if you care about you and. this is why you should. only. trying to stop top secret leaks in the u.s. government congress is trying to get tough on those who still state secrets so why are lawmakers excluding themselves r t shines a light on the hypocrisy. and it was a scandal that rocked washington and the world ronald reagan's administration sold arms to iran to see if it civil secretively nicaraguan contras twenty five years after the iran contra hearings wrapped up where are the key players from the scandal and how does history judge them. as violence spreads inside syria are you getting all the facts as the western media giving viewers a fair representation of what's really going on inside the conflict r t questions war.

it's friday august third four pm here in washington d.c. i'm liz wahl and you're watching r t we begin this friday with congress's attempt to plug government leaks in the wake of some high profile leaks congress is pushing to prevent classified information from being made public the senate's anti leaking bill cracks down on government agencies but not all branches are created equal exempt from the bill are members of congress congressional staffers and the executive branch interestingly though that's where most government leaks reportedly come from so in the quest to crack down on leaks why aren't lawmakers getting to the source of the problem to discuss this josh gerstein white house reporter for politico welcome josh so this bell exclude some of the biggest perpetrators of government leaks what's the point that. well you know it comes out of the senate intelligence committee which only has discretion over only has jurisdiction i

should say over the intelligence agencies so they don't have authority really to regulate the white house to regulate the pentagon the state department or strangely enough they don't even have authority to regulate congress and their own staffers so you're saying that they can't include themselves even if they wanted to well they could pass legislation that would control all those areas with the possible exception of the white house which is a little more complicated but it would have to go through a bunch of different committees and that would probably take months and months and this is something that the senate intelligence committee panel seemed intent on trying to jam through in pretty short order and why do you think that is well i mean there's been a large outcry in the last couple of months here in washington about a series of very high profile leaks and members of congress are eager to do something about it it's not a purely partisan thing a lot of these proposals have gotten support from both democrats and republicans and the main driver behind doing something about it right now seems to be the

senate intelligence committee chairwoman senator dianne feinstein of california although mitt romney the republican presidential candidate has also brought it up himself. bray brought up dianne feinstein and ironically she is one of the biggest leakers and congress. well i mean i can't say that i know that personally but of course if you were looking for classified information to put into a story some of the first people you would approach on capitol hill would be members of the senate intelligence committee and so it wouldn't be surprising if i found out that some members of that committee and their staff had over the years leaked some of the information they're trying to crack down down on right now ok i should say that she is accused of being one of the biggest leakers and that's why some people are finding it ironic that she is now you know presenting this bill but and that's exactly what it is most importantly they don't come from the cia or the f.b.i. or the n.s.a.

but would you say it's fair to say that most of them do in fact come from those that are involved in public office. i would say they come either from the hill or they come from the white house or from senior administration officials from your assistant secretaries your secretaries your public affairs people in the government agencies the truth is that the average rank and file cia officer is not likely to be speaking to a new york times reporter i mean how would the reporter even find out who that person is it seems far more likely that this kind of information comes through the channels of officials who are dealing with these kinds of journalists on a day to day basis ok that being the case that what this bill really change anything. i think it could change things because it makes certain things that go on all the time a lot harder for example there are background briefings that intelligence agencies do for porters there have even been instances where agencies like the n.s.a. tried to give reporters tips on how not to blow the cover of the agency when they're writing stories that kind of stuff would become

a lot more difficult for agencies to do under this law i would say it would be impossible but only the director and deputy director of an agency could really speak to reporters on background or off the record and that would just be a very different way of doing business than these agencies do right now and i mean how i mean you as a journalist i mean how would that affect you know journalists being able to do their jobs and could that kind of lead to a you know this piece of legislation being a transparency kalar. well it's already happening frankly it's not really a hypothetical there is already a chilling effect there are already a lot of people who may have been more willing to speak in the past being very very careful about what they say and who they talk to and that's in part because of legislation like this but in part because of the criminal investigations that are going on into some of these past leaks you wouldn't want reporters name to be all over your desk calendar or your you know your outlook calendar at this point because you never know when investigators are going to come rummaging through that

