why is. everyone i am abby martin and this great game sat since two thousand and two u.s. drone strikes have killed as many as four thousand five hundred ninety people according to bureau of the best of journalism and in pakistan alone there already had been three hundred eighty one drone strikes one in particular in two thousand and ten targeted a home in northern pakistan the strike resulted in the deaths of several civilians including the family of a pakistani man named karim khon as a result khan filed a five hundred million dollar lawsuit against the us government which helped shine a light into this devastating practice and is now a fervent and drawn activist but unfortunately he has been missing for eight days

after being kidnapped by twenty men some of whom are in police uniforms according to his lawyer kahn was set to speak with german dutch and british lawmakers about the deadly effects of drones just this week given the fact that his lawyer was prevented from coming to the u.s. to testify on behalf of other pakistan drone victims it seems that there are forces at play here that are actively preventing these voices from being heard so if you want to hear the truth about what's really going on below these killer robots then join me and let's break this up. the please please. please very hard to take that. lightly that he ever had sex with the terror threat there. was. such.

a. little. sleepy little sleep. lately that. dealing with cable companies is frustrating enough when complaints fall on deaf ears because let's face it these giant corporations couldn't care less about losing a couple subscribers but yesterday an already and enormous media conglomerate just got even bigger comcast the number one cable provider in the u.s. just announced it will be acquiring the number two provider time warner cable for a cool forty five point two billion dollars this deal now puts comcast and nineteen of the twenty biggest media markets in the u.s. and gives it access to about thirty million cable subscribers roughly one third of the entire american market considering that comcast is already the nation's largest

internet and the landline provider this development is just a teensy bit troublesome to say the least not to mention the company already owns n.b.c. universal which in turn owns a myriad of other media properties such as and that's n.b.c. and universal studios now it's important note that this is not yet a done deal the merger must first be approved by the justice department in federal communications commission to make sure it doesn't violate antitrust laws which could take as long as a year but if the deal goes through it will be an absolute disaster for the. public jon burge mayor an attorney for the consumer rights group public knowledge even went as far as saying that this deal will further cement comcast as quote the bully in the schoolyard able to dictate terms to content creators internet companies and distributors who must access its content by raising the cost of its rivals and business partners and in large comcast would raise costs for consumers would be able to keep others from innovating while facing little pressure to improve its own service and of course this latest merger only tightens the stranglehold of the big

six you know the old goblet of companies controlling everything you read here and watch so besides comcast there is disney jones a.b.c. the history channel on e.s.p.n. viacom the parent company of m.t.v. paramount nickelodeon c.b.s. owner of the c.w. and showtime or news corp which owns fox news new york post and the wall street journal and finally time warner parent company of c.n.n. h.b.o. and warner brothers together these six companies control ninety percent of all media in america just for comparison consider that in one thousand nine hundred three that same ninety percent of the media was controlled by fifteen companies for their more courting the website frugal dad just two hundred thirty two media executives are responsible for providing information to two hundred seventy seven million americans yes that's one media exact for every eighty eight hundred fifty

thousand people not to mention that many of these same exacts also sit on corporate boards of every company from one santo to general dynamics so it's no surprise that this type of system results in egregious conflicts of interests such as when sixty minutes aired a false report on the bengazi embassy attack in order to promote a book on the subject by their publishing subsidiary simon and schuster fox news reporters were going to air a story on the dangers of bovine growth hormone but were threatened by major advertisers. monsanto to not pursue the story and they were subsequently fired now it's important to note that these enormous media conglomerations are all possible largely in part to the one thousand nine hundred six telecommunications act signed by clinton with deregulated the media industry in an effort to create more competition and provide more options for consumers but of course there was a reason that big media strongly supported the bill and was intricately involved in crafting its language so the law lifted ownership limits for radio stations

