tv Headline News RT October 18, 2013 8:00pm-8:31pm EDT
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coming up on r.t.e. n.s.a. whistleblower edward snowden is speaking out what he has to say about allegations he gave top secret intel to the russian and chinese government details just ahead and for speeding i give mo should the u.s. government have the right to force feed striking detainees a judge here in d.c. is hearing a case that's asking for an injunction to prevent the inhumane practice will have a report from the court coming up and governing by crisis it seems washington can only make decisions when there is a link a task repeat but is this hurting the u.s. economy we'll get some perspective on that later in the show.
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it's friday october eighteenth eight pm in washington d.c. i'm lynn neary david and you're watching our t.v. . we begin today with the details from an interview with former n.s.a. contractor edward snowden in an extensive conversation conducted through encrypted online communications with james risin of the times so on and gave details responses to a myriad of accusations leveled against him by u.s. officials one major allegation was that snowden had leaked secrets to both the chinese and russian governments and that therefore that made him a traitor to the united states so on and says that before going to russia he gave all of the classified documents to journalists in hong kong and that he reiterated he did not keep any copies for himself saying quote it wouldn't serve the public interest the former government contractor also made it clear that he did not take any secret n.s.a. documents with him to russia which is of course where he is now and he did this he says to assure that russian intelligence officials could not access them but while
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government officials betray snowden as a traitor privacy advocates have hailed snowden as a heroic whistleblower who acted in the government's best interests just last week some of those privacy advocates from the u.s. paid snowden a visit and russia to give him the sam adams award for integrity in intelligence work and i was fortunate to speak to one of them earlier i was joined by jesselyn radack the national security and human rights director of the government accountability project and i first asked her about her meeting with edward snowden and how she would characterize his disposition. you know i thought he was healthy and happy he seemed a very grounded and balanced and thoughtful despite all the pressure that he's under me seemed very. you know very funny and very wicked and i said if you were him or yeah he was very funny and. and social and i think he
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was really glad to see us and we were really really glad and grateful to be able to see him too did that surprise you. his disposition and how happy he seemed i think most of all yes yes i think most people under those circumstances i mean i can hardly imagine being away from my friends and my family and actually having my country exiled me an abandoned me. so i thought he might be depressed or have lost weight or you know be more despondent but knew he looked great and what kinds of safety precautions did you take before you made the trip. we those of us who were traveling there were four of us and we had a lawyer on return shannon if we were detained coming back into the country if we were detained and interrogated and if our devices were taken from us and at the
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same time we also left all those devices including cell phones laptops and any other normal twenty first century landline that you have to give us that had to be so hard to do what was it like his vision disconnected from all of that it's really hard and i'm not even one of the more technologically savvy people who has a million gadgets but for me not being able to talk to my family once i arrived or to tell people that i was safe that was very disconcerting and i think that's horrible that there are a number of people like with all this amazing technology we have there are so many people now who are do. it's connected because it's not shape as we've learned thanks to his revelations to use your cell phone or computers or i mail or internet where facebook or anything people or people are using to communicate it is unfortunate and of course you did go along with three other americans two of which are formal with whistleblowers like yourself i want to pull up what the new york
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post wrote about it the article begins benedict arnold would have fit right in a fan club of us traders went all the way to russia to give an award to their hero terror watch secret spiller ad words snowden how do you even respond to something like that usually i just don't except they keep getting asked about it you know the new york post always has these crazy incendiary inflammatory headlines of the border and they're absolutely ridiculous but if they had done any research they would have known that the people who went are themselves former whistleblowers including myself who have all been vindicated by the u.s. government. and last week the rhetoric surrounding snowden sort of went a step further when on a panel n.s.a. director former n.s.a. director michael hayden jokingly said i must admit in my darker moment over the past several months i also thought of nominating mr snowden but it was for a different list to which then representative mike rogers chimed in and said i can help you with that so of course they're referring to you know snowden being on the
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drone kill list and what does this say about how they are perceived perceiving snowden and you know all of this information that he's really provided to the public i mean it really is a transparent about how i rate they are and how reckless they are these are elected and appointed officials at the highest levels of government and make comments like that it's wildly irresponsible and profoundly disturbing frankly and it really shows you the antipathy and the venom that the us has so when it's like oh come back and we will. treat you well and we'd love to hear from you i mean really are you kidding me when you don't joke about putting people on the targeted assassination of bill if i did hear that that edward snowden is not necessarily taking this very seriously at all. i think he sees it as a veiled threat which it is but i think he feels secure in his surroundings in
