can start turning over a new lease. the code may bring cosmetic changes to combine, but the historical channels to which the country as well is transferred to france is unlikely to be disturbed. the same could be said to for new z wake, who spot concerns over frances uranium dependency. the country supplies 15 percent with frost, as uranium needs and accounts for a 5th of the use uranium imports. the soaring influence across the freak in these african states. this ensures that they remain an indispensable part of french interest on the continent. proof off batch is the more than 100 french companies present in this, the whole region, the most which each one of those companies. it's play as such as the elements which mines processes and exports manganese to to. * introduce another french giant within lots footprints in africa, faces criminal charges over human rights violations, and it's

a big projects across the continent. the total energies has consistently fail to respect local customs and for the ships related to the treatment of graves. in addition, the company did not follow international best practices related to identifying grave sides, developing plans to relocate affected graves, providing compensation for impact of families and respecting the spiritual and really just need self affected family and community members. like dominos, african states, all one by one who dropping the shackles of neo colonial tad. my leave to tune a fast, so you name z and the bar and the all say no to for us as long time domination of african financial, political economy and security of phase from sees the importance of voice interests of stopping these nations from using the resources to grow their own economies. but finally, the african dominos are saying, all revolve from the game is over. yeah,

you know, as a form of colonial power to continue to try and influence the african governments, you know, but of suitcase cash diplomacy here. and there, it really does seem that the african union and the brakes members are quickly becoming the recognized adults in this is all the international good news is that the, the some events are so important, so significant that we all remember where we were and what we were doing when they took place. i'm talking about events like the september 11th attacks or the assassinations of president john f. kennedy of robert f kennedy or martin luther king. but for americans of my generation, we all remember where we were when we learned of the explosion of the space shuttle challenger, all of the astronaut on board were killed. one of them was

a public school teacher, the 1st american civilian and space. what could cause such a horrible disaster? everybody in the country wanted to know. we finally learned the details and it was thanks to a whistle blower. i'm john kerry onto welcome to the whistle blowers the . 2 2 2 2 2 2 the space shuttle challenger exploded on january 28th, 1986, just 73 seconds into its flight. killing all 7 crew members on board. the shuttle was 14 kilometers above the atlantic ocean off the coast of cape canaveral, florida when it disintegrated. it was the 1st fatal accident involving an american spacecraft in flight. almost immediately, investigators began to suspect that the culprit was something called an o ring, which experienced a catastrophic failure in flight. and oh, ring very simply is

a rubber seal both primary and back up on the joints of a solid rocket booster. the o rings prevent hot gases from escaping from the joints of the rockets for segments . but that's what happened in video that became famous almost immediately around the world. a flash of fire can be seen wearing a ring should have prevented that. and in a fraction of a 2nd, the space shuttle was destroyed. as it turned out, many people inside the national aeronautics and space administration or nasa had been worried about the o rings. engineers at martin cya call. the defense and space contractor that manufactured the o rings, knew that something was wrong, and that there was a good chance that they could fail. they were in the process of redesigning them and had intended to install new o rings later in 1986. but as in most whistleblower cases where the public has a right to know, the government keeps the information secret. our next guest is the one who told us

what the truth was surrounding the challenger disaster. richard cook was a budget analyst at nasa for mid 1985 until early 1986. that's not a long period of time. what is important is that almost immediately after assuming his position. richard warren has supervisors about the safety of the solid rocket booster used on the space shuttle. he wrote specifically about the o rings saying this quote. there is little question that flight safety has been and is still being compromised by the potential failure of the seals. and it is acknowledged that failure during flight would certainly be catastrophic, unquote. richard cook, we are so grateful to have you with us. thanks for being here. thank you. right. glad to be here. john. richard, this is such a fascinating story. and one that changed the course of us based program. i want to start from the beginning of your time at nasa. you were a young man. you were new to the job, but you had the background to see

a problem right off the bat and the presence of mind frankly, to warn your superiors. how did that happen? how was it that you were able to determine so quickly that there was a problem? well, let me, let me just say one that young i was 39 years old. but i had been working for the federal government since 1970 really. so over 15 years and i had quite a variety of assignments. i started with us civil service commission. uh and then from there i worked at the food and drug administration and i had a pretty good career trajectory going up. i went into the commissioner's office at the food and drug administration and i was trained as a technical writer. uh, uh, but uh, very quickly i began to work with the scientists of doctors. uh,

