freeboard video for your media project street radio gondar t. dot com. bloodshed and violence rages on in syria a civil war between the assad government and the rebel army but who is arming who are two questions more. was there 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 sets 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 we'll show you why both the democrats and the republicans should take these men and women seriously. it is monday october fifteenth five pm in washington d.c. i'm christine watching are today. well there's a new method being used to try to learn more about what's happening inside the borders of syria a group of reporters with publications including the new york times has taken to using the online pinboard pinterest to try to post pictures and analysis of weapons in rebel possession hoping to learn more about exactly where these weapons are coming from take a lot of what they found now in some cases they're finding weapons in the possession of these anti-government fighters in syria that are marked with the impression made in iraq there are many other types and origins for these weapons

and it's interesting that pinterest has now become a place for people to pool information to talk more about this i am joined by freelance journalist emmanuel stokes emanuel are quite a bit of confusion here about what's actually happening in syria of course but let's talk about this pooling of information when it comes to where these weapons are coming from why is this an important project. it's important because fundamentally this one of where the weapons are coming from you begin to learn about what sort of signs of the sort what's involved in the conflict and who's funding who. i saw on the thing i mean but the main thing we have to say though is we don't know i mean ok we've got some pretty gross missed the triggers which say supply made in iraq now lead doesn't surprise me too much but making the connection between that and say only. the she is. i'm saying that he's involved because that you know we can't be certain about it yeah i think let me just stop you there i

mean having a lot of people you know might know that bashar excuse me that you know the leaders of government in iraq is supportive of bashar al assad's regime so you know coming up with conspiracy theories that there are you know simultaneously you know arming the rebels is certainly you know would be misleading but some of these weapons are actually quite old and most people don't believe that weapons are being made. facts are dead in iraq now a lot of them were from the time when saddam hussein was in power so i mean just kind of taking a look at that talk about what we can draw into you know historical context and the fact that some of these weapons are quite old. you know i mean it seems that basically the new government has taken hold of you know the storage of weapons that saddam had and maybe sending you know to increase regional influence basically in syria because the main issue here and what i mean what the whole thing about you

know weapons from close friends up to me is that this is fast becoming a proxy war even a sectarian war some degree not entirely and i think it would be over simplify things to sort of simply call it out but i believe that's sort of happening. and we can see that you know it's quite clear that. you know just just just from reports for example new york times in june in the u.s. of essing weapons that are coming in from turkey and it's it's clearly a sign that they know they're. coming from from foreign powers in particular saudi arabia that's another thing we saw weapons that mate. that said boxes of weapons made in saudi arabia on the interests of the. site but i mean it's been known for a long time that these these i was getting involved in on the side of the of the bustle and it's become increasingly a. fight between the sunni dictatorships. in saudi arabia and qatar to some degree not totally and also.

the other side which is supported by russia and china and so on why that's not only good point i mean we're seeing these pens of all of these weapons and what they say on the what they look like i want to think is not being pinned at least to my knowledge is about the rebels themselves who they are and if they are indeed unified about more than just ending assad's regime how about this and i mean what do we know about these rebels. well what do you know about these rebels i mean again he said we can't be totally certain but we don't want a zero which is you know it to me has to be fairly pro the f.s.a. to some degree again i was making us a generalizing statements but you know they are qatari own so they were. you know you they they interviewed i think one of the leaders of the of the of the f.s.a. and he said yeah we admit that we are infiltrated by jihadi jihadi succumbing calling to reports from all over the muslim world but we don't know exactly i mean

we know that they've got some links to people but they're listening to none a lot wrong who is famous some would say still artist shaikh syrian ex-partners and in saudi arabia and he's made various bloodcurdling statements about killing other whites who you know side with the f.s.a. . yeah i mean you have to say i mean if you go back to the very beginnings of the arab spring which is of course you know almost out totally out of the picture now but the uprisings that were in syria you hadn't mikhail keeler and we had dr who are some of the intellectual leaders of the uprisings and they didn't want they didn't want. an armed conflict against a monstrous tyrants who naturally had. you know his forte would be you know savage brutality you know and having having a greater amounts of you know weapons and military might and what's really happened is the the values of the arab spring sit down as this is you know increasingly becoming a. you know an arms race but i mean yeah there's

