one hundred days of hunger a one ton of mass protests by inmates at the u.s. detention center shows no signs of abating with authorities resorting to force feeding and isolation. revolt we reported extensively on the hunger strike and where it's heading. the french president calls for greater political integration in the despite his country floundering in the blocks financial slump and for a second recession in five years. intelligence experts say russia one this round of the ultimate spy game is moscow releases purported phone recordings of a us agent made minutes before his arrest. and also reporting that the day the music died u.k.

citizens could feel the full brunt of the british record industry as it looks to clamp down on file sharing websites stories. online on screen international news and comment live from a studio sent to him in moscow so today marks a dark milestone in the history of the world's most maligned prison one hundred days of a mass hunger strike at guantanamo bay. out of one hundred sixty six inmates one hundred thirty are on strike according to prisoners while the military only admits to one hundred two at least a third of them are being force fed a procedure recognized by various medical organizations as painful enough to

constitute torture and by all accounts there's no end in sight to this protest prisoners say this is the only way for them to be heard having been forgotten in the halls of washington the hunger strikers are seeking an end to indefinite detention and for president obama to keep his promises and shut down the facility or he's going to check on explains. after years of the inaction injustice and indifference and after more than three months of starvation one tunnel detainees have finally got the president to have i'm going to go back apis they've heard these words before as president i will close guantanamo reject the military commissions act and if you go to the geneva conventions and now we're dead it needs to be closed now congress and again as many times before the white house if it were sponsibility to congress there's much you can do administrative leave without congress without having legislative act even under current restrictions the

administration has the power to use national security waivers to release many of these men which it hasn't used it's the charge that well the fear that if you release some of these prisoners that have been accused of being terrorist in the past and and they do something else or you find them going into terrorist organizations you pay a heavy political price for that so many of these men have fallen victim not just to their wrongful capture but also to u.s. politicians assumptions of what they may or may not do in the future but you can't you can't invoke people to maybe you know this is we're not future police here so far the administration's only response to the crises of carnival has been to force feeding troops down detainees nostrils the fact of the matter is that when an individual makes a decision of sound mind makes the decision to refuse food as

a political protest then as we said in our joint statement it is not open to the states in those circumstances to force them to do each. and the full speeding here involves the insertion of a tube of some significant down on the diameter through the naval passages and into the stomach in the most horrible of circumstances the un special rapporteur on human rights also told me that he was encouraged to. here the president once again expressed commitment to close the prison president of united states has said kuantan was a problem and yet on the ground for some reason the camp administration continues to treat these men and humanely and to deny them basic dignity for years the administration has been gauged in verbal and legal acrobatics to justify its inaction on guantanamo and still not clear how long before people there start dying but one thing is clear the elephant in the room just too big to ignore in washington. the guantanamo however soaring keeping the prisoners

hells isolated and under total control doesn't come cheap u.s. taxpayers are shelling out nine hundred thousand dollars a year for every inmate in guantanamo and there are one hundred sixty six of them what's worse that course is likely to grow to give a new bills presented by force feeding doctors and medication wendy worthington he's an investigative journalist he's been writing extensively on the guantanamo bay prison and he joins me live now so you've been gathering information all of these inmates what can you tell us about the conditions for them. well the conditions for them are terrible in the sense that they have literally been abandoned by all three branches of the united states government so since president obama failed to keep his promise to close the prison within a year that was in january two thousand and ten they have been unable to to see any

future for them so apart from staying in guantanamo forever and of course you know what underpins the horror of this is that half of these men over half of these men were cleared for release by an interagency task force that the president himself stablish but he then imposed a ban on releasing two thirds of them because they yemenis after a failed bomb plot in christmas two thousand and nine and the rest of the men and for all of the men in general have had their release blocked or made extremely difficult by congress so it's become a game of political football cynically i think lawmakers are preventing prisoners from being released and the president himself has been unwilling to expend political capital on an issue that isn't popular enough with the voters so you know the hunger strike it's taken the hunger strike for the prisoners to get noticed and these men are now seeking desperate measures but we've seen hunger strikes there before will this one have any different impact. well you know i think it has to do

because long time that the prison has been open it's not as though anyone legitimately is claiming that there's any reason for these men the most for most of them to be held apart from the fact that it's proven difficult to close the facility down and to release the majority of them so i think the pressing question is how is the administration finally going to go about particularly resolving the issue of the prisoners that its task force said the u.s. no longer wanted to hold those men have to be released and they have been. good signs this week from eric holder saying following what president obama said two weeks ago that they are looking to appoint somebody to oversee the guantanamo issue and yesterday hinting that this ban on the yemenis which officials reinforced a few just a few weeks ago. by saying that maybe they were thinking of lifting the ban they have to lift the ban it's absolutely interesting. and even hillary clinton said yesterday that the eighty six who were being held without charge should be released

