pleasure to have you with us here on r t today on roller sutured. coming up on our tell you the crisis in iraq from leaves the nation divided as the militants continue to gain brownell while washington struggles for a way to end the crisis so is there a solution more on that ahead. and the pentagon is researching the cause of global on rast and movement groups but critics fear this could help the military stifle and control protest movements braun that coming right up. it's friday june twentieth five pm in washington d.c.

i'm going to a chance you're watching r.t. america. three hundred american special forces are prepping to head to iraq as president obama announced yesterday saying they'll be in the war torn nation soley for advising roles but while the president emphasized the forces will not be returning the combat loyal followers of anti-american shiite cleric muktodhara al saud are warned that an attack on those american soldiers would be imminent secretary as state john kerry will also be en route to the region beginning this weekend hoping to broker peace talks among shiite sunni and kurdish leaders also increasing pressure on iraq's prime minister was iraq's shiite spiritual leader grand ayatollah ali sistani who today called for a new more effective government as the isis sunni militants continue to attack the beijing own fields isis has also seized a former chemical weapons complex with

a stockpile of munitions although the u.s. state department says that there are unusable i was joined earlier today to talk about the sectarian violence in the region by adjunct professor at georgetown law school download carolla i first asked him about the sunni insurgent group and the taliban who took over afghanistan back in one thousand nine hundred six and ruled most of that country until the two thousand one hundred or throw led by u.s. forces could what happens there be compared to what's going on in iraq right now. i mean we can get so many lessons from the experience of the u.s. and the west with taliban in the case of taliban the justification for the taliban resorting to weapons was to drive away the soviets from. from afghanistan the leader. shah massoud was. who he was the actual leader of

a coalition so to speak made of the muscle group the taliban and the khyber the must road was a he was not secular he was a very pious man but he didn't see islam the way taliban silent taliban or violent taliban was they committed fifteen massacres outrageous massacres between one thousand nine hundred six and two thousand and one ever that comparable that you know how and i said has the fact that i'm much older very much so because it's the same ideological background and i think that's why i say this is something that should be an eyeopener we should draw lessons from the experience of afghanistan and these are the same today and they are driven by the same ideology and the outcome is not likely to be much different except to the extent that the iraqi people would resist and refuse domination by.

isis this would depend also on how much foreign elements would help in arming funding and promoting and sponsoring isis and apparently this is what's happening how do we stop the violence. would it work if the u.s. at implemented air strikes well i doubt that the air a site by the u.s. would would do. contribute anything except more messy by image i think the u.s. has friends in the area who are involved and who know how isis is funded how they get their arms and they can play a very very important role not only direct control of isis but they can play a very positive role with sona society who is supportive of

isis in one way or another you've also heard the president obama hasn't ruled anything out yet if the u.s. did commit as you say if they committed to doing airstrikes against isis controlled regions how do you think the people in the region would respond to the u.s. there after as if that's what we did well it would depend on why the u.s. would do this as i said is the u.s. interest would be affected negatively affected one way or another in a tangible manner the u.s. would react. most likely the u.s. would would react and whether this would be bombing certain area as it is doing in other places but to i think president obama is aware of the complexity of and he kept his option open and in a sense i'm not going to commit myself to anything and we will see how things would

work out but i assume that the u.s. is working with all its friends in the area in a positive way in a way that would lead to in fact weakening isis because the u.s. has known that isis has been active and very active in this area it's been growing yeah it has been has been growing and has been growing with the assistance and promotion by friends of the u.s. in the area so the u.s. is not in the dark about what isis is doing new to the u.s. i don't think it is no no now there are a lot of varying schools of thought on how just how to resolve this conflict one of those being is to divide the region into three secular states take a look at the map that we have up on screen here this is where the ethnic regions currently are and what it might look like if the region were split up into those

separate areas for sunni shia and kurds. do you think this is a good idea. i think it is to be disastrous for you that iraq has already suffered after two wars specially the second war of two thousand and three the social fabric of the iraqi has been torn apart the promotion of secondary identities sectarian identity confessional identity it's an issue ethnic identities or whatever and this has prevented or has. distant iraq to from being a nation where a society was coalescing and a cycle your genocide was further of a threat but what does a very dangerous also what has given the good a grass to do this was dismantling the army the army was the only institution that

