i file

a freedom of information act request for these medical records i'm basically told it's a privacy issue and i would be invading the privacy of the detainees in terms of obtaining them so there's still a lot of questions that need to be answered because we just don't know the answer any idea how many detainees were a subject of this and where exactly this goes on. this was happening at guantanamo at prisons in iraq and afghanistan. is named and what one detainees called the prison of darkness in kabul. so the report looked at the inspector general for the department of defense looked at sixteen hundred interrogation plans covering four hundred eleven detainees it's unclear again how many detainees

this this involved in terms of the you know the medications that they were given but the report does say you know many detainees i do want to point out though that the report also says that as a matter of government policy they could not substantiate the investigation could not substantiate as a matter of government policy that detainees were given mind altering substances for the purposes of interrogation. but what the report also noted is that in the case of jose padilla the u.s. citizen who is accused of being a terrorist facilitator. with. the report noted that he was the subject of a deliberate ruse in which his interrogators made him believe that a flu shot was actually truth serum and it took a psychological toll on him and that information was actually withheld from his

attorney when they had filed a torture lawsuit against former secretary of defense donald rumsfeld and other bush administration officials now jason and is there any what kind of answers were the interrogators getting while they were interrogating these drug detainees. again you know these are these are questions that very important questions that we just don't have the answers to i mean what what the report says is that it didn't go into that area simply looked at whether or not the allegations that detainees had made that they were given medication or injections such as truth serum l.s.d. p.c.p. whether there was any they can substantiate that any veracity to those claims however in the case of one detainees that we identified in the report. you know he said that his interrogator essentially asked him that or he confessed to his

interrogator that he was a member of al qaida and we also know that this detained he was injected with how do all we also know from the report that the inspector general determined that this detainees was diagnosed as borderline with borderline personality disorder schizophrenia and psychotic and after he made this confession while he was on these while he was on this anti-psychotic they kept him locked up in guantanamo for three more years so you can imagine that basically they were looking to just get confessions whether they were false confessions i think. i think that the evidence to show in fact that they were false confessions he was eventually freed and to repatriated back to saudi arabia but that again another troubling example of how we were extracting false confessions it appears from detainees captured so i

mean this seems counterproductive and i mean if you're going to get if you want to try to get intelligence and extract information you would want that information to be accurate. you know one would think you would want that information to be accurate yes but as i noted this report. makes clear that you know they were or i should say that the report makes clear that basically what they were doing here was just extracting confessions and sort of you know closing the book in. trying to document the reasons why these detainees should remain in prison but this story also follows another one that my colleague jeffrey kay and i co-wrote just a couple of months ago again from a freedom of information act request document showing the guidebook to false confessions how this type of interrogation or how the the techniques that were used would ultimately simply produce false confessions so it would appear

that they weren't even interested in whatever intelligence they were. trying to obtain and i think that this report certainly shows that you know there is a cruel aspect to interrogating detainees who are gravely ill mentally very interesting another controversial layer to the kinds of interrogation practices going on in these military presence jason thanks so much for coming on the show appreciate it that was jason leopold lead investigative reporter for truthout dot org. well that's going to do it for the news for this hour but stay tuned for a special edition of capital account today house floor unless there is taking the ball by the horns wall street that is she infiltrated the new york stock exchange and we'll bring you a behind the scenes luck as to what really goes down there that's coming up next

but we will be right back here and a half hour see that. wealthy british style. markets why not come to. find out what's really happening to the global economy with max cons or for a no holds barred look at the global financial headlines tune in to kaiser report on r g.

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