what's up guys i'm having martin welcome to breaking the sat so investigative journalist barrett brown has been in prison for nearly a year for shedding light on the dark underbelly of the private intelligence world and now he can't even talk about it federal court order just imposed a gag order on brown is the fence team that prevents them from discussing the details of the case with anyone from the media brown faces up to one hundred five years behind bars for a number of charges including posting a link to information already available on the internet and threatening a federal agent in a you tube video well guess who was the only testifying witness of the gag order hearing none other than robert smith the same f.b.i. agent who raided brown's home last year and brown was charged with threatening yep

definitely a guy with an unbiased opinion on the legality of a gag order now according to the court's decision a gag order is meant to protect brown's right to a fair trial because there's just so much media coverage about the case you know between c.n.n. as miley cyrus twerking updates and amazon receives pounding in the syrian war drums government has been all over barrett brown look at the obvious why they don't want this case to generate attention but i better stop talking before they impose a gag order on me so let's go break the set. the of the possible it was terrible a girl i'm very sorry to take the second of the money or the club that never had sex with her make their lives let's call it was. just so.

lists lists lists lists . just one day after army private manning was sentenced to thirty five years in an all male military prison for exposing war crimes there was an announcement made in a statement manning explained as i transition into this next phase of my life i want everyone to know the real me i'm chelsea manning i'm a female given the way that i feel i have felt since childhood i want to begin hormone therapy as soon as possible i hope that you will support me in this transition now of course several times during manning's hearing her sexual identity was brought to the attention of the court the photo was released of her dressed as a female and although manning has always felt this way she in no way wanted her

sexual identity to interfere with her trial indeed it's incredible that one of the most prominent whistleblowers of our time is a transgender woman and even more inspiring is it the fact that chelsea came out in the face of such adversity while the world was watching her declare her womanhood however now questions are being raised as to whether or not the military will pay for her home on therapy while she's in prison and the army has responded to many requests for her womb therapy with a statement saying the army does not provide hormone therapy and sex reassignment surgery for gender identity disorder so to talk about what's next for chelsea and what other obstacles face transgender people not only in the military but in society at large mark hills and executive director of the transit for the national center for transgender identity thank you so much. they do so much for coming on i think it's really great that this case is prominently out there in the mainstream because it's creating a lot of attention to transgender issues and transgender equality and for those who might be confused about what this even means and who are looking at chelsea manning

explain really quickly what it what does it mean to be transgender trench gender person and for the purposes of this conversation is just basically a person who was born and raised as one gender or raised to some point you know might have just been to be age two or three but now lives thirty. lives or wants to live their lives as. of another gender and why is it that the army discharges those who are transgender why is it looked upon as a psychological disorder and not just a sexual identity well i think the army regulations that disqualify transgender people from military service are are outdated that they're based on old stereotypes and old prejudices and i don't think they're going to stand for very long. i think it's very likely they'll be transgender people serving openly in the military very soon and there's already hundreds or thousands of trenching or people serving in the military they just can't do it openly and that particular primary next question

which is we already saw don't ask don't tell being repealed do you think that that affected the climate all do you think that more things are being pushed toward the equality of transgender people since i really didn't address transgender issues right because don't ask don't tell policy didn't preclude transgender service repealing it didn't help transgender service i think it is helped in this sense i think all of us are much more skeptical of the military the military stand that oh things will fall apart if we allow black people things will fall apart if we allow women things will fall apart if we allow gay people i just don't think there's a lot of credibility anymore in terms of transgender military service so i think it helped us in that sense but. more and more trans people are coming out which is why we're hearing more and more about trans people in all areas of life and how much harder is it for transgender veterans to get benefits after serving if you could speak of them not sure it's a little tricky but in two thousand and ten the veterans administration issued

