deployed this new vision if you open going. through old routine before. r t exclusive we will bring you a part of an interview with the embattled syrian president bashar al assad what he says about the ongoing conflict inside the country and what would happen if western forces try to intervene. and the bradley manning saga continues as this case moves slowly through military court new details are emerging about how his lawyers plan to fight for their client details coming up. and trying to clean up and rebuild from hurricane sandy the new york and new jersey areas face a long and slow recovery but will some businesses actually make

a profit off this monster storm that story coming up. it's thursday november eighth five pm in washington d.c. i'm meghan lopez and you're watching r.t. . all right well we begin this afternoon with the latest information coming out of syria twenty months more than thirty eight thousand people dead and no signs that this civil war the civil war that has split the nation at it seems is anywhere near over several big events have happened this week that have the potential to trigger some sort of action first president obama won reelection and international leaders are now calling for quick and decisive action also turkey is asking nato for permission to line its southern border with surface to air missiles which would effectively create a no fly zone in the region and british prime minister david cameron has promised president bashar assad safe passage if assad chooses to step down but that is

unlikely r.t. international was granted exclusive interview with the embattled syrian leader here's part of that exclusive interview where he talks about the potential fallout for u.s. intervention in the region. the problem vision is going. more than the old which came before because if you have problems here you can drop the stuff a stronghold of secularism and stability in the region and coexistence it so it will have a domino effect but if it works from the atlantic to the pacific and you know the implication will put it on both of us i don't think. to do with i'm going. to go but you didn't so nobody came to what's next now in that interview bashar assad went on to say that he will live and die in syria raising serious questions

over whether he just put a bounty on his head since he is essentially stated that there are only two possible outcomes in this conflict and r.t. international's interview is getting a lot of attention the new york times wrote an article that had the headline reading syrian president warns against foreign intervention in syria even c.n.n. is picking up on this interview with its coverage. this was an exclusive interview given by bashar assad to russia today portion of it was released today not a surprise what we're hearing so far we've heard an entrenched the defiant syrian president bashar the us and meanwhile a landmark meeting was held in qatar today between the different factions of the syrian rebels this comes amid growing international pressure for the movement to get organized if a transition is to take place the ongoing civil unrest is now boiling down to secretary in violence between the sunni majority and assad's minority group the isle of wight that's a faction of the shiite group and in this interview

a big question assad presented was the possibility that fundamentalists will rise to power once he goes now r t international will be airing that interview tomorrow afternoon on our network so be sure to stay tuned. moving on now more information coming out today regarding the trial of private first class bradley manning in an attempt to reach a deal with the government the accused wiki leaks his defense team appears to be trying to work out some sort of deal with the government to get things moving forward again a statement released by bradley manning's defense attorney david combs said quote p.f.c. manning offered to plead guilty to various offenses through a process known as pleading by exceptions and substitutions to clarify p.f.c. manning is not pleading guilty to the specifications as charged by the government rather p.f.c. manning is attempting to accept responsibility for offenses that are encapsulated

within or are a subset of the charged offenses the court will consider whether this is a permissible plea so if it's not a plea deal that manning is after what is it and what are the chances that the court will accept this deal for the latest on this curious case i was joined by josh gerstein white house reporter for politico. well it sounds like it's not a plea deal but it's more of a plea bargain offer from manning and his lawyers there is a very serious charges manning facing including aiding the enemy which is punishable by life in prison in this case and so they're trying to basically make sort of an opening bid perhaps or maybe at the middle of the game bid to put up some more minor charges or more minor offenses and see if the government might basically say well you know what if you're willing to plead to that that's good enough and the court can always reject this or they can accept it and they can still try him for some of the other things that they have for he is facing of

course up to life in prison giving the twenty two counts but can you explain that to us as the viewers and to myself what's the point of doing this if that the court can simply accept that charge in any way well i think the defense team here is trying to dramatize the way that manning has been charged a lot of people feel that the case is over charged meaning that based on what manning allegedly did here to charge him with aiding the enemy for posting something on the internet for example is taking things a step too far and i think the defense is either whether it's a plea deal or whether it's just sort of a public bid to emphasize the fact that manning is being punished too seriously or facing too serious punishment i think that's basically the gambit the defense is pursuing but you're right the court has to decide whether to accept this and then ultimately the military itself decides whether they want to press forward with the most serious charges that manning face so what good can possibly come out of this