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russia because russia frankly has the muscle to stand up against the united states and to protect him sure and of course we learned that on wednesday and as a director keith alexander will be stepping down in the coming year do you think that has anything to do with the snowden leaks oh absolutely not only keith alexander but his buddy chris inglis they're both leaving to spend more time with their families which is frankly ok with me i'd rather them spend more time with their own families than with my family and just one just to wrap it up i wanted to ask you about the award that that snowden received the sam adams integrity award i don't think a lot of people know what it is can you just talk a little bit about it and i should mention you received the award back in two thousand and eleven sure sam adams associates are a collection of former cia intelligence analysts and operatives who have decided to bestow this award on other people who have showed courage and integrity
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and bravery from the intelligence community often but not always they happen to be whistleblowers who've revealed truths that are either embarrassing or frankly illegal to the united states but in the public interest to know and these people as not just for people in the u.s. or been a number of recipients from other countries absolutely well we're very excited grateful to get you fresh off your trip thank you for joining us just one great act former whistleblower and national security director of the government accountability project thank you nowhere. last february more than one hundred men at guantanamo bay went on a hunger strike to protest their indefinite detention but instead of addressing the underlying issues pushing these men to put their lives on the line the u.s. military decided to force feed them now sixteen men remain on hunger strike but the technique to keep the men alive remains and question force feeding has been deemed
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cruel and inhumane by the international medical community and today the federal court of appeals in washington d.c. heard a case seeking an injunction against that very practice artie's sam sachs was there and brings us more. u.s. federal court of appeals here in washington d.c. heard arguments that in a case challenging the force feeding of guantanamo bay detainees three detainees have challenge their force feeding and i've asked the court to put an end to it the issue at hand today was whether or not the court even has jurisdiction to do that though because earlier this year a u.s. district judge ruled that while force feeding is painful and humiliating the courts don't have the power to stop it kuantan no but i would say that decision that's being challenge today right here and we'll have to see if this federal appeals court gives power to the courts to put an end to force feeding procedures kuantan about now at the prison sixteen hunger strikers are still being force fed on a daily basis this is a procedure that's been deemed an ethical and even torturous by the world medical
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association and by the united nations after today's hearing a number of organizations gathered in front of the courthouse to protest the continued use of force meeting. to talk about how surprised because i know there was there that activists andras cohen terrorists who's been on a hunger strike for more than one hundred days drinking only water underwent a force feeding procedure himself force feeding is being done to prevent prisoners who would rather die in guantanamo then to live in the limbo of what they are living not knowing when they will be free but also the constant psychological and physical torture that they are living every single day then the force feeding began . to continuous describes the pain that is when the two of his gone in at times it has blocked my type capacity to breathe it is felt like constant agony and it is these fire in your throat. as you
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saw it's absolutely gruesome and this happens out of sight in guantanamo to the men who are force fed so the hope is. is that bringing visibility to the gruesomeness of in terrell's feeding will shock the conscience and make americans troubled by what the government's doing i cannot not stop and so i have gone in front of the white house why because we need to reveal to the light of day what is the torture that is happening in the shadows there will have to wait some time perhaps months before we hear the appeals court decision but activists here are confident that actions like this today and the strike still underway i kuantan about are working and they're raising public awareness and political will to do something about a prism a just can't seem to be closed and a hunger strike that just won't go away. in washington sam sacks are two.
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it may feel like the distant past now but it was only three days ago that the u.s. government was on the brink of disaster the country was hanging on a ledge as it neared closer and closer to defaulting on its trillion dollar debt a default that could have triggered an economic collapse and reinvigorated a global financial meltdown but despite the stakes being so high lawmakers in washington seemed more concerned about serving their political agendas instead of using the political deadlock to force each other to make tough decisions it's a crisis driven approach that president obama called attention to earlier this week i want to thank the leadership for coming together and getting this done. hopefully next time. it won't be in the eleventh hour one of the things that i said throughout this process is we've got to get out of the habit of governing by crisis . but it goes beyond just a poor strategy to get things done in washington this brinkmanship is starting to
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have a real effect on the economy this according to a new study called the cost of crisis driven fiscal policy the study commissioned by the peter g. peterson foundation shows that this reliance on crisis driven governing just since two thousand and ten has cost the us nine hundred thousand jobs so to talk about how this is possible and what these perpetual political impasses are doing to disrupt the economy i spoke earlier with richard wolfe professor of economics americas at the university of massachusetts am hurst i first asked him about the process by which political deadlock translates into a loss of so many jobs. i think the basic problem has to do with how to handle an economic system that isn't working for the majority of the american people anymore i mean the basic issue the long term issue is that american large businesses have decided they can make more money by moving out of the united
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states taking advantage of the lower wages in china in india in brazil in nigeria all over what we used to call the third world and basically they've left or they are in the process of leaving that leaves the united states with an enormous problem there aren't enough jobs the people who lost their jobs crowded into the job possibilities that remain driving down the wages there and we have a fundamental economic crisis that requires a massive response if there's any hope of getting out of it the only agency in the united states that can deal with that problem that has the money that has the reach that has the broad scope for action is the united states government but the fear of the business community is that if the government takes this problem under its wing and goes after it that either they will be taxed to pay for the solution or that
