tell the story. >> watch this and other programs online at the tv.org. -- booktv.org .. but rising up telling of

history. i think it is very fitting that someone like tom engelhardt would be publishing with k market books because it is a match made in rebellion. for years i actually thought tom engelhardt's name was tom dispatch. i subscribe to this wonderful newsletter. it was covering the issues of the day but covering them in a way that was totally anathema to the way corporate media functions in society. getting in depth, highlighting whistle-blowe whistle-blowers, analyzing u.s. policy without regard to partisan considerations. i think tomdispatch.com is the best we have to offer in this country in terms of citizen journalism and journalism that challenges not only a corporate duopoly but challenges corporate media outlets on their own terms. if you haven't heard of tomdispatch.com were signed up for the newsletter you certainly

should. his name is not time dispatch. his name is tom engelhardt and the book we are here to celebrate is "the united states of fear". i had the honor of helping tom launch his last book the american way of war. i generally don't like it when authors read from their books. i would rather hear them talk. i was so taken with the passion of tom engelhardt when he was reading from his last book i am excited to hear him read a couple excerpts from his current book. beyond being a great writer tom is an incredible editor. he has edited books many of you have read through the american empire series at metropolitan books. fulmer johnson, some of the leading dissident mines in the united states. if we lived in a more sane reality the mind of tom engelhardt would be capped by the national security apparatus to actually help analyze what

u.s. policy should be around the world. let's be clear about this. we live in a very dark moment in history where the united states is simultaneously waging covert wars, over wars, air wars, jerome wars, economic wars on multiple continent sins for of countries around the world. there was much fanfare about the end of the iraq war and yet we see iraq descending further into chaos. the united states has increased the number of private contractors that are going to be operating in iraq as the official u.s. military withdraws. in afghanistan the united states is increasingly moving toward front and center of the most lethal forces in the u.s. arsenal, those from the special operations command. all of america heard about the joint operations command field team 6 because of the assassination of osama bin laden

but after the special operations command has been around for a long time and been at the heart of some of the most lethal operations the u.s. has carried out in declared battlefields than in and declared battlefields and we will hear more from them in afghanistan because they are the lead forces doing nothing and that is the premier policy around the world, believing there are a finite number of bad guys that need to be killed and the problem will be solved. i returned from a two week trip in yemen where the united states has been increasing its bombing in that country not just through drones the tomahawk cruise missiles and cluster bombs and i assure you the civilians that are being killed in these bombings of fuelling a rage that will be difficult to stamp out. united states is back to ruthless war lords including some of them who were key al

qaeda allies at another point in their life and those that helped destroy somalian in the first place in the >> host: 90s. the united states continues to be involved with secret prisons including somalia, pakistan, relations deteriorated between the u.s. and pakistan and terrorism or perceived threat of terrorism expanding in countries where the u.s. claims to be trying to stamp it out. these two realities cannot be seen as separate from each other. we have to come to grips with the possibility, the reality that u.s. policy is fueling terrorism but also giving people a justifiable reason to be angry at the united states. in all of the country's i have seen in the past year i have seen that in a very clear way. one of the forces that i go to, serious analysis for people who

will think outside the box -- i sound like mitt romney. i am not a washington insider. one place we go regularly to read serious analysis and be provoked in a very good way is tom dispatch and the work of tom engelhardt. join me in giving a hearty welcome to the author of "the united states of fear," tom engelhardt. [applause] >> jeremy is a stand-up guy and i'm a stand down and die. i am an editor. is rare in my life i am in front of a group of people like this so i am relieved to have something. i assume since i'm here in the arthur carter journalism institute that some of you -- i

am about to have a conversation with an investigative journalist who gets on the ground in various places and regularly comes back with the goods. i am always impressed with great reporters. i have any news jockey sins i was a kid and a spent time endlessly on line i still read the hometown paper daily. the willingness to go places. the button for couldn't go and bring back experiences i could not otherwise -- i would otherwise have no way. when i speak about generosity, i am referring to the skill of where i live every day and wresting from it, stories i haven't even imagined. in my life i have no journalists. as a book editor and now as the guy who does the web site tomdispatch.com i publish their work and for years i taught journalism legal graduate students at the university of

california berkeley. whar ago i even looked at small west coast news service. just to be cleared these days when someone refers to me as a journalist always denied it. if pressed what i consider myself to be, professionally speaking a guy in a room. that is a literal description. i don't mean it as a put down. if you think about it john stewart is also just a guy in a row. he has a heck of a room and as a lot funnier than i am. in our world which is often remarkably stifling when it comes to thinking about writing and politics and national security state and what used to be called foreign policy but is now more accurately thought of as global military policy we definitely need some guys in the room, the rooms are very small.