other than of course public sympathy. well it brings attention to others in the military that are outside the direct chain of command dealing with this case on a day in day out basis that there is a way to resolve this without necessarily going to the mat with a full court martial it's also interesting that manning decided he doesn't want to be tried by sort of a jury of his peers of other military officers and soldiers but said that he'd rather be tried by a judge all of that is really interesting as coming out of this case of course things are still his they are still trying to figure all of this out but we know that the pretrial hearing that's going on right now as well as a term and whether the court and prosecutors are delaying his right to a speedy trial so what will this play in speeding up the trial or will it play anything at all. i don't think it will delay the trial but this issue of speedy trial is an important one you know it's put off for months and months and months more than a year basically as things went forward in the hearing that's been going forward today according to the blog reports and others we're seeing out from fort meade

maryland indicates that the military has been trying to explain why we was there were something like eight or nine separate delays in the case and not all the reasons seem to be great ones one that seems to have come out is that some of the people involved only wanted to work on the weekends because they didn't want to being bring manning into these official government buildings during the week because people might gawked at him basically absolutely and i know that meanwhile i just want to switch gears a little bit meanwhile the seventh person was charged under the espionage act this week that's a navy linguist station in basra and named james hateful verger he was an allegedly . accused of copying intelligence files that were leased to stanford university and although president obama was reelected it doesn't seem like we're getting much of a change in terms of prosecuting these people a second term right. well so far we're not and i don't see that there's any reason to expect a dramatic change i think as you guys have covered extensively there has been now many more such prosecutions under obama than all previous presidents behind

combined i should say and it looks like this pattern is going to continue and go ahead and me explain a little bit this espionage act that all these people are falling into i know that it was created during a world war one era so is it antiquated. well it's certainly very broad and you know most of it deals with espionage with taking military secrets or defense secrets and giving them to someone who's an agent of a foreign power but there is a part in it that's basically very very broad and elastic that says that if you take military or defense secrets whether you get them legitimately or illegitimately and you pass them on to another person and that can be anyone else who's not authorized to receive them you've committed a very serious felony and that's the provision that had been used very very rarely before president obama came into office and now as you say we've seen come up in seven different criminal cases some of it might simply though be the fact of the advent of the internet it is true now that it's

a lot easier to put information out there that everyone be they friends and enemies alike has access to and i do want to focus on julian a science of course bradley manning and julian aside kind of go hand in hand when it comes to discussing the leaked cables that were hundreds of thousands of documents and also that that document or the movie the clip that made wiki leaks famous i put it on the map the collateral murder video so it looks like the information the latest information that we're hearing is that the grand jury is still investigating julian a songe can you talk a little bit about the developments in his case well there's a document that came out either yesterday or the day before out of the federal court in virginia that shows that there's still an ongoing criminal investigation into wiki leaks it sounds like the federal government plans to keep that investigation open probably until there's bradley manning case is completed you know if there were ever a plea deal with manning and the government it's possible there might be pressure for him to become a witness and to testify against julian assange we heard earlier in the manning

trial that there were some indications that assad had indicated he might be willing to help manning break passwords to get into military computers so that's something the government still seems very interested in getting to the bottom of josh gerstein white house reporter for politico thank you so much for bringing us those latest developments ok thanks. moving right along now the pentagon announced today that a rainy and war planes shot down shot at an unarmed u.s. surveillance drone over international airspace along the gulf coast last week the unmanned drone was not damaged however and the pentagon made it clear that president barack obama and secretary of defense leon panetta were both informed of the incident as it occurred back on november the first pentagon spokesperson george little said that iran was warned through diplomatic channels adding quote the united states has communicated to the iranians that we will continue to conduct surveillance flights over international waters over the arabian gulf consistent

with the longstanding practice and our commitment to the security of the region we have a wide range of options from diplomatic to military to protect to military to protect our assets and our forces and will do so when necessary now interesting the only anough incident comes a year after the cia drone crashed inside of the islamic republic and less than a week before the presidential election well make sure to keep you updated as this story develops. and the east coast is still picking up the pieces two weeks after hurricane sandy ravaged homes and communities as if the super storm wasn't bad enough the latest nor'easter and storm may have slowed that process down significantly as fema and other government and government agencies try to rectify the situation but out of the darkness from the damage and destruction caused by the superstorm