nationwide and allowed an individual company to operate on as many as eight different frequencies in the biggest media markets furthermore the maximum viewing audience percentage for broadcast companies was increased from twenty five to thirty five percent paving the way for enormous mergers so while we continue to hear the truth that we have more options than ever when it comes to choosing what information we consume perhaps we should take a second to realize that nearly every mass media source is actually a company wrapped in a company wrapped in a company wrapped and one of six companies. human beings have been domesticated animals and beginning of civilization but our relationship with different species goes far beyond companionship aside from industrial farming and mass consumption or the ethically questionable crackers of

animal experimentation human beings have also trained animals for war yes from the first eurasian warriors who rode on horseback and three thousand b.c. to the use of dogs for counterterrorism human beings have managed to find the most disturbing ways to turn animals into weapons screw over the fear the weirdest cases of animal weaponize in and during my break in a separate is or man well i don't follow it's going on as a building to what is good business. so this is really scary we're going to talk about laser beams on sharks snakes and of. those actually really insane start off here because there's a ton of animals turn out that even use this bomb yeah i mean actually when we were compiling this list earlier we found that like some of the craziest the weirdest most bizarre cases are all coming out of world war two one of which i found was just turning animals into bombs just very simply put it was one case where. the british were trying to find ways to kind of destroy german infrastructure by

putting bombs plastic explosives inside of dead rats and you know putting them in their cool supply and hoping that it would end up in some sort of boiler room or furnace and if you could see the graphic right here you'd see the diagram of the of the bomb inside the rat that was really disturbing but it really kind of highlights they were already dead i guess i mean it's horrible as it is that there was you know there have a live rat running around with a bomb and no no i'm saying at least no you know all of it's terrible but it's just it didn't work out the point right that didn't work out but it also highlights the fact that this happens more often than you think and probably the one animal that's used as a as a bomb more than any other are donkeys and this is been happening. but no i found one case in two thousand and four that i thought was interesting in ramadi iraq where donkey was i guess you could call it. was detonated outside a u.s. checkpoint there were no casualties that were there were done for the donkey the

poor donkey but there was another one that i just couldn't pass up this is a case in eight hundred sixty two union soldiers were trying to find a way to get at the confederates in new mexico and they had strapped gun powder barrels of gunpowder onto mules and left those mules in confederate territory these meals were so loyal to the union army that they found their way back to the union base and blew themselves if you didn't change that from stubborn as a mule to loyal as the little you know you little mules all they wanted to do is be good to their owners and look they were used as cannon fodder. instead antitank dogs this is another world war two kind of story hell of a lot of stuff in order to not only do the experiment on humans they apparently did use animals for a bunch of all intel all the time and this was actually a program by the soviets they were using dogs and they were mounting explosives on the backs of dogs with this kind of hook on top of the explosive the dogs would run under german panzer tanks and then detonate and you know the dogs were off the casualties this was a gamble because this you know the dogs were afraid of the sounds of the end up

coming back and killing a lot of the red army soldiers and and this is probably project x. ray this is actually a really crazy another world war two u.s. military program that actually wasn't ever implemented although it was tested where the u.s. military wanted right before we carpet bombed japan before the fire bombings and before the nuclear weapons they were putting napalm packets seventeen gram packets on the back of white tailed bats and putting these hibernating bats inside of these hollow. shell casings and then dropping them from airplanes the idea was that they would fly down and like roost in japanese homes or in trees and then ignite and cause fires and they did testing that proved to be very effective but thank god that program was never actually put into use and humane and let's briefly mention homing pigeons because this is something that was also used prominently in the cold war as well two hundred fifty thousand plus pigeons used by the by the by the british during world war two they were used to send messages back and forth but the germans were also using these at the time actually and what i found researching