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the solution will involve taking power and decision making away from big corporations and maybe even limiting their freedom to leave the country without taking care of the mess they leave behind they're determined not to let that happen they work through the republican party but also the democratic party to stymie the government to get it into gridlock so it can't move in the directions they're fearful about that's our problem. and richard people talk about how washington being more divided than ever at this point but it seems like gridlock has always. exist i can you propofol to historical context for us is this government more polarized than ever before not at all it's only polarized around particular issues and it can swing into action when its interests are allied with those of business let me give you the clearest example in the last four months of two thousand and
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eight our economy came this close to complete collapse that's the period of time beginning with the bankruptcy of lehmann brothers in new york and the cascade of disaster incomes the congress of the united states republicans and democrats mostly the same people who are sitting there now and in a matter of weeks they swung into action and they pumped trillions of dollars with a t trillions in the united states in a stimulus program in a bailout program they brought in the federal reserve everybody worked together there was no dispute there was no fighting there was no gridlock all the trouble came later after you bailed out the big banks the big corporations save general motors the whole story suddenly when it came time to maybe taxing the beneficiaries of all those bailouts so that the government could help the average american then
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we had gridlock then we had fighting no no no we don't have a gridlocked congress when it comes to helping the people who call the shots we only have gridlock when the question is what do you do for the people who have suffered five years of this crisis still around employed find their children having to borrow on questionable amounts of money to go to school and all the rest then when it comes to solving the people's problems then we hear about gridlock and division and no no no the issues go much deeper than that and richard i think a fair. thing is that we know that we'll be revisiting these same contentious issues in another four months when the debt ceiling returns lawmakers aren't necessarily fixing the underlying problems here but rather they are finding temporary solutions to them so how difficult is it to actually recover from the damage that's been done. i don't see any change in the basic contours of the u.s.
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economy four years into the future and i notice that one of the most of why these commentators stephen roach used to work for many years at morgan stanley bank has said the same thing in recent days we are not doing anything to solve this economic problem we're patching it over with a little bit of fix it here and there we've made our commitment to bail out the big corporations we fought as a nation that the bailout would lead the banks to lend money to businesses and people so we could recall by our economy they did no such thing the big corporations keep leaving we have a political system that is subservient to the people who run our economic system and the truth of that is unless and until we face that we're dealing with the people who run our big corporations and we have to change how they work and the decisions they make so long as we don't face that we'll be dealing with their
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puppets their tools in the united states congress and the white house too and they will give us lots of political theater lots of raw material for new stories but they will not give us real movement or decision making because they are held in check by subservience to the larger interests control their share and speaking of corporations in response to everything that just happened politically one venture capitalists and silicon valley sat there he said if companies shut down the stock market would collapse if the government shuts down nothing happens and we all move on because it just doesn't matter what's your take on that well i think there's a point to it all i mean it matters you know there were hundreds of thousands of people who lost their jobs for a few days there were businesses that therefore had no customers there were all kinds of hardships when the government doesn't. do the thousands of things we
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needed to do so i wouldn't underestimate that importance i wouldn't underestimate the enormous significance for the rest of the world that used to look upon the united states as the bastion of capitalist calm of capitalist functionality a safe place to invest your money the united states is looking less and less like a society that can control itself and more and more like a society beginning to fall apart the long run effects of that are enormous but i do agree with the silicon valley fellow that you quoted that the real issue is how corporations are making decisions since we have an economy in which we look allow the tiny number of people that control the biggest corporations to make decisions we all have to live with but which we are not allowed either directly or through our government to have much influence over at that was in one term noble situation that was richard wolfe professor of economics emeritus at the university of
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massachusetts amherst. and a texas spanish teacher who came under fire for posing naked in playboy has been fired the former teacher is twenty one year old christina cole do we do we suppose for playboy when she was eighteen as a freshman in college this is before she began her position as a teacher however it became somewhat of a controversy after her own students allegedly discovered photos of her posing nude needless to say parents became outraged over this and it take long before they complained to the school that the teachers passed with inappropriate and that it served as a distraction for the students who had allegedly been looking at the teacher's photos and videos while at school since the firing do we hasn't been able to legally speak out against what happened but that hasn't stopped people from speaking out on her behalf including playboy model liz actually i spoke to her earlier about her interest in the case. what got me involved with the facebook page
