voted overwhelmingly in favor of. the. program. in the u.s. we speak exclusively to a. national

with. moscow which is where we start with a big story this hour russians told the united states to cut the number of diplomatic stuff it has in the country by the first of september it's a move that follows the approval of new sanctions by the senate in washington. is a cross development. i they call the no they're not so mean let's look at the context of where this all started this actually began back in december when the u.s. expelled some russian diplomats and confiscated some diplomatic buildings basically some compounds where it's taken a while for russia to respond but as you said the context now is in light of the new sanctions are being voted by the senate and what's happened is that russia has effectively responded in kind it's saying that the same number of diplomatic staff also technical staff that the m. that they have in america must first fund it in kind with the americans across the

whole of russia this is not just moscow so we're looking at as you say four hundred fifty five people by the first of september what they've also said is that they want to stop the americans having access to certain warehouses and also what they call a diplomatic compounds now that's not an embassy or anything like that it's effectively what they call a dutch respectively a leisure complex out in in the forests near the city but what they're saying is that russia is responding to the tap for what america has done and also will continue to do that if america unilaterally decides to come back on diplomatic staff what they've also said the deputy foreign minister has said is that they will go further they will go beyond cutting diplomatic staff and also access as well because they feel there's been what they call a rise of russophobia on capitol hill now the russians feel that they've acted in a kind of normal way they've tried to normalize bilateral relations between the two countries despite the fact that sanctions have gone ahead but they also feel it's time for these new measures in in light of what they feel is

a new more aggressive american foreign policy as we can hear. these sanctions once again show how aggressive the u.s. is in conducting its foreign policy using exceptionalism as an excuse the u.s. arab league news the interests of other countries. they're american the exception is and this is something that the russians feel that something that they think is appropriate and therefore they've taken this particular action ok now we know exactly what the foreign ministry things anything from the care facials in the building behind you. well yes i mean this is all come about i mean less than a day as we said over the fact that the the senate had voted on these new russian sanctions and then in these donald trump's signature really summit to make it go ahead but the feeling here in particular as you say in that building behind me is that these new sanctions are actually punitive they punish company is trying to do business with the russians particularly the energy companies and that's not just american companies either the ramifications are also global or president putin said

that russia had been patient for long enough and if he felt that it was about time that there would be a response and their response would become pretty centered around. the news of the sanctions are completely illegal they go against international law and the rules of the world trade organization with being very patient and very reserved but at some point we will have to respond because we can't endlessly tolerate aggressive behavior towards our country actions can be perceived as aggravation and i would even say exceptional cynicism. and hasn't just been a response from the kremlin either we're looking at the u.s. ambassador to russia john tester has also said that he feels a deep sense of disappointment over these new moves and has protested against them . or for now in central moscow thanks very much for that. i know many still see president trump as being in a tough position early days yet of course at any just nine am in washington and he had to make his decision either he must take

a hard line on the kremlin or let down his party and trying to go against the will of congress we're going to get more live reaction now minidisc chris an awful so this is with us former greek diplomat and ambassador welcome to the program the russian president warned yesterday that there could be countermeasures do you think anyone in washington would have expected them this quickly. i think that they should have expected it because it is also to the credit of the of russia that they waited so long to take these measures. gave an opportunity to the new administration to do a media rate to thirty geishas between washington and moscow in spite of the fact that there was a good meeting between trump and glad to meet puttin it in. we see that the administration and congress still insist on this hard line

policy by the way it is totally illegal by international law to confiscation of property that the obama administration did he said bert because of the property also all of the embassies they also have diplomatic status and they are covered by the. by the. adventure and diplomatic relations but also i think that the u.s. administration should. also look into all of restore points put into interview where put it was very clear there of what his disposition was visibly the united states visibly the trumpet ministration very quickly i think he called them to the . administration and the bureaucrats of all countries for creating these problems

the other thing that the. congress measures create is that they create a rupture between the european union and and the united states because the interests there are totally. conflicting between the european union and the united states so the measures that russia took. today they are they are according to people about the practice and it's exactly a reply due to the measures taken by the obama administration do you and i find them totally easy not logical to take more against russia or what do you think russia's move will have any bearing on what president trump does in the coming hours. i think it will i think it will but