was keeping iraq together so after iraq has experienced a tearing apart of the social fabric now we give expression physically to this tearing apart by dividing it into three countries that will that would mean we can iraq and we can state each of these states and continuously a source of turmoil and problems between the states and i don't think this would be advisable and i think i hope the iraqi people because only the iraqi people could prevent this that there might be outside forces but the outside countries who would not be opposed to something like this on either side whether in the case of turkey or. saudi arabia or iran or whatever now will we have another map here that shows what areas isis has already seized control of and what do you think this insurgent

group is trying to. which are they trying to achieve their their autonomy this isis state that crosses the boundaries into syria and you know going across the entire northern region maybe they are taking over kurdish state what are they trying to achieve i think. fred what it wanted it wanted to if. they in iraq and syria. it's regime of what and how which would be implemented and they have given us from sample. ground in case of what isis want we don't know and what we know what if isis were to be successful what would happen to iraq what would happen to figure out what would happen to the neighborhood because this is from thing that might be a contagious. it might affect all neighboring countries ok well that was

adjunct law professor at georgetown and attorney and former deputy general counsel at the world bank daoud carolla thank you for your time sir and there's more violence along the russian ukrainian border despite the coming peace talks artie's roller coaster of has more on the victims of a recent ukraine military border shelling that took the life of a family with young children or people in the one family actually lost two members as a shell flew right into the backyard of a private residence instead of the killing mother and one thing her child's teacher gets what she would be thirty knowledge. despicable people to switch off the camera. which guards must to get rid of the ones for my daughter said look at the study shelling i told you to get into the basement immediately she grabbed her son turned around and that's when the shell hit she was no more. the child

was taking to the hospital where doctors worked on him all night said but multiple head injuries prevented the doctors from saving his life they discovered thirty shell fragments in his head and he died right on the operating table meanwhile fighting continues close to the russian border and according to the spokesperson if the russian border guards as shell actually flew into russian territory and injured to one of the customs officers and damage that building as well now moscow is outrage and demands quick in this occasion and a problem so apology from the crane authorities ukrainian defense ministry had already denied all these accusations that any shooting took place near the russian border and now the shelling was probably accidental but russia is not concerned about the security in this area let me put in spokesperson dmitry peskov said the

president ordered back call for russian border guards in order to exclude such events from happening in the future he said this is being done in order to boost security in this highly volatile area. that was artie's roman kosar have another hurdle has been set on the path to closing the military detention center at guantanamo bay late last night the u.s. house of representatives approved a measure in a defense appropriations bill that would put good mode detainees transfers on hold for one year the republican led house voted two hundred thirty to one eighty four on the amendment that bans funding for transfers as well as another amendment that would financially block the transfer of detainees to yemen the home of most of the hundred forty nine existing detainees the ban was proposed in response to president obama's exchange of those five get motive for us p.o.w.

sergeant bowe bergdahl lawmakers are upset that the president did not give congress the thirty day notice required by law which the white house said would have just hampered their exchange the prisoner swap is just the latest snafu in president obama's push to close gitmo which has been embroiled in controversy since it began housing terror suspects back in two thousand and two besides working to mitigate reports of waterboarding and torture a federal judge has now ordered the government to release footage showing the for speeding practices used during a hunger strike last year at the height of the tube feeding it had more than one hundred of its hundred fifty four detainees as unwilling participants the pentagon says the practice of feeding hunger strikers liquid nutrients through a tube that snaked down from the nostril into the stomach was necessary to keep the detainees healthy but the united nations has called it yet another form of torture

. meanwhile israel is also faced with a hunger strike of its own dozens of palestinian it meets have been on hunger strike for about two months to challenge that country's practice of detention without charges. the u.s. department of defense has teamed with universities and social science research or is to study the dynamics of civil unrest both abroad and here at home it's being called the minerva research initiative many scientists educators and activists though fear that the initiative could not only need to the militarization of the study of social sciences but that the information gained from the research could be used by the military to control and stifle ideological and grassroots driven movements like occupy wall street to shut some light on the minerva initiative i was joined earlier by david price a professor of anthropology and sociology at st martin's university i first asked him how the initiative works and what the military hopes to gain from it. well as

you said the minerva initiative started in two thousand and eight it started with very modest funding around four million dollars it was announced by then secretary of defense robert gates with the idea being that the defense department would try and use social scientists and other academics in american universities to research . issues and problems that were of interest to the military and when it started it was it was very broad as you said here in our direction right now it appears that many of the programs that are being funded to try to modeled ways for the defense department to monitor civil unrest and so they're studying both domestic populations and more generally looking at groups around the world and trying to use social science for militarized eons now how does the military and intelligence

