market why not. find out what's really happening to the global economy with much stronger a no holds barred look at the global financial headlines tune in to conjure reports . they've become america's weapons and choice when fighting terrorism now a new report looks at where the u.s. is housing drones overseas what does this say about the future of warfare in the region our team will question more. and drones are being deployed here in the u.s.

by local police departments as well but not everyone is happy about the high tech machines flying overhead a look at why the police claim they need the drones and the groups fighting to keep them out of the air. and talking about real issues and real substance the third party candidates have focused on the drone war. the drug war drones and the campaign finance reform and just to name a few topics but some in the mainstream media have labeled these guys as spoilers will preview the next third party presidential debate that's just a few days away here on r t. it's friday october twenty sixth four pm in washington d.c. i'm meghan lopez and you're watching our. all right well starting off this hour a new report by the washington post is shining a light on the u.s. drone program in north africa under a cloud of secrecy the u.s.

military and the cia are expanding one base in particular right here this is camp led manye a five hundred acre u.s. military base in the capital of the impoverished former french colony djibouti it started off as a temporary staging area for marines trying to get a foothold on the volatile region back in two thousand and two but has quickly become a major asset in the u.s. counterterrorism operations abroad and as you can see this camp's location is part of its lure to booty shares a sea border was yemen in a land border with somalia now just to quickly go over some of the numbers for you thirty two hundred u.s. troops contractors and civilians work there three hundred of them are dedicated solely to the drone program the u.s. pays to booty thirty eight million dollars a year to lease the camp and it's in the midst of a one point four billion dollar expansion and this country certainly isn't the only

one seeing an influx of unmanned aircraft in its skies for more on this changing face of war i'm joined by scott horton contributing editor at harper's magazine hi there scott let's start first of all by talking about the strategic importance of djibouti and what differences there are between the people that are operating drones sitting in camp versus the ones that are in the air conditioned bases in nevada or virginia. well i think you did a very good job and believed in presenting the strategic element here so in fact if you look at recent briefing that's been provided by senior figures in the intelligence community we see something of a pivot going on away from iraq and afghanistan to north africa broadly as an area of concern an arc that runs from mali all the way across the sahara sail region and winds up in the horn of africa and somalia these are

areas of focused attention and of course just across the red sea there in that narrow strait is yemen which may be maybe emerging after pakistan is the next major focal area for drone activities and we know that the drones in fact are operated from facilities largely from tinsel he's back in the united states in fact there's an air force base and where a lot of this is going on at langley we see a lot of direction but you have to maintain and operate them locally so that's the reason for the bases and the contractors and the uniformed professionals on the ground there in djibouti who will do this maintenance and guidance action may they may also step in and handle operations of the drones at some time at some point and scott i know that the military installation here in djibouti is the only one of its kind is the since the first of many to come or is this

a place that the military to get away with in a country because it is so small so impoverished that many times too many flies under the radar so to speak. well i think it's clear the united states is in talks with several different countries with respect to siting some of these installations djibouti is one that surfaced there are actually several island nations in the indian ocean. have in fact housed drone operations and have been in discussions with the united states for longer term drone operations and we've seen signals are hence that something like this may be going on in several other african countries as well so they'll need that sort of infrastructure of support and they're building it and i think you know if this raises the normal spectrum of base citing issues with the host nation so usually having

a foreign military force on your soil is not a popular thing it's in fact there usually is political strong political opposition to it on the other hand you know djibouti here. i mean that's almost juba the xrays on d'être it's it's been the most for foreign forces for a long long time the french have been there for more than a century and this is the backbone of the economy of djibouti in fact these military forces and the u.s. is usually prepared to pay serious money to have the support and have the basically says no other countries particularly in this part of the world that are eager to have that money and thirty eight million dollars a year to lease that land is quite a bit of money for an impoverished nation but scott one of the major criticisms of the drone program is the malfunctions and the crashes i mean there are no pilot crews in these aircraft meaning no american lives are in danger and these planes do cost one fifth of the price of fifteen so replacing them isn't all that expensive

if they do crash but i mean on the other hand there have been numerous crashes sung by providing potential intelligence to enemies and some endangering civilians and what's more important is that there are reports of technical malfunctions of these machines i mean in march of two thousand and eleven for instance there is a documented instance of a predator drone starting its engine by itself through all of the ignition was off and the fuel line was closed so i mean this technology is far from perfect right. that's right i mean it's a technology that's being developed over time but even sophisticated technologies misfunction and of course these are being guided remotely and one of the big concerns about drones is that if you can guy that remotely so can someone else another power may be able to tap and manipulate your drone ends and seize control of it so you know that's an issue but i'd say the bigger issue is not so much for

