for your media. c.e.o. don don carty dot com. coming up on our t.v. on the verge of a self-inflicted economic disaster it appears washington has finally decided to act the senate has reached a deal that will reopen the government and avoid a default of u.s. debt but will the house act updates from capitol hill head. and inside good mon we'll take you inside the detention facility for a look at what conditions are like there is a series of special ports that begins today here on r.t. . and more revelations about the growing surveillance state here in the u.s. to n.s.a. leaker edward snowden the agency is collecting and storing americans personal e-mail address books and instant messaging buddy us more details on this later in the show.

it's wednesday october sixteenth five pm in washington d.c. i'm sam sax and you're watching our to and we begin on capitol hill where there could be a deal in the works to reopen the government and avoid a debt default deal emerge from the senate after a night of negotiations and after the credit rating agency fitch put u.s. treasury bonds on rating watch negative move that usually precedes a credit downgrade archies liz wahl is on capitol hill and she has the latest. looks like a deal has finally been reached here on capitol hill it comes after the partial government shutdown carries on into its third week and the announcement came early this afternoon it was negotiated by senate majority leader harry reid and senate minority leader mitch mcconnell now the deal comes just hours after the debt ceiling deadline is set to be breached this debt ceiling if it is breached it could have it could be even more countess traffic than to its current government shutdown

and that's because that is when the government would run out of money to pay its bills but it looks like at least for now that crisis has been averted it's important to note that even though a deal has been reached it's just temporary here is what it would do it would fund the government until january fifteenth it would raise the debt ceiling until february seventh it would set up a longer term budget negotiations hopefully leading to more permanent solutions and that it would mandate income verification for recipients of obamacare subsidies so as you can see not much of a win for republicans at the heart of this deadlock is obamacare the affordable care act president obama's signature piece of legislation republicans have been trying to strip away that funding for this law doesn't look like that is going to happen at all we've seen this bitter dispute inside even inside of the republican

party itself with members of the tea party not giving in at all on this obamacare issue frustrating many republicans that are i've been a little bit more flexible on this issue. as we had mentioned this is just a temporary deal so it's likely we're going to see more partisan bickering in just a few months but at least for now furloughed government employees can look forward to getting back to work soon here at the capitol liz wahl r.t. . so assuming everything goes according to plan and the house gets in line passes that senate deal in the white house signs it and the government will reopen it will have to wonder what exactly did forcing it to shut down for two weeks plus really accomplish because ultimately by voting on a relatively clean spending bill and debt limit increase speaker boehner is doing what democrats have been asking him to do all along since before the shutdown we could have had this deal two weeks ago but instead we went through furloughing

hundreds of thousands of workers first denying tenser trials to sick kids and distributing food around the country without proper inspections only now only now after all of that are we right back to where we started a similar deal to reopen the government and avoid default to people watching washington from a far this looks absolutely insane and here's the thing it might actually be insane earlier i was joined by dr douglas fields a neurosurgeon to send author of the book the other brain and i asked him what's the psychiatry psychology behind the dysfunction on capitol hill in recent weeks. i think what we're seeing play out on the national stage is hurting behavior human herbut herding behavior which is very important unconscious behavior that allows us to form complex societies and i think that can provide some perspective on what's going on so when you say hurting behavior that means people acting in a group or in losing their kind of own agency to make the right wrong decisions

sort of exactly group behavior is adopting or modeling the behavior of the group that you're in an individual develop emotions and feelings thoughts and behavior according to the group around them and one of the important things about herding behavior that psychologists know is that it reduces the threshold for deviant behavior for. conducting yourself in ways that would be otherwise considered cruel and you would never do as an individual so hurt a reduces the likelihood of your say exactly but in this case it seems to be. promoting that sort of behavior because i mean you could say that the actions that have been coming out of congress over the last few weeks have been extremely harmful to the country that's correct and reduces the threshold for participating in the so you're exactly right no congressman would stand in front of a mother taking her sick child with with cancer to stand in front and prevent her from taking her child into the end for treatment on an individual level that would

