tomorrow marks ten years since the u.s. went to war in iraq over claims that the country was making weapons of mass destruction so what has the u.s. learned from this conflict we have an iraq report card coming up. did you know that the f.b.i. was using top secret letters to gather information about u.s. citizens from businesses a judge says the practice is unconstitutional and orders it to stop more details on the secretive national security letters ahead. the u.s. says it's be thinking off its missile defense systems on the west coast after a threat from north korea should the u.s. really be worried about north korea and is trying to pick a fight with washington r.t.t. questions more.

it's monday march eighteenth four pm in washington d.c. i'm meghan lopez and you're watching our t.v. starting off this hour tomorrow marks the ten year anniversary of the u.s. aggression in iraq in the decade since the war began a lot has changed in this country here's a rundown of the things that we know the u.s. has engaged in misleading the public check the bush administration said time and again that iraq was dangerous because it possessed weapons of mass destruction it was the very foundation on which the entire war was built today the bush administration and the world knows otherwise lack of transparency check the fact that the government will not disclose concrete numbers of how many iraqi civilians were actually killed during the years of aggression or even the true economic costs of war are testaments to this point numbers of iraqi civilians killed ranged from fifty to. million add another check for violation of international law during the height of aggression the u.s.

used and left depleted uranium in over three hundred sites around the country sickening thousands along the way birth defects and infant mortality in cities like the lucia have increased at a rate of five times higher than elsewhere depleted uranium which to this day has not yet been cleaned questionable business practices check the military shady dealings with contractors like blackwater as well as the unexplained last at least nine billion dollars in the country highlight the fraud and waste this war initiated post drawdown instability check just yesterday ten were killed and another sixteen were wounded in a double car bombing in the southern city of basra another two dozen people that were killed that were killed by a car bombing in baghdad on march fifteenth only add to this these two incidents are just the latest examples of violence and instability in the region for more on the true legacy of the u.s. left in iraq i'm joined now by political analyst joe maccarone. so we've had very

specific goals in mind when we entered the country we wanted to depose of saddam hussein get him out of power and we wanted to find locate and take control of the weapons of mass destruction will saddam hussein is dead and we know now that there are no weapons of mass destruction so technically we have control of all of them is this a mission accomplished in this case. i mean mission accomplished was we have the missions i think to do this through the mission food but i think after this goes and six we have the shift of strength that you were the coalition election the republicans both lost the election you had gets going to go up you had big you had those this whole shift the sued but differently we never phoned. up of months ructions so the image of the invision the was not for food some ho but the most important thing. we have to look back i think the big picture of the invasion if you want to look back ten years or ten years now we see that iraq

change washington as much as was not change in iraq you see how much there is concern you see you see that there you see it you see the biskit of being involved now in syria and elsewhere in the words you see the conservative party over the course of a different but in general is much more weaker you see it the conservative woman two days ago nobody spoke about any international issue you see there's more worry about the debt in general and so i think it's was the most way to change if i look back on the longer so you just saw our list our checklist of what was actually done in iraq do you have anything to add on to that checklist no i think you covered basically pretty much of the main thing is you had a group of civilians who came into iraq who planned the invasion they say in the army this creates a fiction so that inside the pentagon you had you had this friction still go on going to not going to just to highlight it but on the more

a longer term. you had the decision to go to war without any international cover without any basic cover on the long term you know after two thousand and six so. you create you knew there was basically a dysfunctional country moving forward and as you say there was a lot of corruption and the destruction there we have over ten billion will release that somehow it was it was a mess somehow definitely all right so let's talk about modern day iraq one of the things that the u.s. did succeed out was shifting the power away from the sunnis into the shia hands did this really create stability in the region. not create but that if you remember the iraqi army was the you had you had the fragmentation of the state so basically the only way forward was to create the sunni shia and you have the old guard the elements you. iran jumping in to expose to ition you had turkey also so basically they created a cult so we basically that looks like lebanon somehow we have