calendar or through your e-mail looking for your entire history of contact with reporters so maybe this legislation is already having some effect before it even hits the books so do you think you know things like the kill lists and other things that have been made public that some of these things are not going to make it to the media because because of this crackdown. i think that's very likely that some information won't be coming out and you know there are real questions about whether all these secrets in fact are secrets and which ones of them really need to be kept under wraps and which ones are things that people should be have the right to debate about in a in a democracy and this comes at a time where the government is accused of over classifying documents and you know especially in the wake of wiki leaks and bradley manning a lot of people are saying that too much is being considered classified information so i mean how does that kind of play into this. well i think almost everybody agrees that too much information is classified and too many people have access to

it there is something something like five million people that have some type of security clearance in the country that's like approaching two percent of the population and you really can't claim that you're holding these secrets that tightly when five million people can look at them so that's definitely a problem that needs to be worked on and other folks if that look you can't keep the really secret stuff that you need to keep secret secret when you have a system that makes secret all kinds of things that don't really need to be kept from the public it makes the task of keeping the true secret secret a lot harder. to another thing that this bill seems to do or or the effect of it is that it might in sales some fear within the government you know within the government oh yeah as i said i think it's already having that effect there's already a concern that look either right now or in the future people are going to be monitoring what we say to reporters so why bother to talk to the journalists at all the other weird thing that happens here is instead of speaking to journalists a lot of these quotes might decide oh i'd rather speak to the folks at

non-governmental organizations it doesn't cover foreign diplomats or any kind of the other dinner party conversation that takes place in washington it just mainly cracks down on contact with the media and especially those consultants who are talking heads on the cable news networks what do you think needs to change in this bill to make it more effective i guess well i mean they really need to look at do they want to do they want to apply these rules to everyone in the government or do they want to only have it apply to those in the intelligence agencies that's really the critical question that i think congress has to confront and will they apply the rules to themselves all right josh thank you very much that was thank you so much for coming on the show that was josh gerstein he's a white house reporter for politico. well today marks the twenty fifth anniversary of the final hearings into one of the biggest scandals to rock american politics it's known as the iran contra scandal but strangely it seems most americans forgot it ever happened and went down during the reagan administration and involved the

u.s. selling weapons to iran and funneling money to rebels in nicaragua r.t. correspondent ben will wrap takes us through a timeline of the scandal. remember that time the united states sold weapons to the iranian government in a weapons exchange for hostages deal in spite of an embargo against selling arms to iran i'm talking about the iran contra scandal this scandal resulted in the single largest short term drop in approval ratings for any us president in american history so here's what happened we know from declassified documents and what became known as the reagan doctrine that the contras who were in the early one nine hundred eighty s. battling the cuban backed sandinistas and you were as president reagan once put it the moral equivalent of our founding fathers under the reagan doctrine the cia trained and assisted the contras and other anti-communist groups across the globe this was a challenge for the reagan administration however because the democrat controlled congress at the time opposed any us government involvement in iraq still reagan

insisted that no effort should be spared in aiding the contras the events that led to the words iran and contra even being used in the same sentence are the result of a complicated set of super secret operations that would alter the public's perception of president reagan dramatically it was nine hundred eighty five iran and iraq were at war when iran secretly requested an arms deal from the united states national security adviser robert mcfarlane convinced reagan that the deal was a good idea despite an existing embargo against selling arms to iran at the time reagan had also grown frustrated over a stalled hostage situation involving seven americans being held by iranian terrorists in lebanon the deal takes place anyway violating the embargo and consequently striking a deal with terrorists breaking reagan's campaign promise never to do so by the time the public learned that the transaction took place more than fifteen hundred missiles had already been shipped to iran reagan addressed the media denying that the sale of weapons had been a weapons for hostages exchange and later simply claiming that the didn't have any