be cruel no member of congress would would prevent their neighbor from going to work in the morning and earning a living and contributing to society in their own way now that would also be unacceptable. and many of these things that we see going on and we accept only because of a psychosis hurting behavior so that could explain away why a republican is might have gotten together to kind of force this shutdown to exact these demands which have led to this shutdown how do you explain behavior of individuals leading misheard the light maybe senator ted cruz or certain members. of the house. individually they will lead a movement they they state they put their self on the line to do all these things that denied any cancer treatments or it led to hundreds of thousands of people being furloughed i mean can we right there just decisions off based on this herd mentality as well well hurting behavior describes the behavior where people adopt

behaviors and attitudes and beliefs according to the individuals around them whether you like an i phone or a gucci bag depends it's not a rational decision and it's not behavior this dictated so we have leaders and groups they're not really dictating necessarily the behaviors and thoughts of the other members of their their herd they are participating so it's a natural process it's essential for humans to form social structures to coalesce around others in their group so there are leaders but they're not dictating behavior but one of the individuals in the group but once you become part of this group you adopt unconsciously those same those same beliefs and behaviors so it was a psychopath this is not psychopathic behavior in the sense that it's normal behavior there would be no human society if we didn't have this propensity in neural circuits which are unique to humans that allow us to mimic and adopt other people's behaviors but what is what is in

a sense psychotic about it is that. an individual would not behave this way towards other individuals except for the anonymity and the reduced compassion and apathy that develops in herds and we see this in mob violence and. what is this her herd mentality. being has so much more prevalent it seems in the last two and a half years in congress than we've seen before i mean the debt limit had been raised you know so and so the government shut has shut down in the past not for this long it was usually over spending issues not over issues like obamacare. but we've seen this sort of every few months dysfunction dysfunction dysfunction what do you make of this uptick in the recent years i've wondered about that myself i don't have the answer to that but i think the flip side of that is that the solution from a neuro scientific point of view is to realize that that these tendencies to form herds and take actions that are really. destructive and cruel are

a result of this deeply ingrained behavior in human beings and that the way out of this is to perceive that we're all part of a larger group we're all the same group we're americans and that dividing into these factions. and becoming aligned with faction within a group is to this kind of problem of our behavior but a lot of people are blaming washington d.c. the actual location washington d.c. for creating this sort of empathy gap between what's actually the problems americans are facing today and the problems that congress is focused on is there's something in the air in washington d.c. that inhibits our empathy we're receptors. no it's just that this is where it happens this is where the groups coalesced in and they have these interactions but i think that what will happen is that either members of congress will realize that we're all part of a bigger group and have to come together or the larger group that is america the

citizens are going to remind them through their votes that that you know this is this is not an acceptable behavior to sabotage the normal operation of government and i think by and large people don't accept that there's something that actually psychopathic about choosing to be a politician choosing to go to appeal to people for you know ask for votes all the time i mean there's been studies one percent of the population is believed to be psychopathic something like four percent in corporate america fifteen percent in prison is what you think the rate is on congress you know i think that members of congress are all well meaning most of them quite devoted individuals i know you know by and large i don't most of us say composed of things yes not all. they have some of the they certainly requires a unique set of skills and a lot of in arrogance or fortitude. and a lot of people don't have dr douglas fields narrow scientist and author of the other brain thanks much so. thank you much now for more on the action on capitol

hill i spoke earlier with democratic congressman rush holt of new jersey and i started by asking him about his first impressions of this deal that came out of the senate this morning. well that it comes at the end of several wasted weeks there are several ingredients as i understand now no one has seen anything in writing yet none of the democrats have anyway but we think the ingredients of this agreement are that there will be an extension of the debt ceiling into february early february that there will be. a continuing resolution to keep the government operating into january. that there's an agreement that there will be budget discussions undertaken between now and december. through all of this is to say that after shutting down the government threatening our good our good record our good financial record.