a ray of economic hope private companies are teaming up with the public sector to rebuild infrastructure damaged by the superstorm everything from homes to tunnels to roads are now in need of repair all along the eastern seaboard and businesses will no doubt benefit from the reconstruction efforts and possibly the economy could benefit as well to discuss the more about this private public relationship r.t. producer rachel curteous joined us earlier. there are few major ways a public private partnership can work in the sirkar the first way is that essentially private businesses take over for the government so for instance bill essentially buy rode off of the government and after that bill benefits say they will have to deal with all the repairs and things of that nature but at the same time they get all of the revenue from tolls and from any other sort of profit generating revenue like even you know rent along the side of the road things like that the other way to do it is to actually have the businesses from the outset be

the ones who build the roads to begin with and i think that's what we're going to see a little bit more in the wake of superstorm sandy seeing as these roads are entirely destroyed to begin with so instead of having a bond measure where in the government borrows money off of taxpayers to pay for these new roads what they'll do is they'll essentially beat out those roads to businesses who will then do it and again take all of the revenue in from having built it it'll essentially be their rows that they build for the sake of the government so talk about what the east coast will potentially look like under these kind of this kind of partnership or we're going to see tolls on every road and also i want to bring up the fact that if it is the reason roads are going to be paid paid for by tolls is there really any difference between charging people taxes and these tolls does a really fantastic point and i think that that's exactly how we've got to look at it so you're saying people are saying oh we don't have to borrow money to pay for it but instead was kind of

a penny wise pound foolish policy because when the government issues a bond in order to pay something they continue to have control over for instance how much the tolls will cost over time as soon as you have something like a private enterprise taking over you'll see that that's not the case anymore they can raise the tolls pretty pretty much whenever they want they have something called non compete clauses which means that government they won't be able to build another road or bridge nearby because i'm a complete compete with the ability for the privately owned road to. raise revenue and things of that nature i want to bring up make up an example of something that happened in two thousand and eight that was essentially a public private partnership that in my opinion has gone a bit a ride in chicago mayor daley in two thousand and eight centuries leased out all of the chicago parking meters thirty six thousand of them is the third largest kind of parking meter group in the in the country they leased it out for seventy five years to a morgan stanley group that is essentially assembled that was one point one five billion

dollars which seems like a lot of money much of which was used to plug up budget holes and things of that nature so the daily could pay for public employees the issue is that new research coming out shows that over these seventy five years was actually happening is that . they're going to make the morgan stanley group is going to make eleven point six billion dollars out of the deal altogether now the way they're going to do that is they've already boosted rates they're changing around the parking so that you can fit in more cars which is a good thing if you're really good at parallel parking a lot of people myself included aren't so that's a little disconcerting and they're adding hours to that require fees often you know after six pm you're fine not to add in money that's not the case in chicago anymore another issue is that let's say i want to have a street fair i can't close off the street because by contract those parking meters have to keep running to make sure that this company is making money and rachel that's a really good example that you bring up however what i am saying and the different

articles that are being written about this is that you know the states that it's no secret that saves states these cities are in some type of a budget crunch and that this storm only adds onto it but from what i'm understanding it could actually be cheaper for these private entities to make these public roads but you're arguing that that's in the short term you're arguing that in the long term it can actually not be any for i think it's really difficult to determine the value say of parking tolls excuse me. parking meters of road tolls over the course of seventy five years when you lend something out for that long of a period of time you have no idea how much money you could be losing and i think that in particular there's a lot of secrecy regarding these deals in the case of chicago for instance mayor daley proposed this idea only two days before it went to a council vote that's very little time for independent groups for the inspector general for people like that to actually go in and determine whether or not this is an effective deal for the people of chicago and i think over time we've learned that it's not that again over time they're actually losing