people had a pretty high level. so i had an extra talking to the expiration and for understanding what was going on. and then i, uh, very for to a display i got an assignment to the jimmy carter white house where i was there a working in the office of consumer affairs on issues having to do with consumer economics. so i had a quite a variety of experience and i, i went out of the government for a couple of years and then came back uh after i had spent some time working for a defense contractor. uh, the t r w a company in a project that was going on with the washington dc suburbs. so this is my introduction to the high tech as it were. and nasa picked me up to yard, that'd be offer me a job of the national, picked me up and i was immediately assigned to the space shuttle program. i ended

comptroller's office and i was supposed to be looking at space shuttle hardware from the standpoint of cost analysis, particularly because there were so many cost overruns going on. so i got a very rapid orientation to space shuttle hardware. because in, in that office you had to work with the engineers, you had to talk to people and find out what was going on. we visited all of the nasa field centers, including the kennedy space center, where i was down there a week before. the challenger disaster, but i had the ability, i guess, to talk to engineers and understand what they were saying. and as soon as i began to work with the headquarters engineers for in the solid rocket booster program, they began telling me the of the potentially disastrous problems with the solid

rocket boosters. and being an experience analyst, i wrote it all down. i passed it up to my superiors with a whole series of memos that i was writing throughout the the fall of 1985 and then uh i saw on the tv monitor at down on nasa headquarters uh the explosion of challenger. and the speculation began immediately of that day that it looked as though on the films that the solid rocket boosters were the cause of the disaster. there had been an explosion. uh and uh, the national meanwhile was putting up the story. they had no idea of what was going on, the investigation could take months and might never discover the exact clause. but

i went back to my notes, to my documents and to the engineers who had been giving me all this information. and everybody knew at nasa headquarters exactly what happened and days went on. and finally i got tired of trying to raise awareness of this. uh, she sure various channels. so i just said, well actually i'm gonna take these papers to the newspapers. so i called the new york times and they said, yeah, this looks pretty interesting. come on down. and that sunday the or ring papers were published. so that's, that's kind of how i got into it. another thing that you had, the presence of mind to do was to consult nasa engineers. they to told you that they were worried about the o rings. one engineer told you that he was so worried about the o rings, that every time the space shuttle lifted off, he would hold his breath. why were these warnings discounted wherever they ignored

by the national bureaucracy, habits something like that happened? well, that's a long story. and i didn't really understand the whole story at that time. but i left nasa of the week after i gave testimony to the presidential commission. they did call me to the stand and i did try as best i could to explain the things that i had written and to point out to them that nasa had known about this problem for many years. so, subsequently i began to collect documents. i published a couple of newspaper articles including one of the washing and posting, got quite a pretty good readership. and it wasn't until i retired from the government in 2007 that i put all the information together to truly, really, really and truly try to understand what it happened. and the primary conclusion

that i reached was that the space shuttle. and i could see this one, i was there, the space shuttle was in the process of being and soared into the department of defense. there was even speculation that at some point it was going to be shifted over a wholesale to the air force. and what was driving that was what was known at the time as the star wars program. this is president reagan's a weapons in space program that he claimed was a defensive a system. but in reality, there was a whole series of studies and experiments that were gonna go on in order to use the space shuttle as a delivery platform for putting weapons into space. and uh,

the budget for the space shuttle was increasingly dependent upon reimbursements from the department of defense. and as somebody said to me at one point during less research, you don't tell the department of defense story, we can do this. uh, we gotta stop for a couple of years and fix them since they couldn't do that. uh, it was, uh, uh, the whole, uh, it was like a jug or not. uh and, and it was hiding behind this facade that nasa was perfect. the space shuttle was all completely understood, nothing whatever go wrong, all of that was large. and the little people down in the system. uh, i mean, i don't mean that disparagingly, but i mean, the g s 14 g s 15 engineer is pretty small potatoes when it comes to the entire drift or the federal government into the department of defense and the white house

to do something. and so nobody had the ability to just pull the spoken the wheels and say, no, this has to stop the whole, the whole system was railroaded into acquiescence in what the real insiders knew was essentially catastrophic. you argued in an op ed in the washington post in early 1986. the nasa culture was such that it contributed to the disaster. that's something i hear from whistle blowers all across the us government . and especially in the intelligence community. can you explain what you meant by that? what was it about? nasa is culture that made it so difficult to report on a problem that was in the end. deadly. well, yeah you're, you're, you know, the phrase, gung ho i was put on a, i have that i bought it when i was working at treasury and it said us treasury

