bloodshed and violence rages on in syria as a civil war continues between the assad government and a rebel army but who is arming who are two questions more. plus if you're waiting to hear the truth the whole truth and nothing but the truth in the upcoming trial against the accused nine eleven coconspirators you could be in for a rude awakening ahead we'll ask why some topics will be off the table in the trial of five guantanamo bay detainees and what this says about transparency in the united states. and there's a big debate coming up but i'm not talking about the made for t.v. drama that's that's a play out tomorrow night between president obama and rival mitt romney third party

candidates will square off in a live stream debate next week coming up i'll show you why both the democrats and the republicans should take these men and women seriously. is monday october fifteenth four pm in washington d.c. i'm christine for you're watching our team. let's begin this hour with some interesting developments in syria where what we do know is of course murky and often comes in video snippets and unconfirmed reports but of the biggest questions one of them is about the strength and supplies of those battling the assad regime well now there may be some answers the arms trade in syria is now being documented in an unlikely place on pinterest for those of you unfamiliar with pinterest it's essential to an online pinboard most people go on to pin recipes of dishes they hope to make wedding dresses and center pieces they like and ideas to give rooms in

their home a make over and now a group of reporters including some affiliated with publications like the new york times are sharing information pictures and data from syria take a look these are images of weapons in possession of anti-government fighters in syria you can see some of them are actually marked with the impression made in iraq but these extra starts with clinic pretty clear though is that these photos of these weapons come from a variety of places they've been reported to have come from saudi arabia. when the white house is asked about it very little of course is revealed but we did get this from the vice vice president joe biden that last week's presidential vice presidential candidates debate we are in the process now and have been for months in making sure that help humanitarian aid as well as other aid and training is getting to those forces that we believe the turks believe the jordanians believe

the saudis believe are the free forces in side of syria that is underway. so the question of course many people are still wondering to this day it is about this aid and where it's coming from and also a question that's not asked nearly enough who exactly are the rebels to talk more about this nick jensen jones military small arms and ammunition specialist joining us from australia nick pistor arrest is better known for his wedding inspirations talk about your role in what we've been seeing on these pinterest boards and also about the thought process behind using it to sort of crowd source information about the syrian armed conflict sure look i can't speak to pinterest specifically it's not a little platform i use but we're pressed facebook twitter forums blogs and so on so the social media play an important role tracing but also on analysis. it's

becoming more clear net that some of these weapons are coming from so many different places i know we heard recently you know the b.b.c. talking about weapons coming from saudi arabia we've heard weapons coming from ukraine i mean i guess this demonstrates on one hand just how difficult it is to get good information about these weapons but talk a little bit about give us some hints about how you track these weapons that salute look first of all for much as mission that we have seen weapons from saudi arabia we've seen small arms ammunition that appears to originated from syrian forces so that's that was produced as we discovered in the ukraine and then in the office the ships in saudi arabians and from this incident in syria somehow. tracking tracking which is interesting she said it's always difficult we use a very collaborative approach where possible and like i said social media made this a lot a lot easier for us as you mentioned it was a woman you know people like c.j. she was from the old times right through the images it was the home and just have the time to browse through the video and then we have people who are so for most

special to come in sort of help identify themselves so it's a seventy collaborative effort and something that's only happened in recent conflicts libya and syria have been two very good sort of testing grounds crispus for this sort of work or it's always developing but i think it's a very positive outcomes yeah it makes sense to me i mean when you talk about the need to pool information we've seen just how difficult it is for reporters to even get into places like syria and libya to actually cover the conflict do you think i guess what do you think this will help to do by collaborating and pulling this information look i hope we can get a clearer picture not only of what was it but also what are they coming from with it going summer it's one thing for us to look at and i did five what it is and that that lets you know people in the ground handle them safely and and take appropriate so you just treat me so but it's nothing also look you know where the arms come from but also we might be going to in libya already we're seeing signs that have some of the weapons have left the country and of a neighboring neighboring region sooner i think by working together and pulling all

the daughter we can get a bigger picture across the region in trying to stem the flow of arms. something that was really interesting to us here in the our to news room was on some of these weapons this this made in iraq stamp it's a little confusing because of course the current iraqi government supports bashar assad and would therefore most likely not be sending weapons to the rebels or not to mention that very few people believe any weapons are actually being manufactured in iraq these days or have been really since saddam wasn't paid winterson power so talk a little bit about you know these made in iraq weapons and what they might tell us . absolutely look. the ones i've seen so far have been made about internet in syria peter been produced during the reign of hussein and not post his dissent so it looks like they've been supplied as best we can to prevent a little tribal lines we see in rifles which are a dozen in muscle drive which in some heavy machine guns and d.s.h.

