drones have become one of the top u.s. military weapons in recent years now the cia is asking the white house to approve an expansion of their drones program does this mean the spy agency is turning into a power a paramilitary force will question more. and the race for the white house is extremely close so close between mitt romney and barack obama but could the election be tipped in one direction by employers dictating who their employees vote for well look at the force being applied by some bosses during the presidential campaign. and a state lawmaker in new jersey believes it's a dire issue pets being injured in car accidents she's now trying to pass

a law that requires pet owners to restrain their animals while in automobiles will ask is this the nanny state overload. it's friday october nineteenth five pm in washington d.c. i'm meghan lopez and you're watching our. all right starting off this hour cia director david petraeus is urging the white house to expand the agency's drone fleet but try to said the expansion will allow the cia to carry on with its mission in pakistan yemen and possibly expand into north africa and the cia isn't the only one asking for unmanned vehicles more of them in the next decade defense spending on known to medium sized drones will be nearly forty billion dollars the pentagon is planning to increase its inventory by thirty five percent so let's compare that

with the drone fleet we have now and the one that we will have in the future as far as electronic warfare and the clinton's drone goes the u.s. has five hundred thirty six operational you avi's and is planning to buy another one hundred forty five when it comes to light attack and reconnaissance drones two hundred fifty five of those are operational and another five hundred eighty seven are planned so in total the u.s. has seven hundred ninety one operational drones right now and it's planning to buy another seven hundred thirty two now it's important to note that these are only air base drones so to talk about whether or not these military machine is are really necessary lieutenant colonel anthony shaffer joined me earlier this afternoon he's the director for the external communication center for advanced defense studies i first asked him why the cia needs those drones in the first place take a look. you know i think this is one of those areas where i would consider mission

creep one of the things that happened and let's be very clear drones go back to the one nine hundred fifty s. us or force used them for any number of purposes since then they've become much more sophisticated over the past ten years one of the things cia was doing back in the late ninety's early two thousand was what it was using drones for reconnaissance a very legitimate mission however it's redundant and which is where we need to be careful about who's doing the walk regarding military operations overseas special operations command and the military also have a fleet of drones so the question becomes why do you need to fleets and is the cia's essentially as you pointed out your direction ramping up to be a parent paramilitary organization is that in our interests i would argue no during world war two we had some occult o.s.'s office of strategic services it did both the intelligence collection mission this special operations mission and a lot of us who are on the inside studying the budget issues where we talk about being more efficient not loaded really are asking why do we need both of these things so i think drop a curious is a call for this at this point time especially in light of president obama's

narrative that we're quote unquote shutting down the wars really calls to question why wait why do we need all of these drones if we're actually rushing back our military and funny thing about the often just what you just said there in the past ten years we've really seen a blur between if you think. tween military operations and cia now the cia was supposed to be soviet intelligence gathering service and now they're conducting these operations so can you talk a little bit about this test and also whether or not it is here to stay right well the cia has always had something in this responsibility called covert action covert action is something you do clandestinely but the the results are are over you can see the results this is been part of their d.n.a. from day one i'm not saying that they shouldn't do that what i'm saying is you need to use that capability on a limited basis focused only solely on strategic issues. arguably the military the department of defense does things to defend our nation and when it comes to this

sort of d.o.d. has always had the capability to do what we call black operations which is different by definition only sometimes then then covert action and this is one of those things that we have to have a smarter congress smarter white house determine what is needed and then ask congress to fund that rather than allow everybody this indefinite expansion of capabilities and that's what we see here kind of this hey we think this is a good idea let's fund it without regard to what is the actual threat or do we actually trying to build capability to defend ourselves against again this is why we have to take a step back and say do we really need all of this at a time that we have difficult challenges regarding budget i mean we're about to go see suz seaquest ration for goodness sake is system best use of our limited defense researchers and tony i also think it's important to note that general petraeus was in charge of the afghanistan and iraq operations up until little bit more than a year ago now he had a vast arsenal of drones and his pocket back then and now he has only about thirty