we need people willing to step back, ready to make their way out of the massive trees and take in the woods we have lost. united states -- "the united states of fear" is what one guy could produce in a year of reading, writing, talking and considering the american world and the absurdities in it that are accepted as ordinary reality. as those of you who read tomdispatch.com know i'm right along myself. despite what everyone thinks about brevity and attention spans and the internet. before jeremy and i talked i will read two pieces from the book both on the shorter side. the first is you will see is really my thoughts about guys in rooms. i wrote it in march 2010 before the military was out of iraq and just after the supreme court issued its citizens united decision but before it was clear that the floodgates that opened so wide that what might be

called the politics of the rich in america which soon becomes simply american politics i called it on being a critic, all the world is a stage for us. in march of 2010 i wrote about a group of pundits and journalists eager not to see the u.s. military leave iraq. that piece was on the op-ed page of the los angeles times and a longer version at tomdispatch.com and began wandering the media world. one of its stops was the military newspaper stars and stripes. from a military man came this e-mail response. read your article in stars and stripes. when was the last time you visited iraq? a critique in 15 well chosen words so much more effective than the usual long angry e-mails. his point was interested. as i wrote back i was then a 65-year-old guy who had never

been anywhere near iraq and undoubtedly never would be. i have to assume my e-mail < some time there possibly more than once and disagreed with my assessment. firsthand experience is not to be taken lightly. what do i know about iraq? only the reporting i have read from thousands of miles away or analysis on the bloggers of the experts but even from thousands of miles away i was one of many who could see enough by early 2003 to go into the streets and demonstrate against an onrushing disaster of an invasion that a lot of people far more knowledgeable on iraq and many of us considered just the cakewalk of the new century. it is true i have never strolled down a street in baghdad. that is a deficit. if you want to write about the american experience in iraq. is also true that i haven't spent hours sitting tee with iraqi tribal leaders in the

green zone or set foot on the vast american bases of the pentagon's private contractors built in that country. nor did that stop me from writing regularly about what i called and still call america's ziggurats when most of the people who visited those bases didn't consider places with 20 mile perimeters, multiple bus lines and fast-food franchises a ugandan mercenary guards and who knows what else to be particularly noteworthy structures on the iraqi landscape and sir with rare exceptions were commenting on. i am no expert on shiites and sunnis and a little foggy on my iraqi geography and never seen the tigris or euphrates rivers. on the other hand it does occur to me a lot of american pundits and government officials and military types who have done all of the above and spent time in iraq or at least in the american version of the same couldn't have arrived at dumber conclusions over the last few

years. firsthand experience, bible for great reporters like antennae should lead of the washington post and the new york times or patrick cockburn of the british independent can't be the be all end all either. sometimes being far away and not just from iraq but from washington and all the things that go on from the visibly claustrophobic world of american global policymaking has it's a vantages. being out of experience we speaking allows you to open your eyes and take a larger ship of things which is often obvious. i can't help thinking about a friend of mine who's up close and personal take on military commanders in afghanistan was they were trapped in an american made box capable of seeing beyond the boundaries of afghanistan. ahead no doubt that being there's something to be desired but if you take personal blinders with hewitt often hardly matters where you are.