a lot more revenue in order to plug up these short term budget holes and rachel let's talk about what type of a save the citizens have if any in this private public partnership yeah well as i said before i think a lot of it is really guarded in secrecy not only the fact that these deals and contracts aren't presented until right before they're made actionable but another issue is that they're entirely written in legally the written jargon and it's really difficult for a normal person to look at this and say oh the let me see this over time is not going to cost us that much money or it will i think that the analysis is very difficult to determine so there are at least needs to be more time given and i you know in the in the case of hurricane sandy there are people in new jersey in new york and all over the eastern seaboard who are certainly suffering right now so i think that time is of the essence in it i would think it would be hasty to immediately sign on to a really long term partnership with the business whose main goal is profit i mean let's face it they're trying to make money and the thing is when we're talking

about infrastructure infrastructure is something that should be for the benefit of citizens so over time i think that the. maybe these two things aren't as aligned as we'd like them to be rachel we only have about thirty seconds left but what you're saying is you're not necessarily opposed to the private sector stepping in and just to clarify. a little bit more regulation maybe with a little bit more explanation as to what's going on outside but also the thing is investors only really want to invest in things that are going to be profitable that means that the government is selling off. things like say the eastern corridor which are very profitable for private businesses but then say look at the midwest the government is going to have to continue to pay for all of those things new investors are going to come in the government is losing revenue that could actually boost them and still being in charge of you know roads and infrastructure that no one else is interested in paying for our to produce or rachel curtis thank you for that and to have. all right well we've all heard the stories natural gas drilling content natural gas drilling contaminating groundwater and sickening the residents

and you've seen the videos where one person after another sets their tap water on fire heck we hear in our t. have even filmed it with our own camera but it looks like the damage hydraulic fracturing causes might go even deeper than previously thought how do you all the way down to the earth's fault lines researchers now say that this extraction method actually causes earthquakes hundreds of them this is the first time that the term causation has been used instead of correlation when referring to how earthquakes and hydraulic fracturing are linked now you may already know how the method works but here's a quick refresher for those of you who don't know natural gas companies come in and dig a well down thousands of feet into the earth's surface into the shale rock formation this can be seven eight nine thousand feet below the earth's surface from there the company objects millions of gallons of water and sand and chemicals into the shale rock formation under extremely high pressure causing that rock to actually crack or

fracture and that process releases the natural gas bubbles to rise to the surface through natural gas company to collect but a new report by british columbia oil and gas commission says that the fluid that is injected into those preexisting faults can actually cause them to slip thus creating an earthquake so to get to the root of this report might klug wig reporter for truthout explain the process and the problems with fracking. they're taking sand and water and they're taking industrial chemicals and the pumping them deep below the earth now actually you know in a sense already creating many earthquakes and they break up the earth to release this oil and gas go over things in this report here is that here if you have an area where there's some preexisting fault these liquids these fracking liquids they used to break up the rock and get in there lubricate them and cause a series of other smaller earthquakes now in the past you know fracking has been linked to earthquakes in arkansas fracking wastewater injection cause earthquakes

in ohio what the industry has repeatedly said is that it's very rare and compare the number of operations that are out there it barely ever happens or we're seeing here in this case this report is that it could be actually much more common than people thought we just haven't had the kind of logical data to put it all together and of course we are starting to see some of that data come out one area in particular as in ohio can you go and talk about what they found with earthquakes in ohio if you do know and where those epi centers for those earthquakes were located . right now about two thousand tended to start using two thousand one hundred twelve there juries are twelve smaller earthquake with the final earthquake ranging about four point five on the record scale that was actually felt for miles around these all happened near youngstown and north eastern ohio now investigate these earthquakes later in the summer and found out that regulators actually had to injection well it wasn't fracking well but they were taking waste water from

fracking operations and rejecting them into an older well they had headed to the highest pressure on a well known high on the ignored by logical data showing that earthquakes started to erupt in that area and they continued to allow the pressure of this well to increase until finally the governor had to step in and shut it down last january and so this this injection well of wastewater is actually allowing the waste water seep into a precambrian preexisting fall because the earthquake and we do know that just to put this in perspective like that these earthquakes are all relatively small there between two point two and three point eight on the rector scale many of them are not even felt on the earth's surface and no damage has been caused to this point so why should people be worried. well there was some mental damage actually caused in arkansas and ohio and that were eventually linked to fracking after a lot of review and a lot of kind of going back and forth among state scientists and geologists there