a health care directive that requires all of their facilities and all of their personnel to treat transgender veterans respectfully and to give them the care that they need with the one exception of gender reassignment surgery which is still precluded but we think that is wrong and illegal and i think wolf that'll fall soon . but more and more veterans are reporting to us that they are getting almost all of the care they need very respectfully at v.a. centers there are still some problems but even if laws are passed to protect transgender people serving how could the military's culture of kind of segregation and cheese mow. be be eradicated to ensure just rights and equality for these people serving sure i think that's really tricky but. the military has a lot of problems right now that have to do with that kind of a culture and i think we no longer find that acceptable as a society that transparency that they didn't need to worry about you know decades ago they do need to worry about now and we see that there's all sorts of really

horrible things going on inside inside the military and i think congress is insisting that they clean up their act the white house seems to be insisting they clean up their act and we are insisting that they clean up their act i find it really interesting that in the wake of all this happening a lot of people who are supporters of chelsea manning at you know whistleblower exposing your crimes saying well i don't want to pay for her hormone therapy and i'm like really that's that's the most of your concerns are and i was paying for the hormone therapy or having the state pay for it of course the army said they would not do that but i find it interesting that in civilian courts it's actually considered cruel and unusual punishment to deny hormone therapy or sex change operation for someone who's serving why is it different in military courts we don't believe that is different in military courts the eighth amendment to the constitution prohibits cruel and unusual punishment and courts have over and over again for more than a century said withholding medical care is cruel and unusual punishment the military is not allowed to withhold medical care either and the medical community

now is a unified that transgender related health care is legitimate health care that can can make a significant positive difference in addressing a legitimate. now. understood condition so do you think that it's just ignorance which is what we're dealing with mostly when you know you have them kind of deferring back to psycho psychiatry as psychologists and also when you see in the wake of this news coming out fox news i mean has a das if you play arrows in this dude looks like a lady when reporting this news and you have c.n.n. saying chelsea hasn't taken any steps toward transition when really she did ask to be referred to as chelsea manning from now on and we know how hard it was for her even before she went to prison saying she didn't want her face to be plastered everywhere as a man what do you how can we deal with this there's still a lot more education to be done around transgender people to many people around the

world and in the united states think of transgender people in terms of some of one of the kinds of medical treatment that that many of us get many of us can't afford to get and some of his don't need or want we are so much more than that i always tell people that my being trying to me being transgender is about the least interesting thing about me and you know as for the military being ignorant i think what i say is this is just another area where the military just needs to update its policies if they look at what the medical community things if they look around at all of the transgender people serving openly in the military their policy is another one of these military policies that just doesn't make sense anymore if it ever made sense right it's about kind of getting with the time and getting up to date and how much of the media play a role in kind of perpetuating these falsehoods oh i think quite a bit and we saw that a lot with the chelsea manning situation where people. i think i want to

cut some people some slack i think there's lots of people out in the public who really don't know what it means to transition and then when do you start using different names and pronouns but in the case of chelsea manning she was pretty clear you know this is the name i want to be known by and the question you have is . person the question you have as a reporter is do you want to respect that person's personhood and for you know for us i think whether you think chelsea manning's hero or a villain and you want to respect something as simple as that. well put thank you so much for coming on thanks very much i know nothing of these barriers mark rising transgender rights activists and executive director of the national center for transgender equality appreciate it thanks happy. and. despite encountering much resistance from world leaders and his own government

obama is not yet back down from his plan to attack syria in fact after congress votes he's slated to address the nation to continue to make his case to go to war and of course the arbitrary red line of chemical weapons use has been this administration's main factor in moving forward with military strikes. but forgive me for asking the obvious question why is the use of chemical weapons a reason to bomb a country after over one hundred thousand lives of arda been lost in a two year bloody civil war moreover what gives this country the moral authority to intervene in nations that use chemical weapons when the us is responsible for some of the worst chemical weapons attacks in world history think back to just a few decades ago between one hundred sixty two and one nine hundred seventy one the american military sprayed about twenty million gallons of agent orange over twelve percent of vietnam to allegedly pull the enemy out of hiding and force them to land and deprive them of their food supply but as former president of the national lawyers guild marjorie cohn explains the u.s.