so in effect that could be a turn of the type at the same time let's concentrate on those conditions for the prisoners at the moment because it seems that they getting worse and that the authorities there are really putting further pressure on them that's according to reports from the prisons themselves yeah absolutely and you know i mean i agree with all the experts who find the force feeding of prisoners deplorable but that said you know there really is no way that the united states government is going to allow prison the diagrams i don't know if they can help or whether they should be allowing them to or not be so what are the consequences if they do that and if they do die yet what would that really be a turning point and if that did happen. well i think the turning point that needs to happen is the political turning point you know the reason these men are doing this is because they are in despair the reason they're doing is because half of them were told they were going home and haven't gone anywhere so it needs resolving on that basis as soon as there is emotion on that i suspect that the repercussions

in the prison will will will bring the issue down a little bit i mean at the moment it seems to be very much you know the prison is a kind of terrible bubble within which the authorities have been trying to gain the upper hand over the prisoners and have you know resorted to isolating them which is a terrible thing for these men who are already despairing you know having to having to force feed them and then manage and if the politics takes the lead we'll actually see some improvement all right so politics takes the lead and let's say the prison is closed down but we just see another one opening up in its place somewhere else just briefly. i don't think we're close to seeing this one closed down you know we have to get the eighty six cleared prisoners released we then have eight z.-man left to go into them and some of these men are supposed to face a trial those of course have been very very slow in happening and forty six of them were actually designated for indefinite detention without trial by president obama

in an executive order two years ago now at the time the only thing that made this notion even vaguely palatable to lawyers and human rights groups was that he promised there would be periodic reviews of these men's cases to establish whether they remain a threat those reviews haven't happened at all so they need to happen and there needs to be a genuine object of analysis of quite how many really dangerous people there are ever have been england and these people must be tried and everything that we've seen over the years these are reports from the inside suggests that this is no more than a couple of dozen of the one hundred sixty six men who is due and i thank you very much and if you thought anybody can live in london well there's been very little official reaction over this crisis from washington but we're always interested to get your reaction on the top stories and of course we'd like to know what you think could be the implications of this hunger strike there in guantanamo and whether this one hundred day hunger strike will achieve anything well we can see that the

majority fifty five percent just over half of the believe actually this will lead to the conditions worsening for the detainees in the prisoners prison authorities turning up the screws fatalities among inmates is a possibility just over a third of you think that could well happen we could see some deaths meanwhile the minority nine percent or four percent more optimistic saying this could lead to the closure of guantanamo bay or perhaps it could lead to the release of those who were held without charge or at least some concessions for those detainees so that's what you think at the moment here on r.t. dot com you can find the online poll on our web site at the moment now to. about the psychological conditions that these detainees have to face at guantanamo we're going to talk to stephen soltys an outspoken critic of the mistreatment solve inmates at guantanamo and he's a psychoanalyst so steven tell us what exactly all of these psychological pressures these detainees are going through at the moment well. they've been there

for almost a decade over a decade in some cases. as your previous person and pointed out eighty six of them have been cleared for years to go and yet there's no motion there's no possibility in the reasonable future of that happening and the other eighty are also stuck where there is seems to be a profound level of hopelessness among the man that's what we hear from the attorneys who are the only people outside a lot of contact with them and they seem to feel that they have to do something to control their own their conditions you know people cannot live in circumstances that make certain no control wonder just how damaging then is it for the inmates mental health this idea of not knowing when they going to get out being held in such confinement this. mental pressure on them is that more damaging than the

alleged physical torture we've heard about. i don't know how you compare damage i just think if your listeners asked themselves how they would feel to being locked up on this island for years and years and years i have no idea. when or if they are ever going to get out of there and then being told in the case of the eighty six that they're cleared for release but still held for years and years they're you know constantly degraded so these things are inseparable they they go together. the but. you know people just cannot tolerate that forever and what about that the idea of these very harsh interrogation techniques are they really much different from those in any other american prison. well in terms of those harsh conditions and harsh interrogation techniques doing no interrogation going on at one time or and has not