a different confessions fighting for power and definitely you had shared anger from the sunni over the years from saddam hussein's days you had the kurds who want their own entity somehow so they created or iraqis also played a big part in creating the spokesman system that it's impossible to take any decision so you have now power concentrated in an elmo licking you have the could still vying for power you have the sunni side led now the gulf countries are upset from maliki the americans know that is the only want to deal with so it's a whole complicated region let's talk about our molokai we don't have that much time left he's been heartless two thousand and six he said he will not run for a third term in twenty fourteen what does an iraq without all molecule look like it's hard to know who it was the structure that man who really got out of this doesn't fix basically it was the time of when the americans wanted to make an indicted salute to the to the iranians to prove their role in iraq somehow so it

was elected in that it could lead to bring america to power and has been since trying to balance it relation between iran and between the us and same time it's very hard mission to do recently he got more power into inside this party most probably if he really did not run for another election you have somebody close to him but the the internet internal friction in iraq is open so i don't think if maliki stays or not it will stop right we know there's a lot of people supporting and also against him boss in the u.s. as well as in iraq joe maccarone our political analyst thank you for your opinion. the hunger strike in guantanamo bay is entering its sixth week and still there is no resolution in sight it's started after the detention facility officers be searching and in some cases confiscating the personal belongings of detainees including their korans omar gaius is a former get mody dany he spoke earlier with our teen or national about his experience in from side the facility here's part of that interview. there are many

bad things that happen there's a beginning is there's a systematic torture where everyone goes through where they are a. they stepped out of their clothes for example and they sometimes sexually abused their physically abused like myself and others we were physically beaten up until as you can see my right eye has been the sight in my right eye has been lost they tried to god both in my eyes so you never even were told what. a lead allegations against azhar we were questioned for hundreds of times and we were interrogated many many times and then we are released without any conviction we were never convicted never had the chance to see the evidence against us the generals have set up in the time of. bush. dick cheney and all the other officials of the lawyers who legalized torture and they justified the methods of torture and this book and publicly in defending this kind of thought i think of course we hold all

these people responsible now obama and all the other officials the taking over the the people there were serious crimes of committed inside montana most people don't realize their people were killed inside and on them more than nine people were killed in one tenement people that i know inmates were sexually abused there were people who have lost their arms and lost limbs in like amputated like of the desire some people were paralyzed throughout their lives some people lost their eyes these are serious problems these are serious war crimes or crimes against captive people and these people have to come to justice if we let these people at large what will happen is that more across these like these would take place they are examples of criminals committing crimes and just not paying back for their crimes that was former guantanamo bay detainee omar to guy yes. well it looks like even the f.b.i.

is subject to the rule of law a federal judge last week found that the f.b.i. has not been abiding by the constitution for years and is demanding for the agency to change its ways here's the rundown the f.b.i. has been writing hundreds of thousands of so-called national security letters to private businesses these letters demand for employers to disclose private information about their clients that would otherwise require a warrant or a subpoena in order to obtain essentially it's the f.b.i.'s way of skirting around court orders the agency even tries to hide these letters by preventing businesses from even talking about them but that's not the case any longer here to explain why i'm joined by kevin blogger at firedoglake hey there kevin so what is the latest information coming out from the u.s. district court. well sir to explain why this decision happened because you're basically constraining speech an issue of free speech you're making it so that someone who is receiving this request to be silent is unable to

acknowledge that they themselves are under an investigation of the court. while there's nothing wrong really with national security letters that a person or even the company should be able to talk about receiving that there's no risk at all that could be even found anywhere that you were a risk you know nationals purity by talking about the receipt and the judge's decision addressed several constitutional issues that she found with these and s.l. letters and her decision she said quote moreover this there is no evidence before the court that congress was still concerned about the constitutional doesn't definition say is after it had taken steps to address some of the constitutional infirmities found by the district courts in the second circuit rather it appears that in amending and reenacting the statute as it did congress was concerned with giving government the broadest powers possible to issue in s.l. disclosure orders and preclude a searching judicial review at the same time so what's congress really helping the