information available to him at the time speculation about the involvement of reagan then vice president george bush and the administration at large was everywhere take a look at the c.b.s. interview from one thousand nine hundred eight then vice president george bush was asked about his involvement. can you reconcile that you were there mr underscored three separate occasions that it was a hostage swap and told you were doing the most radical elements in iran you were doing straight away with the ayatollah khomeini told what they were doing and not what we were doing and that's the big difference and then i expressed my concerns and reservations about that that has been testified to under oath by mr poindexter that's not the end of the story though during the arms for hostages deal investigation it was found that only twelve million of the thirty million dollars that the iranians reportedly paid for was accounted for the discrepancy resulted from a diversion of funds aimed at funding the contras in nicaragua enter all over north

of the national security council and national security adviser admiral john poindexter who had full knowledge of the operation both assuming they had reagan support so did the president know the activities were illegal and if not how could something of this scale occur without his knowledge by one thousand nine hundred two george bush's president everyone gets pardoned and history is left to repeat itself we see examples of this today in the forms of emboldened claims of power by u.s. presidents when it comes to foreign policy or the justification for say warrantless wiretapping or in the events leading to the iraq war many rob lowe r. t. washington let's talk more about the iran contra scandal is the man who actually broke this story back in nineteen eighty-four rather apparently polk award for his coverage of the scandal and joins us now to discuss robert welcome so first i want to start off by asking you how did you discover the iran contra scandal. well the work i was doing with the associated press was more focused on oliver north he had

this dual portfolio one side was for central america and one side was for a counterterrorism i was focused more on his central america side in covering that and dealing with where the money was coming from to fund the contras we stumbled upon his network which was this is essentially extralegal operation being run out of the white house to get money and weapons to the contras no later on it turns out that some of that money was being diverted from these arms sales to iran now how would you describe after breaking this story how would you describe the public's response well the public was outraged that especially that president reagan would deal with the iranians who had not that long ago been involved in their own hostage. case in terms of taking american diplomats and other people working at the u.s.

embassy in tehran hostage back in one nine hundred eighty s. and that had been a major issue during the one nine hundred eighty campaign as as president carter tried to win their release and was constantly frustrated making the american government will weaken making him look weak and that was part of why reagan won so decisively in november of one nine hundred eighty. but that the taste of all that was quite unpleasant still for the american people and the idea that reagan would be secretly funneling weapons to them was something that was hard to believe and i believe we do have a clip of president ronald reagan where he comes out after the story about where he comes out and addresses the public when it's right take a listen to that a few months ago i told the american people i did not create arms for hostages. my heart and my best intentions to tell me that's true but the facts and the evidence tell me it is not. so what do you make of president reagan's response they're kind

of taken responsibility but not really well i think there was a cover up and the cover up was largely successful some aspects of the story were work supposed to probably by journalists and probably by the work of congress in in bringing an investigation to bear for a while but they don't count it very serious pushback from the white house in the in the reagan administration. which led to the investigation never being seen through there was an effort by a special prosecutor lawrence walsh to get to the bottom of these things he was constantly delayed and by the time he actually began to break through the coverup in one nine hundred ninety one one thousand nine hundred two people were properly bored with the scandal people have forgotten about it and then and then even as he was making progress in late one thousand nine hundred to president george h.w. bush who was who'd been defeated for reelection on christmas eve ninety two turns

around and pardons half dozen of the defendants effectively killing the investigation so the trials that what that might have explained much of this in one thousand nine hundred three never took place and the cover up ultimately worked did you expect i mean when you first broke the story that there would be ramifications for the big players you know like like reagan and you know and point x. or did you expect that there would be some consequences. well you have to remember that back in that time frame one thousand nine hundred it was not that far from watergate the watergate scandal had led to nixon's resignation in in one nine hundred seventy four. there had been a number of laws put in place by congress to control the cia and to control and to limit what the president could do in terms of these kinds of secret activities in a way what iran contra was a push back to that ronald reagan and his vice president george h.w.

