these are credible witnesses but admittedly half a brain is setting the bar very high for most british parliamentarians and most british political commentators in the media and surely anyone looking on here with an open mind about what may or may not have happened will question the the quickness of the urgency for the u.k. for france and the u.s. to go in and make those strikes why so quickly why couldn't they wait until the results of all these investigations are going on so more testimony have been heard because more doubt over it surely. exactly what the british media are also failing to point out is that it was russia and syria which requested the o.p.c. w. mission they requested it britain america and friends still not to this day confirmed that they wanted the mission to to go ahead and the fact that they bombed

the very day before the mission with due to arrive. i think this looks rather suspicious well aside to the same questions about how long the u.s. is going to stay in syria now u.s. secular state matters said today that the u.s. is going to expand its fight in syria but again contradicts donald trump's early desire to leave and he's made various statements about as we know it was going to pull out that it wasn't that this happened what is the white house latest strategy do you think. i don't think the white house has a strategy of. different tactics from from day to day. but to be fair to president. bush strong inclination to put america bring american troops back home and stop wasting trillions of american taxpayers' money that his clear inclination but of course the deep state in america the

security the generals the political elite are all pulling in the other direction they want endless war in the middle east you know peter whether of us agree with you or not it's always very good your insight your experience of peter ford for you come to syria thanks being on out international with us tonight. you. know it's been revealed that a dubai based company hired a top level p.r. executive to produce a film linking qatar with terrorism a report from the bureau of investigative journalism also claims propaganda material was created for the pentagon breaking it all down for us o.c.d. correspondent were ghastly of tonight there's no propaganda quite like military propaganda psychological operations that these psyops serious stuff aside from mere unlimited money you also don't have to deal with all those annoying ethical restrictions i just assumed it was news gathering. having seen the process

and worked in the process i then realized this was a big project so we would do the news items that would go out on the news and around various channels locally and we were to make it its best we could look. as if it was made locally belled porton ger specialized didn't military grade propaganda the british p.r. firm was active in iraq for years into the us commander there they did crazy stuff faked local news reports smeared iran put together al qaida propaganda videos planted them in people's homes and tracked who viewed them i was asked by my horse. we need to make this style of video. and we've got to use ok it is footage and all their propaganda to it and we're going to track of our google analytics

good times last year bellport injure lost its license after it emerged that it likely stalked racial tensions in south africa as part of its work their thing with having morals is once you lose them it's difficult to pick them up again but i digress guess what belle parton just former boss is up to the biggest diplomatic crisis in the middle east since the first gulf war a growing diplomatic crisis that qatar seems to be in crisis as more middle eastern countries sever diplomatic ties with saudi arabia bahrain egypt and the u.a.e. have all cut diplomatic ties with cut up you know the whole cat saudi arabia schism where the two u.s. allies almost came to blows that was helped by charles and dreher the man who oversaw bellport injures operations in iraq propagandist extraordinary

financial and logistical support for terrorists and terrorism groups like hamas the taliban and al qaida who operate freely out of doha and use business and financial institutions to support radical islam and global jihad. mr ron dreher was paid handsomely by a dubai based company to smear cata tire to terrorists to iran to tell everyone how bad. it is using the iraqi formula anyway where's the radical islamism is operational. significant operation going to be fine but. these documentary it really isn't became available on netflix you tube it was shown to trump's former chief strategist steve bannon former cia director david petraeus ex defense secretary leon panetta just to make it clear foreign

money gulf arab money used to make a fake propaganda film by professionals and then shown to millions shown to some of america's most influential figures to promote international conflict on fake grounds this is psyops the big time league of propaganda so far and associates which produced the film as well as the base company lapis communications and yet to get back to our request we can tell if a comment on the matter in the film was released last summer when gulf states cut diplomatic trade and transport ties with qatar accusing it of supporting terrorism something doas repeatedly denied but then the u.s. president sided with arab nations saying that katter a history of funding terror at a very high level so the rape it took the lead in the isolation campaign became the foreign minister is now warning the qatari government it could collapse if it

doesn't support washington's military operations in the middle east. kids are should finance the u.s. military presence in syria and send its own military forces there before the u.s. president lifts american protection for qatar if the u.s. is to withdraw its protection represented by its military base in qatar then the regime there will fall within less than a week the saudi foreign minister was referring there to the presence of over eleven thousand u.s. troops in qatar he made the remarks after donald trump called for money and ground support in syria from his wealthy allies in the middle east however security analyst and former british army officer charles shoebridge believes it is the saudis who should be concerned over their friendship with washington right now that it is using this issue as a stick to beat qatar and of course qatar has used its considerable wealth to also attack for example in propaganda term saudi arabia both countries have been

