for balmain r t but instead he gave an oddly valid threat where he claimed that artie's coverage is one sided regarding the conflict not only did he not apologize but netanyahu his own spokesperson basically insinuated that the r.t. station is fair game to be attacked because of the side we've taken in our coverage i guess this is their way of saying you want to cover gaza fairly well this is what you get unacceptable and despicable behavior coming from the office of the israeli prime minister look if you aren't convinced that israel's full on war against the media quite yet check this out according to a recent press release by the human rights organization a doll quote following complaints received about the intention of the israeli army to demolish the tower also called the journalist tower in gaza city this fifteen story building which housed both local arabic international media agencies such as via t.v. sky news france twenty four and russia t.v.

was hit this morning the fifth day of the israeli military offensive name operation pillar of cloud local media sources reported that eight journalists were injured in the initial attack in fact i.d.f. spokesperson a veto of both even admitted to the press quote we obviously knew there were journalists in that building here's the deal israeli forces bombed media buildings and gaza deliberately and whether or not they targeted r t we do not know but what we do know is that they had the audacity to try to rationalize it so why would they be targeting journalists unless they were trying to conceal the truth. and for any israel backed media that attempts to smear my name this show and this network keep this in mind this is an opinion show and i'm entitled to my own opinion but the facts are the facts and sometimes the truth hurts doesn't it.

all right folks the thanksgiving holiday is upon us which going to mean only one thing turkey pardon day this year president obama has pardoned not one but two turkeys cobbler and gobbler yes this bizarre tradition happens every thanksgiving or politicians pardon birds but what about people well today i want to talk about article two of the constitution which gives the president the power to pardon or grant clemency but do these pardons really right the wrongs of the justice system and doesn't justice really deserve a pardon me break it all down and more i'm joined by our two producer manwell. manning so before you even get into what the party thing is really i mean i just couldn't help bring up my favorite act of parting which was sarah palin you know

that famous gaffe where here she is pardoning turkeys all the while they're getting slaughtered behind her it's so hilarious to look at the video and it's. so i don't know if they're going out on purpose or what but i mean seriously this this tradition is just so odd but let's talk about pardoning people talk about what a pardon it really does many showing a pardon is exactly what it sounds like it is you know you get to get rid of both punishment and guilt with a pardon so presidential pardons have been going on since the beginning of this beginning of the republic and the real question that we should be asking is you know if we're going to continue to do this pardoning process is it fair and the way to test that is the transparency and so what we're looking at right now is that you have to look at it on a case by case basis so is the president pardon people out of an act of you know righting the wrongs of the justice system or doing the pardon as a result of head maybe a favor to someone that's you know contributed a lot of money to my campaign and so that's where you have to kind of decide what

what's right or wrong but in terms of it being fair i think there are a lot of injustices in our justice system so it is necessary for. this program of presidential pardons to continue but there is a lot of room for reforms and i think transparency is actually the way to go about that sure let's talk about some of the most notorious cases of presidential pardon for kind of political clout or political gain or like you said you know there are some sort of favors to be paid to talk about a little bit of those cases sure i mean i think that there's a lot of controversial cases when it comes to presidential pardons not all of them are controversial i mean there's been thousand since the beginning of the republic but a few that come to mind you know the iran contra pardons george h.w. bush the pardon. who was the secretary of defense caspar weinberger i mean this guy was directly involved with purchasing a weapon selling weapons to iran even though the congress had outlawed selling weapons to iran so that they could find contra rebel groups in nicaragua i mean

everybody came out of that scot free so that's one of the more controversial ones other ones including the president ford giving a pardon to president nixon after a white watergate scandal mean people were outraged this caused a lot of you know emotional people with the people with the american people and so i mean that's one of those really controversial ones as well in fact president ford's press secretary i even resigned as a result of that the thing is that you know it's it's there's so many pardons that take place not all of them a controversial but some of them are going to be and that's the ones that we have to look out for and without having the transparency to do so it's really hard to know whether you are actually you know pardoning injustice like real injustice right right it seems like it almost a pit in my eyes of the two tiered justice system where you have you know a massive amount of people who are low level drug offenders of course we're not getting maize enough you know obama came out and was just like everyone who's in jail for having you know marijuana i mean you're pardoned yeah i've interviewed credible but that makes me think of that pro publica report that got out last year

which was talking about your you know four times more likely to get a pardon if you if you're white you're three times more likely to. if you have connections on the hill if you have connections with with the congressman and that kind of disparity that mirrors the disparity in our prison system in the united states has five percent of the world's population but a quarter of the world's prisoners so presidential pardons you know to be completely honest are very very underutilized to that to that end so yeah i mean the like i said it mirrors the present the prison system in the united states where and it also mirrors the sentencing system it's been overturned but if you remember when it was crack versus cocaine you could argue that you know once a black drug once a white drug in the sentence it goes according you only have about a minute left but i just wanted to go over president obama you know of course you're not going to see him pardoning bradley manning or anything like that but i mean he has pardoned significantly less people than proportionately and terms of so far in the administration why do you think this is i mean you're right you're