neither side has gained anything here we could have passed the debt ceiling weeks ago we could have kept the government operating all this time the democrats have been saying for months that they wanted to go to conference on the budget committee on the budget resolutions the difference between the house and the senate. as for health care which is essentially nowhere in this agreement there's a minor point evidently they want. more income verification before people get assistance from the federal government in paying their premiums but that's a it's a minor point certainly nothing worth threatening to shut down the the entire economy over. and why why that's what i'm left with why would people hold the country hostage why would these. arsonists and hostage

takers carry on as they did. you know they're they have nothing to show for it. the republican caucus has i think one thing million is going to come out of this badly damaged because they can't hold together the democrats have held together in this senate has said you don't negotiate on some of these fundamental points about how this government works and if i could just i want to just jump in here on this you're on something you're kind of a you're kind of we had to go in there is a long time ago right but i mean clearly it's hard to find someone who wins or loses out of this still as you sort of mentioned there was the pain of a two weeks of a shutdown a national embarrassment that all this caused but i mean at the end of the day you've prevented republicans from using the delaminate to exact more cuts to obamacare but democrats are going to all line up to support a spending number that's more in line with republican demands that's more in line with austerity in this clean senate spending resolution what should democrats like

yourself make of that. well of course that's the number that was was in play because of the sequester and you know if this if this crisis had been avoided if we had dealt with this weeks or months ago as we could have we could have turned our attention to. increased revenue. obviously austerity and spending cuts are not the way to go but we could have we could have dealt with that we could have gotten the sequester fixed now we're going to turn attention to it and i think fix this sequester and other words. remove some of these deep. cuts. to the i think that's going to be the result of these budget negotiations and. i do think that you know if you talk about winning and losing the democrats come out of this

feeling unified. the democrats stuck to their principles stuck to our principles in this and said you we won't negotiate with hostage takers the republicans come out of this fractured because they've demonstrated as recently as today they can't hold together they can't agree they couldn't even agree why they were holding the country hostage was it about the affordable care act was it about a demand for us territory was it about you know some something to do with social insurance and and medicare. they could say one more one more question congressman they come out of it politically weak and i think one more question here before a time is the debt limit and the idea of a shutdown a flaw in our government i mean the debt limit itself is not unusual concept in all other countries the budget isn't agreed to the same funding levels are just kept

the government doesn't shut down so should we consider making fundamental reforms to our budgeting process and departments to avoid this sort of mess in the future. you know going all the way back to james madison in the framers of our constitution you know they put in checks and balances in divided powers. they made it clear however that a self-governing country depends on the goodwill of the of the people and the governmental mechanism a self-governing country works only if you believe it does and i certainly hope that there are no fun there's no fundamental damage to the willingness of people to govern themselves that there's no fundamental damage to the american cherished belief that we can govern ourselves there's no regulations or rules or parliamentary procedure that can guarantee it certainly our constitution

provides some very good checks and balances against unbridled power and concentrated power. but it but it has the framers said that's not an airtight guarantee and certainly there is hope we can get back to a time of goodwill but in the last few weeks i've been sort of trying all there's a satish and congressman rush holt from new jersey thank you so much for joining us thank you now on to the u.s. detention facility at guantanamo bay where our team recently sat reporter anastasiya churkin to cover the latest coming out of the prison that's now been indefinitely detaining terror suspects for more than a decade here's her first report. after a few months of people work to get cleared to visit the base the trip to get mobile hop and a skip from the big apple to fort lauderdale in florida and from there a short hour and a half flight one largely kept under wraps with no indications of it on departure boards. the minute we land were greeted by escorts who stay with us every step of