a lot of people going around i mean at the same time you know moscow i mean putin's a pretty bad human rights abuse and we've seen that recently a lot of things including you know we would proceed right so you know people you can't take more of a stance from either side and you have to be quite objective about what's going on here and it just seems like it's a dirty war being fought with hard power in military hard power for political gain and what really needs to happen is some kind of comp. yes i think it's important to emanuel to you know just talk about connecting the dots here i mean one of the main reasons that we know so little about what's going on in syria is because we see when journalists do try to report from there you know that their kid now is very very hard to get around is the bottom line so i guess i mean is this as a freelance journalist yourself i mean do you think this is a new age of journalism you know it seems like in this case in the same way that painter s. allows you know people to function as

a village putting together the best recipes for a liaison yeah you know these people are pooling their information about these weapons yes what do you think is going to be the end result here well i mean the trouble is this is abuse i mean you know you go you go you shoot videos that you can't confirm of people being you know talk show being executed by the f.s.a. in the streets now they seem pretty convincing but we just don't know you know we don't know who they come from we don't know the provenance however yes pinterest loads of other sites can be used but you know the internet is also about a growth propaganda and has been since the early days just as me just some degree you know have been since the media's been in existence what's basically interesting though is citizen journalism this is something i respect very deeply and this is what i like about the freelancers like you sort of say what i want you know. i'm trying to get at the truth i mean of course you can do the stuff reporter but you do with some subversive things more and citizen journalists you know they don't

have an agenda they just want all the tree from learned you know perspective and. i think to safely represent their own experiences. so that's a very interesting development in war and i mean given that you know we've seen like iraq you had also an awful lot of embedded journalists who. you know toe the line of the of the of the one of the nation the government one of the nation the reporting while they were not what they were shown they didn't see you know it because he wanted the protection of the of the troops they saw where they were taken and that's the story that they have i just ask you one where. question because you are in new zealand we're obviously based in washington d.c. last week here we have the vice presidential candidates debate i just want to play really quick what vice president joe biden said regarding syria. 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 under way so upon seeing that the question a whole lot of people ask is what is the other aid the vice president was referring to i guess i'm just curious to what the reaction to this was internationally emmanuel. well i mean it's sensually what we've got of them i mean if you read the chip as was the new york times journalist or erosional times that went along with his interest based he was talking about how a lot of people inside syria were saying well the west is not really doing a lot it seems to me that the west and so you know it's not reaction is probably you know talking about how we hate the state law insulin so i think most people feel that way the question hangs over a lot of people's minds is how do we solve it and how do we solve it not only as a massive mess. in terms of what he's referring to biden. support well i mean we know some aspects of what the u.s.

is doing i mean they definitely know about the flows that are going in they said that they provided non-lethal support but it's pretty clear they're probably more issue with satellites even drones. and so they're providing diplomatic you know support and intelligence support i think the rebels. you know it's hard to speculate and i think i've speculated too much right about you know aspects of what's going on. so it is interesting i mean just such an interesting story at least we thought that the whole pinterest aspect the idea of various journalists freelancers like yourself pulling information just to try to better connect the dots about a story that frankly we just don't know much about and we appreciate having you on the show especially from new zealand freelance journalist and manual stokes thanks so much. well today kicks off a week of pretrial hearings for five men accused in orchestrating the attacks on september eleventh two thousand and one those men including the lead shaikh

mohammed who has called himself the mastermind of the attacks as well as ali abdul aziz ali moustafa. well lead been a touch and ramzi bin al s'shibh these hearings have been a long time coming and before they truly get underway judges may must first make decisions about the way the hearings might be conducted and what information that is shared will be made public as because prosecutors in the case of ask the u.s. military judge to consider what's known as a protective order in which a forty second delay would be implemented so that if for example information about enhanced interrogation in secret cia prisons is revealed that it could be censored prosecutors cite security as the main reason 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 just justice system and also about potential holes in our nation's history earlier i was joined by colonel

