to you today i roll researcher. the the. what is up i'm out of martin this is breaking that well we're all familiar with the ongoing nuclear powder keg of superhuman daiichi nuclear power plant but here in the u.s. there's another nuclear problem that this government just can't solve the storage of nuclear waste is the department of energy is supposed to have a program in place to manage and store radioactive waste which is why the d.o.d.'s collected these from nuclear power plant operators to the tune of twenty seven billion dollars over the past few years but in two thousand and ten obama decided to abandon plans to develop the yucca mountain nuclear waste depository in the data leaving us with no long term storage site so what did the twenty seven billion

dollars in clean up fund end up being used for that turns out absolutely nothing that's right for decades this money is just been sitting there collecting interest while doing zero zero to dispose of the nuclear waste of the nation's one hundred different commercial reactors and this tuesday a federal appeals court ordered the government to stop collecting this new waste feat considering how it's not being used for anything in response to the ruling general counsel for the nuclear energy institute said quote today's decision confirms that the federal government cannot continue to defy congress explicit direction to implement a viable program to manage reactor fuel from america's power plants that it's not often that i agree with the nuclear energy institute but their right to this problem isn't just going to go away in fact it's going to last for generations not only is this nuclear waste problem something we need to deal with now all the hazards associated with this technology is just not worth the risk of advancing nuclear energy anywhere in the world if you join me let's break the sack.

the they look ridiculous they are looking very hard to take that. should. have you ever had sex with the terror threat their little. league. after more than twelve years of military occupation the u.s. and afghanistan have finally come to terms for

a tentative bilateral security agreement that will suck the role of troops in the country until two thousand and twenty four secretary of state john kerry and afghan president hamid karzai reached the accord on the heels of the loya jirga or afghanistan's grand assembly however just today cars i said that he would delay a signing the agreement until after the presidential elections on april twenty fourth team with these negotiations and one point of contention has been the number of criminal incidents which afghan civilians have been executed via night raids or drone strikes that kerry said an apology on behalf of the us for these instances is off the table if the security agreement is approved it will cement the notion that the war in afghanistan is far from over and it will extend well beyond the twenty fourteen deadline or bridge loans that by obama of course the u.s. has also promised to continue funding the afghan security forces so a bin laden dead for years and no clear goal of why the u.s. is so keen on staying in afghanistan i'll break it all down i'm joined by ray mcgovern former cia analyst thank you so much for coming on right welcome thank you

so. what do you think the outcome of the security agreement is going to be and why do you think hammad karzai is kind of stretching it beyond the. presidential election well karva karzai was called by our ambassador in a kabul i can bury as not an adequate strategic partner and didn't he show that today kerry was mousetrap and thinking how to deal karzai goes and tells the jirga look you know we have to vote on this and i'm not sure i trust the u.s. they don't trust me and so we're at all oral in this is what i can very worried about that once you have a reliable partner to work with you're up to this trick without a paddle and also you know that i can very said this is way back in november november nine of number six of two thousand and nine he said you know i think that karzai would like to have us invest even more freely in there because

he thinks that the u.s. is just interested in in fighting it in eternal war on terror and permanent military bases to have influence in that immediate area well i can very have it exactly right karzai is acting that way it's an insoluble problem as long as the populace nani's play the game of feeding the insurgents the parker studies or our loyal allies of course and this whole question of of supply of the we used to call the. supply and the resupply of weapons you know they're becoming very difficult and the afghans have the the cudgel there to charge and often the time they want which they've done for several months now it's almost like he's trying to pass the buck while still maintaining that colonial ally that kind of saying oh no you know i'm looking out for the afghan people which they pretty much see him as a puppet kerry has made it very clear that despite this deadline. and that combat

mission will still be over race still in two thousand and fourteen i don't know what that means there's still to be troops on the ground and plus the one hundred eighty thousand private military contractors going to be there how can combat not be engaged with this sort of force and playing with words as long as they have these night raids as long as they can do what they want with the persian permission of the local authorities of course they can do it they want so they're trying to address this thing up in a way that can be sold to the jirga i'm not sure it's going to be able to be sold they have a situation like the one in iraq just as bush was leaving where he tried to get this kind of agreement and he couldn't and the reason he couldn't was because of the brutality that was shown by u.s. troops against iraq east he couldn't he couldn't get them to buy an agreement that would allow the u.s. to prosecute these kinds of crimes i think the jirga may end up doing exactly the same thing question that now yeah in which case the u.s.