uncomfortable allies for some time certainly they've both been backing the syrian rebellion of course in this particular instance saudi arabia knows that qatar is not in a position to physically provide troops on the ground simply because its armed forces are so small but of course they would like to see qatar's finances further trained it's interesting donald trump's remarks from self where he said that without us in other words without the americans those countries would fall within hours or weeks or something like this instead this is a truce that is very rarely spoken publicly and they want to then deflect attention onto one another. facebook site in the grilling from lawmakers this time in the u.k. the social media giants been taken to task by employees over the platforms handling of people's private data and questioned over russian online activity around the time of the brics it vote. has got the latest for you the. russian brock's it could have been potentially

a hot topic here in westminster this thursday however that did not go quite well as a grilling of a top facebook executive didn't seem to go and produce too much we did look at it several times to understand connections between. russia and the brits a referendum that you meant in two thousand and sixteen we found one dollar of spend so this is the extent of what we found which is you know almost nothing given to the ways i think it was and that if we had it happen to look good if it did have it it was done in a different way that say you know i can't prove a negative that was facebook's chief technology officer who to add insult to injury was sent by mark zuckerberg to answer m.p.'s questions depart despite repeated pleas to have the facebook c.e.o. appear before this committee himself and we have to be clear that this is far from the first time when attempts to connect the dots between russia's use of social media and bracks it have failed just previously we know that facebook said that

they have found that russia had spent less than a dollar on any ads related to bracks and even when this committee travelled all the way to washington to get more answers that did not produce very much we looked at all advertisements with any connection to russia and we found no evidence of our services being used to interfere in the referendum a very small number of suspects its research agency linked accounts forty nine such accounts were active during the campaign which represents must not point north of the total number of accounts these are very low level things until we complete this investigation we won't know but what we haven't had this. information that's enabled those to target on a particular page or a particular phenomenon next to a golf club in the us state of pennsylvania has apologized to. for calling the police on them seems they were kicked off the grounds of the cohen or the club when

his father complained that the women were playing too slowly it's the latest in a series of incidents where african-americans have been arrested or os to leave a public facility in the us. on sunday a black woman was arrested at a waffle house in alabama for refusing to pay for plastic utensils the video of an arrest shows literally officers dressed and head to the floor and there was another case two weeks ago you may recall in a starbucks in philadelphia stuff they called the police on two black men because they did not place an order and in fact just want to use the restroom maybe they were going to place an order to the wouldn't then that sparked a wave of anti racism protests. that it was just ok it was. in response the c.e.o. of starbucks ordered all restaurants to close for mandatory on two races of training following

a nationwide campaign against the coffee chain reaction from economist dave perkins and human rights activist randy short. racism against the two sions is real and that were prejudiced is real that we need to care about america as an entire society and look after everyone if we don't do this we're going to have worse problems i have enormous difficulty accepting the idea that this young lady trying to run her starbucks in philadelphia spends time thinking about class and segregation and trying to target black people can't she's trying to run the restaurants and she's trying to. keep the business working and not let people take advantage of the lord during and not purchasing products from the store while using their facilities how do you stop that from happening again and i don't think that's a little girl running the. starbucks as best she can and reluctantly calling the

police signing saying loitering again is thinking about using loitering laws against black people yes there are people that have a literate and businesses yes there are folks out of order some of them of black but i've worked with a lot of white drunks in my day and they don't get handled quite the same way this is a fact i'm a glass lanolin playing another slowly than men then five women together play very slowly and the entire culture is waiting for the fact has nothing to do with it it's the fact that they are lol as a long ass people pretend that injustice and mistreatment of people is ok as long as it does not impact yeah that is the problem with the majority it they lack an understanding that it can be us today and it could be them tomorrow now this is where i asked myself the question at what point do you treat black people like we're doing there e people and subject them to ordinary rules of society at what point do you stop

taking every incident as racism and start evaluating them as human beings and how they're reacting that's my question do you fancy an exposé well american broadcaster n.b.c. has joined the dots discover that all the t's online series in case you missed it is in fact linked to. and expose a article the journalist say they looked at the registration dates of the shows website and then they cross checked against the registration for a go we could decide in the trouble if they just go to a website called click talk shows that the found it is nice brought in both in response to n.b.c. scoop in case you missed it then is taken who is behind the scenes to blow the lid off its connection to our t.v. . so here we are very slick offices although there is a slight smell in the air a vodka and caviar. were in sofas probably a spy i keep an eye on it. but first glance it looks like any other office