agencies we use the information that's being gained working with the social scientists an anthropologist like yourself is it something that they're they're looking into as far as behavior is is concerned is as large groups. well there are several answers to that one is we simply don't know how the information being used as with any any sort of social science research that's how can you know i don't know. well because you know i'm not involved and i don't work for minerva i'm a critic of. and so but anyone who's who's doing research puts it out in the public domain and it can be used for eons that we the researchers don't understand now with minerva. the results there's two parts of minerva one is a program where people come up with with research designs that they want to do and it goes through a very public process using the national science foundation and the other. is not

public it uses a classified process so there are scholars out there that are doing doing work where they're doing things like analyzing texts so they'll take one of the one of the funded programs as they took. documents from iraq from the invasion of iraq that were taken back in and they use very sophisticated programs or programs like there's one called the new disk which is a qualitative analytical software package that social scientists can use to look for themes that show up in documents and so in terms of what it's being applied for we don't know because all of this occurs behind a wall of secrecy. that the professors that are involved in the never project do they even know what they're involved with why this information is useful to them yes and no you know they on the one hand it's one of these sort of dual use things

on the one hand the scholars working on these these projects are working on issues that are very interesting to them as individuals i don't think they're necessarily thinking through the app. cases are this in terms of counterinsurgency and other applications or perhaps they are in their politically comfortable with having their research being used for these sort of manipulated into i don't i don't really know i think there's a lot of naivete not really understanding the history of abuses of programs like this. will thank you so much for your time sir that was david price a professor of anthropology at st martin's university. and sex workers are up in arms in canada a new law criminalizes buying and selling sex in the country it would also prohibits sex workers from advertising their services and make it illegal to sell sexual services in public spaces where kids could be present now the old sex laws

were struck down by the supreme court in december of last year and lawmakers gave it a year to come up with new legislation so here to talk more about the world's oldest profession and how whether it will continue in canada or not i'm joined by katrina pace litigation director at his it legal society hello katrina now if you knew that if the supreme court of canada has previously ruled that these laws prohibiting brothels and public are public communication for the purpose of prostitution and those living on the profits of prostitution they ruled that unconstitutional then why are we now seeing the new or legislation attempting to prohibit. well the government the federal government in canada has tried to find creative ways to get around the decision of the supreme court of canada which did straight down those laws and they've tried to reenact or create new criminal laws that will continue to criminalize adult prostitution in canada but in ways that look different from the

laws that were struck down so they're trying to continue with the approach of overall criminalization but to do so in a slightly different way but what we know is that the harms that are created will be the same well the the sex workers are obviously upset about this new law saying it'll make working in the sex industry more dangerous can you tell us how so. well the provisions the new proposed provisions do things like say it's illegal to communicate in public for the purpose of prostitution they try to make it a little bit more limited than it was before but still have the effect of driving street sex workers into the most dangerous parts of our cities into really isolated areas where there is no one there to help them if they need support where they have to get it to be a cause very quickly to try to stay away from and avoid police detection and then a number of other provisions like making it illegal to be a client of a sex worker anything illegal to buy sex or making it illegal to advertise make it virtually impossible to work in doris which the supreme court of canada said really

is the safest way for sex work to happen so this is the government's attempt to sort of try to stop restoration from happening but we know it will have all of these various harms making sex workers have very little control over the conditions of their work right and speaking of control and keeping the industry indoors actually historically canada has kept prostitution legal and one must get even a business license essentially right to practice and so as a result canada has had i believe a lower incidence rate of diseases and violent crimes against the people within the sex industry so when criminalizing prostitution not only clog up the judicial system but like you said just put these people in harms way. yeah you know you raise some really interesting points one is that prostitution itself the exchange has never been illegal in canada but all of these various other activities have been but what we have seen as the most of the balkan foresman has been targeted at street based workers and in fact ninety five percent of law enforcement is targeted

at those women and they of course have experienced the most unbelievable violence we've had an incredible tragedy of missing and murdered women and in vancouver especially it really shows how criminalization makes their conditions very very vulnerable and the way he raises an interesting question about the fact that there's this licensing scheme at the same time where we know many cities and municipalities across the country do license sex industry businesses so even though we've had these criminal laws that say brothels were illegal nevertheless we have municipalities granting licenses so it's a very messy system and what we know is that from a human rights perspective and from a safety perspective and based on the evidence from canada and all over the world it's really time to move away from criminalization and recognize that the health and safety of sex workers must come first right and for example in edmonton. the licensing of these businesses have generated more than i believe a quarter million dollars for that city alone what were the financial repercussions