thinking about my stars and stripes reader's question, my conclusion is this. is not just where you go. it is how you see what is there and no less important to you see that matters which means sometimes you can see more by going nowhere at all. and iraqi tragedy. when american officials, civilian and military open their eyes to check out the local landscape no matter where they landed all evidence indicates the first thing they see is themselves. the seat world as an american stage and in countries we invaded and occupied or in pakistan or somalia and yemen we conduct what might be called semi work. this is why in iraq and afghanistan military commanders and top officials like secretary of defense robert gates or james jones continued to call utterly

unselfconscious the for putting an iraqi or afghan face on whichever war was being discussed. to follow the image to its logical conclusion putting an iraqi or afghan mask over a face they recognize. this is why american officials regularly say afghans are in the lead when they aren't. when he read newspaper descriptions how the united states giving hamid karzai the leading role in deciding the latest military offensives or pushing such and such an official with western mentors in the wings to take the lead in some action that seems to have been largely planned by an american the afghans sound like so many puppet's which doesn't mean they are. this doesn't american -- embarrassed americans and the lease. generally speaking the american post 9/11 language ostensibly aimed at building up the forces washington supports invariably sounds condescending.

they are always peripheral to us even when they're being heard to be the center of the action. this is why they're civilians come in harm's way arkin referred to as collateral damage. inconceivable way to describe americans in harm's way. in the movies made about our wars, americans are center stage. you usually have to keep a careful watch to find passing of the sins of those we are fighting against or for. this was y. 40 years ago the vietnam war was regularly referred to here by hawks or doves as an american tragedy. not a vietnamese one and the same thinking applies to afghanistan and iraq today. this is why using imagery that might have come out of the mouth of nineteenth century colonialists, they talk patronizing lee about teaching the iraqi about democracy.

with us as global parent holding on to the bike seat. the secretary of defense, visibly stays in my mind. this is the context within which even the president wondered when takeoff the training wheels. this is why the introduction of democracy to iraq is considered an american gift so precious that it somehow makes up for anything that has happened in the past eight years. this is why tom friedman could write this sentence about the u.s. prospect, project in iraq. former president george w. bush's gut instinct that this region the democracy was always right. like afghanistan iraq is largely the forgotten war and here is what has been forgotten. what friedman suggested future historians were out. that the american invasion led to hundreds of thousands of iraqi deaths.

millions of iraqis fled to exile abroad and millions more turned into refugees in their own country but the capital, baghdad was ethnically cleansed and a brutal shi'ite/sunni conflict and the country was littered with killing fields that the devastating insurgency, death and terror to make it one of the more dangerous places on the planet. soaring unemployment rate and black of delivery of most basic services including electricity and potable water created nightmares conditions for impoverished iraqis. the u.s. government for all its nation-building proved remarkably incapable of reconstructing the country or the oil industry even though american private contractors profited enormously. fullscale foreign military occupation left americans 500 bases nationwide in the largest embassy on the planet. the pride of us.

in other words as bad as saddam hussein was, and he was a megalomaniac monster what father him -- would follow him was a staggering catastrophe. americans no longer give much thought to. against what friedman would prefer to leave to history stands one counterbalancing factor, the gift of democracy. even many who never supported george w. bush's agenda seem to take pride in this. leave aside a moment the fact that the bush administration arrived in iraq with remarkably and democratic plans for the country and was thwarted only by the unwavering assistance of the shiite cleric in a 1-person 1-vote election. in all of this there are staggering levels of hypocrisy. in the fact that we were for said dom before we were against him and the u.s. government had in instances after instances regularly fostered and supported

strong men and dictators and democracies not to our taste. the democracy we have in the united states, offering an apology for invading other countries is subjected to analysis in the context of the urge to support the same. let's stop and think about the

like terrorism democracy really welcome deliver power more important for those people who take positions themselves. and that by its nature is hard to import to great distances especially when the delivery system is being exported seem to be strikingly deficient. keep in mind that the people exporting that system to iraq were largely incapable of seeing the iraqi disasters in their own democratic drama. incapable of demanding the nature of the lives they wanted to shake and change. in a sense it is less true when they look homeward. glorious the locker see they trumpeted to the world, headed by an imperial presidency, and installing in washington for generations to come.