she could not do badly things because this was adopted in the congress with the three negative votes so even if he even if he vetoes this. this act it will still pass by congress with i think the two thirds majority i mean any way it's a lost case the measures will be applied and i don't think the trumpet can do very many things that ok so your expert opinion then as a career diplomat where is this going to take us in the future then on solving the big issues like syria for instance where both the u.s. and russia seemingly ending up on the same page but now the diplomatic tool kit increasingly angry between the pair of them was not going to lead us. to the problem to. now is purely economic i think that the on the syrian issue it's not going to affect it very much because lover of has

a very good contacts with his american counterpart and they're working out. what they have worked out until now has been effective so i hope not but i don't think that it will affect the other issues of course it's up to the. congress also to assume do responsibilities i mean they're treating this or they're treating the russian federation as if it was just the soviet union and they should add to that that it is no longer the soviet union this is what they have to put into their mind some twenty first century thinking is needed ok for now leaders christian thoughtless former greek ambassador thank you very much for joining us on r.t. . thank there are also fears in the e.u. that the proposed sanctions would hit european companies as we've been hearing over the past twenty four hours also the german economy ministers criticize the u.s. over its plans she says that washington has abandoned the sched position on anti

russia sanctions and is even suggested counter measures to cut him open has been asking people in new york how they'd feel about having sanctions imposed on them. the economic minister of germany is saying he wants to put sanctions counter sanctions on a country in coordination with the world trade organization. crash maybe the u.s. troops u.s. then a sway i probably in the states on the united states oh you know well and how do you feel about that i faked that our trade policies under the present current administration it's got a right i can't believe it could be president that we're trying to protect themselves with trouble being president you've got to expect a lot of crazy things not good but we have to stand out it's not good for us and it's not good for the world we think that we can exist by ourselves we can the world is a much bigger place now with becoming less and less important it's

a trade war a trade war between us and the jar and the germans us and the rest of the world it saves a lot of people i think voted for mr trump. because he was hoping not to keep our continual adventures in foreign countries to reduce the wars and what we're having here is just we're creating more a worse situation in were and we're needing our european partners as well and we're basically we've got a congress imposing their own foreign policy without regard to impacts on europe nor really the considerations on the ultimate objectives of of mr president trump as well. to other news now weeks after the city of mosul was finally freed from islamic state in iraq more details of the liberation and urging a new report from human rights watch suggests one iraqi military unit has executed dozens of suspected members of eisel without trial this is how international

observers describe what they saw in mosul. a group of iraqi soldiers the naked men down an alleyway to which the hood multiple gunshots. through the doorway of a damaged house the bodies of a number of naked men lying in the doorway the said one of the dead men was lying with his hands behind his back and appeared to have been handcuffed and there was a rooper around his legs two sixteenth division soldiers a school should one observe and shoot the seven head of the soldiers said was an american female isis sniper whom the hard to care perceives it was not clear whether the decapitated her alive. this is one of a series of reports that human rights watch has issued on the final weeks of the battle in mosul against isis and in these reports what we have seen is numerous extrajudicial killings by iraqi forces of men that they say were linked to isis

without any judge without any trial simply executing them on the battlefield really all the iraqi forces that are involved in this fight against isis have been committing rampant abuses including war crimes we have yet to see a single incident be properly x. investigated by the iraqis or any commanders to be held accountable the report claims the executions were carried out by an iraqi unit that played a significant role in the liberation they received american training and assistance while fighting iceland twenty fifteen his field from human rights watch again says there's no indication that washington has stopped its support to the division. the u.s. has publicly for a long time publicize the work that it's done training the iraqi military sixteen division that it calls on its own website has press releases up highlighting the training and support that the u.s. has given to this specific division you know we as human rights watch do not know

if support through the sixteenth division is ongoing but we have not seen anything thing to suggest that that support ended in the recent past. torturing killing allegedly carried out by the iraqi army have previously been documented by a camera man embedded with one of the unit he claims to have filmed abuse and extra judicial executions some of which he said were also recorded by the officers themselves. city of spoke to the camera man last month but please again be aware that some graphic violence is about to be shown up i understand the dark background is intended to conceal the way you walk how serious is the threat to your life after you made these revelations about all this torture and wrongdoing in iraq. my family received many threats from the especially from captain mourners are she wrote to my father on facebook he said they would come in the night and kill them