to thirty five according to the cia reports so right i mean i have to ask you is this an example of a tried and true policy being pushed through the back door. absolutely and what i've said i see right here r.t. and i said this on other networks what you see is the president the the predator president raised the obama white house becoming overreliant on drones one of the things about those that these drones are part of the kill capture program always forgotten is the capture part of the program dead men tell no tales and we have created a dearth of intelligence by the fact we were capturing people quit interrogating them that's why you saw a lot of things going on regarding this resurgence of al qaida because as a senator dianne feinstein said yesterday we don't do well in human intelligence human intelligence is getting inside those networks drones don't help you do that my suggestion to drop a trace get back to the p. and q. p.d.q. the piece. accused of actually doing human intelligence what c.i. supposed to be doing and step away from the technology and tony what we're also

seeing is that it's not just kind of that they're focusing on they're also focusing on the hakani network can you talk a little bit about the difference between maybe the people that the cia is focusing on with these drones and the people and organizations that the military are focusing on or are they in fact one in the same well the blind the real truth here is that you have both organizations looking at key leadership what we call high value targets when i was there in zero three zero four we had a list cia analysts a lot of those guys with one of the same there's cheers on that list and that's where you divide up the radically you're going after he goes after who cia goes after with that said there's a lot of overlap there's tons of overlap and we have a closer battlefield without any clear and indication of how we're going to sort through this and do it work one of the unpleasant truths is a kind of network was used to our benefit during the soviet occupation it's being used against us now because we failed to understand the politics of pakistan and

we're suffering the results of that again good human intelligence would help solve this using drones to kill mid-level leaders is not helping is creating the next generation of leaders who are more committed to the death and destruction of united states and our allies much more than the ones we were dealing with before so i don't see the drone program as a path to victory in the current application and tony like you said we are losing a vast database of knowledge where every single time that we strongly different compounds. we lose the possibility of being able to stop future attacks by not being able to gather that information but i do want to put the conversation just a little bit to libya now the new york times reportedly tracked down and interviewed one of the ringleaders behind the september eleventh benghazi attack meanwhile president obama is saying that the u.s. is still sorting through the information now given libya's shaky situation i mean what are the chances that this man and others potentially responsible for this

attack will be held accountable for their actions and i mean what is taking so long . two things first this administration one of the slow roll this and let me make it very clear you know when you talk about taking three weeks to get an f.b.i. team to benghazi let me tell you something went to churchill was here in washington d.c. within two weeks of the beginning of the war two so if you can move was in charge of the washington d.c. in two weeks i think you could move an f.b.i. team using twenty first technology to benghazi that was a choice with that said i think there's a lot of things that we missed ration doesn't want to come out that's why you see a slow roll here and more importantly while there are drones now circling libya the administration's admitted this they going to do a thing until after the eighth of november as far as i can tell because the optics would be all wrong so much of what's going on right now is all about trying to slow roll this to make sure that we don't see anything that looks looks like it does goes against the white house narrative until after the election it's a political issue let me tell you from here my guys inside we knew about this

within twenty four hours we had the capability of f.b.i. guys there within twenty four hours the white house and others have chosen to not exercise the capability with a lot of money to have one point is just so surprising that the new york times was allegedly able to track down this man apparently he was in a very high class hotel lobby sipping on a strawberry frappuccino evolving and he was actually talking to us saying it's your fault that this happened that we don't want you here and that is nothing is going to happen against them but let me ask you one more question today there was a car bombing in london on it was one of the most. horrible an incident that happened in lebanon last four years obviously there was a lot back in the ninety's but up in right in the last four years it's been pretty peaceful now the region talking about the middle east and north africa continues to see this influx of instability are we getting to the point where intervention in the region will be inevitable just to follow the violence. no i don't see it as being practical i'm a reagan republican and president reagan i learned a hard lesson in lebanon when we try to have the marine corps there doing

essentially peacekeeping operations as much as it pains me to see people die especially and service syria it is not our job to straighten out local issues i think we maybe need to be very clear what the american interests are what we have to do to protect the american people and frankly it is up to the people who live there to work their issues out do we have allies there absolutely should we help our allies yes turkish turkey is an ally you know that jordan for the most part is an ally that we need to look at how we work with our friends but not take the place of their work within what they have to do to protect their borders and their interests less than a colonel anthony shaffer director for community i started communications the center of the vance the defense studies we appreciate your time sir thank you. well we are to minus eighteen days until the presidential election and critics are already saying that the voter intimidation and voter id laws will affect the outcome of the selection now over the past few weeks we've told you about a few cases where employers are pushing their political views on their employees