been for many years i mean what to interrogate them about they've been there for a decade they have no you know the only thing that they interrogators could do is not get intelligence they have no intelligence and been in contact with what's going on in the outside world for over a decade the they would like to get confessions from some of them so you know you could subject them so most of the brutality that they're subjected to is not around interrogations it's around simply prison conditions and in that sense it's sad to say that we have in the united states a number of prisons that also are extraordinary brutal as do other countries. and when i was going to last many of those held at the detention facility there are the terrorist suspects are being convicted how do you think they then should be treated and questioned well first remember eighty six over have been cleared for release

for years. they should be but among the other eighty they should be tried or released my personal opinion is that the military commissions that they set up with despite the reforms under the environment ministration are never going to work and they're never going to have the credibility around the world and they should give up on that idea and go back to where the obama administration was at the beginning. and it's things going for al so i just wrote just briefly and finally i think who should be blamed for the conditions of these prisoners and what they going through that the jail is all u.s. legislation since prison authorities claim of course they're reacting to the letter of the law just finally if only i understand i mean my understanding from attorneys is that obama administration has a lot of flexibility be any sex could be released tomorrow if obama signed

a statement to that effect be a legislature and doesn't stop that requires him to make certain certifications that he could do on a moment's notice he's chose not to because it's just not a political priority the question is does the hunger strike put pressure on to change that what we hear is that a number of the prisoners are entering the state of being in deep danger of long term fiscal how health and probably in a matter of weeks we may have some deaths so whether the u.s. administration wants to take especially on the world arena having people dying there from hunger strikes and and whether that changes the political calculus we'll have to see but the president could release those eighty six immediately it's just he's not going to take the political heat to do that right stephen thank you very much indeed for that was great to hear analyst steve insults that joining us live well now let's take

a look at the timeline of the guantanamo. standoff according to inmates the hunger strike began on the sixth of february for the next month the military denied any protest was going on lawyers though described their clients as lethargic and delirious with more and more joining in it was only mid march that the military admitted to a strike and detainees began to tell of harsh force feeding techniques water deprivation isolation in cold cells and in mid april there was a military raid on a public cell block with gunfire being report of the first time in kuantan of those history and the prisoners were split up in an apparent effort to force an end to the protests and towards the end of april the military dispatched a further forty more medics to guantanamo and at the end of april barack obama finally acknowledge the strike was happening describe the situation as problematic and vowing again to try to close the camp so that's the timeline for you here in

r.t. we'll continue our coverage of this milestone one hundred days of hunger strike with more expert analysis and opinion coming up on r.t. throughout the day so stay with us we're coming to you live from moscow hunger strike despair pushed to the limit. nearly one hundred kuantan of the detainees are screaming for justice. where is the end for. wealthy british style. markets why not. find out what's really happening to the global economy

with mike's concert for a no holds barred look at the global financial headlines tune in to kaiser report. continues here and i'll see president forceful on the strength of his rhetoric

against the stars he's saying the policy is preventing a recovery in the eurozone that's as france's again found itself in recession like another blow to the reputation of its unpopular leader well he says are silly reports now on how the financial woes and europe's second largest economy has raised fears over the whole block. i we're looking at a cafe culture here in paris still continuing looking calmer wherever this is a far cry a contrast to the other images that we've seen across the country such as protests against president francois launce a first son diversity as president has there seeing him as not having done enough for the economy or those and a steady protest now the a french finance minister had come out saying that this contraction that we're seeing now is a result of the overall depressed environment that france finds itself at its neighbors in the euro zone area however it is still a blow to our fund swollen to what dan has been seeing a lot of criticism for the policies that are in place and also there have been a lot of economists who have been calling france for some time now as

a ticking time bomb in europe it's one of the core countries now that we're seeing in recession no longer the so-called periphery of the euro zone such as countries like greece or portugal but a core euro zone nation it would be extremely difficult to get out of the speciation. stream a bad policy which are using now. a sprint she's catching labor cost cutting. of course we level. and you are not going to spend the afternoon in nice car fees like this one because you know it becoming too expensive for you well as these the small numbers hit europe and france finds itself officially in a recession the question really there is how long is it going to take before economy starts growing and growing again and stop being in the red and also the concern is the longer it is that we see the sustained a lackluster numbers the harder it will be for a recovery to take place reporting from paris i'm tess or so yeah. i mean this onyx