but take a look below the surface and something starts to seem off we spoke to i see why in my eyes members of staff so tell me what's it like working for someone connected to r.t. well i always loved the topless game show tutti frutti when i was at school there you could get us girly right but that was that was on the sky channel r.t.l. this is this is r.t. this is this is funded by russia we're talking about well what you mean r.t. is funded by russia. for the russians who are. yeah i mean if your parents is mainly just one in stuff over to poly and things like that to be honest i've never really had so much freedom at work no one tells you how to answer for over and i'm just really happy but do you work alone i mean do not you know really something i like to talk about. i have total

freedom to study looked at who was what was it talks to move to for a short order of bits from toss to look for fuel. or limited supply. on a good can prove records for. and i've just heard that the host of the show polly boyko has just arrived at work so let's see if we can get a word with her boy. was booker high you are aware that i see is funded by the russian state through us he wants us. all. yeah hi yeah yeah i got the email yeah. i've just got to take this site. so that we have it i see links to r.t. you'd have to be pretty special to think it was a secret. check out online from

us i'm kevin owen as ever from me in the team or moscow thanks for watching and talking about. great stories there twenty four seven and you can see that show as well for now from a. back geysers financial survival guide. housing bubble. oh you mean there's a downside to artificially low mortgage rates don't get carried away that's cause a report.

on the welcome to worlds apart cuba is one of those countries that's long been perceived in described in terms of ideological opposite. known in the years to sign later russia as to freedom island chains of capitalism it has long been seen in the west as one big reason ruled with an iron fist but when you've spent almost half a century documenting the lives of its people as my guest today has done you'll find that the reality is different from the ideal or ideological cliches what is cuba really like well to discuss that i'm now joined by john alpert the american journalist and documentary filmmaker so it's good to see you in our studios think you're much for coming thanks for inviting me i appreciate it now you are here in russia to promote a documentary called cuba and the cameramen reach i think is

a very straightforward and a very honest title because you really show cuba as you've experienced it over what is it forty five forty five years on the film and i think this is very unusual for a western north american journalist because most of them believe that you need to cover stories from the position of iron neutral observer and so often from a position of judgement rather than experience or immersion why did you break that tradition i wanted american people to really experience what the cuban revolution was like. it's complicated and i don't think you can understand this ninety second news report i don't think you can understand it in twenty ninety second news reports i spent forty five years following three families and see the castro when you watch the revolution and you watch these people age and you learn a lot about cuba and i think it is also very obvious in your film this kind of emotional involvement that you develop with your characters also allowed you not so

not only gain trust but actually gain unprecedented access to some of them including fidel castro you go the extra mile to show him as a human being rather you know historical figure the way you show came is that really how you remembered him. that's the way i remember him. fredo trusted me. and with you he considered me to be a friend and. took the risk. in my camera into places it had never been before into his bedroom into his kitchen. taking his shirt off for me. that he is not a bullet hole but is this it's a female that nobody had ever seen even the cubans had never seen a feel like this before actually some reviews especially in the american press and they were very very critical of. the reviews that i saw i saw there were about three weeks after the really right wing people who obviously i don't think it even

seen the film decided they didn't like it but up to that particular point every single review was positive positive positive but i think the accusation of the claim that some of the review writers made was that you were. way too friendly and not critical enough by pam how did you i think there are some very very critical moments in this film special period in cuba when the economy collapse when the soviet union fell. and they withdrew their support to cuba the negative impact on the cuban economy was like an eighty five percent contraction of their economy no electricity no transportation food shortages and because the people trusted me the people who are suffering i film things that the cuban people never filmed and that nobody else was filmed and so. the room reviews that i saw understood that. more gratifying was it and i still get them today the hundreds and hundreds of

e-mails from all over the world especially from cubans and because i think you cheated them really as a human being rather than you know a foreign they're coming into their country and passing judgments about how flawed various systems really is and i think this is what many people experience in western journalists including in this country when somebody comes to your house to your country as flawed as it may be and tells you you know how flawed do you really are and i tried really hard to be honest and. most gratification i get is when the cuban say that when their children ask them these are pro castro needed castro when their kids say mommy daddy what was the revolution like they're going to take my film out and show them my film now to close this famous saying by a british historian lord acton that power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely and i'm not sure you would put it in quite those terms but. i think