now we'd like to say that this is not the norm we'd like to report that this is a legal and that steps are being taken to address this form of voter intimidation but neither happens to be the case here's a compilation of some of the most egregious offenders earlier this month the koch brothers sent out a letter to for forty five thousand of their employees at georgia pacific saying quote if we elect candidates who want to spend hundreds of billions of dollars borrowed money on costly new subsidies for a few favored cronies put unprecedented regulatory burdens on businesses prevent or delay important new construction projects and excessively hinder free trade than many of our more than fifty thousand u.s. employees and contractors may suffer the consequences including higher gasoline prices runaway inflation and other ills this is true regardless of what politician what politician what the politician might be now list letter came in

a packet filled with information personalized by states for which candidates the koch brothers approve of also part of the package was a brochure you are looking at right now this one was approved for organ employees it provides information about voting deadlines as well as a list of candidates that have the koch stamp of approval and then there's the case of the c.e.o. of westgate resorts david segal westgate resorts of course is the national timeshare company and one of the largest resort developers in the world in a letter to his employees he wrote quote it's quite simple if any new taxes are levied on me or my company as our current. president plans i will have no choice but to reduce the size of this company rather than grow the company i'll be forced to cut back this means fewer jobs less benefits and certainly less opportunity for everyone he went on to say that if this does happens and he has to close up shop

eventually he won't be worried instead he you can find him in the caribbean sitting on a beach under a palm tree retired and with no employees to worry about and let's not forget about bob murray the c.e.o. of murray energy now if you recall he's the one that forced employees from his west virginia coal mine to take an unpaid day off work and attend a mitt romney speech in front of the mine he also said that he wants his employees to donate their time and money to political causes that he supports in one letter he wrote quote what is so difficult about asking well paid salaries employees to give us three hours of his or her time every two months we have been insulted by every salary employee who does not support our efforts more importantly we are going to lose of what friends we have in washington d.c. at this very critical moment in time while mines are closing around us and obama has eliminated forty five thirty unit coal fired power plants. now i know what

you're thinking wait a minute i thought there were federal laws prohibiting employers from pushing political views not true not since the supreme court ruling on citizens united turns out it wasn't just about money or super pacs the ruling also allows employers to express electoral opinions to employees in private sector workplaces and they could also limit the amount of free speech employees can have with the national labor relations act so why is this all happening is this a form of voter intimidation and what are the potential effects that this will have on the upcoming election to discuss this further i was joined by labor journalist mike elk who has brought many of these stories to light here's his opinions. there was an instance where the union that represented a bunch of casino workers in las vegas got together with the company and they had a joint effort where the company allowed the union pusher harry reid over so yeah

that happened but this was the union doing it and you know union is a body elected by workers and there's protections and contracts and you know union doesn't have the power to fire somebody for attending these kind of events so that's a big difference. and there's no real legal protections if you are nonunion workers there to prevent a boss from firing for political there simply are none. you know and what happens in this kind of situation is that it has a real chilling effect in the workplace when a boss says hey i'm voting for someone so and you're not voting for that you know what if you put up a yard sign for the what if you don't volunteer in your boss finds out about your job at risk and in this kind of economy and want to go out of people are willing to do that and i know that also mitt romney came out and this is your latest report is that romney came out in a conference a news conference and said that hey employers should be encouraging their employees to vote i think we have a clip of that let's play that really quick and then i'll get your your opinions on

that. i hope you make it very clear to your employees what you believe is in the best interest of of your enterprise and therefore their job and their future in the upcoming elections and whether you agree with me or you agree with president obama or or whatever your political view i hope i hope you pass those along to your employees nothing illegal about you talking to your employees about what you believe is best for the business so larry is saying that this is what's best for the business you have no legal obligations other than to just you know say your personal opinions tell me about this report that you wrote and what the implications are of it so there's been a bunch of companies like you said that all of a sudden in the wake of citizens united are pushing politics in the workplace and telling workers that if they don't vote for president obama they could get fired. and we might starting to look like this might be a coordinate republican strategy here you have mitt romney encouraging a group of businessmen the national federation of independent business right wing