department and this guy came up. so what do you go? uh, everybody in the system, particularly when you get into the military and intelligence side of things, is expected to be going home. and uh, what that means is you are provided by an atmosphere of fear. your whole career, your whole livelihood, your whole self image all depends on whether or not you're going to salute when they run some crazy policy up the flagpole. and if you salute and you're, you're going to make it in the system. if you don't salute is career suicide, and that's the way nasa was. it was the most gun ho atmosphere i had ever seen. i had not seen this in some of my other assignments, including the carter whitehouse. we used to say stuff in there, the disagreed with the with the policies and they might even talk to you about it, but no, not a nation. thank you richard. as we're speaking with whistle blower,

richard cook about the events leading up to the destruction of the space shuttle challenger in january, 1986. and the story doesn't end their state to. we're going to talk about richard's federal whistle blown. the

says 2060 numerous monuments to soviets, soldiers in poland, ukraine and the baltic states have been destroyed or vandalized fish. this, the body must pharmacy to be the most, certainly within your muscle or even some others could. i skip everything. so that's the most on whether it's, it's special on what is the police government denies the rules. so it'd be assumed just in the victory of a non system. and is it raising historical memories of world war 2? because the, in your story, although it did seem the non c regimes of trustees would remain things in people's consciousness, but have a but as long as russell phobia is profitable and brings dividends, you are willing to have a to rewrite the cost. if you don't think of the, i'll provide i need to see because fox do i need october 30th a

welcome back to the whistle close. i'm john to reaku. we're speaking with richard cook about his experience blowing the whistle at the national aeronautics and space administration or nasa just before the failure of an o ring destroyed the space shuttle challenger. that was exactly what richard warren, his superiors would happen to have you with us. richard, thanks for staying. good to be here. thank you. one more question about the space shuttle richard in 1986 after the challenger broke apart and that's a tried to keep its own fault in it at bay by providing misleading or even dishonest information to the, to the media. you contacted the new york times and let them print key documents that you had collected over time. along with that, you also testified before the roger's commission, which was investigating the disaster and you became instrumental in exposing the white house as cover up regarding the explosion. you only worked at nasa for about

7 months, leaving in february of 1986 the month after the incident. but you still manage to be honest and to do the right thing. what was the fall out from doing that? what was the reaction from your colleagues at nasa, from your superiors and, and even from the white house? well, as i said, and i left national right after i testified before the presidential commission. but i continued to be involved in the aftermath. i gave interviews to the commission staff. i gave interviews to the national office of inspector general, where i discussed a whole lot of other issues having to do with the space shuttle. some of which made her get into the commission's report with many of which did not. uh, and i was also doing press interviews. uh, when i got to treasury. uh,

they pulled me into a meeting with the treasury department headquarters. uh, i are taking a job with uh, one of the component agencies which in treasury the financial management service. uh, nobody's heard of them. they process trillions of dollars of government payments every year. and that's a pretty big project that i was starting to work on. but i was labeled as a whistleblower. in fact, my new supervisor was quite angry at me, but he got a job somewhere else and left. so i was able to, to work and to do my job. but a point came where i actually gave a press conference, where i said that it looked to me is the white house was involved in the flood launch decision. uh, well, uh. as i was told later,

the white house contracted the treasury department and told them to fire me. uh and of course i would have been a personal disaster. uh but the head of our agency. uh username. was there any douglas? and he was an old, hard bitten uh, career treasury guy, a burning actually told the net treasury headquarters. no, i'm not gonna fire this guy. he's done nothing illegal. and that was the stance that they took when, when the rubber hits the road to this my, with my whistle blowing from that point on, i was always a suspicious character. but i was still a pretty good analyst. and uh uh, i think there was a, a kind of a grudging respect for me that i had one down in the uh,

in the bureaucracy. and so i actually got along pretty well for the next 20 years. retired with distinction. richard, i have to say, and i hope i'm not embarrassing you, but you were something of a whistle blower. superman. you were only on the job at nasa for 6 months and you became a major whistleblower and then you left nasa and went to the us department of the treasury. it was there that you exposed serious problems in the monetary system. so tell us what that means, what, what was it that you exposed? well, um, okay, that was kind of a, uh, an evolving process. uh, i did a lot of different kinds of things at treasury. i was an analyst. i was assigned to all kinds of different projects, but later on i began to develop training courses on the history of the