here in variety and also of course the seven governor which is of course we've also seen the transfer of what we think to the transfer of i.e.d. technology syrupy is that there have been some sort of sherry of techniques in terms of how to manufacture improvised explosive devices. so it looks like there is that way some support that but again we think it was staged organized long tribal lines as opposed to a government backed act if it what surprised you the most to in kind of what you've seen and what you've been able to analyze in terms of these weapons and where they come from. it's a different question which same perhaps the answer for this is the brits the ones we've seen far off from across the world from neighboring regions from neighboring countries rather also from within the region to broader and also part of the date from the thirty's and forty's right through to modern weapons so there's really a big range of small arms there and we don't have a complete picture and the only way you get a complete picture is like i said by collaborating by getting people on the ground to liaise with people with perhaps expertise who want it so some of these weapons

have been around literally for sixty or seventy years i mean that's fascinating reading you know when it's not just the origin of the weapons in syria i think another important question is the origin of the rebels who they are what they want and why do you think the media at least here in the u.s. has focused so little attention on finding this out. look at that's really not something i'm come to talk about it's not layer at all i have heard you know a wide range of theories i think it's certainly important to understand that particularly we're going to be supporting we in the broader western sense are going to be supporting the rebel groups or even supporting foreign governments to support rebel groups and certainly question that needs to be honest and i think it like you say it hasn't received attention deserves but it's not something i can answer yeah absolutely so in your expertise i mean you sort of study precisely what these weapons are and try to get a better at a better understanding what dots do you think in and of course there's still a lot of information that's not out there quite yet but what you've seen so far

what dots have you been able to connect yeah well when you say it's interesting person looking at the weapons and also the mission helps us help us determine not only where they've come from but to where the market or so i think which seems an obvious it is of supply through turkey obvious evidence of supply through iraq and through letter not there that it's really we've been was a pinpoint we've seen the iranian gyptian supply lines still have recently though and of course the chinese have backed. the assad government with the fire as for sometime. so there's that that range of weaponry laced what would be nice now is to look at the uninitiated it's only gives a look it's all very nice to look at a foreign but sometimes looking at the small arms ammunition can help provide a picture of of when when what is going resupplies when i mean it has been provided to people to keep weapons operational i think that's a critical part of the puzzle that we're missing yes that is so interesting i mean i think one of the questions here to nick is how this process works i mean this is not something that you know the rebel army shows up to

a warehouse and gets their weekly supply of weapons any idea how the process works i mean so interesting how many different places they're coming from how many different areas they're coming from but about how do they actually get into their hands it is fascinating we're seeing not only the cross border smuggling from from living on or from to here from iraq in small quantities we see organize what we believe to be organized mostly across the iraqi border for example like i say again will travel once we've seen what appears to be state support in the form of iranian deliveries of what we think of high explosive mortars and then we've seen over slee civilian foreigners to have in the fight as arms shotguns hunting rifles those sort of things would be the purchase of the border is. all from private collections so there's definitely range of ways that it is required but the one that is perhaps most important in the fight is battlefield capture and it's raising the sillies of troops and taking those farms and research into the rebels certainly multiple factions and strategies that work here really appreciate your analysis nic denson

jones military small arms and ammunition specialist joining us from perth australia thank you thanks. well today kicks off a week of pretrial hearings for five men accused in the or orchestrating the attacks on september eleventh two thousand and one those men include collegiates mohamed who has called himself the mastermind of the attacks as well as on the do as easily with stuff. while leave been untouched and ramzi bin al s'shibh these hearings have been a long time coming and before they truly get underway judges must first make decisions about the way the hearings might be conducted and what information that is shared with will be made public that's because prosecutors in the case of ask the u.s. military judge to consider what's known as a protective order and which a forty second delay would be implemented so that if you know for example information about enhanced interrogation in secret cia prisons is revealed that it could then be censored prosecutors tight security as the main reason here but