called bill he believes that the french need to overhaul the financial policies to get the economy back on track. what we saw in france was not a stereotype but what we calling for. is. pretty if you're. paying taxes. and public spending the average british worker is taxed at fifty seven percent the. proportion of public debt. in the g.d.p. is at ninety percent so clearly we should look the other way and place industry. lower taxes lower spending and. its weight one billion dollars has been put forward to develop a gold mine in the wilds of north west russia and the only official who's funneling so much money into the massive project by keeping the ministry benefactor to themselves that it's online at the moment plus. deadly twisters with

across the u.s. state of texas sending rescue workers into a spin got photos footage of more of our t.v. dot com right now. hundred thousand dollars up front and one million a year apparently that's the price the cia is willing to pay for russia's classified information the country's federal security service released parts of wiretapped phone conversations of the recently uncovered american spy on the recordings run fogle is allegedly heard trying to bribe a russian agent you're going to start some. more. talk of someone you know what a story. or do you want. someone. russia has expressed his disappointment over the incident repeatedly stressing it

undermines all cooperation efforts between moscow and washington exposure has failed to rattle the diplomatic arena though with the media mostly focusing on the funny side of the story ridiculing the agent's clumsy spycraft this is seen as common reaction to events like this but previous cases show it doesn't make them less true british intelligence analyst harvey he thinks russian counterintelligence is one this round of the great game it is a great success for the f.s.b. the russian domestic security service what fairly fail to do is follow a set of rules which the cia have always had it's called the moscow rules it requires you very the pattern of your behavior you're constantly told what has happened in. the great game well in this particular instance russia has scored america has lost

but make no bones about it there will be a fool recalls at that moment and before we know relations through better knowledge and as i say. the cia will replace only with another intelligence officer and the game will continue. and the full interview with harvey british intelligence analysts is available for you right now on our websites and also online we've collected a selection of the top spy scandals of the twenty first century involving the u.s. and russia had r.t. dot com for the background to all of this. a new crackdown on illegal downloads in the u.k. looks set to begin leading body representing the national record industry is now deciding if it will take legal action to block citizens from accessing dozens of file sharing sites but as officer a furphy explains there are adults over how effective any new measures could be. well record labels could be about to launch the biggest battle yet against pirate

sites and what's alleged will be the main blocking blitz in the ongoing fight against websites file sharing and infringe on music copyright the british internet service providers or i have already in the recent past been asked to block websites certain websites that are illegally file sharing music now it's thought that the british industry trade body. he launched the previous successful legal action is set to take a third wave of action now p.v. i haven't yet responded to this latest information but it's thought that would be targeting sites such as the us based file sharing site grieve and what would that mean well for british consumers of the music industry they won't be able to access these sites anymore this action is aimed at targeting the casual illegal download or of course for the hardcore pirates they'll simply move on it's thought to the

vast array of websites that you have out there at the moment so already questions being raised as to just how effective any legal action would be certainly is seems that these are fire sharing sites at a previous ever more popular are next for the chopping board is this music industry attempts to continue this crackdown on other legal file sharing. service reporting that barack obama's administration is reported to be rapidly losing media support in the wake of the associated press surveillance going to what was going to be seen as a damage limitation exercise the u.s. justice department came up with a new reason for watching the phones of a hundred journalists claim it was necessary to protect americans from dangerous information leaks but norman solomon he's from the media watch group says it was all about teaching a lesson to whistleblowers. that is really one of the last refuge of scoundrels when it comes to top leaders who want to turn off the tap of information reaching

their own public that those leaders would rather the public be kept in the dark about and i think what we've seen with these revelations about the phone records of a.p. reporters is that this isn't ministration which has already weighs data larger war against more whistleblowers than any other in u.s. history has continued to push the envelope and try to have a chilling effect on not only journalists but the sources within the administration . well that to bring you up to date for the moment i'll be back with a news team with more in just have a thirty minutes from now in the meantime it is the latest edition of a money show the kaiser report off of the short break is that it's.

a fairly dickinson university study has been revealed to twenty nine percent of americans think that a revolution won't just happen in america but needs to be done in order to protect individual liberty if respondents consider themselves conservative than that number is bumped up to forty four percent that's nearly half also fox news found out that since nine eleven the percent of americans willing to sacrifice their personal freedom to reduce the threat of terrorism is at an all low this number might sound trivial but it only takes a tiny percent of the population actually start a revolution i mean how many communists were in russia at the start of the one hundred seventeen and how many were there at the end revolution may sound like a nice thing to a growing number of people but the media wrongly portrays revolution as some fun video game battle where freedom fighters toppled a statue of the dictator and then democracy just instantly comes about and life is good and happy i don't ask you to ignore movies like v. for vendetta and.