they can contact me because i was in hiding of course i understand that my life is in danger you spent a lot of time in bed with iraqi forces and i know i spent some time in mosul i know how hard it was to you know get in touch and embed yourself with iraqi forces and especially difficult to gain their trust but what was your position within the emergency response division. and how to work together every day we all slept together i spent more time with them than with my family i thought they were heroes yes they were so brave fighting on the frontlines every day but then i saw the other side the torture the raping the killing first they didn't want me to film the torture and other bad stuff but eventually they relented and gave me permission how did you feel when you first witness these torches scenes and how did you feel as time went on and as they got more brutal and violent and fatal. at first it didn't register during the second week i went home and my relatives asked me

what was wrong with me after that it all changed it affected me my psychology i kept thinking about the torture of those people and their suffering it got worse and worse and after five weeks it became so. horrible they decided to publish everything. and it was unbearable but i made myself continue to film because they knew it was important to be tortured people and killed them over and over. as i remember it happened on december twelfth katz an insurgent hider came back and started to show us a video we saw how sergeant hyder started to shoot he showed a man six nine times and we heard the voice of no more fight or stop the sonos want to talk to him and he shot the man two times and so another photographer also recorded the devastated city and its residents during the battle for mosul and off to the city was liberated. in the last couple days we witnessed there was really

just this tremendous push to just just crush the remaining fighters who were very deeply entrenched i guess in the city there's this vast tunnel network i guess that is sort of existed for thousands of years you know dating back to mesopotamia but spiders have also dug in their own tunnel network system underground in mosul and there was just this you know it was a very aggressive push by both the iraqi forces and the coalition to just pretty much and i await their remaining fighters kind of at you know i will result in being kind of a heavy civilian cost i think that what you know what the mainstream media sort of sort of does they try to they try to generalize you know the conflict in what's happening they try to package it into these very easily accessible headlines you know like mosul is liberated and so you know you read that headline and you think oh you know the battle is over you know the operations are over and you know everything must be tied up and tidy but that's just not the case so i guess that that was one of the biggest shocks to me was that you know there's this this

narrative that you know the fight is over and you know it wasn't the case at all and the scale of destruction in mosul is just you know it's an unimaginable hell. the city is littered with i.e.d. . you know unexploded ordnance from you know from airstrikes and it's just going to take you know decades to rebuild this city one of the headline news to come the creators of the cia's war on terror interrogation program could be facing trial i'll tell you all about that after the break.

called the future we know you're going to. the world. according to just. come along for the. you know again two military psychologists regarded as the architects of the cia's enhanced interrogation program will discover on friday whether they have to stand

trial over their so-called participation in acts of torture bruce jessen and james mitchell created and personally tested harsh torture methods forming a company that profited from the program that techniques were used on suspected terrorists held at secret cia prisons when the country launched its war on terror following the nine eleven attacks but a twenty fourteen told to report released by a senate select committee found that some of those who were subjected to the brutal interrogations are not even being involved with extremist activities. michael cancer who worked with one of the psychologists and devised a program to help u.s. service personnel withstand torture he says that his work on see it as it's known was used by one of the men to develop new and more brutal torture techniques but

the cia's methods go far beyond that. the resistance to interrogation program we don't actually use the word torture in the training however there are torture techniques that are used to certain levels during the training this is all part of a program that's called sere s e r e survival evasion resistance to interrogation and escape so what we were doing were protecting those operators those people on strategic reconnaissance flights doing operational work of around the world to collect intelligence and also those that were operational and working and counter terrorism how to resist enemy interrogation and those techniques were educated to fill a very precise and were not used to hurt or harm the students and every student had a stop code a code that they could use at any time to have all activity stopped so again torture in the mind of

a student is different from being tortured for days and days and weeks which is what we're hearing about the bush she torture program all of the activities that one on by the cia were grossly beyond anything at the school standards for my opinion please understand that i retired from the u.s. air force in one nine hundred ninety one only in two thousand and six or two thousand and seven did i even have an inkling that these people that i haven't seen for dozens of years were doing this roger aldridge bruce jessen and jim mitchell were the people behind the torture program it was the people that i worked with for several years that had taken and reverse engineer. the harsh part. and turned it into the tease the enhanced interrogation program. brutal techniques all the lawyers for the two psychologists in question say their client's innocence and should be viewed like the supplies of poison gas the nazis were in their words it simply doing business in line with