journalists and others are fighting back the a.c.l.u. calls this proposal by prosecutors both extraordinary and chilling and it brings up larger questions about truth and transparency in our justice system and also about potential holes in our nation's history and joining me now is colonel morris davis a retired air force attorney and a professor at howard university school of law and colonel davis thanks for being on the show today this is an important day as we know these hearings have been a long time in the making talk first about this secrecy aspect and your reaction when you heard the prosecutors were asking for this forty second delay well the whole reason guantanamo was selected to begin with is that it was out of sight now to mind in very easy to control and keep the public from understanding and knowing what's taking place there so this is just a continuation of that policy has been in place for a decade but it is unprecedented you know american court of justice that you were holding up to the world is our example that this is the process that we're using

but bill let's be honest i mean some of these enhanced interrogation techniques are indeed classified right. are there any that you can think of the public have heard about one hundred times already waterboarding you know i probably wouldn't know about it but waterboarding and all the other things have been discussed dozens and dozens of times for me some of these metal been in our custody for over a decade well that's the case then why do you think prosecutors are so concerned about all of his prosecutors so much as i mean they're carrying out their orders i think it's more of a political decision and. i think it says more about what we did to these detainees than what these detainees did to us because we prosecuted hundreds of people in federal courts with classified information without a security incident and quite successfully so i think these three dozen or so that we want to prosecute in a military commission which is a second rate process by any definition of the term compared to our patrol courts is really to overweight embarrassment to the u.s.

more than it is about these guys being war criminals that only this form is appropriate now as we saw the hearings kick off today we sort of been monitoring them as the day has gone on nothing get no decision yet has come down to my knowledge about this forty second delay. talk a little bit about sort of just the process of it i mean family members of victims have been invited to sort of see this obviously journalists you know defense attorneys even what topalov about the process if indeed this is granted that would make these this delay happen which would make it possible to censor the answers and it was really a very bizarre process has been used before really what the defense is asking to do here is to deviate from what has been the process in the past and to allow the public through the media to understand what took place but it's a very bizarre environment the spectators are seated behind a glass window where they can see the movement in the animation in the in the lips

moving in the courtroom but the sound lags forty seconds or more behind that at times is blanked out entirely so the. motions in the words never quite match which i guess a guantanamo is is a program yeah it is very strange though i'm sure for people who are sitting there trying to keep their eye on this through the glass let's take a look back now colonel davis about how we got here of course this trial has been more than a decade in the making it's been delayed numerous times i mean some of the reasons have included the threat of a hurricane internet outage you know letting these these defendants participate in ramadan the holy month of ramadan and that but that's just this year back in two thousand and eight you know these five appeared before a military commission but the judicial branch stepped in and demanded that new rules be written for some of the handling of this i guess just let me get your take on why this is taking so long with all of this. well unfortunately this probably

could have been finished in federal court years ago in fact attorney general holder not long ago in an interview said he regretted looking back now at two thousand and nine when the administration backed off of their plans to have these cases in federal court and gave in to the fear mongers and kept the yeah that was certainly the intention but then we heard so much i remember i was covering this we heard so much about bringing you know collegiate mohammed to new york city and children because you know this terrorist is going to be in town all right well and as you know attorney general holder said that in hindsight you know these cases could have been over and done in a credible way this a credit to our country and not an embarrassment and at less cost i mean we're keeping a hundred sixty six minute kuantan a mode of about one hundred sixty million dollars a year the really about eighty that we intend to keep in the others we'd like to send home but you know if you do the math as about two million dollars per person per year we're federal prison is about thirty thousand dollars a year so for the fiscal conservatives this audit when the fleece award for

policing the taxpayers for wasted money right but some of these same fiscal conservatives are the ones saying this needs to be in a military court and we're hearing you know frankly a lot of family members of the victims are repeat that saying you know this is a war crime this should be held in a war court well you know it's interesting abu hamza just came it was extradited from england back to the u.s. along with four others they were being prosecuted in federal court the president told mark bowden of the author of black hawk down in a recent interview that had bin laden been captured instead of killed he was going to be prosecuted in federal court so our federal courts are the gold standard i mean that's what we hold up to the world is the gold standard clearly the military commissions arm so this notion that these are war crimes that have to be prosecuted in front of a war court clearly and borne out by the facts of the hundreds of other cases we prosecuted in our federal courts so why then. i guess let's peel away sort of the