will have to you know have to withdraw and the right wing in this country will say well you will have lost afghanistan we never should have been there in the beginning it was a fool's error error and i don't know what possessed. barack obama to heed the advice from those struggle to die it's very clear you know his generals are bobby gates yeah the search over stuff you know. that didn't work or a history that didn't work in iraq look what's happened a failure this was you know this was another search this was the one that they sold him to a surge into afghanistan and then saying see it's the same time but we're going to pull back out you know pull out i don't know what general thought that was a convincing strategy clearly and one of the sad things here is i can barry had it right he was a military he was a general. and he had spent years and years in afghanistan working with the afghans trying to train them and all and so he came in with his advice to obama. in

november of two thousand and nine before obama made his decision as to have a surge there and he had no resume months he got nobody to listen to even though he said all these and insightful thing and here we are on the verge of these horrendous war crimes being uncovered from afghanistan i want to. this is just really shocking and it shows you kind of this extensive cover up going on by the u.s. military with these afghan security forces what do you think about this and what do you feel about the part in the security agreement where kerry saying by the way a small part of this is that we're going to have immunity for all of our soldiers here i mean what kind of message does that send a small part and that's the crux of the deal that's what a status of forces agreement is all about so again. it shows some sort of democratic procedures and thinks about what they've seen in afghanistan these incidents that you referred to i think it's really problematic i think kerry probably thought he had a deal

a card who knows where cargoes going to play but karzai has got us where he wants this if we if we leave will have no permanent military bases though it's a permanent it's a enduring and we want an enduring military bases ok so that's the name of the game just as it was in iraq we lost out in iraq on the military bases but we got the oil western companies are in there big time so you know fifty fifty now with afghanistan. i don't think we're going to the program permanent military bases there are nine of them or six of them up there but i also don't think we're going to get that pipeline that takes that rich deposit shackling guess dream one hundred raise money. to top the plate and i wanted to bring up this other crazy story just for me i just saw yesterday another revelation senator g.n.d. shot heene is claiming that u.s. soldiers are being killed by terror groups that were actually financed hundred

fifty million dollars plus by the u.s. government i mean. right you're a former cia analyst how something like this even happened without any oversight of her own ability whatsoever well there is a inspector for this kind of thing john coord think is a miss and he sees a form for her security says what i saw with. these funds and to the taliban and other bad guys there call made my hair stare at him. ok and so you know what's really going on here well when karzai says i think the americans are playing a double game here and actually funding or helping the taliban well maybe that's what he's referring to if millions of dollars every month are going from these contracts just the army lights to the taliban to the canid the worst of those guys well i can't it i prefer to believe it's misfeasance but it could be you know the generals your sassoon have this war on terror and as long as you keep these guys

going we'll have the war we'll get another little star appear and. you know keep this terror terrorism churning out you know let's talk about o.p.m. what last month actually saw record yields up twenty five percent from last year how does this realistically play into the larger picture of the occupation because i find it extremely hard to believe that the u.s. is spending billions of dollars locking up millions of people for nonviolent crimes all over the us in prisons yet at the same time harboring and protecting the deadliest drug in the world in this country are two things and that the prison corporate complex in this country makes a lot of money you know if the each person knows here not so much over there the other thing is that this is a real problem i mean russia iran and all you know all the all the surrounding areas are really plagued by the by the open access to this opium and so

that could be a good thing. because the stakeholders here could be brought into a sensible arrangement where we couldn't leave afghanistan without just leaving it in the lurch another way you can get people to sit around a table mature people figure out how we address this thing so the worst doesn't happen that could let us get out with some measure of dignity but isn't it already the worst we have ninety percent of the world the heroin car here it's the largest opium den ever it is but we can kind of get together and you know it's limited i think i hope so i mean you know looking at it it seems like that's almost another coincidental you know unfortunate accident you know i don't put anything past this government thank you so much for coming on breaking down this really complicated issue ray mcgovern former cia analyst will share time with. the ground guys after the break i'll tell you about what may be the most people in the world.

did you know the price is the only industry specifically mentioned in the constitution and. that's because a free and open press is critical to our democracy. will. in fact the single biggest threat facing our nation today is the corporate takeover of our government and across silicon we've been hijacked why handful of transnational corporations will profit by destroying what our founding fathers once i'm job market 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 in a real discussion critical issues facing the. ready to join the movement and welcome the.