this earlier is that the british to counter the use of german homing pigeons they were actually using peregrine falcons to patrol the to exactly to intercept these pigeons before they would leave so what you're. just garbage no no no they're not applying that to the city. actually smarter than we take a lot of covert messages that we should use it instead of actually texting each other many so that's the only thing that the n.s.a. and the and in the age of government surveillance i don't think anything safer than a pigeon i think we all. well know we've all kind of and really are like abstractly heard about minesweepers using highly intelligent animals such as dolphins to actually sing we right on the ocean floors are but also this is happening on the land to talk about this in iraq in two thousand and three morocco had had you know wanted to send monkeys but actually that the weird you see some monkeys here but the weirdest thing that i found is that they're now genetically modifying animals mice are being genetically modified by country university in new york are being genetically modified to be able to sniff explosives in place of dogs because they

have this amazing a factory sense that's you know way beyond what a dog is capable of so it's just remarkable things up there so they were the first point at monkeys and they found that was kind of not as effective as possible and then now they're genetically modified and rats to try to blow up mines and of course the dolphins sweeping the ocean floors and are also training sea lions as part of the navy shallow water and true detection system giuliani because people let's stop advertising animals really stop westernizing the planet all right these health was creatures have no voice manny thank you so much for breaking the set we have to share it is. stated to you guys from my exclusive interview with nick ogre of the band skinny puppy.

the scarf or so that was. in the finish line of the marathon.

was. like. the. music is a beautiful thing that can be used to inspire and heal one of the last things you would expect it to be used for is torture that's exactly what happened at one time obey prison an industrial music group skinny puppy founded by kevin king and never over ogre excuse me discovered that their music was being used in this way they decided to do something about it the band sent an invoice the pentagon for six hundred sixty six thousand dollars it was a balls a move but nothing out of the ordinary for such a politically conscious group one that used its music to drive awareness about issues ranging from animal testing to nuclear power while skinny puppy happens to

be on poor right now and i was not only lucky enough to catch their show but i also got a chance to sit down with the front man in the decoder i first asked him as one of the pioneers of industrial music how the band has maintained its political charge in the genre after all these years. times i think i was telling you i think sometimes we exist in order to give the impression of freedom of speech in america but i'll grab that as much as i care and and older industrial music used to be far more politicized throbbing gristle to. it's p.-orridge they did things to try to rock the establishment a little bit and shake things up an open perception and open people's eyes to the you know the realities. you know and changed kind of the musical concept in the sense of musically it was about any instrument. any sound any any form of you know musical structure was allowed as long as it wasn't you know the norm personal use a lot of theatrical like blood masks gore on stage what are you trying to portray

by using these elements during your life performance always we've always used those types of things to try and shock people into awakening and one tour we actually used some japanese footage called guinea pig it was wasn't real at the time we weren't really sure either and it was basically almost an off t.v. and so we started during one of the songs incorporating some of it in to see what the reaction was to our fans who kind of you know would embrace the blood and the stuff and knew what we were doing but once we incorporated that footage there was revulsion and so i realized that there is a difference between how people react to you know theater versus what they feel is reality and it gave me some hope and a lot of ways you know people you know weren't just kind of continuing down this path of looking for more and more you know death blood to fill the vacuum in what i see as a powerless nation i wanted to move on to your music one of my brother and my favorite songs the killing game i want to read our audience a portion of the lyrics after playing mean changes toys in

a tools twisted plane things on the staircase fools fools weapons represents the killing game who taught that killing game i've always considered this kind of an antiwar ballad what does it mean to you means it means the idea of taking one step beyond and actually using violence as a way to solve something to and so i see you know within a lot of you know first world nation stuff it's like you know we've created a lot of the conflicts. and a lot of the blowback and a lot of the stuff you know people come and go why do they hate us and it's like well there's a lot of reasons why and if you look back historically you can see that there is there is there's there's certainly a litany of things that you know create the idea of who really taught the killing doing first and then times when in the case of of killing game it was i was using myself as a reference point but i think it goes oh beyond the puppy i've always tried to use