f.b.i. skirt around the courts. that's the way it appears and it wouldn't be surprising when you consider how willing the congress has done to authorize these sort of surveillance measures under things like the patriot act and other legislation it seems and the court really put a pin on a and discussed how it seemed like congress would actually carve out this legislation so that the court would have it be really impossible to review this sort of process so it would be ultimately difficult for someone who was the victim of this gag provision to even go challenge the way things were going in the courts so let me ask you this how fundamental were these were these letters to to helping the f.b.i. out how the f.b.i. collects information without these n.f.l. letters well so we have to pee reminder that we're talking about ending the n.f.l. process so that's really

a fundamental concern here but boy i guess what becomes the concern and why the f.b.i. i once every wonder made silence is that the way that the cells are being used is to create these communities of interest to not only just you surveillance on one person but start to ferret out and look at the associations of individuals so it makes it very powerful to go after members of like a hacktivist group like anonymous or even you know consider the cases of maybe muslims of perhaps maybe the f.b.i. providing some background support for the n.y.p.d. that likes to engage in racial profiling and that has come under scrutiny for the surveillance of muslims there and so this is how function kevin i do want to ask you one other interesting point to make is the sheer volume of letters that was actually being issued it's shocking to say the least in two thousand and three over thirty nine thousand of these letters went out in two thousand and six some were almost almost fifty thousand were sent out and in two thousand and eleven over

sixteen thousand were signed stamped and sent out so how could this have been happening for so long with that with no one really questioning it until now. because there were gag orders that made people afraid to speak about the fact that they were receiving them and made it afraid for companies only recently to go posting data on the requests that they're receiving from government even then they're only posting ranges and not the exact number because there's a there's a chill and they've everyone involved in this who is being asked to cough up information is under this fear that they're going to come under some kind of prosecution if they violate the gag very outgoing things going forward we have now we're over that it seems like there's going to be some kind of way for people to toss their interesting information kevin will still a blogger at firedoglake thank you for that analysis. well the california coastline is going to get a little more cluttered soon u.s. defense secretary chuck hagel has ordered the military to beef up its missile

interceptor system on the west coast all in the figure that north korea would launch a nuclear attack fourteen missile interceptors will be added by the year twenty seventeen as a precautionary measure here's how it will work if north korea launches a missile toward the u.s. several of these interceptors would be launched and fly over the sea and smash into the missile causing it to explode over the sea and potentially saving millions of lives if it works properly to explain more about this military ramp up i'm joined by alexandre tomas he's a nuclear nonproliferation expert and chairman national security project fellow thank you so much for joining me so let me begin by asking you how imminent is the threat from north korea. thank you for having me first and foremost i'm happy to be here at this somewhat tense time it's actually if you look at it this is a pattern for north korea this is not something new that they've vacillated back and forth between peace and bellicose sort of warnings and so we shouldn't be

shocked about this i think that with the new leader coming in he wants to establish himself as a military leader as well and i think this is part of that that stance that he's having forward but how imminent is a threat realistically as i think many of your viewers may have seen this week and president obama said that there isn't an imminent threat but we would rather not have the risk and we want to hedge on the side of the margin call now to respond to threats like this are we threatening north korea ourselves or are we provoking them are we acknowledge what they're doing we're absolutely acknowledging what they're doing we are doing military exercises with our allies the south koreans but that's a normal thing that we do we're certainly working with again our our neighbors in that reason the russians and the chinese as well and i think we actually need to be more of that to be clear with those in the region that this is. thing that's normal that the u.s. is doing these exercises and to make clear our intent at the plymouth see we've done those exercises for quite some time every year but really ramping up this