world. it's technology innovation called the least of the limits from around russia we've got this huge you're covered. well guys out of all the horrible law firms in the world i think i finally found the worst gifts and done crutcher as main partners are gone olsen check this guy out and ran and james jim walden gibson and dunn has been around since one thousand nine hundred it's considered one of the most prestigious and selective firms in the country with over one thousand attorneys and eighteen offices around the world including one right here in d.c. it's no surprise that this firm has had

a hand in some of those the spectacle legal cases to ever the courtroom so i look at the case that gibson and dunn has been dealing with since two thousand and eight you know valving one of my favorite corporations wal-mart is in early five years ago today a wal-mart employee died from it sixty ation after a rabid crowd of black friday shoppers stormed the store trampling everything in their path now do this employee's death the occupational safety health administration find a wal-mart a whopping seven thousand dollars but unfortunately wal-mart just couldn't find the money to pay that fine out of its seventeen billion dollar your income stream is worth paying a measly seven grand walmart would then have to admit that it didn't provide adequate safety training for its employees citing a dangerous precedent for other employees who may die while on the job so instead the company has spent hundreds of thousands of dollars more to hire gibson and done to make sure it's a new one from future settlements the case still remains tied up in appeals court

today but that's just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to this law firm's clients in two thousand and seven the firm also represented nearly the entire u.s. auto industry in a landmark climate change lawsuit for the first time ever would have held carmakers liable for their contributor contribution to growing greenhouse gas emission. in california according to the suit california taxpayers have spent millions of dollars dealing with reduced snowpack beach erosion ozone pollution and the protection of endangered wildlife in the fish and of course gibson and dunn possessing the resources that it does was able to get the lawsuit entirely dismissed but if you're not yet convinced this firm hates the environment it's also representing chevron and the oil giants that korea's countersuit against indigenous rainforest residents of aqua door is in two thousand and eleven thirty thousand ecuadorian plaintiffs were awarded eighteen billion dollars by in ecuador court to clean up a decades long toxic dumping campaign in the amazon by chevrons predecessor company texaco but not only did chevron refuse to recognize the ruling the company hired

gibson and dunn to go after those very same plaintiffs for conspiracy to extort the company which brings me to perhaps the firm's most egregious case of all citizens united that's right gibson dunn was squarely behind the landmark two thousand and ten supreme court case that allows corporations to contribute an unlimited amount of money to political action groups. so if you want to thank someone for a system where corporations going to byelection some special interests drown out the voice of the people then look no further than three men that had this in the horn law firm john olsen ken durant and james walden. it's been four years since a military coup depose the democratically elected president of honduras since then

the country of little more than eight million people have seen a downward spiral of violence that is there in the small central american nation a reputation as one of the most dangerous countries in the world and there is now on the eve of national elections have been characterized as the most holy. arising in the country's history surrounding the run up to these elections have been several assassinations of political candidates from the opposition party violence in the country is largely exacerbated by a military police that boreas for human rights violations that receives financial backing training and diplomatic support from the u.s. have a breakdown this volatile situation and it's likely what it all means for us i'm joined by b.t.s. producer of animal below what are you what's going on man or so why should we care about hunger is election oh i mean these are pivotal elections i mean it's a huge year just on the poor. the big word plurality. ideology plurality you know that is a lot easier of ideology alone it's massive and if you look at the country's

history when i was born and raised there are these elections are actually. going to show a side of hunters that i don't think has ever been seen before in the country's history it's a history dominated by dictatorship followed by civilian government pulled by dictatorship and military. coups and then civilian government since the eighty's we've had civilian government rule and democratic transitions take place but then in two thousand and nine there was the coup which you mentioned just a little while ago i think that what we're seeing right now just alone we have eight different candidates running on very very different platforms you're having a breakaway from the establishment politics of the past the parties that were established by the united states similar to republicans democrats here where you have that kind of domination by a tea party that's something that we're seeing a move away from in honduras and that's being reflected in the policies that are being presented so you're seeing anywhere from propositions and you mention the high level of violence some of the candidates are proposing more militarization of

the police follow there saying you know let's disband the military altogether follow a model similar to. i think that the biggest. thing that we're seeing come out of this right now is a move by the very popular candidate which assume out of castro the. wife of deposed leader. who was ousted in two thousand and nine kind of a move toward the socialist bloc in latin america and while she has a lot of support from the working class which by the way is the majority the population the it's a very poor nation she doesn't have the support from the all the in the ruling elites and more importantly the military who was responsible for the ouster of the president in the first place so i think this is going to be a very pivotal year wow i mean this is really significant i mean we have a country that's kind of been propped up by the u.s. and a lot of. interests going into that country as we as you just mentioned i mean we're funding essentially these death squads these military police squads as you said earlier to me that there could be multiple vice presidents because of how divided

this really is what talk about really it's amazing we're talking about one hundred and twenty eight. deputy seats that are up for grabs and like i was saying i mean eight different candidates we're looking at an outcome of three different vice presidents for the country there is not a likely outcome we're going to have more than forty percent of the population vote for a single candidate so regardless of the outcome you're going to have a majority of the population completely dissatisfied with what the outcome and what we're going to see as a result is a multitude of different ideologies represented within the country's congress and that in itself. it's not necessarily going to be within the interest of the united states which is seeing honduras following in the same lines of guatemala bolivia and several other countries in latin america falling farther looking more towards the global south looking more towards the the socialist bloc the alba countries in south america and away from the policies of the united states that have sort of