this part of the world i mean north africa sea we don't have an awful lot of air traffic there but now it's a match and twenty or thirty thousand drones operating in the united states or over western europe areas that are extremely congested with air traffic and you know we don't have the resources right now to track or monitor them the risk of collisions and damage resulting from collisions will be astronomically larger over these highly populated areas specially north america and western europe. of course had mentioned that all of this information this newest information is coming out in a three part series in the washington post now we also know that the united nations is getting ready to start investigating the use of drones by the u.s. in the middle east i mean they're asking the u.s. to quote clarify the procedures in place to ensure that any target killing complies with international humanitarian law and humanitarian rights and indicate the measures or strategies applied to prevent casualties as well as the measures in

place to provide prompt thorough effective and independent public investigations of the alleged violations now the u.n. special repertoire ben emmerson did go on to say that if the relevant states are not willing to establish effective independent monitoring mechanism then the un may have to finally resort to to the last resort for the u.n. might be that it needs to take action but it's got can we really expect anything out of the u.n. at this point what is their responsibility i mean i think this is one area. where the u.n. is acting entirely within their confidence you know what's going on here essentially is we're seeing a new form of where warfare developed and there are very serious questions as to how this checks against existing standards of international humanitarian law and the law of war itself and the u.s. is own position about this it's been extremely ambiguous i mean there's been a couple of important speeches given by officials of the obama administration where

they've set out some guidelines and they've also left in the enormous number of questions on the answers and because we're going to have to leave it there i really appreciate your time sir the fact is that there's a lot of things that we do know about this drone program and a lot more things that we don't know about the strong crowd around scott horton contributing editor of harper's magazine thank you for your time great to be with you. all right still ahead on our t.v. it's a bird it's a plane nope it's an unmanned aerial vehicle police departments across the u.s. are getting into the drone race up next we'll ask why they need the high tech spying machines in the first place.

we both agree we agree we have to bring the tax rates down i feel the same as the president do. you agree let's go back to something the president i agree on and you do view that the voters have a choice you know you wonder who to vote for when romney and obama agree on so many things never you do have other options on november sixth two to see the second round of debates between the major third party candidates but i cover thirty. welcome back well drawn programs aren't only expanding abroad they're also gaining momentum right here at home check this out this is the mini helicopter dragon fly or x. six it's much smaller than the predator and reaper drones used in the middle east

instead of being equipped with missiles though this little guy carries a camera that most weighs thirty five ounces it also has a battery life of just ten minutes harmless right well privacy advocates certainly don't think so and many of the community are up in arms about the idea of drones patrolling their skies. we had. just last night the seattle police invited the public to take a look at the drones in question a handful of people showed up to make their disapproval known to the forum and as it stands earlier this year the federal aviation administration better known as the f.a.a. gave seattle p.d. permission to fly the drones under a set of strict guidelines however the a.c.l.u. is asking for even more restrictions so are the people of seattle making something out of nothing or should they really be concerned well joining me to talk about all

of this is trevor tim activists for the electronic frontier foundation hi there trevor well we all know that these drones came came into being about a year ago or really started making spotlight about a year ago what's so new about the story. well this is kind of the first time of the public is getting its chance to express his feelings and know at the local level about these drones i mean the f.a.a. has been handing out these authorisations for about a year now as you said but now police departments are finally starting to at least put in plans to start putting them to use and i think people are really worried that their privacy is going to be invaded by these drones you know the argument is that these drones are exactly the same as the ones that fly overseas because they're smaller and their battery life is lower but the problem is this technology is advancing so rapidly these drones are going to be able to fly for hours and days the time very soon and the police will take advantage of that and i think the

citizens of seattle are concerned about their privacy and want to make sure that the proper safeguards are in place to make sure they don't get warm sleep i don't know if trevor while you're on this topic of these many drones i do think it's important as you just started to do to highlight the differences in these many drones versus the ones that are used by the military i mean first of all the f.a.a. has strict guidelines on these drones they can't fly at night they can't fly over people or crowds so spying on protests is out they must be flown under four hundred feet in the air and the drone operator in the observer must be within eyesight of the drone at all times so these policies are different do they offer some sort of promise. well actually no you're correct that these called the those are the exact policies that are in place now of the f.a.a. is set to drastically expand those in the coming year to actually a public records request we got through our drone census project. as partnering