missile defense system what type of a message are we sending to north korea i think i mean it's not really ramping up it's the european phased adaptive approach this is where we talk about putting missiles in poland and obviously again with your with your audience the russians were not too happy about that but. indicates it's adaptive or adapting to new realities so we're not we're not ramping anything us we're just adapting to and responding to the north koreans ok i do want to play a quick sound bite it's president obama talking about iran and the threat that iran poses now we think that he would take your word for. to develop a nuclear weapon. so the american military is it taking its eye off the ball here by focusing on north korea which one really poses more imminent threat i think i

mean i think the president made. very clear remarks and neither paper poses more of a threat i think we need to look at all threats and look at them equally and circumstances change i mean we have to respond as these circumstances change we did not know that the north koreans would would do another missile test another nuclear test and so that's the way we're responding ok now the vice chairman of the joint chiefs of staff is admiral james when i felt he said that the system is meant to dissuade the north koreans but really. is it possible that this type of system could provide a false sense of security that's a good question i think that in working with our allies as i mentioned in the region the japanese and others i think we are working with them to let them know what the what the security is what we can provide and what we can't provide and as long as we're clear and transparent i think we're trying to do that i think everyone will be on the same page and everything will be fine finally was supposed

to be this window of opportunity for the u.s. we were you know trying to reset our relations with north korea this really isolated place that we don't really understand all that well do you think that the u.s. to snuff to reach out to north korea i think we did in fact i was one of the ones who really was hopeful and thought oh god this guy's been educated abroad he's a westerner we can have an open opportunity with them i think we did the best we could do and i think we continue to do that we continue to reach out through our friends i would say allies the chinese in the region and so i think we're on the right path yes all right alexander tamas nuclear nonproliferation expert at the truman center and the truman center national security project thank you for joining us thank you. it's one of the more uncomfortable conversations that couples have to have a one point or another in their relationships sexual history and sexually transmitted diseases the fact is that an increasing number of americans both old and young are afflicted by any range of diseases is becoming so much of

a problem that the centers for disease control estimates it costs americans tens of billions of dollars per year to deal with r.t. correspondent liz wahl reports. and outbreak of sexually transmitted diseases is plaguing the nation if you're sexual activity you probably will have at least one sex returns in your sexual life time according to a new report from the centers for disease control one hundred ten million people in the u.s. are infected and twenty million new people contract a sexually transmitted infection each year these are the eight most common diseases the c.d.c. looked at topping the list of the most prevalent hiv chlamydia trickle monogamous and genital herpes the human papilloma virus or h.p.v. is by far the most common infection transmitted by sex doctor to make augustus is the director of o.b. g.y.n. at the med star washington hospital center she says h.p.v. cases are driving the numbers up there's a lot more cases of h.p.v.

especially women. young teens to young adult symptoms can include genital warts but they don't always show up when a person carries the virus in serious cases h.p.v. can lead to cervical cancer in women half of the newly infected are young people between the ages of fifteen and twenty four students they live and area where they are engaging in higher wispy haven just because they're having sex with one another so that creates a pool of disease that more risks for people getting infected well figures show that sexually transmitted diseases have skyrocketed physicians point out we're deathly screening a little bit more often and so i think we're also picking up a cup workers says what's clear is with sexually transmitted diseases rampant in the u.s. almost everyone that is sexually active is at risk of getting infected the invincibility of risk that this may not happen to me but will happen to someone else the c.d.c.

