so. bloodshed and violence rages on in syria as the war continues between the assad regime and a rebel army but who is arming home r.t. 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 is set to 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 republicans should take these men and women seriously. well good evening it's monday october fifteenth fifty eight pm in washington d.c. and my name is christine for your washing our tea. let's begin this hour with some interesting developments in syria where of course what we do know is very murky and often comes from video snippets and unconfirmed reports but of the biggest questions one is about the strength and supplies of those battling the assad regime well now there may be some answers the weapon supply chain in syria is now being documented in an unlikely place on pinterest for those of you unfamiliar with pinterest it's essentially an online pinboard

a place where people save ideas and images that they like most people go on to pin recipes of dishes they hope to make wedding dresses or center pieces they like and ideas to give rooms in their home a make over but 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 it says made in iraq now it's pretty clear based on these photos is that the weapons have come from a variety of places when the white house is asked about syria or weapons very little is often revealed though we did get this from vice president joe biden at last week's 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 in 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. the vice president talking about humanitarian aid and other aid a lot of people after hearing this you know asked what is this other eight and the question still not asked enough who exactly are the rebels to talk more about all of this and more i was joined earlier by nick jensen jones military small arms and ammunition specialist i can't speak to pinterest specifically it's not a little platform i use but we're pretty 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 much as mission that we have seen weapons from saudi arabia we've seen small arms ammunition that appears to originated from saudi own forces so that's that was produced as we discovered in the ukraine and then in the over the shoot to the 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 it meant you know people like to see that it was from the old times right through the images who were sitting at home and just have the time to browse through was not a video and then we have people who are so for most special to come in sort of help identify themselves so it's a silly collaborative effort and something that's only happened in recent conflicts libya and syria have been two very good sort of testing grounds christians 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 a by collaborating and pulling this information look at how 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 that if i have what it is and that that lets you know people in the ground handle them safely and and take appropriate just and so but it's nothing also to look not only 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 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 team is 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 was unpaid winston 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 being produced during the reign of hussein and not post his dissent so it looks like they've been supplied as best we can to present a little tribal lines we see in temple grovels which are designated muslims or off which in some heavy machine guns and d.s.h. carry in variety and also of course the seven overnight which is of course we've also seen the transfer we think of the transfer of id technology syrupy is there have been some sort of sharing 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 that the state is organized the tribal ones as opposed to the government backed backed if it what surprised you the most to and kind of what you've seen and what you've been able to analyze in terms of these weapons and where they come from. did you wish you were saying perhaps the answer for this is the bridge the weapons we've seen so far i was from across the world from neighboring regions from neighboring countries rather also from within the region the brutal and also far of the dates from the thirty's and forty's right through to modern weapons so there's definitely a big range of small arms and we don't have a complete picture and the only way to 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 already you know but 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. that's really not something i'm going to talk about not larry 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 better at a better understanding why 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 to not only will it come from but when the market or so i think which seems an obvious it is

a supply through turkey obvious evidence of supply through iraq and through letter not that it's really we've been able to pinpoint we've seen the iranian gyptian supply lines do still have recent there and of course the chinese have backed. the assad government with the fire as for sometime. so there's that that range weapon or at least what would be nice now is to look at the uninitiated it's only gives it a look it's all very nice to look at a farm but sometimes looking at the small arms and the mission can help provide a picture of when the 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 nic 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 which they literally the cross border smuggling from from living on the from to here from iraq in small quantities you 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 a high explosive mortars and we've seen over slee civilian foreigners turning up in the fight is short on hunting rifles those sort of things would be the purchase of the borders. 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 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. well today kicks off a week of pretrial hearings for five men accused in orchestrating the attacks of

september eleventh two thousand and one those men include colleague shaikh mohammad who has called himself the mastermind behind the attacks as well as ali abdulla as easily mustafa. while 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 must first make decisions about the way the hearings are conducted and what information that is shared can be made public that's because prosecutors in the case of asked a u.s. military judge to consider what's known as a protective order in which basically 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 for this but journalists and others are now fighting back the a.c.l.u. has called this proposal by prosecutors both extraordinary and chilling and it brings up larger questions about truth and transparency in our justice system and

