war you have to write about war in all of its aspects and you know it's a i think it's a very thin argument to make the case that us reporting on strikes that may have gone bad or may have killed civilians is it's the reporters who are strengthening the other side i mean i think that these things have these calculations have to be built in built into any kind of decision when you decide to prosecute a war and a specific example abdul heidi a shining i'm sure you've heard about him the journalist who's in prison in yemen he reported extensively on the drone strikes there and he shot the footage of children killed in one of those strikes he was jailed he was about to be pardoned by the yemeni president and then there was a phone call from president obama who reportedly insisted that they keep him in jail what do you make of that you know i don't i know this story i don't know. in depth sort of i know others have reported extensively on this story i mean i think

that there is a there's no question that there's been a crackdown by the administration this administration on information as a whole and reporting on various secret programs i mean you see it overseas you see it in the united states there's been more leak prosecutions of the obama administration than there was under the bush administration and makes it incredibly hard for reporters whether they be american reporters or foreign reporters to get at the basics of these shadow wars that are going on because although it is all classified in the past it has been easier to sort of find the basics of things is now i know it's quite hard have you felt that crackdown in your own work on your own skin yeah certainly the it materializes in different ways in the very basic way is that. people who you once spoke to and we're we're we're free to meet with you don't call you back or tell you i can't meet you anymore

because there's this fear of of implications for that now these are people who in the past it felt you know it was important to talk to journalists to sort of try to get as much of of the basics of the truth out as possible now they basically feel well it's not it's not worth me going to jail to talk to you the question that you can't get an answer to but would very much like to from the cia what is it i'd like to know much more about these so-called signature strikes that are carried out in pakistan where the cia does not know the identities of the people that they are firing at it there but they're based on who patterns of activity so if they see people doing midsts suspicious things that they suspect is a militant activity they're authorized to carry out a drone strike it used to be they only had to know they could only carry out a strike specifically when they knew who's down there that's how they end up targeting weightings and and so when they don't have specific intelligence you're sort of basing it on to some degree assumptions and there have been strikes that

have gone bad there's a concern that the cia could be targeting not just suspected terrorists but also be the competition of the governments that the u.s. supports in other words political opponents that the targets could be politically motivated is it a concern that he would share well i think what tends to happen i mean is that when you are reliant on foreign governments and their intelligence services to carry out some these operations as the u.s. has sometimes they are in yemen and pakistan is the u.s. getting fed intelligence by the government to take out people who are not. affiliates or the like their opponents or or rivals of the government i think it's very difficult to know and i think there have been cases if you just look at yemen . where the united states has had very poor intelligence they've been very reliant on the government of yemen for these strikes and in one case there was

a deputy governor of a province and yet he was killed i believe in may of two thousand and ten and is now believe that the united states was fed intelligence by this person's rivals in order to kill this person so it's this murkiness of how these wars are carried out i think that can lead to these types of situations you mentioned the u.s. is setting up new drone bases they need targets to keep them operating right could this business of killing suspected terrorists turning into a self generating them to price sort of the cia would have to come up with targets to keep them running well i think that you know i think the cia is these days a conservative organization in the sense that they have seen their past and they've seen all of the controversies of the past they would at least want the white house to sign off on whatever they did now they can of course present cases like west africa new threats and it's not just the cia it's the pentagon it's it's parts of

the national security apparatus that do may legitimately see threats but there is an interest too to perpetuate some of these operations a concern about scaling the back you can certainly look at places in the world that look very dangerous and see opportunities for carrying out more of these shadow wars that doesn't necessarily mean it will happen but you could certainly for instance look at mali other places west africa as quote unquote the next front without really seriously examining well are there costs and consequences of the u.s. getting involved in these places as opposed to handling it in different ways will there only be more problems for the u.s. to get involved then if they just step back and let it handle be handled in different ways what do you make of the administration's attempts to come up with legal opinions on why it is justified and legal to execute people without due process without a trial. you know they they have basically examined the. did