didn't quite take a targeted approach to the news about chemical. the landmass was sprayed with no distinction between. troops and this and civilians and certainly millions of civilians were affected and so that is a violation of the geneva conventions. unfortunately because of the blanket spraying of aging or the toxic chemicals devastating effects on the country today including contaminated farmland an extensive birth the facts from cancer to babies being born without brain cavities and so far there's been a zero compensation allotted to the vietnamese still adversity affected by this poison but that's just one tragic example believe it or not the government is also overseeing the use of chemical weapons against civilians within the borders of its own country and why does has to go back a mere sixty years to the city of st louis missouri and corpus christi texas where the u.s.

military engaged in cool war experiment in on its residents yes during the fifty's the army waged a secret war on its own population by spraying something called the zinc cadmium sulfide in the most impoverished residents of st louis according to documents later released in the ninety's the army place prayers on the top of old buildings and station wagons exposing unsuspecting people to hundreds of pounds of toxic military grade chemicals worst part the military even use the fear of the cold war to keep the people in the dark. city officials were kept in the dark about the tests the cold war cover story was that the army was testing smoke screens to protect cities from a russian attack i can see the press release now don't worry guys we're just trying to build a cloak to shield us from russia nukes all right so stop asking questions or what about more recent history like in two thousand and nine when several human rights groups learned that israel was spraying palestinians in gaza with white phosphorus

. received these burns when an israeli round slammed into her home in beit lahiya in northern gaza around that shows all the signs of containing white phosphorous it completely burned to the children recalls sabai from head to toe the house was inflamed us. her husband in for a virtual tour and died in the attack so landis will bomb us called ben for striking israel a wait i forgot the apartheid state and human rights abuse or israel us is closest ally can do no wrong and speaking of white phosphorous turns out that the us a liberal they dropped this chemical incendiary in iraq during its occupation this is a chemical that burns to the bone but it's not nearly as lethal as depleted uranium otherwise known as you another chemical weapon used gratuitously during the iraq

war justified as a protective shell casing for ammunition the use of duis undoubtedly left thousands of iraqi babies with birth defects even years after u.s. soldiers have left the country. tough to do quorn rates of cancer leukemia and birth defects rose dramatically none chop off the air is affected by finding some of the biggest increases we believe it's because of little weapons lead depleted uranium and hospitals here cancer is more common than the flu cancer more common than the flu. i guess we're talking about a highly radioactive substance that has a half life of four billion years we should only expect that trend to continue so remind me again why chemical warfare is obama's reason to attack syria yeah that's what i thought. well if you thought the n.s.a. was already overstepping their bounds listen up because new revelations prove that they know how to tap your smartphone to discuss how after the break.

i would rather i asked questions to people in positions of power instead of speaking on their behalf and that's why you can find my show larry king now right here on our t.v. question. i think. everybody. did you know the price is the only industry specifically mention in the constitution and. that's because a free and open press is critical to our democracy correct albus. in fact the single biggest threat facing our nation today is the corporate takeover of

our government and across several we've been hijacked by handful of transnational corporations that will profit by destroying what our founding fathers once told us i'm tom hartman and on this show we reveal the big picture of what's actually going on in the world we go beyond identifying the problem. rational debate and real discussion critical issues facing america if i ever feel ready to join the movement then welcome to the big picture. amidst all the ads. snowden traitor talk in the senate there is one senator that is consistently stood up to the n.s.a. oregon senator ron wyden since the flurry of publicized leaks why did his work to amend the patriot act and declassify secret court orders that violate the privacy