a contractual agreement one former cia analyst and whistleblower though told us that the men managed to eighty one million dollars doing such business. the reason why mitchell and jessen were put in charge of this this terrible this important program was because the cia simply had no experience in this kind of thing nobody in the cia was trained in interrogation that's an f.b.i. job but the cia wanted to be the organization that did it themselves and it's because the cia blamed itself for the nine eleven attacks well because they had nobody internally who could do these interrogations they decided to hire mitchell and jessen at a cost of eighty one million dollars to come in and teach the cia how to torture people at the end of the day mitchell and jessen were the ones who flew out to the secret prison site overseas and actually carried out the torture themselves we know from the senate torture report for example that it was mitchell and jessen who were

personally torturing these prisoners there was no discussion of ethics there was no discussion of morality and once the memo was signed by the president there was no discussion of legality it was it was as though the cia was just winging it they were taking it one day at a time they didn't care if they were breaking rules they didn't care if they were violating the laws they didn't care about professional ethics and when vice president dick cheney said that we were going to turn to the dark side they meant it they meant that the cia was going to go overseas and it was going to kill or capture everybody that it encountered and then just deal with the fallout later that's why guantanamo was created. a commuter trains crashed into the buffers at a station in barcelona in spain injuring at least fifty four people on of them seriously it happened during the friday morning rush hour video shows the front of the trains been badly damaged the driver is among the injured the cause of the

crash has not yet been established but it's understood that the train did pass an inspection ten days ago the council on regents presidency and the mayor of boston i don't know is it to say. police in jerusalem are preventing men under the age of fifty from entering temple mount also known as a rama al sharif and as paula slay reports it's a move likely to reignite the already tense situation of the holy site. the situation here in west hollywood a neighborhood of arab east jerusalem is extremely tense this has been a flashpoint of violence in the past and police have fought in additional reinforcements there are heavy security barriers they've closed a lot of the roads into the old city and also have secured they checkpoints between east jerusalem and the west bank even more now the police have also threatened that they are expecting casualties today indeed if islands explodes and there has been violence here in the past i was.

ok. thank god thank god the was was was. was. thank god i don't believe in the next thank you on this tuesday night dozens of palestinians were injured when clashes broke out at the last a mosque several were arrested by the israeli police particularly off to keep of youngsters climbed on to the mosque and flee the palestinian flag from there was the was. at the same time we are hearing that more than a hundred people have been injured the number of palestinians who've been killed in the last two weeks of violence has now climbed to six after

a youngster who was shot in the head succumb to his wounds overnight there have been three israelis who have been killed so what we're looking at really is two weeks of violence. i hope that the situation will come under control soon but certainly the mood on the ground extremely tense particularly today as many palestinian groups call for a day of rage. the soyuz spacecraft is due to blast off for the international space station in a couple of hours from now it's set to carry the next crew to the orbiting lab garrett is at the baikonur cosmodrome in kazakhstan for us. this is the soyuz rocket that will carry its three months really to the international space station where they will spend one hundred thirty nine days in all beds enjoying the time they won't just be enjoying music they have a whole list of experiments they need to get through and some of those sounds more peculiar they know of this. one of the most

peculiar sounding experiments to be conducted on the international space station this time in both testing sensitivity to pain in zero gravity i asked people how they think it will be done but you could do some tweaking it like that but just project other the face but it's zero gravity as a punching heat you know because you know when you're in the gravity everything's very slow with imaginations running wild i decided to get the details from the crew themselves indecently one of them there is a device you put your finger inside the small voice begins to squeeze as soon as you feel a little pain shot so there's also a thermal sensitivity to how you put your hand on the circumstances when it comes to what you believe you want richard to do for the trial over the years experiments in space have touched on everything from the weird to those wonderful but the questions that most people really want to know the answers to our a little less complex. here but you keep. it on the function that

the law is what the studies i. just answer all. evil. so that having to answer the same old questions it is a small price to pay for the incredible journey this is making aaron reporting from on t.v. from biking. no doubt we'll have a camera trained on the launch pad when they settle for just over a couple of hours let me get in there in just over half an hour for more reaction to russia's diplomatic mission to the prospect of yet more u.s. sanctions meantime good news alerts from altie on facebook and twitter. with this manufactured consensus still to the public will. when the ruling closest to protect themselves.