has been some minor damage but what we have to worry about here is that there's an industry that is moving and drilling much faster than regulators and as we can see with this report just coming out today much faster than science and so there's a lot of we still don't know and as it rapidly expands we have to wonder who is going to step in and make sure they don't cause some problems that are bigger than we've already seen maybe some shakeups that are perhaps more violent and also that our water supply are in danger when you're breaking rock you're causing many earthquakes what can you know is it possible for these chemicals to migrate into refers and into drinking water supplies and that is another big concern and i want to know from you from all your reports and from the people that you've talked to do you think this has the potential to have serious consequences in the future what are starting out of small earthquakes could they be potentially become big ones. i don't know of these could ever become very big earthquakes i think it's possible that it's a very large. fault somehow gets lubricated and maybe geologist

of mass is good because something major but there are some areas of the country with histories earthquakes there are drilling happening right now so what is important is that we have a really solid it unwatchable data and really so a geological oversight by regulators and you know by independent groups and like i do want to go ahead and bring up a graphic really quickly kind of showing where all of these fracturing sites are within the u.s. most of them are in. pennsylvania some are in colorado texas north dakota so they're all over the place and if you see all those little black dots on your screen those are all those so called for accidents have happened not necessarily earthquakes but for accidents on cells of spelling and whatnot so given all of these areas i mean not very many of are happening in california california of course is where most of the earthquakes happen in in the u.s. so do these companies consider where these fault lines are or should they in the

future will this research help them to figure that out. i think of it do consider where these fault lines are but you have to realize they're imperative to get the most out of their drilling as quickly as possible they're taking all the time to make sure their voting falls obviously they haven't i mean not avoided in ohio there's been small earthquakes you know measured here in british columbia and actually some new drilling intensity is only like an arc and start in areas where historically there have been some massive earthquake so it's you know i can't speak for every single company we hope and they're all doing their job right but as you can see those are deep in some accident so you know that has some cause for concern and you know arkansas is one of the places where thousands of very minor but thousands of earthquakes were recorded after intense shelling has happened there's been more problems too recently gas and drilling related disaster just happened where i am and where a massive five and a half acres called just opened up in the bayou and they had to evacuate on

a pretty people and that is that is an area that has been drilled for twenty years pennsylvania has a drought that heavily for twenty years where the company going to look like in twenty years i mean these are all the kinds of questions we have to be asking ourselves mike we have only a fairly short time about thirty seconds left but i do have to get to some of the solutions one of the solutions that the basi oil and gas commission reported was simply lowering the pressure of the water being injected into the ground very quickly is that viable i think that could help but we really need solid seismological data we need seismometers in every area where there's major gas drilling happening that did not happen in ohio it was not happening in british columbia and it was not happening in r. and b. star we need that data mike ludwig reporter for truthout thank you so much for joining us having me. all right breaking the set is coming up in thirty minutes here on our team let's check in with the host of that program abby martin to see what's on today's agenda hey there abbie what do you mean breaking today we're going to be breaking apart

a whole bunch of stuff you know the obama just charge the seven person under the espionage act another whistle blower we did talk about that a little bit today i'm sure you know i think a lot more detail yes we're going to talk about that we're going to talking about you know everyone's telling us that iran is the biggest threat to our national security no one tells us the history of us interventionism any wrong starting with the overthrow of their democratic elected leadership in one thousand and fifty three we're going to be covering that whole thing talking about you know what if the u.s. was in iran's position how would we feel if kind of this military buildup all around our country aside from that we were talking with ramon galindo on a new york and l.a. to talk about the historic propositions that were passed in this election and pretty much the case for reelect or reform proportional representation which we don't really have in this country which excludes third party voices we're also going to be talking about israel palestinian statehood they're seeking statehood this month so we'll talk with the architecture of oppression a lot of that and more megan check it out and we did see your interview yesterday with kevin go still out talking about wiki leaks and bradley bradley manning in his

case so we appreciate your research there abby martin that comes up at the top of the hour with breaking the set thanks megan and that's going to do it for the news for now but for more on the stories we cover to go to youtube dot com slash r t america or for the very latest information you can check out our web site r c dot com slash usa back here at eight pm. thank you . through and through and. through a wealthy british song remains.