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for christy nicole to waste was. everything that i had heard on the news about her losing her job and being unemployed due to her previous affiliation with playboy and her pictorial so i was really upset about it i felt like it was unfair and so i decided to go ahead and start a support group for on facebook and try to get her some help and be a voice out there as a fellow model that understands what it's like and people's misconceptions about what we do except work cetera and pretty much we've got rolling from there she had reached out to me from a previous email i sent her six months ago she never answered because you have a modeling anymore. and said that she was probably gonna have to model again because she was unemployed so that kind of gave me the desire and the feeling of having a connection with her to really like push it and help her get some notoriety and get some you know good press out there for sure and liz as
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a fellow model i mean what do you think about this should nude modeling really affect your future. i mean i can understand it on a fact and from the future depending on what kind of a career path they were doing and if you were doing it at the time i understand there's more of a clause and every teacher's contract accepted but i really don't think that people should be judged based on what they used to do before they were doing what a professional job that maybe. unless they're doing it at the time or something illegal or something really immoral really horrible. so i just feel like what's next i mean what if you're an actress and you did a nude scene or if you're a singer news that's really you know out there lyric or something like that does that mean you should never be able to do anything else but just do that where do they go or draw the line i sure seems like the lines are becoming more blurred you know some parents are saying that it's been really distracting for for their
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children to have christie as their teacher what do you think of that argument. i mean. i guess i guess someone could argue about but i also say with the media and the things that we see on t.v. with all the different philosophies out there and everything else that they're saying a lot was not octoroon with her cheat their teacher teaching them spanish because i'm pretty sure she was a spanish teacher or a foreign language teacher on than they would ever see with her you know anything i mean i just feel like the media and pop culture and everything if you will is just so full of sexual innuendo and all kinds of stuff that this is just not anything in comparison and i mean i guess you could argue that because now the boys know that she's modeled nude but i mean i don't see how that's impacting her ability to teach and you know and you know you could obviously argue that what you're doing is
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inherently public now do you think people who work in this industry shouldn't expect that it comes back to bite them later down the road. you know girls actually ask me all kinds of questions when they decide to go down this path and i do tell them that they can't ever take it away so i tell them if you're planning on doing something in a professional reyna in certain fields that you might want to think twice about doing modeling you would because people are definitely they don't understand this community and it's a very small little subculture if you will give i don't really understand it and they just kind of. make judgments against people that do it and sometimes unfairly and. i mean i think you're right i mean i think you definitely have to be careful doing that maybe if you were in more of a creative field people be a little warmer toward somebody who had done something like that before but then again there's a focus on every side. that was playboy model liz actually. it's
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no secret that the n.s.a. is tracking millions of americans their phone calls text e-mail social media accounts and the list goes on and on and in fact as we develop new ways to communicate government intelligence agencies find new ways to monitor us so what do you do to fight back besides write some snarky comments on twitter well perhaps give them a taste of their own medicine by over inundating their system with a little too much information for more on that here's the residents lori car financed. we just learned that the n.s.a.
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is hoovering up all of our e-mail contacts facebook just changed their terms so that you can no longer opt out of searches to remain private google just changed their terms indicating that they are now going to use our photos and names in ads at their whim he entire world is outraged at the u.s. phase data collection programs but that outrage hasn't stopped the n.s.a. and its v.f.s. tech companies from spying one bit in fact they only seem to be ramping it up if we are online we will be tracked so what do we do to fight back besides write snarky things on twitter maybe it's time to data the system and as a director teet alexander has defended the practice of bulk data collection in the past by saying you need the haystack to find the needle well let's give them that haystack let's give them tons and tons of data they don't. need because
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we also just learned that the n.s.a. is being overwhelmed by spam as they suck up all of our data they are also sucking up the tons of spam we receive and then as these utah data center keeps melting down with fire it's from all of that equipment because who the hell can properly store that many they get bytes of information maybe the only way to effectively fight the n.s.a.'s data collection program is to bomb their systems with more data than they can handle let's make fake browsing histories with plug ins like paranoid browsing which makes it look like we're visiting thousands of websites more than we actually are let's make a fake maybe every time we register for anything let's all have twenty e-mail address that instead of unsubscribing from bed bath and beyond email list let's quick reply and write long misses about how our days are go in a new report says that spam has increased by three hundred and fifty five percent
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this year on social site let's embrace all of that crap as our first line of defense against the n.s.a.'s data collecting because our government and our corporations are not going to stop so maybe it's time for us to get creative and have some fun and data on their systems with more information than they can possibly handle because they don't care about our outrage so let's not care about making their jobs more difficult tonight let's talk about that by following me on twitter at the resident. and that does it for now for more on the stories we cover today go to youtube dot com slash r t america or check out our website r t dot com slash usa you can also follow me on twitter adam you're a dave a david and from all of us here at r t have a great night. well
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