well with pyongyang might result in eight million dead worldwide and yet just as peace talks are on the table between washington and pyongyang a major us news organization quoted unnamed cia official of who seem to claim there was no point in gold trump talking to kim jong un the korean leader has no intention of disarming joining me from virginia is a mutha gehlen prize winner for journalism gath porter author of perils of dominance and balance of power and the road to war in vietnam thanks for coming on going underground what do you make of the cia leaking this information to n.b.c. owned by comcast that north korea won't disarm their nuclear weapons well first of all this this story which is really quite an exercise in dissin for mission by the corporate news media is just one small part of a much larger campaign that has been going on for weeks now and which i think is certainly one of the most important developments surrounding the whole u.s.

north korean developing relationship that has occurred so far and that's because i think the corporate media are very very closely aligned with those forces within the u.s. national security bureaucracy the pentagon some of the cia people who are very very much opposed to reaching an agreement with north korea that would change the entire face of geopolitics in northeast asia because the the u.s. role in south korea and its threat to to attack north korea should there be a war is of course the mean. excuse if you will the main justification for the entire u.s. military presence in northeast asia so i think that that's really at the core of what's going on here and this specific story that you asked about is is really quite interesting. because it's making the claims that the cia knows very well

and has said formally in an intelligence analysis that north korea will not give up its nuclear weapons i have a very strong hunch show you say that what actually happened was that the cia gave the white house or the trying to mr asian a paper that said we don't think north korea is ready to give up its nuclear weapons any time immediately it's going to take a long time and it will be part of a lengthy process that is what the news media have been reporting for a long time with a twist that they suspect there are three things ultimately won't agree to give them up but i don't think the cia actually said what is in the headline of the n.b.c. story and in the lead just to remind people that the cia's mission is to protect

the american people in this piece. i mean the nameless officials are quoted as saying kim jong un would really rather use the talks if they did happen to open a burger restaurant in pyongyang is it seriously some kind of a joke to the to the cia and i should say the tone of the article and perhaps the broadcast. coverage of this well i think definitely the authors of this story were being somewhat snide in their coverage suggesting that that kim jong un is more likely to open a burger joint than he is to give up his nuclear weapons it's a nice sort of political line that you might expect opponents of the of the agreement to use politically in this country in fact i would argue that the corporate media have become the main source of opposition to an agreement between the united states and north korea it's not coming any longer from republicans or democrats it's coming from the call. what needed is

a there or would you say there are ironic honorable exceptions because the financial press reported on the falls in stock prices unlucky martin raytheon boeing northrop grumman all contractors involved in the u.s. weaponry in the southern korean peninsula aimed directly at north korea oh i think you're always going to be able to find some small exceptions to the general rule but certainly no major david gest there we're just reporting the share price in venice right right but i think the general pattern here is very very clear and very strong that the major electronic and print media have been unanimous in their position that the united states is on the wrong track your the trunk administration's on the wrong track in trying to bring about an agreement with the mystery of because of it because trump will be played that's that's the underlying theme of most of the coverage and then ninety ninety nine there was

a trip by the clinton administrations that william perry brought back from the cold former pentagon boss that failed when cheney and a man called john bolton and to the bush administration bolton's libya option is it off the table now because again lever of apparently was told by kim jong un in the past few days that kim jong un does not like us had geminids him well definitely the idea that the united states would seriously push for a libya option is off the table that bad course is what bolton proposed and i think proposal itself was clearly an effort to blow up the talks i think it is contributed to the campaign that we've just talked about it was essential to a feature of that young pain and that was the function of what bolton said but what trump has actually said over the last week has made it clear that that he does. not

entertain the notion of demanding that north korea turn over immediately all of its nuclear weapons to be shipped off to a location in the united states he knows and he said so that that is going to take a much more lengthy and complicated process in which the united states will be expected to make some significant concessions to north korea specifically and particularly with regard to its security and just briefly no chance as that corporate interests could start looking at the spoils for the winners of any did taunt some people already speculating russia china maybe japan looking towards unexploited resources in north korea well of course there will be companies that will step forward and take advantage of those opportunities but i don't think those companies are going to represent the power that is inherent in the in the war party which has built up over decades which has tens of trillions of dollars spent over

these decades on military and intelligence programs and which has suborned the mass media of the united states and most of the rest of the world now for thank you . allegedly supported by scientists at a u.k. w n d laboratory tereza his government is apparently determined that military grade nerve agents are not necessarily lethal that while scientists in the united states appear to have proved that the cuban government is engaged in warfare against american diplomats the scientific evidence of possible acoustic warfare was used by president trump to trash relations between a van or in washington not only was the u.s. blockade of the caribbean island escalated but canada joined in studying the evidence of that has been robert mcintosh from the human cognitive neuroscience department at the university of edinburgh he joins me now robert welcome to going underground people around the world know this if it gets of cuba which arguably the . world could have been destroyed back in the sixty's if we heard reports all