morris davis a retired air force attorney and a professor at howard university school of law the whole reason guantanamo was selected to begin with was that it was out of sight now the 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 that you know american court of justice that you were holding up to the world as our example that this is the process that we're using but the 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 i mean some of these made a bit in our custody for over a decade well that's the case then what do you think prosecutors are so concerned about along with his prosecutor so much is 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 kicked off today we've 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 to lay. talk a little bit about sort of just the process of what i mean the 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 with joe you said one time i was it was appropriate 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 defendants participate in ramadan the holy month of ramadan and that ashes 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 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 one hundred sixty six minute guantanamo to 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 for federal prison is about thirty thousand dollars a year so for the fiscal conservatives this audit when the police 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 repeat this saying you know this is a war crime this should be held in a war court well you know it's interesting. just came i 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 blackhawk down in

a recent interview that there had been a lot and 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 as the gold standard clearly the military commissions are so this notion that these are war crimes that have to be prosecuted in front of a war court clearly have been 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. you know 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 in 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 the 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 howard university school of law thanks so much. 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 it day and night while the second of three presidential debates take place takes place tomorrow night but there's a growing sentiment that some people will be missing from the stage at the two party system. is not viable anymore so we want to tell you about another debate taking place here's part of an ad coming up promoting it. step outside the two party stranglehold and we can learn what's being discussed outside the rig 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 party good constitution party and rocky anderson justice party this is storage presidential debate will take place on

october twenty third at eight pm central time at the university club of chicago so 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 doesn't have the money mind or for that matter and the air time to talk more about this i was joined earlier by christina tobin founder of the free and equal elections and i first asked her if the president governor romney were invited to participate in a third party debate. well thank you for having me work with the free and equal elections 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 would say maybe

not probably actually what the people want throughout the united states for economic foreign policy we're also going to talk about the threat of stop to spreading across the nation the biggest threat to our electoral process of are people don't know about o.b.l. are open in question but you know we're going to interact with the people and bring in the internet 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 only within 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 well 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 close debates you have the fraud and we don't have real election 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 austrian 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 is a big article out 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 you talk about the mindset 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 system the people in 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 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 at

three 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 is bigger than judging apollo tado i'm so excited and we're expecting lots of media russia today of course from al-jazeera to all these to for. 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 the store 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 and 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 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 strangle of the system again the close debates why did ron paul you know the republican party they rather crash the party then let a good man like ron paul take over or else nader 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 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. of 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 and i should mention certainly a lot of our viewers christine you 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 tobin founder of free and equal lections foundation thanks for being on the show thank you for having me earlier this month the home of a family in billings montana was raided by a swat team the most egregious error during that raid was a miss timed grenade detonation the result of that

a twelve year old girl suffering from first and second degree burns this after a flash bang grenade was dropped through a window next to her bed as you can see here the flash bang grenade that left a large bowl shaped dent in the wall and according to the girl's mother it blew the nails out of the drywall another mistake the billings police department sent us want him to the wrong house the disastrous raid resulted in no charges or arrests despite the police having quote credible intel that the fashing family home was also home to a crystal meth lab jackie fashing the mother of the burned twelve year old said they quote a simple knock on the door and i would have let the men she said they said their intel told them there was a meth lab at our house if they would have checked they would have known there's not. same intel did not inform the swat team that there was a juvenile in the room unfortunately these no knock swat team raids are often a recipe for disaster resulting in injury and sometimes even death of innocent people the cato institute found it three hundred seventy eight documented

paramilitary raids have had some of those errors and this is not as rare as you think since one thousand nine hundred five swat teams have raided innocent people one hundred ninety one times so why does this keep happening well it may have something to do with those increased funding for a military militant police force in the case of the billings ma police there senators were bragging as recently as august about securing more than fifty two thousand dollars through a justice department grant for equipment to quote improve community safety the twelve year old with the first and second degree burns may disagree about those improvements in safety well that's going to do it for now but for more on the stories we covered go to youtube dot com slash r t america or you can check out our website r t v dot com slash usa and you should of course follow me on twitter i'm at christine for example.