with mccracken news to file public records requests all of the us found that the seattle police department thinks that the f.a.a. is going to expand its its regulations in the next year or so that they can fly it in other places and you know predator drones are actually owned by the federal government and they fly along the borders of canada and mexico so there are predator drones that are flying around the u.s. obviously not with missiles on them they're just for surveillance but the thing is that this technology. is transfer is transforming so rapidly that eventually police will be able to use drones maybe they may be smaller but they'll be able to stay in the air for long periods of time even the congressional research service report on drones in the fourth amendment said the same thing so it's definitely a legitimate word right and while while right now they can only fly for about ten minutes who knows what can happen in the future five ten minutes does sound a little short right now so another point that i do want to bring up here is that the battery life on these guys is very small that's what we were just talking about

but also the missions of these drones are very different than the ones you see overseas they're dedicated to search and rescue operations natural disasters and unusual crimes or at least that's what the seattle p.d. says they will be used for are you worried that they'll be used for other things in the future and will there be any proof that they could be used for other things. yeah i mean you're right there are definitely very legitimate uses for drones that could help out society like you said mapping natural disasters fighting forest fires those kind of things but the problem is mission creep gets involved and when the technology advances to the point where they can fly for hours or days and time for it's very cheaply clues can start using them for surveillance i mean a bunch of police agencies already have expressed interest in this you know the seattle police department deserve some credit for being so open with this saying that they're not going to use them for protests or surveillance on people and hopefully they'll put that in britain binding rules so they can live up to those

promises but police across the country have expressed interest in using them for proactive purposes in california for example here sheriff down the down the street actually said he wanted to use it to find marijuana growers or use it for proactive policing the public records requested suspicious persons or large crowd control so there's definitely a legitimate worry that this is what they're going to use them for maybe not in seattle and hopefully they can prove us right on that but in other places it's definitely could definitely become a real consequence right and i know that the a.c.l.u. has also laid out the criteria as i mentioned earlier that it wants the police to agree to before using the drones i mean the a.c.l.u. wants to know under what circumstances these drones are going to be used what type of information they're going to collect how the information is going to be used how long they're going to keep this information they want an auditing process to ensure and here is for the policies for the drone use except i mean so does any of this if

the police agree to those terms would that make privacy advocates happy with that do it. oh yeah absolutely that would go a long way in showing that they're serious about caring about americans' privacy and we want to make sure those who are on the books before they start flying these all around the country because once they're in the air and the police think they don't have any rules they're not going to want to implement tighter controls so we completely agree with the a.c.l.u. we need data retention standards telling us you know they're deleting this footage what they're using this footage for making sure they're not sharing it with agencies making sure that they get a warrant if they're going after surveillance on an individual person all sorts of safeguards they can put in place of they can use drones for legitimate purposes that could really help society and you know if seattle ends up going this way and putting this in the city council puts this in a binding ordinance that i think they could actually be a model for the rest of the nation on how they approach this issue rather than

something somebody looks at and says you know we don't want this absolutely trevor and we do have to give it to the seattle p.d. after at least showing some part of transparency and coming out with best public hearing and both showing what the technology can do and also taking a questions and criticisms of the public chapter ten activist with the electronic frontier foundation thank you so much for your opinions hi fredricka. all right and drones might not have been on president obama or republican. republican presidential nominee mitt romney's agenda what they were looking to discuss last monday night during their final face off before the election but the issue did drive the conversation in another debate the third party presidential debate held one day after the final square off between mitt romney and barack obama now featuring many of these issues didn't mention it didn't mention a bunch of other issues as well including the drug war but the top democrat

republican didn't focus on any of those issues not the drug war not campaign finance reform or anything else for that matter except for a bunch of singers now r.t. of course showed the debate in full on tuesday but many might not know that another debate took place on that tuesday night excuse me let alone what the issues were for and who the candidates were so laurie harshness of the resident dot net hit the streets of new york to find out if anybody actually knew that there was a third party debate and what they were talking about. this week third party candidates for the u.s. presidency held a debate do americans even know that this week let's talk about that did you watch the third party debate you do you think did best. obama do no that's not the third party debate who do you think did a good job in the third party debate i think. did

a little bit better job than mitt romney no that's not the third party to that was the main candidates debate but the third parties are we have actually other candidates that are running did you know that no i didn't there's jill stein she's the green party there's gary johnson libertarian none of these names ring a bell and. think it's unfortunate that americans don't know they have more than two main options but you know we're stuck with democrats or republicans we don't cover for that so why do you think that is. a tradition. tradition. we do we used to i don't think either one of the third party have other ideas other than democratic somebody sure they do they're against the n.c.a.a. they're against the war and junk they're against drone strikes there's a lot of other ideas. you don't agree with any about you know drone strikes not. protecting us and saving our soldiers from being killed even when they have