the messaging and the fear mongering and let's try and get to the bottom of why these are then held in military courts i think by and large is the embarrassment over what we did in trying to keep that quiet i mean i was on a panel last week here in d.c. with one of the senior members of the prosecution team who said all these trials are going to be a new era in transparency but as you've seen today i mean if transparency is a forty second sound allay and reporters tweeting from guantanamo then these are extraordinarily transparent but the public can attend and like i said you know the government can pick and choose what it wants to blank out and i think that's the purpose of the military commissions is to try to avoid embarrassment over things that we did in some cases a decade ago i guess just last question for you is so what do you think will be the long term impact of this trial well assuming it eventually gets done i mean today is just a preliminary hearing on motions last i heard there were in excess of one hundred fifty motions. i think of anyone in visions these trials went over and done any

time soon that's doubtful. but i think when they are over and done if they're done in a military commission they could be the most perfect trials in the history of mankind and the world is still going to look at it with a skeptical eye because for a decade now we've said over and over this time we got it right and this time it's justice and we're on about the fourth or fifth version of that now absolutely certainly a very interesting case that as you say will be going on for quite a long time colonel morris davis retired air force attorney and a professor now at howard university school of law thanks so much for. all right everyone we are twenty two days away from the presidential election and you've probably been inundated with all the breaking news about campaign stops both mitt romney and barack obama have been making each day and night the second of three presidential debates takes place tomorrow night but there's a growing sentiment that some people will be missing from the stage but the two party system is no longer viable here so we want to tell you about another debate

taking place here's part of an ad coming out promoting it. step outside the two party stranglehold and we can learn what's being discussed outside the ring two party political system the top six two thousand and twelve presidential candidates have been invited to participate confirmed candidates include gary johnson libertarian party jill stein green. good constitution party and rocky anderson justice party this is story presidential debate will take place on october twenty third at eight pm central time at the university club of chicago. so a debate for third party candidates many of whom you will see on the ballot in most states and yet whose ideas you rarely hear about because the media really pays the many mind or for that matter and the air time joining me to talk more about this is christina tobin founder and chair of free and fair elections christina talk to me a little bit about next week's debate have you invited the president and governor

governor romney to participate well thank you for having me work with the free and equal actions foundation and of course we did invite both romney and obama to participate in this debate but as we know the commission on presidential debates is committing a fraud on the american voters according to the league of voters and i don't expect them to attend but we welcome them to but we do do do have four candidates confirmed for this debate talk a little bit about some of the issues you expect to come up i mean will this be similar topics that we've seen in the debate that we've seen so far i would say maybe not probably actually what the people want throughout the united states from economic foreign policy we're also going to talk about the threat of stop top two top two spreading across the nation the biggest threat to our electoral process of are people don't know about o.b.l. or open in question but you know we're going to interact with the people and bring in the enter net let the people you know through online sources maybe you tube so on ask the questions at least a final question and our sponsors as well so it's going to be really interactive

and getting the real issues out there not on. lee i was in america but worldwide there's a lot of things going on the world that our current presidential commission has not addressed and that's wrong i want to talk to you a little bit more broadly about elections in general they're supposed to be free and equal and fair both according to the constitution and really as part of democracy as a whole when do you think elections stopped becoming free and fair oh it started back in one nine hundred seventy with the creation of the austrian ballots ballot access restricted ballot access here's the number one reason ron paul didn't run for as a third party can it back in two thousand and eight because of the difficult ballot access barriers and then you have the closed debates you have the fraud and we don't have real election electoral you know issues like proportional representation which are great things and you know for equal actions we support opening the base getting rid of fraud you know all these sort of things so it all derived from the creation of the ballots in the f.e.c.