meaning group to get their employees to vote for romney and then you had a nother story that was just broken about an hour ago by george zorn about herman cain and herman cain now is going around the country doing these training seminars training the small business owners and how they can pressure their employees into voting for mitt romney and what you're seeing is what happens in anti-union campaigns which is that you have a lot of workers that want to join the union i've seen so many cases like this you have seventy percent of the workers initially say they want to join the union then you get a couple weeks of your boss saying hey we may close the plant we may close down and then folks change their opinion not everybody does but if you get ten percent of workers in one factory to change their vote because they think they might lose their job because the boss tells them something untrue. it's a pretty unfair way and dirty wig the campaign in my opinion and not only that but they're also suppressing these employees from expressing their own political views so talk about this a little bit and more specifically what exactly they're suppressing so i did

a story on georgia. if it were then i have a social media policy that's very restrictive they say that you can't post anything even if it's non-work related the first poorly and georgia pacific which is owned by the koch brothers brand or reputation and this includes talking about the owners of georgia pacific the koch brothers so some workers have been told that they are posting too much about the koch brothers and that of being too political in fact we had a worker who blew the whistle on the koch brothers in a story that marc games and i wrote. who was denied a promotion despite having a very good score on his evaluation and it was written as a valuation and he talked about politics too much and were pushed so this is a real scary trend that employers are increasing their free speech rights to pressure their employees on the election while limiting the free speech rights of their employees to talk about their political views really does seem like they're trying to control the message and i know that all of this is possible as far as limiting speech goes but like as i mentioned earlier the national labor relations act and it's also extending as i understand into the social media realm where

you're not allowed to say anything on twitter against your employer or your employer and that you can also be hurting yourself by expressing your political views if you have a facebook page and you like mitt romney or you like barack obama that could potentially be damaging on the right you could potentially be damaging or the national labor relations board has read that has ruled that some of this activity is protected by the national labor relations act but it's unclear i talked to a liberal or this week if you were to georgia pacific and you posted something about the cokes anti-union activities that would be protected as part of unions but if you were to georgia pacific and you posted something about the cokes environmental record that's not protected you could be fired for that so it's a real gray area and i also want to talk about the fact that it's not only these organizations it's also bigger organizations that we've seen i know one of them is delta delta airplane that we arrive pretty frequently they actually gave incentives to employees to go to washington d.c. and lobby one of the things that they offer was cheaper flying it's upgrades to first class they said if you want to go to washington before it's free flights

there you go if you want to go. washington d.c. you want to lay a lobby for us against an anti union bill against the federal air and ministration and you you feel free to do that and we will get you there so it's not only against or for presidential candidates it's also against unions that these companies are offering incentives yet delta was certainly a company that has done some of this in lobbying for an anti-union bill and last year delta push a referendum in georgia where they were trying to get workers to vote for delta it was really defensive today in the atlanta journal constitution saying that they haven't quite been engaged in this direct election so companies are more wary of this and i think there is a big backlash you know not at a nonunion company like delta but in terms of brand i think it really hurt but if you look at all the small business owners who are nonunion i think you're going to see a lot of intimidation there and is there any way to solve this very quickly you know folks are members of the union that can protect themselves everybody else here and i have to listen to the lessons of the speeches all right michaela labor journalist

thank you so much for joining us we appreciate your patience. and let's stick with this topic of the presidential election and highlight yet another case of potential corruption new allegations are coming out this week that tagg romney owns an interest in heart the interests of the voting machines which will be used to calculate the votes in hamilton county ohio and because ohio is guaranteed to be a critical swing state in this election every vote in every county matters so could the republicans be stealing the election floor harshness of the resident dot net took the political pulse of the nation. electronic voting machines owned by a company with strong republican ties are set to count the votes in ohio which very well could determine the outcome of the two thousand and twelve u.s. presidential election so is there a chance that mitt romney could steal the selection this week let's talk about that