what the bush administration did in terms of of say of defining the world as a worldwide battlefield and say if we find people on that battlefield they are not they are they are they are they are soldiers and their enemy soldiers and they need to be needin need enemy combatants they need they need to be killed i mean there's very in that sense there's very little difference between what president bush authorized and what president obama authorized i'm sure you know that the majority of americans support drone strikes. as long as there is no threat to u.s. troops they seem to be fine with the strikes. does this surprise you this culture of acceptance i think it's surprising the extent that the public see it seems to embrace it without without too much controversy or too much sort of discussion i think that the the sort of the ministration is gauge the mood of the american

public which is partly this wariness about these long costly wars of occupation like iraq and afghanistan and people see drones and drone operations as a cleaner. more secret something that's out of the public view. as something that's acceptable whether that's going to change or not i don't know i mean i am surprised that that neither in the public or even in congress there is a whole lot of of intense scrutiny and for instance in the john brennan confirmation hearings it was amazing that they didn't find out that they didn't even have the the legal opinions that were justifying the drone strikes and they tried to hold up brennan's here nomination in order to get them and they didn't get them and they still approved brennan i'm sure you read the report about the cia bribing karzai his office with cashing backpacks plastic bags and whatnot unnamed u.s. officials told the new york times that much of the more money goes to paying off world lords and politicians many of whom have ties to the drug trade and in some

cases the taliban the result of this appears to be that the agency empowers the same networks that american diplomats and law enforcement agents say they're trying to dismantle they're trying to fight how do you explain what seems like conflicting priorities of different parts of the u.s. government you know this one is hard to explain exactly what the cia money goes for how it's distributed what the purposes other than to sort of gain influence in cars in the circle i mean i helped on that story and it was very difficult to. we still don't know and karzai has come out this weekend and said come through they confirmed it right so how much of this acts at cross purposes with. you know the work of as you said law enforcement officials or diplomats i mean there is a lot of angry people in the united states government that this goes on but it's

still goes on and it is approved i mean the cia has been giving large abouts of money to karzai and other warlords since nine eleven it's their argument that this is how afghanistan operates this is how afghanistan works with large bags of cash and also the stated objective is to help afghanistan get rid of corruption when in the same time if you are feeling it yeah. thanks very much. sigrid laboratory. was able to build the most sophisticated robot which on fortunately doesn't give a darn about anything tunes mission to teach music creation why it should care about humans. this is why you should care only on the dot com.

it is time for us to settle this question about britain and europe. david cameron's under increasing pressure to guarantee a vote on the u.k.'s future in the you will have a sell britain's european populace fear that such a divorce could destroy the. real damage and complexity of this oil spill was not something you can just by looking at dirty birds we have between four to five million people in this directly affected area of the coast and it's pretty. clear why it's not being reported because b.p. can't afford to have a reported all along the gulf coast are clean they are safe and they're open for business if b.p. is the single largest oil contributor to the pentagon the us war machine is heavily reliant on b.p.

and their oil this is a huge step backwards for democracy it's a step forward. carex it is toxic is it looked like spray. it was it was not a picture either the government or b.p. really wanted to have out there i don't want dispersants to be the agent. this bill. some of these traditional chili lines they've been bred and developed and asked down from generation. this is a total struction of the culture of mexico by telling them i mean this is not going to impact asylum in mexico whatever happens here. in the in the you know in a. genetically engineered crops why do you think this country is full of

obese and sick people because we have a crappy food system. live . please. please. please please

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get. the latest news on the week's top stories here on our t.v. the hunger strike and one tom obey passes the one hundred day mark with most inmates still starving themselves over the or indefinite detention without charge. the u.s. government seizes the phone records of over one hundred journalists from the associated press sparking me outraged by the white house insists he was unaware of the probe. syria's president maintains he'll stay on till he is voted out and warned the foreign backed rebels will keep fighting despite international efforts to mediate peace. and more spies in disguise russian security exposes a cia chief in moscow as u.s. intelligence has left red faced after again getting caught red handed trying to recruit a russian agent.