absolutely right this is four years of obama there's been a lot less pardons than say under the bush administration or the clinton administration but i mean there's no i see no reason to think that president obama is any different than any other president we've had very and he's just not exactly the bulk of the pardons we're going to see at the very end the thing that we need to look out for is whether or not these pardons are politically motivated as in the clinton administration where he gave at the very last day of his presidency hundred forty part. of all hopefully hours to spare you know it would be interesting to see what happens thanks so much for coming on breaking it down. like we see so far go to our you tube channel at youtube dot com plus breaking the set answer scribe got our facebook page at facebook dot com slash break in the set you can follow me on twitter as well abby martin and i'd like to take a break from my preaching but stay tuned to hear whether or not the t.s.a. security actually makes us safer next.

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gulf war. give him a note so we have a lot of. groups. all. right you know my mother was like. that wasn't. the smadi when i was fourteen yes you can. certainly can't do it through the barrel of a gun salute the social change you can be the afghans themselves afghan men and women we believe. cannot cross paths. but. it's up to the shop and. stuff people in the obama administration talking

about how much they care about the women of afghanistan it's not true they don't care about the women of afghanistan. the mission of free cretaceous free school or church and free. range mentioned free. three stooges free. food free blanquita cullum videos for your media project a free media. what

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so guys it's the day before thanksgiving of the day we all start daydreaming about the turkey the family and of course the downtime but unfortunately for many today represents something else the travel day from hell yep this year an estimated twenty four million people are expected to fly for the thanksgiving holiday and that means twenty four million people will have to endure the wrath of the t.s.a. the huge lines the body scanners the racial profiling and the unjustified scrutiny it's a hard pill to swallow especially when no one has ever been proven guilty that's right not one person stopped at the t.s.a. has ever gone on to be charged in connection with a terrorist plot and so it begs the question is it all worth it and does t.s.a. security actually make us safer to talk about all that and more i'm joined by harvey volage professor of sociology at n.y.u. and author of against security how we go wrong at airports subways and other sites of a big u.s.

danger harvey thanks so much for taking the time to join me glad to be with you so first of all i just want to repeat what i just said how to not one person who has been stopped by t.s.a. screeners has ever been charged with a terrorist act yet at the same time proponents of the t.s.a. will say well we know it's working because we haven't been attacked since nine eleven that people are under the illusion that the t.s.a. is working when it's really not. well there there's no way to prove a negative and in fact nothing has happened but it also hasn't happened in other places there are for example lots of security mechanisms in new york and other cities in the country in new york with the subways for example have a huge campaign of surveillance cameras and see something say something campaign there too no one has ever been charged with an act of terror either through the m.t.a. programs or the t.s.a. is programs so in neither case is it very likely that

any thing much has been substantially. stopped and harvey you point out your book that there are some other glaring security risks that we're not paying attention to that could be even more serious and you mentioned this both in airports and other places can you elaborate on that. well there are just trivial ones are mean they seem trivial but there are consequential things should go wrong so for example at airport security. the great thing that's happening there is that the security gate is acting as something that assembles the actual target in other words there are more people waiting to go through security. often than will ever be on a plane and none of those people have it have been checked the same thing happens of course at check in there are are various places along the trail in which

the targets are have been created by the airport itself and the most remarkable one is an ironic is the security gate itself. do you think that the t.s.a. is just security theater at this point. i think the t.s.a. a i think some people within the t.s.a. understand all of this i was able to spend hours actually talking to hiring people in the t.s.a. who had formerly been in the t.s.a. but have left the agency they are very intelligent people and they understand quite a lot of these things in part they just don't know what to do about it that is if they don't go through all of this this way then what are they left with and some political leaders in the united states and some other countries to the band that something be done so at the airport as well as other places there's

a kind of conspicuous security that must be done and being conspicuous is is part of the recipe it's part of what is necessary in order to demonstrate that these agencies are indeed doing something to protect us well one thing that they can do harvey is eleven at the body scanners which we know don't work other countries. use them because they don't work what do you think about those. again i think the body scanners and it's another theatrical aspect one of the reasons for the body scanners is that we respond to the last miscellaneous event however sort of odd ball it was and most of the things that have happened. to people who have tried to attack passengers are a plane have been detected by the way by other passengers or by the by the flight crews and. most of those those people in other places too

like again the subways they are a later found out to be not all with it in some cases just incompetent as as human beings and so they slip through the apparatus with their with their objects and then we react by banning that object and finding new ways to scrutinize for that object and now we have these scanners which are also vastly expensive and of course the corporations that make them are only too happy to sell them to push their sales and to push the idea that the whole the whole thing is effective and necessary and that their particular product is also necessary and effective. going off something that you just said you said a lot of these people who do try to attempt some sort of terrorist plot or bring