be criminalizing prostitution. well i mean that it's an interesting question because i don't know how cities are going to respond to the new federal legislation because they were as kind of i just mentioned licensing these businesses that were fundamentally illegal but they were licensing them as things like massage parlors or they were calling them health enhanced and centers it was a different framing of what was going on there but nevertheless i think everyone knew the business that was taking place so i don't know if the cities will start licensing these businesses or less and less than they have been before but i think you're right to say that this has been very lucrative for cities across the country and it would be really substantial hit if they are not licensing those businesses and be a huge hit of course for sex workers who want to be able to work indoors in order to ensure their own safety that's right well thank you so much for your time that was katrina pacey litigation director at pivot legal society thank you thank you

and we're learning more about nasa's new developments called path to mars the space agency has listed nine potential asteroids for astronauts to explore after choosing the final asteroid nasa will use a robotic spacecraft or a giant inflatable bag to tame the small planet and secure it above the moon while the exploration will aid in space travel research the program will also help officials learn how to protect earth from dangerous asteroids now out of the million plus near earth asteroids in space officials believe around twenty thousand of them have the capability to strike our earth and cause severe damage officials are also thinking about obtaining a chunk of a larger asteroid to study instead nasa is likely to make a decision on which method to use later this year. and back here on earth

an exclusive club of futuristic vehicles is getting a brand new member of the iconic harley davidson company is sharing its latest creation project a live wire is a harley davidsons first fully electrical motorcycle weighing at just four hundred sixty pounds it can go from zero to sixty in less than four seconds even though the bike is not available on the market just yet the company will start touring a dozen prototypes around the u.s. next week looks pretty cool the official specs for the bike suggest it can reach speeds of ninety two miles per hour thanks to a seventy four horsepower engine and fifty two foot pound feet of torque but harley executives say that all might change. and before we go don't forget to tune in at nine pm for larry king now tonight's guest is former n sync member lance bass here's a part of what's ahead why you televise your wedding you're making yourself your

own pop culture it's true you know it's something that i think the world needs to see. you know i you know gay marriage is just legal in just a few states right now and i think it's really important to be visible as as a gay person and and especially as a couple my fiance and i we love being able to walk the red carpet together and as a kid you know growing up if i would have seen a gay couple on television that i could've dream saying oh my gosh i could have that one day because growing up i didn't have anyone to look up to so that's why i want to be so visible for these kids in middle america that feel like they're the only gay in town like i felt i want them to be able to see something and be able to dream big. so tonight nine pm tonight right here on r t america and that does it for now i'm a military and have a great weekend. i'm marinating in the financial

moral means test back to serious developments having not stopping citibank's only taking on the demand for credit not going to get any economic benefit in life there are blues and there are facts. politicians use the term national security to justify spying on the entire world invading countries stealing resources he name it and now the court just used national security to justify the f.b.i.'s practice of torturing americans when they're traveling abroad the u.s. district court of the district of columbia just dismissed

a case brought by the a.c.l.u. on behalf of us that is send them your michelle in two thousand and six he was in somalia when fighting broke out the fled the kenya where he was trying to find a way back to the west when kenyan soldiers picked him up tossed him in a filthy cell and called in u.s. officials to decide what to do with the f.b.i. showed up and started questioning him they accused him of being trained by al qaeda which mr michaud tonight so the f.b.i. started threatening him they told him they were going to hand him over to the kenyans forever they told him they were going to transfer him to israel where he be made to disappear they threatened his family they repeatedly threatened him with execution and torture and all kinds of bad stuff to get him to confess when a canyon human rights group filed a petition on his behalf the f.b.i. has be quickly flew mr michel back to somalia and then over to ethiopia in total he

was detained for over four months by the f.b.i. interrogated over thirty times and he lost eighty pounds he was finally returned home where no charges were filed against him he would just let go. no with no explanation or apology so the a.c.l.u. brought the case to court to try to get some protections in place for americans against their own government when they travel abroad because apparently there's a need for that in the past other americans have similar stories about being tortured by the f.b.i. off american soil and brought cases to court that were also dismissed and that's exactly what's happening in mr michel's case right now it was just dismissed and guess what the court used as grounds for dismissal yes they said the u.s. government had a right to detain and torture an american citizen abroad because of national security the court also said that while they found mr michel's case disturbed.