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 it was out of sight and out of mind and 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 an american court of justice that you know we're 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. there any that you can think of that the public hadn't 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 you know dozens and dozens of times i mean some of these may have been in our custody for over a decade well if that's the case and what do you think prosecutors are so concerned about along with his prosecutors so much is i mean they're carrying out their

orders i think it's more of a political decision that. i think it says more about what we did to these detainees and what these detainees did 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 federal courts is really to avoid embarrassment to the u.s. more than it is about these guys being war criminals that only this form is appropriate now as he said the hearings kicked off today we sort of been monitoring them as the day has gone on nothing yet 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 it i mean family members of victims have been invited to sort of see this obviously journalists. defense attorneys even

. talk a lot about the process if indeed this is granted that would make this delay happen which would make it possible to censor the answers. 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 it times is blanked out entirely so the motions in the words never quite match which i guess the guantanamo was is a program it is very strange so 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 al outage letting these defendants participate in ramadan the holy month of ramadan and that ashes this year back in two thousand and eight. these five appeared before a military commission but the judicial branch stepped in and demanded that new roles 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 with 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 how did your children because you know this harris is going to be in town all right well and as

you know attorney general holder said in hindsight in these cases could have been over and done in a credible way this a credit to our country not an embarrassment and at less cost i mean we're keeping a hundred and 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 like to send home but if you do the math is about two million dollars per person per year where federal prison is about thirty thousand dollars a year so for the fiscal conservatives this audit when the fleece awards for fleecing the taxpayers for wasted money grab some of the 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 abu hamza just came i was extradited from england back to the u.s. along with four others they're being prosecuted in federal court the president told

mark bowden knew the author blackhawk 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 are so this notion that these are war crimes that have to be prosecuted in front of a war court clearly isn't 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 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 of 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 elaine 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 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 over and done any time soon that's doubtful but i think when they are over and done if they're done in the 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 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 sir well there's sense of the damage done by banks involved in the live war rigging scandal isn't yet known some experts of us made that money misappropriated could be in the trillions of dollars but we do know that there were plenty of chances to expose the scheme years before the news of it shocked the world back in june. most notably the treasury secretary timothy geithner was made aware of the manipulation in two thousand and eight while leaving the new york federal reserve bank well we now know that even some in the academic world looked the other way when the alarm was sounded conan snyder and thomas you all were grad students in economics at the time and they were a paper about libel rigging in two thousand and ten well just last week they said their attempts to have the research published in academic finance journals those were rejected snyder said they were told their work was neither interesting nor important but the real reason might be

a little different as charles ferguson the director of the oscar winning documentary inside job told r.t. in june academics can be subject to the same kind of corrupting influences that have reduced politicians to cheerleaders for wall street runs amok. what's happened over the past thirty years in parallel with the rise of money in politics has been the rise of money in academia and it is had the same effect it has had the same corrupting effect on academic work you know on the public and political statements of. famous academics as it has had. in our political system well since i jobs release an academic institutions have forced economists to declare conflicts of interests meanwhile snyder in your work has been cited extensively in lawsuits brought against banks accused of manipulating life or. so i had on our team and tomorrow's presidential debate you'll hear from a couple of the presidential candidates of iraq obama and mitt romney aren't the

only ones eyeing the white house well in addition to some third party candidates that are giving both the democrats and republicans in competition.

all right everyone we are twenty two days away from the presidential election and you've probably all been inundated with the breaking news about campaign stops by both mitt romney and barack obama that they've been making day and night while the second of three presidential debates kicks off tomorrow night but there is a growing sentiment that there will be people missing from the stage that the two party system is not viable anymore so we want to tell you about another debate taking place here is part of an ad promoting it. step outside the two party stranglehold in wake up 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 virgil goode constitution party and rocky anderson

justice party this is store of presidential debate will take place on october twenty third at eight pm central time at the university club of chicago 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 pays them any mind or for that matter and the air time to talk more about this i was joined earlier by christina tobin founder and chair of free and equal elections foundation and i first asked her if the president and governor romney were invited to participate in this third party debate. 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 would say maybe not probably actually what the people want throughout the united states from foreign policy we're also going to talk about the threat of stopped up to spreading across the nation the biggest threat to our electoral process ever people don't know about o.b.l. our opening 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 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 any collections 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 go on our web site 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 different these. 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 that hopefully events one with fox and so on al-jazeera we want to get amy goodman who got a couple confirm there 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 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 a 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 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 well that's going to do it for us for this evening but for more on the stories we covered.