these objects through are mentally unstable motional and stable and it does seem like after nine eleven harvey every terror for oil terrorist plot is have some have has had some sort of f.b.i. entrapment where the f.b.i. . facilitates these plots and gives the people the bomb i mean do you think that any all of this is really being manufactured to justify keeping this thread alive. enforce these security measures to keep people reminded of terrorism i mean like you said it we're just going to use dehumanisation methods were first it's the shoes then it's the body scanners i mean what's next right it is it is a kind of militarization of civilian life and that just keeps on sort of creeping in there been entrapment i don't know of any incidents of entrapment that have occurred at the airports entrapment certainly has happened having to do with. a legit or attempted bombing.

operations in other parts of the systems in new york. and not at the airports or airport security so far as i know but but you have these and these. these intelligence operations by the f.b.i. really do entrapment and they often lead to cases that cannot be effectively tried sometimes they are tried and fact some people are found guilty and in some sense they are guilty but the question is would they have proceeded with those activities if there had never been an f.b.i. agent who aided them on and if you look at it closely you really see they are a dawn in no uncertain terms right why advisors to check out current haskell's case he was a passenger on board of the underwear bomber flight going to detroit i think from

amsterdam and he has a really interesting story about that he suggests that there was another case of entrapment that went too far really interesting case i advise you to check out what do you think though harvey about these viper teams expanding to bus depots railway stations been an extension of the t.s.a. now put in even potentially word of putting body scanners past airports now. right weekend there is really no end to it we can because the see the targets are just infinite so right down right now if you walk out of this studio i'm in new york and go into any of our department stores again you will find a larger crowd of vulnerable people then you will find at the airport and so to really see this thing through we would have to militarize everything because i mentioned go in the department stores but the sidewalks themselves have throngs of vulnerable people and it just. goes beyond

imagination to figure out how you could inspect all the people before they get near people who are vulnerable it just is a impossible inconceivable kind of project and in the meantime it's going to really make a lot of people unhappy and miserable and that's one of the things that course this your segment began with is the mass misery that occurs at the airports and which potentially can expand out from the airports to other aspects of civilian society guerrier i mean where does it end you know movie theaters grocery stores i mean this could potentially go on and on but you know as a sociologist how does this really you just said of course it makes people miserable makes them dread flying but really what is the state the surveillance state how does it really affect the psyche of people living in this country how

does it i'm sorry affect affect just the psyche of american citizens i see well first of all there's just these sort of ordinary psyche i mean one of the things we want to achieve in the pursuit of happiness in the united states and something like it in virtually every country of the world is to have the day go smoothly. when you go to the airport you're tense anyway most of us are due to my hearing time on time what i'm going to do when i get there how do i pack that i bring the right things all of these issues are making us tense and then when you face the gauntlet. of people who are here in new york really yelling at you sometimes to move along and then all of that machinery and these very odd weird things you have to do put your arms in the air and you know like that and take off your shoes and put them in one place as opposed to another this is

a massively intrusive and for many people especially difficult because there are all old people for example who have trouble with is there are people with one or two toddlers that they're trying to manipulate and all their toys and bottles and all the rest of it so this is a high price to pay just in ordinary terms never mind anything deep about the psyche it multiplies out that is every think of how many people this affects per hour within the united states that's a lot of human happiness hours that have been sacrificed for what i think is basically an illusion and something that could be done much better even if your believe that the whole thing is effective so for example you could help people that people at the at the gates at the airport could have it as their job not just

to order your around scrutinize you go through your stuff but to help you out to hold a stroller to help someone get their suitcase up on the. up up on the conveyor belt these are ways also of learning things about people including if they're up to no good i mean we all know if you are high. child get their code on you find out if they took the cookie because you feel it in their pocket and if it's what we always we tend to think that security is always about control and militarization whereas sometimes you learn and you make people more secure by being helpful what an awful idea harvey to be whole instead of you know having the small intent i really is a lot of methods of dehumanization unfortunately are out of time really appreciate you coming on breaking it down harvey knowledge thank you so much you're very

welcome. a novel idea indeed help people instead of hurting them then instead of take after all it's not the spirit of the holidays should be it's time we start watching out for each other instead of acquiescing to a surveillance state that claims to look out for our wellbeing when instead it does just the opposite of happy happy all it is you all. will do the trick to look at the world sure but as the best and brightest take minds gather in moscow some came to work while others came to play to get up close and personal with devices that recreate masterpieces and scan russian treasures for

insight in from space to keep us safe from oil spills and forest fires unleash your inner gadget geek is the me just search for the next big thing in the computer world and russia's only joints willing to risk goodies if we just take the fight straight to their competitors going to update you on a long ways down the future. live live. live. live. live. live live live. live live.

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