even if ohio if one person wins i think that the other person can win without ohio yes but no republican has ever won ever without winning ohio this time. i made it mitt romney wins i'm moving to canada. is that that simple do you think there's a possibility that this election could be stolen. if it's going to be stolen. it will be stolen by the democrats why do you say that because they're going to lose and if they lose they're going to be extremely bummed out anything is possible does that scare you sure so do you vote still any way or absolutely that you can't just let the fear keep you from being participatory right no you think it's possible that mitt romney could steal the election i think it's very possible i think it's close and it's going to come down to the last minute so it's going to be

something a little like that that could sway it which is unfortunate and. a lot of people don't even know about it they just think oh well he won so that. yeah we want to do about it want to make sure go vote for brock. and i'll go tweet about her right now so most people in the story know they told me about one of my houses one day they'd be there are forty would win the election no it didn't matter does it matter where the you know greedy libertarian conservative whatever just to break the halls to court he says and if he's a she that wouldn't be right so i'm going to magically said he it's no use to does it concern you that there's things like best in our country in general sure of that kind of thing shouldn't shouldn't really happen. but i guess it goes it happens a lot of places you never find out about you know why don't we find out about this stuff why isn't there more transparency about what's really going on because like you say there's lots of money and whether or not you think romney's going to steal

the election the bottom line is those evoluting machines in ohio are owned and operated by a company whose employees have given hundreds of thousands of dollars to the romney campaign so they very well could be determining who wins ohio a state that often determines who wins the election. so we've talked about the elections and ways that employers have intimidated their employees into voting one way or another about a potential issue and also ways that republicans have a proposal might be stealing the election with these voter machines and no doubt the economy will be a big factor in the way many voters cast their ballots new jersey is a really good example of why in this election matters the state is the fourth worst in terms of unemployment the city of camden just fired the majority of its police officers and crime in new jersey is through the roof but instead of focusing their efforts on these issues assemblywoman l.

grace spencer has introduced a bill that would require drivers to buckle up their cats and dogs or face a twenty five dollar ticket so is this the latest case of a nanny state party correspondent. reports. me adrian at seven years old and eight hundred pounds she's an experienced traveler . calm and composed. would be a dream isn't aware of. is that the future of pets and cars has been a major concern for some lawmakers in new jersey who have been considering implementing a law to buckle up but you've been probably the most effective way to secure an animal in a car is either using a carrier and then buckling the carrier in or using a a travel harness. we tried to use a buckle with adrian and it came up and then without

a cage. harnesses can cost up to forty dollars and if this bill were to become law we would be fined from twenty five two thousand dollars and slapped with animal cruelty charges while the cat sits peacefully in the back row while the extra safety may make sense for bigger pets a sixty pound dog can exert up to twenty seven hundred pounds of force on impact. it's the future of animals of all sizes but debated new jersey would be the first state with a lot requiring pets to wear restraints though governor chris christie has vowed to veto it if the legislation reaches his desk a couple weeks ago we were stopped by a police officer who told us that you know i have to buckle in once just once this law gets passed and something i should be aware of but it's a motorcycle how can i how can i buckle the dog and. well pet owners have different

opinions on which part of the bill makes sense and which doesn't have a bigger dog mauling like bove or hammer and he also gets a little back feeling it's kind of a little ridiculous to me to put him in a harness for a big dog it may be possible but for a small dog like grace i don't know. i think should we go right out of this is about. one thing they've done is that lawmakers could find more crucial issues to focus on i do think we have better things to concern ourselves with i think that if somebody wants to do it they should and if they don't want to do it they shouldn't have and if anything this is a cash grab there's other issues in the world that they should be focusing on so leave leave us alone especially at a time when the state of new jersey is experiencing a nine point eight unemployment rate the state's worst in the last thirty years. creatures like adrian traveling around like this like this. is a curious top priority is the future. new jersey. so something to think about on this friday afternoon but that's going to do it for now for more on the stories we

covered go to youtube dot com slash r t america or check out our website r t dot com slash usa you can also follow me on twitter for to find out what i'm doing what i'm not reporting the news at meghan. this presidential election is not just about obama and romney there are also third party candidates on the ticket and they will influence its outcome see the debate among the.