rights of american citizens now obama insists he's kept congress in the loop concerning these intelligence programs but why does said that that's not the case at all and those sentiments are only echoed by his former deputy chief of staff jennifer whole solar served in the white and for sixty years and has recently taken the obama administration to task over its orwellian survey once policy she joins me now from l.a. to discuss all things and say jennifer thank you so much for coming on thank you for having me so you weren't interned for two years at the white house national security council and had top secret clearance at the age of twenty one can you talk a little bit about the culture when you were there how was the privacy versus national security debate was it a prominent topic among the security community. well i mean probably my job at the time did really put me in touch with that but it did put me in touch with the lack of thought that was put into classification decisions i mean i as an intern at twenty one got to determine whether my e-mails were classified or not and you know

that doesn't really make you think about are we keeping things secret for national security reasons are we keeping them secret for other reasons and i think that continues today good point jennifer you've repeatedly said that your former boss senator ron wyden has worked tirelessly to bring these n.s.a. programs to light but really what options does someone have in congress who sees abuses occurring in classified operations but cannot legally talk about them. i mean he's definitely was definitely difficult situation i mean in my position i was his deputy chief of staff and communications director my job was to to speak publicly on these things and he came to me and said we really need to you know raise alarms and get people realizing there are some problems here and he wasn't even able to tell me what i was raising concerns about and that's a real challenge he really wanted to conduct oversight he can introduce legislation in committee in closed hearing but without the ability to make the case publicly without getting public pressure senators to you know take

these reforms seriously there isn't much chance of making anything happen you could tell that he was almost bursting at the seams trying to get this information out before you could just. a shame that you know some of the only options is to wait for an n.s.a. insider to come forward with this explosive information last month obama announced the creation of the panel to conduct an independent review of n.s.a. surveillance activity and then assign james clapper to assemble the group what does this say about the legitimacy of this review. well i think it's the legitimacy of the review it's the legitimacy of this debate in general is we cannot have an open debate as long as the intelligence community is the one mediating it you know the intelligence committee is the one determining what we get to know how we get to know it up until now i mean i do not believe that we would ever have found any of this out it was up to the intelligence community they still haven't declassified

the legal rationale behind their domestic surveillance programs and they keep you know the spin off of this their icon their record you know website is kind of mind boggling so i think they are having director clapper in charge of reviewing his own department decisions that's highly problematic but it's also having the intelligence community you know essentially mediate this debate you know put the. information out there and determine what is and is it out ok for us to talk about how is it ok to talk about it that's that's hugely troubling to me it is and speaking of james clapper i want to play this infamous clip of his response to senator wyden and let's hear about that. does the n.s.a. collect any type of data at all on millions or hundreds of millions of americans. no sir. it does not. not wittingly. i mean where is it countability here do you think that clapper should be imprisoned for perjury or

at the very least fired from his position for blatantly lying i mean personally i don't think clapper is the only problem with this yes he blatantly lied but i think what hasn't gotten a lot of attention is the fact that senator wyden gave him those questions the day before the hearing i mean there's massive processes that these departments go through to prepare a director like this to testify in an open hearing so i imagine others tell that question before director clapper made that answer i mean so i'd like to know what was the process behind the decision for him to lie to congress and even if for some reason they didn't get that question in advance you know senator why this office went back to the director of national intelligence his office the day after and said would you guys care to you know correct the record you know in the written record because you guys know you weren't exactly honest here and nobody from the white house to the general counsel's office of the director of national intelligence to the director of national intelligence himself so anything wrong

with this so yes i don't think that he should continue at least but i don't i don't think he's the problem i think the problem is the culture of the national security community right now which thinks it doesn't need to subject itself to congressional oversight or public debate it's incredible arrogance there i mean even the taking twenty four hours to carefully construct a lie and it's really just completely arrogant you know kind of ability let's look at the latest phase the court reversal revolutions that came out this weekend from the washington post is that was something was white in trying to get that declassified as well oh yes i mean it wasn't just declassified i mean this is an example of where he was trying to pass a legislative fix early in two thousand and twelve when they were reauthorizing the foreign intelligence surveillance act sorry long title there he offered an amendment in the intelligence community committee that would have required the government to get a warrant. before it search the database for the name of american citizen and you