our trip the special guantanamo joint task force media team. one of them sergeant rebecca wood far from the stereotypical face you might imagine working at a place like this controversial military base as we soon learned the first of many surprises this is a really big break for me in my career from a military resume the people i work with every day they they share the same idea like they're all very proud to be here she joined the u.s. military a decade ago with no money for college a twenty eight one ton a most her second deployment you've heard about it like several movies but you don't really it is just a place that people forget about only they don't ever think about it getting to the main part of the base is a slow pace trip we have to wait for a ferry to take us across the bay and are taken to visit a beach first one of a handful of scenic locations you wouldn't really expect here we're going to the logic area now it's about

a twenty minute ferry ride one side of the bay area where the airport is. several residences but the main part of the evil b. and the detention camp are over their head and given its reputation guantanamo isn't quite what we anticipated as we approach the meeting area it's interesting to note that to be unsuspecting this place looks just like another tropical island with an american flag you would never be able to sense the place policy going to be united states or u.s. presidents village in the area were taken to is like any typical hotel with palm trees and a marina right out the window first impressions this can't be the place that has been casting a long shot. in america's human rights image for over a decade where torture allegations hunger strikes and force feeding have been making headlines i remember when i moved here i thought i would just see like people in orange jumpsuits and fences everywhere but i mean the families all stay on one side and the rest kind of happens on another the other side as where total

of seven hundred seventy nine d. t.v.'s of america's war on terror have been kept since two thousand and two a total of one hundred sixty four now remaining at a whopping eight hundred thousand taxpayer dollars per detainee per year even though more than half of them have been cleared for release but we are in a remote location that factors into the cost it cost what it cost to do it right we're doing it right means to those running america's most infamous detention facility and what lays beyond the picture perfect scenery all the realities of guantanamo in our reports to follow and our one ton of cuba now to talk more about her trip to get more i'm joined by none other than on a sausage from new york welcome back out of here. when you first arrived at. the indistinguishable from a vacation spot you talk about how you talk about the scenic locations that you wouldn't have expected there and yet when we think of guantanamo normally we think

of this hardened prison that people are in definitely spending time out explain these different locations that you went in and out who works at each want to and everything behind that was some you know i think some of the confusion in terms of what guantanamo really is stems from is that people don't realize it's not just the major notorious prison it's actually a big military base where thousands of military personnel serve and are placed there to to to run the facilities so there's certainly a huge contrast on on this on the. reef in this location because you have all these kind of wonderful questions for the people who live there baseball fields in a gold field than you know a marina and these are a couple restaurants of. you know starbucks the mcdonald's and then you have this dark place that has gained just so much controversy surrounding it because of so many people having been detained there since september eleventh so many of them do and definitely many of them force fed a mass hunger strike so just contradicting things that at first glance you're just

shocked by how normal this place really is just you know another place in america to feel you didn't get any golf and while you're you know you're down there let's go let's talk more about the people who worked on the unit we heard from georgia rebecca wood in this sort of. dollars that were there with you how do they treat you how do they regard the work they're doing their work what's their purpose really there when it comes to media liaison well us sam a lovely friendly very nice people their purpose there was to from what we understand just make sure reporters don't go anywhere by themselves because they have to say we really didn't spend any time left to ourselves except for you know night time in our hotel room we did we we were taken everywhere by this media group and at the end of each day what they did was review all of the video this is the media media team they reviewed every single shot the reporters film on the ground

of photos audio if there is anything they think is kind of questionable in terms of security at least from what they tell us those shots would be deleted so their purpose is to really make sure whatever the officials don't want to leave guantanamo doesn't leave guantanamo. time or the pentagon the nearly two hundred dollars million requests from yourself to renovate. guantanamo bay you were there did you construction there what was the upkeep of the prison did it need renovations well also you know curiously again the residential area everything looks lovely and there's certainly construction going on there a new facility is being built we were told that this is because even if and when event. get more will potentially be shut down the detention center at the. area where people live the military base will remain so the they are working on this but curiously the places where we were shown inside the detention camp we were really seeing these kind of very nice put together cells and unfortunately did not get to