you know i've certainly had my own folly through and through life and i learned a lot of lessons and i've come through quite a bit and you know all of that i tried to kind of relate to a more externalized view point six was your fourth studio album in it the single test year the video for which shows a kid who abuses dogs getting actually brutally abused himself and experimented on top of the concept of the song the album and why he wanted to create a piece of work that not only called attention to the issue but wanted to portray animal experimentation in such a way while this is you know i've always been. you know very. hurt or. angry about the fact that we commodify animals to me i've always thought animals have souls and when i was younger i was called out and so many times but science was starting to prove that the consciousness of the animals was far greater than we once thought it was to the point that some scientists are even saying that most

animals are the same as us with consciousness and i certainly look at my dogs and my cats and their personality. you know way beyond so this is sometimes they have sensors that are way beyond what i see and i think our perceptions are different and i think you know him for better or for worse we're all we're all here together and animals are proving to be the canaries in the coal mine of so many thing that's exactly out of voiceless creatures i mean and that's what happened you started out as being with the idea of life through a dog's eyes seeing all these injustices and seeing things that couldn't. talk about all it could do is really bark and and and again due to my lack of vocal training when i was actually came over here december it was an intelligible. this this was in the eighty's when you guys made this album how do you feel now to see animal rights activists actually looked at as terrorists on the animal enterprise terrorism act horrified and thought i got a letter just the other day of somebody. actively involved in

a chimp rescue program and they were set up by the f.b.i. and three of their members got arrested some going to look into that and see if there's anything we can to but you know i mean you know i was around when elf was doing their thing the animal liberation front and admittedly i think that they started off with a little heavy handed maybe and there may have been a better way of going about it i was thinking there's a kinder gentler approach in philadelphia there is. research experiment there was using sudden impact head injuries and they're using chimpanzees they lock into a chair with a head restraint and this is a horrible machine and they. simulate these sudden imparted to me i was going in there is such a false sense to because the animal or if you or i experienced a sudden impact head injury we wouldn't be aware of it coming from these animals were completely aware of what was going on there adrenaline was up so all of their body chemistry was i'm sure i'm sure you know all of the all the results of it were absolutely useless this guy actually was was arrested and jailed after all for me

and exposed to all of that so i can see the need for all this stuff and you know with these new laws come you know all of that kind of dissent has been you know shut down much in the same way as the secrecy in japan. with any reporting on. speaking of torture though you're banned obviously now infamously known for producing your new album weapon as a literal invoice for the u.s. government for using your songs to torture prisoners bring us back to how you found out that this happened. it goes way back to our album the great iran of the right and we did a documentary on depleted uranium in the battlefield and we had access to the gulf war veterans administration stephen robinson and we interviewed ramsey clark when we'd start to do well and we contacted those people and sent invoices through and you know the album was supposed to be cover art and invoice and we were going to take the show on the road and torture people on stage and of course you know we're a small band we probably would have been shut down and so we switch things around

and i found a kind of a more of an abstract with weapons but in the meantime i was on a tour and a guard who had worked in guantanamo who was taken across his military police over here he was given two weeks of training and then sent to the world trade center and said this is what they did to you and then sent over to look after all these prisoners and he was the very kind gentle person and went over and was so affected by that he. he was honorably discharged at the end then he converted to become a muslim he has extreme post-traumatic stress so i started seeing kind of like not only are the prisoners developing post-traumatic stress from this torture. are only men and women you know who have you know moral slack and have empathy are being affected by too and so from from from from his research he saw our music was being used to torture and it's not just us after that we found out it goes everything from barney to britney spears sesame street you know it's just i mean it's you know