a back in the thirty's forty's and then the federal reserve while that's that's the scariest component of our electoral system that these few guys at the very top they control almost all of our politicians democrats and republicans alike and it's really interesting i know there was a big article today in the new york times about libertarian candidate former new mexico governor gary johnson we've had him on our t.v. a few times but according to this article the libertarian candidate who's on the ballot and i think every state except michigan and oklahoma is starting to worry republican operatives they're concerned about johnson being the sort of ralph nader of today in other words the candidate who gets votes that would have instead gone to one of the other majority candidates christine to talk about the mind set here and also about some of the tactics being used both to intimidate voters and to try to block some of governor johnson's efforts oh don't be fooled by back in the last election when they labeled ralph nader's a spoiler there's like over twenty candidates that ran in florida that had enough

votes to change the elections again the real issue here is the two party stranglehold of the sister. the people in the office the d's and r.'s alike are controlled by the central banks which is controlled by the federal reserve which are the powerful guys at the top so if you want to hear the real issues gone on our website free and equal dot org and reserve today reserve to watch our online live feed of the debate october twenty third it's actually going to be at the hilton chicago now we outgrew the university club so we're really excited about that again free and equal dot org for real elections all action shall be free and equal what constitution what about the role of the mainstream media here i mean do you expect this will know you're going to have a live streaming on the web site but do you expect this is something that's going to be covered by by the major news networks it's huge we are announcing a world renowned moderator tomorrow no later than wednesday i bigger than judge an apollo tondo i'm so excited and we're expecting lots of media russia today of course from al-jazeera to all these different even fox maybe coming on board

c.-span i mean i'm so excited you know this is going to cover not only within the u.s. but worldwide we have a group of kids and leaders coming in from egypt to attend this debate so i'm so excited this is a story to open the elections and shift the power back to the people back to the origins of the constitution our forefathers said parties don't work and parties don't work their evil they said we're back to the individuals the independence of two thousand and fourteen is the key to shift the power back to run for office and i know here in our we have a show called the big picture hosted by our tom hartman tom will be at that debate what do you think he should be kind of keeping his eyes out for when he's there where he's going to be want to five political correspondents with josh tali and a couple others that hopefully events one with fox and so on al-jazeera we want to get amy goodman who got a couple confirm their thank you kevin for being there so talking about the stranglehold the system again the close debates why did ron paul you know the

republican party they rather crash the party. to let a good man like ron paul take over or else mater maybe he'll come in and you know be there jesse ventura you know talk to these people that have experienced the problem celebrities and so on i mean that i'm so excited tom will be there and i will also be having a second debate a week later october thirtieth in washington d.c. which the people will decide their instant runoff voting on october twenty third which two candidates will advance to the final debate i'm so excited that this is all happening so i should mention certainly a lot of our viewers christina know that this is not just something that takes place outside of the two party system i was you know in tampa for the r. and c. and even within the republican party there was a lot of backlash against you know just within the republican. nomination there is a process and it just wasn't followed with so much support for delegates who came there to support ron paul and were basically ignored so so it is really interesting

and i just wanted to mention that this isn't just sort of outside of the two party system it's even within that system that you know rules are being followed and people are certainly being frustrated so we appreciate what you're doing christina toben founder of free and equal lections foundation thanks for being on the show thank you for having me. coming up next on our capital account let's check in with lauren lister to see what is on the agenda today hey there lauren what's cookin hi christine it's monday and over the weekend i don't know if you caught it but the i.m.f. wrapped up some meetings of financial chiefs from all over the world concerned about the eurozone crisis the fiscal cliff in the u.s. the slowdown of some of the major emerging markets that have been driving growth and no decision or even agreement on how to approach this situation but sometimes it's hard to see the kind of more narrow vision of some of these world's economies when we're looking from such a broad view so we will bring you that today with our guest chris mayer christine

all right sounds very interesting lauren thanks. that's going to do it for us for now but for more on the stories we covered go to youtube dot com slash r t america or our website r t dot com slash usa. culture is the same us but there is a let me begin with i am a real a listener again that we are the global economy risk getting back into recession just three years after going out of the previous world growth is slowing in. the submission priests cretaceous priests or judges priests arrangements three. priests two priests the old cerebral against libby old for your media project a free media dog r t v dot com. poll

. colors. coming out the i love. the submission is pretty good you take priests or judges priests arrangements three. three stooges.