being in power for so long as fidel has been in power and being hunted for so long because i think he survived more than or around six hundred assess a nation at times that would change your personality have you noticed any character changes in him over time well i think i was the last journalist. the last american to be with fidel before he died. and he was always very open and friendly with me i think in terms of his relationship to the united states. he had a he needed a strong defensive posture because the aggression focused on him was really really very severe i think it hurt the revolution and i think that the revolution needed to be more flexible and he to be more flexible with the human rights that needed to be more flexible economically. and. to some degree pushed into inflexible position that he didn't come out of you saying it was a matter of. personality aging or was because of the pressure that his

country was subjected to i think it's both. i think it's very very important to have a very very strong feedback loop when he was young was all over the island he was playing baseball with everybody. you know he certainly could do that towards the end. but every country needs to be corrected my country really needs to be corrected and you know that's the that's our work that's the work of false reporters some people say we're not patriotic. i would like to say that maybe that's quite a high form of patriotism when you point out the things that are wrong with your country because you want your country to be better well i agree with you but i think it also depends on how you say it because i think sometimes and that's my personal issue of the day american journalism and american or western criticism in general is that sometimes critical things being said to put people in countries

down rather than show them deficiences in their systems and i heard you say in some of the other interviews that you believed that cuba was never really given a fair chance to run its social experiment to the fullest do you still believe that i sure would have liked to have seen that happen you know when the revolution began free health care free schools housing guaranteed jobs literacy campaigns that taught everybody how to remove the we were fighting for these things in the united states at that time and the fact they were going on in cuba was very very exciting. but there was always so much tremendous pressure economically politically and militarily against the regime you know would have been let the cubans experiment so we don't have to try this if it doesn't work we can look down there and all gosh it didn't work in cuba let's forget about having universal

health care. but they never had the chance the problems that the communist systems in general is that while striving for bigger things they tend to forget about the little comforts of life and i think you put it well in one of your interviews when he said that it's good to have free education and free healthcare it's also nice to have a hot shower shower in the morning if cuba hadn't been pressured so much if it hadn't been sanctioned so much do you think they would have figured out how to provide both to their population you know that they had the internal debates they were about the economy and sort of the individual is a i don't think they were resolved i think is one of the reasons why che guevara left the country because he was in conflict with some of the other people that have more power internally and the tragedies will never never know cuba is now in the process of having a pistol transition of power and the united states department of state has already described it in pretty derogatory terms. well they said it wasn't free it wasn't

fair it was dictatorial in nature. they also believe that this is not really a change of power after all and you know just a change of a figure had but. there's no way of knowing what i'm going to ask you at this point of time. given their way of making it an educated guess but i'm going to ask you still. how do you think the relationship it's been transamerica cuba ended this new president is going to develop over the next few years how do you see it i would like to see it continue on the path to normalization that was started in the previous administration i think that was healthy look at the blood. kate in the animosity for fifty almost sixty years did it change the regime in cuba no it was a completely unsuccessful policy if you got in your car to go see your bush every day and you turned a key in the car doesn't go any place when you get in that same car every day for

fifty years no you go to the metro you take some other route to this the united states had a talk about cuba's inflexibility we had a really inflexible policy too there was totally unsuccessful cost a lot of suffering on the united states can afford to be inflexible when it comes to little neighbor now and then and now there's no point. that's going. to the retrogressive miami community that is every day more and more a minority unfortunately that's back and forth again the last administration realize that the majority of cuban americans want to normalization the normalised and when you normalize you can talk. and i want to tell you from my experience in cuba when the united states use sugar instead of a hammer things change in cuba in the way that the united states wanted them were like i can't go backwards fast enough in this year to show you what what what's

going on in cuba now. it seems that in order to protect lection prospects in florida there is a little bit of a game that's being played with a very very very reactionary cubans who are disrespected more and more every day by the cuban community since the western commentators compare this new president maybe l.d.s. now to now. and i know that you visited the soviet union during its reformist years of glasnost and perestroika which as inspiring as they may be now in hindsight it ultimately led to the collapse of not only the system to the soviet system but also the collapse of the country do you think that's likely a likely scenario for cuba if the new president indeed pursues the reform agenda or if he doesn't so that was a question that i was asking myself and i was very very curious because of the half a century that i spend cuba because of my love for the cuban people i wanted to

observe this firsthand but i didn't want to observe it from the back of the pack and so i had. asked the cuban government to allow me to come inside as they were making their deliberations as they were passing the power in to observe this basically like a fly. and. they didn't answer me i had the choice to be in cuba or be here in moscow for some very important thing this past week and i chose to come here to moscow instead of going to cuba well we are very happy it's you're welcome here in this country but for the time being we have to take a very short break we'll be back in just a few moments.