six to twelve hours of anything being blasted high volume in a cold room where you're shocked at the ankles you know prostrate and you know people coming in pouring cold water on cue until you you know either urinate or defecate yourself and then they come in and break you about it i mean it's horrifying to me you know of course our music is unsettling and when he first asked me how do you feel about your music being used i said well i can certainly see why they would use that doesn't make it easier for us to write i mean how did. i can't even imagine being so passion about animal torture to know that your music was actually used to torture human beings and people that weren't used to music either you know culturally you know you know not studs the other thing that kind of god to me so we were going to do an album where we actually researched all the frequencies for torture and do a narrative with songs and then have aspects with a booklet that would i would say ok now put the hood over i don't want to just start music now and then we're going to insert not subliminals and different

dialects pashtoon whatever you saying things like you know although this music sounds horrible and terrible and scary please understand that in our country it's used to fight the very thing that's tortured right now has anyone from the u.s. government responded and blames the b.b.c. and it went through this game of telephone which i'm sure you're aware of and again you know i just want to say that we didn't come out there this was an old story for us we had kind of you know weapon came out last year and a lot of the press came out for that we didn't go out of our way to make this happen it was one sentence in an interview that kevin didn't finish time got taken and just went for some reason and so we didn't look for any publicity so much so that we didn't even say in the interviews that i've done that we're touring right now. so. you know we we we we were just as surprised as anybody that when the spiral. yeah and if you do get that money from the government what do you intend to do with it when tony it's supposed to my extras are sure of anything

and i just want to say so i went to the b.b.c. in the b.b.c. is you know they came out with a statement saying that they had got in touch of the pentagon and they could neither deny nor confirm receipt of our invoices so now we've gone on and reset the invoices can we've got a new connections with new addresses of the department defense department of intelligence let's talk about your newest music i mean there she seems to be still an overtly and to us militarism message. in the latest works mythmaker and weapon but you said in an interview with critical mass in two thousand and seven i think i've tried to peer away from going on a really healthy band political rant again but over do you still feel this way given such heroic whistleblowers bradley manning. edward i'm sorry chelsea manning edward snowden that now is the time to get help and not just for skinny poppy but for pretty much all artists it is it is really for sure and i think you know i

think probably when i said it was during the bush administration because myself and al jourgensen from ministry were just you know always beating the drum and i was like you know you can go a little too far to one side without realizing that you know the pendulum swings back and forth and sometimes i'm starting to believe that this is more of a centrist government and you know it means the left things the right but the direction is all the same you know and so i think you know people need to be educated about it and yeah i think you know we'll always do things like that i can't think of any other way of presenting skinny puppy without but i'm finding as i get older there's abstracts to things not that i'm kind of interested in there and you see you know the weaponization. of our you see the military industrial complex which again. you know in a lot of ways has taken root in this country. so much that. you're seeing things like nuclear power plants are loaded to spend spend fuel that are just sitting out in the open you know leaking and i see the just as much as as

a weapon against you know in the citizens of our own country i think these whistleblowers are wonderful and you know i applaud bird snowden child for what they did i think it's the bravest thing in the world especially with such a huge you know kafka esque sort of machine that's clamping down on them and demonizing them and finding every little again you know funny every little thing about them and putting it out there without talking about weaponized. in the world and it really does seem impenetrable at this point but as chris hedges said i don't fight fascists because i will when i fight fascists because they're fascists. your album is out it's been out for a while you're touring right now to tell people about where they can find your music and. when i too. will be will be touring in philadelphia new york and across to the west coast all points west so we're about halfway through right now and i'm having

a blast it's one of the finest tourist i've been no thank you so much thank you for being vocal is skinny puppy really appreciate it thank you very much that's our show you guys thanks for watching. technology innovation. developments around russia. the future covered. i marinate joining me. for kinda impartial and financial reporting commentary can from news and much much. only on bombast and on.

the shelves our forces at. least. six nations and the finish line of the marathon. coming up i. think. i would rather ask 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 r.t. question lol. i am. i am i am. feel words location to my voice still river. to. its demise but there's always room for an extreme situation before the usually it's the weather and when we take off we can never be sure that we are coming back that's all i want to call it the only thing i remember is my brother in france and carrying me.