know the obviously the administration pushed back on that but not only did they defeat the amendment but they hamstrung us from being able to even tell people about it the intelligence committee you put out a press release immediately after passage of the vote saying yeah this is great this past it's a wonderful bill it's going to keep americans safe but they you know i was told this senator wyden communications director that i wasn't allowed to explain why senator wyden didn't vote for the legislation or anything about his amendment that he offered so it was you know here you can offer this and close committee but you can't tell anyone publicly about it or explain the others voted against this to try to raise public pressure to make the stuff happen sounds democratic jennifer. it's going to be run and they're patriotic let's talk about the other and as a revelation i just broke that showing that the n.s.a. can access nearly all smartphone data should we really just expect at this point

that the n.s.a. has direct access to everything we electronically use i think if the n.s.a. can figure out how to do something they're essentially doing it and claiming they have the authority to do it because it keeps americans safe and i think. that's highly problematic but just because it sounds like it keeps americans safe we're sounding tough and talking tough doesn't mean it's the smartest best way to do it and you know as long as they're keeping out everybody every other intelligent person in this country from participating in these decisions i don't think we're going to have the best policy policies going forward right is there's no real proof that this is actually keeping us safe to unconstitutionally spy on everyone i love what you wrote about this and i want to get your response again to former n.s.a. director michael hayden comments about all snowden orders must be nihilists anarchist activists anonymous twenty somethings who haven't talked to the opposite sex in five years jennifer would have to say about. might take. personally. no

i think that you know as long as you know how are those of us who are sticking up for democracy those of us sticking up for the smartest possible national security programs i mean how are we somehow less patriotic than those you know who are shutting the american people out of the decision making process which seems highly unpatriotic and democratic to me but yes i you know i think i occasionally talk to the office. because i don't live in my mom's basement. and as a former intelligence insider we have about a minute left but do you see just continuity between the obama and bush surveillance apparatus or do you think it's expanded more now than ever before well i think what we learned over the weekend is in two thousand and eight the bush administration asked for you know curbs to be put on this power to censure search these databases for the names of americans and now you see you know two years later the obama administration going back and say we want these removed so i mean i think

there are areas where the a bomb ministration has tried to be you know quote unquote more transparent but i think that's more about wanting to have the appearance of transparency and the appearance of oversight versus actual oversight and i wish there was a way that we could show the intelligence community the oversight can be a good thing you know the congress the american people they might have good ideas and they might notice you know things that these guys who block themselves off and think they're right about everything miss and right absolutely thank you so much general holder former deputy chief of staff for ron white and really appreciate you coming on thank you for having me. if you like what you see so far how do are you. breaking the set subscribe so you don't miss a single episode will sell for interviews posted separately and of the videos tab i encourage everyone to check out my interview with george galloway. propaganda. area and his latest project the kind of time blair go and check out all that and more at

youtube dot com slash breaking the sat and guys that's it for us tonight can't wait for you to join us again tomorrow so we can break all over again. ok. i dave a crock you welcome you to ted you're all of virginia it's a little while in the middle of the chesapeake bay kind of a genocide and county. rampage here all in the chesapeake bay probably one of the best areas in the fence to fall for it. this is the result that you have to endure island before the channel was. oh here. way up there. as go all. right here are some of the headstones from graves that for you this is a fruits that's what we don't want to happen to taint your all and we want to get

some protection and make sure that we don't go into the chesapeake bay like uppers did in other communities. with. science technology innovation all the latest developments from around russia we've got the future covered.

ok. i democratic it welcome you to tangier island virginia it's a little island the middle of the chesapeake bay and of a genocide. back county where population around four hundred seventy people give or take. ever most are paper or independent water money from our fisherman crabbers and. twenty percent are where our tug boat captains are our tanker our are our second mates on the six. so far we're holding on to ourself but erosion has taken us taking us away slowly but. everybody same survey contending right now worried by to future but in a water main you are a day day by.