bush simply didn't want to go along with that they wanted to carry out their own foreign policy and so they found a way to do it sensually circumventing congress circumventing the law. i suppose when you look at the fact that some of what they did would constitute felonies i.e. the arms export control act where people are supposed to report to congress when they sell arms to a country any country but especially one on the terrorist list like iran the fact that that could be done and there would be fact effectively no consequence is somewhat surprising but i think in retrospect looking back at it what you would you would see of iran contra was it was that middle stage from the period of watergate and the reforms to the more wide open approach that president george w. bush operated with last decade you could see iran contras as a as a fork in the road and ultimately the united states took the path of allowing the president to do more and more in the nick and accountable fashion and some muddling

along with that you know some people call the iran contra one of the greatest examples of the president over a stepping down drains and bypassing congress i do believe that to be the case. yes i think that was the case the president president reagan affectively. told congress that it was not he was not going to follow the law as if he did not wish to when some of it was exposed anyway he did a lot of the symbolism and even lying sort of the people around him they gauged in a very aggressive coverup they attacked the investigators quite aggressively. especially using some of their media assets so you had you had basically the framework for the the executive branch. becoming unaccountable when it came to congress trying to assert its constitutional role in setting these kinds of laws to constrain the president so yeah i think what you see here was that the case with

the president did what he wanted to in defiance of the law and pretty much got away with it and you had mentioned earlier you described it as a fork in the road do you think that's kind of set a dangerous precedent for the way you know business is conducted in washington and how would you say the scandal changed the course of history in the last. well i think basically what you saw here was the failure of the institutions of washington to get control of these things there had been an effort in the seventy's after watergate after the exposures of cia abuses to bring some constraints on to this process and then you saw the iran contra scandal it was the first test case really of would congress really hold the president to task and and make sure that he couldn't go off in his own direction and the press as well the american press corps was changing here too going from the more aggressive watergate press corps to the to the to the less aggressive press corps we see today and so i think in all those

ways the institutions of washington failed to to both enforce the law see the law was in force but also in just explaining to the american people what had happened there are still many sections of the scandal that we don't know the full story about or even a chunk of the story there's the really issue when this actually started the report you should had earlier described it as starting in one thousand nine hundred five which is the conventional wisdom but there was evidence that we kept going back to and as we try to trace the history of this showing that that the shipments actually began in one thousand nine hundred one and according to the assistant secretary of state for the middle east nicholas dalio does when he investigated some it is he found out that it went back to one nine hundred eighty and the reagan campaign when some people in the reagan campaign were making contacts with the iranians off the books so we never got to the bottom of this whether or not this was actually a much bigger scandal that involved essentially trying to fix an american election

in one nine hundred eighty we don't really know all that happened in that early phase we do have a glimpse of what happened in eighty five eighty six timeframe which we have a pretty good history on now but so much of this remains still something outside the historical picture that the. american people have been denied we don't really know who did what and why and even how and you know and despite the magnitude of this scandal and the implications of it it seems today most people don't even know what it is or that it ever even happened i mean what do you think about that do you find that shocking and why don't people know more about this well there was a desire after this period to to make ronald reagan into more of an icon as one of the greatest presidents ever was is the way some people put it it really doesn't match the historical record but there was a tremendous effort to name buildings after ronald reagan the name national airport in washington after ronald reagan he was turned into this kind of like conic figure

this hero and there was very important for the republicans that in effect they wanted their version of john kennedy and they and they use ronald reagan to sort of build their own fire brand if you will so i think that was that was a factor that people came away in the conventional wisdom was that ronald reagan was a nice guy trying to do the right thing. the evidence may not match that but that's the that's the sort of the hangover of this period that's what people think that's the conventional wisdom so i think given that there's been a desire to sort of shove aside some of the unpleasant history about ronald reagan and just look at the good side very interesting robert thank you so much for coming on the show that was of robert perry investigative journalist for consortium news dot com. point turned out to the crisis in syria where there is seemingly no end in sight as things western media outlets are racing to place the blame on

