well, they don't have the money to send anymore. meantime, russia continues to make pro stalemate. there is no stalemate. hello, wisdom press. if you're listening, there was no style made. how is this gonna wrap up? how much longer that we could bite? and because the presidential election next year, the, of course, the political establishment wants to maintain the image, but ukraine's winning so they will wind rush. you will lose how we're going to get around this for just in time for the election. do you think? well, i think the hawks are going to try to keep it going just a little bit longer because that's the military. you know, that's where they make their money. but bear in mind to there's that money laundering issue, right. that's all coming to, to light in congress, all of the things that were happening with, with ukraine and the money laundering that has to do with the politicians that are involved. and so they're trying to do ducking cover and people are, are kind of taking each other out. so it's going to be really interesting to see how the movement towards the negotiations towards the scouts. but right now, rushes in a position where they don't have to negotiate, they've been doing knots of fine moving steadily as you said. and the tragedy is

that a generation of ukrainian none are dead. yeah. and, and, you know, this is the lot on the hands of the western leaders fight in the forest. johnson and others that pushed this war through when there could have been peace in turkey, in april with the ukrainian economy is war machine. and even government salary is currently relying on money from abroad. the secretary of ukraine's national security and defense council because it's time for citizens of the country to rely on themselves. i can read all about dots heading over to all websites, spotty, all the is just being you, a bits or breaking news and all the top story now gets all says it's money is to negotiate the resumption of the hostage. and over soon as the results of the mediation along with the egypt, now they say they have israel's assurances that they will comply with the prison exchange agreements. that united policy indians ought to be released tonight by

israel will have multiple free 13 is where the citizens and 7 of the nationals. and that's all according to the consolidate for ministry. and of course, we'll have more on this developing situation at the top of them, the best also. now be sure to check out all the dot com for all of the latest updates. and we'll see you right back here in around about searching the society of dia, credit accounts offensive, but you know, it was a fine, you does arise serious souls. probably lucian's on the, on the west and ukrainian side issues about their own strength illusions about the strength of the russian opponents. basically, the, you know, the care to rush or a new crime was a young adult. i just thought to be checked in and the whole structure would come, come sometime in the solutions, have been shocked with the

take a fresh look around his life. kaleidoscopic isn't just a shifted reality distortion by power to division with no real opinions. fixtures designed to simplify will confuse who really wants a better wills, and is it just as a chosen few. fractured images, presented as 5 can you see through their illusion going underground can 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. foot 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 astronauts on board were killed. one of them was a public school teacher, the 1st american civilian in space. what couldn't 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 o 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 through 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 the 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 from 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 the us space 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 as well? let me, let me just say um, when that young i was 39 years old. but i had been working for the federal government. uh since 1970 really. so uh, over 15 years and i had quite a variety of assignments. so 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 uh, i was trained as

a technical writer. uh, but very quickly i began to work with the scientists. of doctors. 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 very for to additionally i got an assignment to the jimmy carter white house where i was there a working in the office of consumer affairs on the issues having to do with consumer economics. so i had a quite a variety of experience and i went out of the government for a couple of years and then came back uh after i had spend some time working for a defense contractor. uh, the t r w a company in a project that was going on on 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 pick me up. and i was immediately assigned to the space shuttle program. i ended comptroller's office and i was suppose to be looking at space shuttle hardware from the standpoint of cost analysis, particularly because there was some of the 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 fields 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 or in the solid rocket booster program,

they began telling me of 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, was 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 speculations began immediately of that day that it looked as though on the films that the solid rocket boosters were the cause of the disaster that there had been an explosion. uh and uh,

the national meanwhile was putting out 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. sure. various channels. so i just said, well, heck was that? 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 openings 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 a? 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 washington posting, got quite a pretty good readership. and it wasn't until i retired from the government

in 2007. but i put all the information together to truly, really, really and truly try to understand what has happened. and the primary conclusion that i reached was the space shuttle. and i could see this one i was there. and the space shuttle was in the process of being and george 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. programs that he claimed was a defensive 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't do this. uh, we gotta stop for a couple of years and fix them to sense they couldn't do that. uh, it was, 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 lies. 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 of the federal government into the department of defense in 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. new argued in an op ed in the washington post in early 1986. the ness as 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. uh, i was put on a half that i bought when i was working at the treasury and it said us treasury department and this guy came up. so what do you gun ho, 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 a policies and they might even talk to you about it, but no, not a nation. thank you richard. as we're speaking with was the 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 blowing. the release of russian states, narrative as one of the most sense communities in most all sense and that's the standard assistance must be the one else holes. question about this, even though we will then in the european union,

the kremlin media mission, the state on russia cruising and supports the r t spoke neck, keeping our video agency roughly all the band on youtube, the payment services for the question, did you say stephen twist which is the welcome back to the list of lawyers. i'm john through yahoo. were 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 old 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. so 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 managed 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, 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 it into the commission's report with many of which did not. and i was also doing press interviews when i got to treasury or they pulled me into a meeting with the treasury department headquarters. 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 whistle blower. in fact,

my new supervisor was quite angry at me, but he got a job somewhere else in the 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, um, it looked to me as 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 that would have been a personal disaster. uh but the head of our agency. uh username was ernie douglas. and he was an old, hard bitten career treasury guy earning actually told the net a 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 hit the road. because my, with my whistle blowing from that point on, i was always a suspicious character. but uh, 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. a 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 that was kind of a uh, any 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 to, to never were supposed to criticize. one was the defense department, they had their own a financial system in the course. and 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 extra general funding relation, fisher treasury, including the sale of, of treasury bonds to bills all that 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 then 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 month of the money trust against the congressionally mandated for variety of, of, of congress, an n and a federal executive branch to create and manage the monetary system of the u. s. and i began to realize it was this whole federal system that was a federal reserve system with the banks being increasingly due regulated lead to the catastrophes that we've seen over and over again over the decades of what's the monetary system. recruiting the see 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 i'm still writing about that as 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. as 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 things like for you at treasury was life easier for 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 u. a civil service commission, the men and women that i worked with. and we're, we're tremendous professionals with integrity,

which competence and, and it continued that way to 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. the 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 the the most affordable cuz it also gives them business and you can in the daily design, you know,

many cons graham, we'll go through with this discussion of curriculum and i'll see what i can provide you with stuff such and sure. ruckel was not as if author of the different student and for which of course, and yet you throw in with them in the probably just a moment. that was curious. if it was you or the 2nd shift to isaac care to tap through yours. man. i'm guilty and that the study skills for civilian forage of place to for me to on, on, on thursday to tutor which originally it was, it's just some of the posting sustainable. they won't because we use new way to possible do school culture. we really don't know which these are i know for the don't or that you suggested to given me other than a year to sort of these disappearing and pronounced has come up with the

the gets all says is help negotiate a resumption of tonight's fun turned over all hostages and prisoners, most between israel and her boston crowd top products in facilities ahead of the release. also at the c, people are interested in a shooting outside and it's really one prison in the west by process 39 palestinian offset to be released from the facilitate also this hour. the prison by themselves is all of secure the release of how much of the, just as gross as it is on the streets remind him of the other side of the complex, the pond itself. you creating an official compounds. it's a.