a very low actually percentage rate of unfortunate collateral damage as part of war you know who else is running besides the to mean one don't i don't so do you feel informed enough to make a vote. no. for to go get a vote right i think the media has pretty much walked to that whole aspect. why do they do that they're supposed to be impartial disposed to be saying the news the poor ocracy you know i mean. you've got democrats you got republicans two heads of the same snake and they're both supporting big business big corporations they want to make it look like you have a choice you know what's but just two sides of the same coin so it seems like most americans don't know there are more than two candidates running for president and with only a few days left of voting day chances are obama or romney is going to be elected and.

now i do want to be fair here c.n.n. did give some airtime to the libertarian presidential candidate gary johnson today c.n.n. anchor ashley banfield started off by calling the four candidates that for featured in the third party debate also rans and the conversation continued. to challenge our plutocracy our government that is run by for the benefit of monstrous corporations rather than in the interest of the people of this country. so that was rocky anderson running for the president of the justice party wait a minute stop the tape stop the tape we have to stop for a second right there let's take a look at the bottom of that screen it actually said if you looked at it that the debate was held on monday it was actually held on tuesday but that detail aside let's continue. do you think that you could beat governor romney or president obama

and become president of the united states are you this campaign's spoiler meaning you could cost these states going to mitt romney yesterday a fiscal conservative vote but legalizing marijuana is clearly not a conservative campaign platform does that mean that you're more of an equal opportunity spoiler as well nothing like calling a presidential candidate a spoiler not once but twice right so changing the political discourse in this country might be a little bit harder than we think that interview being one example so to talk more about the third party politics as well as the state of the race today artie's own lives walsh joins me in studio liz nice color there is all right so let's get started oh what's different about this debate we're going to be talking about foreign policy in the upcoming one what we expect well we can expect to debate very different from the debate that we've seen between. president obama and governor

romney and it's going to be even different from the first time around of the third candidate debate now it is down to the winners of the last debate so that is. the green party candidate jill stein and the libertarian candidate gary johnson so they the focus is on foreign policy so but the foreign policy is that is going to be an expanded dialogue one that is different from the foreign policy debates that we've seen in the main debates they're going to be focusing on things that we don't typically hear talked about in the mainstream we're talking about things like the war on drugs campaign finance and. the drone campaign all of these things that aren't brought up they were brought up the first time and now the two winners are going to have more time to discuss them even more in depth so looking forward to it and those you've been covering this year i know on the desk on tuesday night being a part of that coverage what has the response been so far of the third party debate

well so far the spot response has been great we know that tens of thousands of people all over the world did tune in it wasn't aired on the mainstream networks we're at it here on our t.v. and we got the response was a great i know that people it was trending on twitter people even though it wasn't on the mainstream channels people were taking to social media to get their voices out and to react and to respond to the debate it was even get i was trending on twitter and even i saw you know responding to me and responding to our t.v. saying thank you so much for covering this it's really refreshing to hear these new voices something different outside of you know the dialogue that we've seen republican versus democrat these other issues and some fresh ideas and i know that a lot of people right now the main thing that they're concerned about is the economy about what's going on back home i mean president obama mitt romney both of them are saying it's time to rebuild the u.s. so. it's hard to get people to pay attention to foreign policy debates between

these two very popular people how are these people these third party candidates going to get americans to pay attention to what they think should happen on a foreign policy stance well i mean. that's true the economy is supposed to be the number one the number one issue in this debate but foreign policy is also very important and so i think that as we've seen the people that do tend to tune into these debates are concerned about foreign policy are concerned about things like the drone campaign and the drug war because a lot of these foreign policies have repercussions for our own country in terms of spending in terms of the way that americans are perceived throughout the world and these are issues that people do care about and i think that's a really good point that the military spending is just eating up the economy so not to focus on foreign policy issues is not to focus on the economy is definitely our chief of correspondent liz wahl thank you so much for joining us thank you and

again i want to put that information up on the screen there the debate will take place on tuesday october thirtieth at nine pm eastern right here on r t so stay around. and that's going to do it now for more on the stories we covered go to youtube dot com slash r.t. america don't forget to check out our website our t. dot com slash usa there are web team is hard working on stories that we don't always have time to get to here on the air follow me on twitter at meghan underscore lopez and we'll see you right back here in a half an hour. this

. culture is the same i'm going to give visitors to our fire department living in a tricky and dangerous neighborhood this is warm been let in on face the assassination of the country's top security official and the political.