see many of the real areas where the detainees are held because we were just not allowed there to be. there so what should read this is the first report that we're seeing from your trip down there what should we expect from future reports are well less and we are going to be airing weekly stories from there this was more of a kind of a teasing one this is how we got there we will be doing more in-depth stories in terms of the actual conditions in the way detainees are held. questioning officials about force feeding questioning them about suicides you know a lot of interesting controversial interviews we were able to bring back also the legal aspects and really the whole idea from the realities of the on the ground whether or not guantanamo is likely to eventually be shut down and also another fun story in terms of just fun facts nobody would ever expect so hopefully our viewers will stick around for that correspondent on a story thank you. and now breaking news from the national security

agency the n.s.a. director general keith alexander will be departing from the surveillance organization within the next few months reuters reports that alexander were tired by the upcoming march or april while his civilian deputy chris engle is will leave by the end of the year alexander's eight years at the n.s.a. have recently been over overshadowed by the revelations from leaker edward snowden which showed that the organization has been collecting data and conducting wide reaching surveillance on u.s. citizens speaking of that this week we learned of another bulk data collection program being run out of the n.s.a. now based on documents provided by edward snowden the n.s.a. is collecting and storing millions of personal e-mail address books and instant messaging buddy lists including those belonging to americans now basically the way it works is someone logs into their you yahoo or g. mail or facebook account those company's servers which are often located overseas transferred the user's address book and buddy list of them across the internet now

it's in this transit that data links housed overseas that the n.s.a. steps and scoops out that information and since this collection is happening overseas and since it doesn't exclusively target americans in the u.s. it doesn't need to legally justify this collection to anyone outside the n.s.a. or the executive branch as far as collection numbers go there are enormous as one document showed in just a single day in two thousand and twelve the n.s.a. collected more than four hundred forty four thousand e-mail address books from yahoo. another hundred five thousand plus from hotmail more than eighty two thousand from facebook and nearly thirty four thousand from g. mail plus more than twenty two thousand other address books from other providers so on a typical day that works out to roughly two hundred fifty million address books collected every year by the end of said there's e-mail and chat companies cited in these documents deny any involvement and hand over their customers contact lists for two senior u.s. intelligence officials told the washington post that yes americans address books

are swept in to these databases as well perhaps even millions of them now unlike other another bulk program run of the n.s.a. the telephony metadata program that scoops up data belonging to american citizens as well this program that captures address books and buddy lists give the n.s.a. a lot more information to work with as they create social maps and look for connections to foreign targets telephone metadata reveals only phone numbers and time in length of calls but address books usually include emails addresses business information and other personal information. internal documents at them as they also acknowledge the problem of over collection noting that n.s.a. databases have been overwhelmed by mass collection of contactless loaded with spam and defensive ball programs like this the n.s.a. chief keith alexander has said they are critical counterterrorism tools and that ultimately quote you need the haystack to find the needle. well beyond those

snap chats you're sending you know who you are maybe getting viewed all right but just not by the person you want septet allows users to send us photos and videos that automatically self-destruct in a matter of seconds or so users think but actually this multimedia message sticks around a bit longer and may be available to law enforcement and a message posted on its website this week snapchat admitted that it can retrieve snaps that were left unopened by the intended recipient the company said they don't do this under normal circumstances but that if they received a search warrant from law enforcement for the contents of snaps and those snaps are still on our servers a federal law called the electronic communications privacy act obliges us to produce the snaps to the requesting law enforcement agency snapchat said that since may of this year it's received about a dozen search warrants requiring them to run and opened to turn over i'm sorry

unopened snapshot messages can be also said that only two people within snapshot have access to retrieve these messages. and that does it for now for more of the stories we covered go to youtube dot com slash r.t. america and check out our website r t dot com slash usa you can follow me on twitter at sam sachs see back here a p m. dramas that can't be ignored to. stories others houston knows. this changing the world writes now. the old picture of the states leaves. from around the globe. local. t.v. .

i would rather as 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 for.