around the world of some test scientific test proved the cuban government was again engaging in some kind of warfare acoustic warfare you have carved out on the thirty seven scientific tests that prove cuba's guilt yes well the test that with securely concerned were the ones in our field which are cognitive tests who were ministered to the us diplomats and we've been complaining of subjective sensations of mental fogginess irritability loss of concentration memory lapses and so forth. now obviously subjective complaints on one thing but i do really want some kind of objective evidence and so the research is gave a whole series of these tests to a number of these people so what sort of test are they i imagine it would be testing these diplomats skills on throwing

a ball or being able to listen to things they reported themselves that they the felt concussion like symptoms after being in the u.s. embassy in havana this was echoed now by a u.s. diplomat in china and canadian diplomats are saying they have had similar symptoms . so the tests are a number of standard cognitive tests for really quite basic mental functions like attention and alertness memory language reasoning and so forth and the researchers gave thirty seven of these tasks which they argue covered eleven different mental domains and just for example the sort of thing that people might be asked to do is to listen to a sequence of numbers read out hold them in memory and repeat them back after a delay or they might be asked to do something even more difficult which is bring them back in reverse order after a delay and so the researchers were looking at how well that we performed on these sorts of basic mental operations. now your problem was with the statistical

threshold over this particular set of tests that is then yes it's very perplexing indeed in fact to my colleague sergio de of summer contacted me and said can you just check that are not going mad here does it actually say in this paper that they used the fortieth percentile as the threshold for impairment the forty eight percent by definition means that you expect forty percent or full intending to score a lot lower normally where testing for impairment then we might once or quite a low threshold say the fifth percentile that would mean there's only a one in twenty chance that if you pick someone out of the street that they will do that by loudly and if someone's doing that badly then you think something is wrong with them however if someone scores below forty eight percent of you expect that to happen for four out of any any ten people that you picked off the street so it's

not evidence of anything why do you think the media just reported this information as a conclusive something problematic about the the public understanding of thirds the the information it must be said is very very well hidden in the paper so although it's critical information the actual statement that says the forty eight percent is used is in small italian front under the table to you in the supplementary information to the paper so you have to really go digging around on the web and you have to be looking very carefully at the fine detail to see this information so it's perhaps not surprising that it didn't get immediately picked up on but it is surprising that it passed through a process of peer review because the peer reviewers and the journal like the journal of the american medical association are supposed to be looking at the evidence indeed there are going to ask about peer review obviously when a paper is this geo. political would use they academics are swayed what possible

reason could they be there be for them to miss on this threshold i really wouldn't like to speculate on that it's very puzzling indeed that a paper with a plane like this could get through a rigorous process of peer review and the argument for the paper being published because the dates are a presently very incomplete and the cognitive testing only concerns six individuals and they are under the orders of made is that they are entitled to publish this preliminary evidence because it is so strongly in the public interest that this evidence should be in the public domain now or something so strongly in the public interest one would think that it's also very important that it should be risky checked this doesn't seem to have happened here but i doubt it's really not for me to explain about occurred and just finally what advice would you give then to journalists maybe little and politicians when they the foreign office here or mike brown bear state department issues the scientific or things like that very evident

for making a case about political warfare well i think we need a reliable informed and independent finds of so we're able to comment on the quality of the evidence it's very easy for a paper like this but charles quite extraordinary claims to gather a lot of attention but it doesn't seem to apply to the necessary scrutiny now there's an old adage in science that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence so you really need to be sure that the evidence is really good in this case it looks to me that the evidence is pretty extraordinary but unfortunately it's the wrong kind of extraordinary they seem to be extraordinarily weak rollback adarsh thank you and that's it for the show we're back on wednesday the british m.p.'s return from another holiday keep in touch with us by virtual media feel with a thirty six years to the day the british army is ready for the invaded lebanon.

so what we've got to do is identify the threats that we have it's crazy. let it be an arms race. period dramatic development the only mostly. i don't see how will be very critical time to sit down and talk. standing steadfast germany's chancellor stresses her commitment to be a. really prime minister arrives in europe to lobby against it. european parliament looks into the misuse of. cambridge. while more

revelation show the phone company was involved in a secret country insurgency operation in yemen. putin signed legislation in the veins to give russia greater scope for retaliation against foreign sanctions . french authorities. in prisons are problems to europe's largest guard say it's overcrowded security in adequate. revery are tuning in from right around the world this hour welcome to moscow and to r.t. international my names you know neal good to have your company.