dictated the policies of the past talk about where this violence is stemming from because people really don't understand other than war zones i think it's the second most violent country in the world other than syria where is this violence coming from and what's up with all these political assassinations going on it's really be . systemic in the country i mean we're a country of eight point five million people there's on average daily twenty homicides twenty people are killed by a violent crime and this is it's not an inherent problem this isn't something that's just that's just the way things are in honduras i was actually born and raised there before i moved to the united states like many other people do decide to stay here because of the level of violence because of how dangerous and unstable the country is in two thousand and nine following because it was a sort of power vacuum in the country so where mexico for example was enjoying these. the narcotrafficking in moving the gang violence south they took full advantage of the power back in going on in honduras and they seized on

that the they had the weapons they had the money so you know this century they are now in cahoots with the old works of the country they're now in cahoots with. the narco traffickers gangs and even the police are there's a high level of corruption there and you were mentioning the death squads and yes the united states and this is something one of the few things that you do hear about in honduras is that the united states has for many years now been funding these whole death squad of interest there we have got a minute left one of the u.s. interests on where the u.s. interests the same as anywhere else in the region of the world they do this under this guise of of democracy building and under this idea that they're fighting this war on drugs the katic swear and i think that this is such a it's such a fallacious argument it's really really sad because what they're doing is they're pouring millions of dollars into a police force that is operating under an umbrella of complete impunity in the country as a result you have police going out and just killing people at random almost so not

only are the gangs the narco traffickers responsible for the high level of violence but so are the police the police are actually and during this they're doing this with the full support of the united states and even the funding and funding from the united states we need to get you back on to talk about after these elections what changes we can see there limited amount. of time and. this week marks the anniversary of the assassination of john f. kennedy but it also marks the birthday of another kennedy one whose life was tragically cut short as well robert francis kind of a he would have been eighty eight years old c r f k was on his way to becoming president after serving as senator from new york attorney general the u.s. and close political partner to his late brother john kennedy over the course of his political career he was always stern in his. infections have been resigned from the senate subcommittee investigation because of then senator joseph mccarthy's intimidation tactics during the red scare during kennedy's tenure as attorney

general he launched a campaign against the mafia as organized crime it was a fervent advocate for civil rights in fact it was already paid to deliver the news of dr king's assassination to an almost all black audience and urging the crowd to embrace dr king's message of love and unity instead of letting hate and anger blind them after winning two state primaries he was shot in one of his campaign stops by a twenty forty four year old palestinian man i'm so handsome and and died just over one day later and what controversy surrounds the assassination of his brother drawn there are still plenty of and answered questions over what happened to robert early enough the inconsistency of the official narrative near his brother's death for example according to salon dot com the forensic evidence from the event proves there actually twelve bullets fired that day her hands her hands gun we held eight this is just one of the many oddities regarding robert's death so many in fact that

even the l.a. coroner refused to conclude that so hands around was the lone perpetrator. unfortunately will probably never know what happened r f k or his brother or what would have happened if they had lived but there is one thing we do know his powerful message still resonates today. cannot continue to deny and own the demand of our own people well bending billions in the name of freedom elsewhere around the globe. no nation can exert greater influence or power in the world than it connected with the great capital. beyond. but it is not beyond our control. but more tenet than one throat like begin to twinkle from the rock. long day wayne low moon climb. round with many points how my friend is not too i think

a new world i come to you today who say that we can build a newer and better nation i think we can do. that we might do so and that we will do. i've got a quote for you it's pretty tough to. say wait stop story. let's get this guy like you would steer that guy stead of working for the people to choose the mainstream media for each other right right stay true to. the brother.

or. rules in effect that means you can jump in anytime you want.

that was a new alert animation scripts scare me a little believe me. there is breaking news tonight and they are continuing to follow the breaking news maybe they are alexander's family cry tears are so why every great things other than there has to be ever read or get a call or a wall around. there's a story made sort of movie is playing out in real life.

i. think i think. the word might go to do its job did you know the price is the only industry specifically mention in the constitution which says that's because a free and open press is critical to our democracy which correct office. will. never go on i'm sorry and on this show we reveal the big picture of what's actually going on we go beyond identifying the truth rational debate real discussion critical issues facing america about her ready to join the movement then welcome the big picture. i am sam saxon for tom hartman in washington d.c. here's what's coming up tonight on the big picture.