treasury department and under us monetary system. and we ran into at that time, was that there were 2 parts of the government of the 2 and never were supposed to criticize one of us, the defense department, they had their own, a financial system in the course. during that period, the defense department came up with some many trillions of dollars that were missing. and that's never been explained, but we weren't supposed to go there. same with the federal reserve, the federal reserve was a treasury fiscal agent. and that means they handle all of the x journal funding relation, fisher treasury, including the sale of, of treasury bonds, pay bills, all that a and to manage the federal government debt. well,

as i began to study this more and more, i began to realize the age that the federal reserve was really not a federal government agency. the federal reserve was a banking conglomerate that was literally owned by the wall street banks. and as i began to investigate this further and got into the origin of the federal reserve system, more and more began to see the creation of the federal reserve in 1913 as a, almost an insurer rection by the my money trust against the congressionally mandated for variety of, of, of congress and n and a federal executive branch to create and manage the monetary system of the us. and i began to realize it was this whole federal system that was a federal reserve system with the banks being increasingly due regulated. that led

to the catastrophes that we've seen over and over again a over the decades of wisdom monetary system, including the sea normal financial collapse of 2008, 2009. and so when i began studying this, i began to realize that the monetary authority of the united states have been taken away by wall street and the big banks. and that has had to be restored. if we were to gain any kind of stability or sanity in our monitor assistant. and i still believe that and i'm still writing about that. you had a long, proud career of 32 years in federal service and you made news more than once you went to treasury already having a reputation is a truth teller, ronald reagan was still president. then the people at the white house who had tried to cover up nasa's and their own involvement in the challenger disaster were still around. so what were the things like for you at treasury? was life easier?

or did you have to constantly defend yourself because you were a nasa whistle blower? it was a lot easier. and, and, you know, i have a great fondness and respect for the career civil service. and i really began when i joined the government in 1970 with the us civil service commission, the men or women that i work with. and we're, we're tremendous. the professionals with integrity, which coffins and, and it continued that way through most of my federal career. and it was that way of treasury. i really liked it. there. people treated me well. i did my but i moved up the career ladder. i had a lot of interesting projects. and i had a had an honorable retirement when the time came in 2007. and then i

continued to write articles and books afterwards. uh, with no rep precautions. i have a tremendous respect for the federal workforce and still do. uh and uh, i had that way all through my treasury career and i, i just really loved it. richard, thanks so much for being with us. it was a pleasure president calvin coolidge, one said, doing the right thing never requires subterfuge. it's always simple. indirect coolage was famously a man of few words, but these words are quite clear. sometimes issues are clear, cut their right or wrong. doing the right thing is always, always best. just look at richard could. his truth was in service of the american people. it's as simple as that, and history will smile on him because of it. thanks for joining us for another episode of the whistle blowers. i'm john kerry. yahoo! we'll see you next time. 2 2 2

2 2 2 2 the hi, acceptance, and i'm here to plan with you whatever you do. you do not watch my new show. search like why watch something that's so different whitelisted opinions that he won't get anywhere else. welcome to please, or do you have the state department to see i a weapons makers, multi 1000000000 dollar corporations. choose your fax for you. go ahead. change and whatever you do. don't want my show stay main street because i'm probably going to make you comfortable. my show is called stretching time, but again, you probably don't want to watch it because it might just change the way you think . as a result of why this can be started by law, these can be expanded by

a true importance of we can never be kind of a station. so that transparency is an extraordinary join mistake. patrice then just succeeded in finding the documents that existed in making them available to the world public. i mean, what could be more holding back by publishing information and sharing information with the public. he was exercising the right to free speech. he did so in the public interest wants to so long realize tends to me. uh and, and, and honestly, to relate to seriously, i'm, i know why advice may assume that no one who is the guy that illegal anymore wisely bought the adjustments for to be on box weighing

a 175 used to go through the sentence. are we going to let that stay? the palestinians are waiting to release of 42 more detaining use from his re me custody . on the 2nd day of the troops coming that the 1st group arrived in the west bank on friday, who was suffering in prison. there was said as the installs with us and she really a, to the us. the tele pride is tight and our dignity is raised. for god's sake, our heads will remain high as part of the swamp. how boss release is 24 hostages with 14 more expected to return to israel in our type as reports coming up the west pressuring ukraine to negotiated with russia to end the conflict at the top of pictures.