estimates sexually transmitted infections cost sixteen billion dollars a year and medical costs sexually transmitted diseases come as significant physical psychological and fine. it's all costs but all of it can be prevented and we have now the numbers and the data to back us up to say this is really a problem so let's work towards i think education that means spreading awareness and using protection in washington. well it's been more than a week since sixteen year old money gray done it in a storm of police bullets in flatbush brooklyn the controversy swirls over whether new york police officer shot him in response to gray pulling out a gun or just adjusting his belt his community in brooklyn has been the scene of protests in response to the shooting which have resulted in more than fifty arrests now the two policemen who fired the eleven around sacré have been named. and officer. this isn't the first time the two in my pretty police officers have come

under questioning regarding their actions in uniform sergeant moe rather has been named in three federal lawsuits and officer card into all five of the lawsuits allege the civil rights violations and ultimately cost new york city two hundred fifty fifteen thousand dollars to settle currently both of them have been placed on desk duty but gray's death has created more responses than that gray's high school principal matt willoughby wrote to about the sophomore in his dedication and to learning really on the controversy of his death has generated he really be wrote this letter to students saying quote my hope is that as a community we can agree that the death of anyone so young is tragic whether this death will result in any policy or tactical changes on behalf of the n.y.p.d. or flatbush community remains to be seen. well late last week the new york police

department hit a historic number the five million stop and frisk the stop and frisk procedure is when new york police officers to stop people that they suspect of criminal activity in the street has kept them down all without a warrant today a federal judge in new york started hearing testimony from a class action lawsuit that alleges stop and frisk is unconstitutional while the new york city government says stop and frisk has resulted in decreased violence and that police need to intervene to prevent suspect. people from committing crimes but the lawsuit claims that these suspicions are based on prejudice the large majority of the people that are actually stopped in the stop and frisk procedure or young african-american and latino men of those frist eighty eight percent walked away without a rest this trial will get at the heart of whether these stops are necessary to prevent crime or are unconstitutional and counterproductive the trial is expected

to last a month and will help sculpt the n.y.p.d. practices in the future but stop and frisk isn't the only controversial matter that is on the police docket these days are to correspondent margaret howell took a look at some of the recent examples of police brutality. how many innocent u.s. citizens were killed by police officers this year shockingly there are no hard numbers on the subject but here's what we do know at times cops are authorized to beat maim and in some cases kill law abiding citizens the us constitution guarantees americans the freedom to peaceably assemble still individuals linked to social movements like occupy have been bullied by local law enforcement police officers attempting to break up occupy protest like these at berkeley often showed up in riot gear armed with pepper spray and baton and many cases police sprayed protesters in the face beat them and hauled them to jail remember that these

citizens are unarmed and well within the laws to peacefully protest and assemble. occupiers aren't alone in the past year we found seven concrete examples of police brutality resulting in serious injury or death here or two of these examples on december twenty first of two thousand and twelve sammy davis was shot and killed by a cop in georgia as he stood in the grocery store parking lot asking customers for spare change the officer who killed him had a link the disciplinary file in his department and a history of excessive force against citizens here is davis' sister talking to local media there's a problem with leadership that we keep somebody like who was sworn to protect us here today because i did get an innocent person to. another example bradshaw iraq war veteran and father of three young children was shot and killed by a member of the local sheriff's department in bowling green kentucky the bailiff is

claiming self-defense but bradshaw was shot point blank in the head while seated in this car as for the bailiff well he was placed on administrative leave pending investigation and not arrested three hundred gathered in the streets to bring awareness about bringing this case does the law protect u.s. citizens from the savage cruelty of cops this abuse of power goes far beyond to serve and protect just you gave them that right in washington murder howel r.t. and that's going to do it for now if you missed any part of today's show you are in luck we post all of our interviews online in full just go to youtube dot com slash r t america and for the latest information on all the stories we cover today and a few that we just didn't have time to get to check out our web site r c dot com slash usa and don't forget to follow me on twitter at meghan underscore lopez i always want to hear your comments and feedback so tweet me see it at five.

they've been living this way since the seventeenth century. their rituals are strict. their communities are the silicon. the clearly distinguish between their own and the alien. and guard their family infamy and the treasure of. it all sometimes you see a story and it seems so you think you understand it and then you glimpse something else you hear or see some other part of it and realize that everything is ok. i'm tom harpur welcome to the big picture.

is the key to. communicate. with their old leave us we're not supposed to be public people we'd rather not be filmed.