damascus for the bloodshed while turning a blind eye to rubble atrocities artefacts on a boycott reports. i've heard. or seen a story joining the camp when a japanese journalist travelling with syrian rebels converted to islam it wasn't just his old name he abandoned. most but for those around him he still being someone who become political he became one of the few camera hanging places when i come back. while religious conversion of journalist is rare on the syrian front lines becoming political disciples on one side the rebels is almost the norm for many reporting to the world in the past weeks of coverage c.n.n. has aired five exactly just from the syrian frontlines people all detailing butterflied of those fighting the government and while the regime has always come down to use of force against the militants there's

a government onslaught killings by the rebels barely get a mention what happened to the guy you captured this from he died the rebel commander says god willing he went to hell usually open and talkative syrians are now afraid of cameras those who agree to be interviewed often ask for their faces or names not to be shown for fear of reprisals satellite dishes or household commodity syrians do watch western coverage of the conflict and many feel that their concerns that fears the losses are intentionally lost over. but you don't. just because you know what this is not really even first time i've been able to come to syria you know why you might want to before you did and you don't have a visa. we've been waiting for a visa you know you know sort of they really don't come to get these are the usual claim that the syrian government doesn't let western reporters into the country is not accurate currently there are around eighty foreign media outlets accredited in

syria a sizeable number of them european or american but they're dispatches are not always welcome to talk christiane is an independent belgian writer. and. to bring. about syria. the evil. the use of force arsenal or selective editing is hardly a new invention the war war's has long become a cliche but in syria one sided coverage keeps the war going and shooting for t.v. . journalism schools no longer teach their students to be objective it's considered impossible rather they're told to strive for balance and integrity and to put humanistic values above political but syria is once again a special case in this bloody conflict was to media rarely calls for the conciliation of political dialogue rather it's for arming the rebels and for the

war also known as freedom fighter to go on some of the artsy reporting from syria. that's going to wrap it up for the news but the capital account is up next on our team and let's check in with lauren lyster to see what is on today's agenda lauren i understand are going to be talking jobs report today absolutely it is jobs day last we have the report out for july and people probably know what was kind of the headline number from that report the unemployment rate at eight point three percent a little higher non-farm payrolls that exceeded expectations coming in at one hundred sixty three thousand the question is this a good report or a bad report because you know depending on who you listen to you get a totally different story you have mainstream media saying the good july jobs report that exceeded expectations is why the market rallied then you see mitt romney out using this as ammo to say that the economy essentially sucks we are going to look at how economic data this being one example can be used as a choose your own adventure kind of story and what really then is the true picture

is there one that we can gather from something like the economic data coming out from the government that everyone seems to base their. there's feces off of and what does that mean for the economy for investors for average folks good question we're going to talk about it also live it wouldn't be a day i guess without new news of wrongdoing from the too big to fail banks that has really seemed to be able to get away with anything without much scrutiny new reports show that the london whale remember that massively risky trade that j.p. morgan was taking well turns out this guy was doing it according to the wall street journal and sources hey guess what his boss told him to fudge the valuation so we'll just look at what this signifies about a rigged system and what people can do about it liz that's all coming up a lot to talk about that's coming up next on the capital account with lauren lister but that's going to do for the news from one of the stories we cover check out our you tube channel you tube dot com slash r c america can also follow me on twitter

at liz wall we'll be back here and have our. i'm a former soviet soldier. or prisoner. husband . a father. an alien in the beginning stages. a son. a brother. an alien in ukraine. craving for my whole family. you

know sometimes you see a story and it seems so for lengthly 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.