given the nature of american democracy the first billion dollar presidential elections staggering, and influence-peddling that go with it and the barrage of bizarre advertising and -- have broken congressional system, and unparalleled money. and find them lacking. after all in 2000, our presidential election went to the candidate thanks to the decision this made by supreme court justices appointed by the father. if this happened in nigeria, afghanistan or iraq we would know what we were doing. we have no word to describe what at the national level, and asking others to admire. when a new dynasty arrived on

the scene the emperor perform the ritual called collecting names. the previous dynasty in part because reality and the names we have for it had ceased to correspond. we united states need such a ceremony. we need a new term for our own democracy before we are quick to hold it up for others to match. we need to rethink our language when it comes to the u.s. military undertaking nation-building. and in just the way the k b r construct military bases so i have never been to iraq but i have been here watching and i can see among other things that the american mirror on the wall which shows us ourselves in such beautiful detail has a few

cracks in it. for my second reading i chose a personal piece about a subject that has been in the news repeatedly but only in the strangest and most limited of ways. one of the bizarre spectacles, has been this. nuclear-weapons and nuclear politics only manifest themselves in our news and political debate. i am talking about the iranian bomb. the one we can't stop talking about, beating the war drums over or fretting over almost daily. the nuclear weapon that isn't. there is no evidence the iranians are moving to build nuclear weapons at the moment. error intelligence service suggests they are moving towards break out capacity. the ability to build a weapon relatively quickly if the decision to do so were made.

this is the only nuclear weapon in the world other than the brief moments of north korean ones that get any significant attention. the united states at last count possesses 5,113 nuclear warheads. russia, similar thousands. about ourselves, and a couple hundred in the arsenal. we evidently have no doubt or worries. we trust ourselves implicitly. we are the only country ever to use such weapons. the recent pentagon budget cuts, and involve no cuts to the nuclear arsenal. the actual money going into are on the rise and no one demands anything. no one thinks about going to war. no. we fret about the indian nuclear arsenal, washington has aided and abetted even though the continent is the place where

nuclear-weapons are most likely to use. with all that in mind and given the fact that the child should, what we used to call the bomb on the brain i thought i would read this piece which i wrote as another august hiroshima anniversary roll around. another story refuses to go away. even though we promptly dubbed the site of the 9/11 attacks in new york ground zero, once a term reserved for an atomic blast americans have never come to grips even with the atomic bomb in hiroshima or nagasaki or the nuclear age they ushered in. there can be no question that the big bank might end little, the atomic bomb haunted cold war america. in those years we watched and was versions of nuclear disaster. the grown-ups who ran our world

went on a spree. when the cold war finally ended with the soviet union's peaceful collapse a nuclear peace dividend never quite arrived. the arsenal of the superpower adversary remained in place, throws down the strangely and touch awaiting new mention but just the on site the knowledge of making such weapons spread to other countries ready to launch their own mini cold wars. 50 years after the first bomb went off over hiroshima it still proved impossible to agree on a nuclear -- august 6th, 1945, the personal global war and horrific beginning of the new age. the plane that dropped the hiroshima bomb that shattered school child's lunch box from hiroshima, the same exhibit at

the smithsonian national air and space museum in washington d.c.. for people of a certain age like me, hiroshima is where it all began. i would like to try again to lay out the pieces of the nuclear story that none of us have seen. there are three characters and no dialogue. there is my father who volunteered at age 35 for the army air corps after the japanese attack on pearl harbor. was painfully silent on wartime experiences and died on pearl harbor day in 1983. my father's war was glorified everywhere. my play fantasies included mowing down japanese soldiers but whose nightmares were nuclear destruction. finally there is the japanese boy whose name is unknown to me. this is a story of multiple silences. the first is the silence of my father, wants no barrier to the stories i told myself.

if anything the silence enhanced since the 1950s. mail silence seemed a hero can attribute and perhaps it was though hardly in the way i imagined at the time. sitting in the dark than in any world war ii movie was enough for me. it turned out the only part of his war i possessed was its final act and a puzzling silence. the very idea of nuclear destruction seemed not to touch him. like other schools to go awry when through nuclear attack drills with silence -- he worked in his office. it was i who watch the nuclear monsters of the teen years of the earth. it was i who went -- i was shocked by my first sight of human casualties. to catch a glimpse of how the world might end.

it was i who is of a mushroom cloud rise in my dreams and felt its heat through my arms before i awoke. of all this i said not a word to him or him to me. his erstwhile enemies, my father was not silent. he hated the japanese with a passion. they had done things that could not be discussed to boys. subsequent history, the american occupation of japan re-emergence of that defeated land as an ally did not touch him. his hatred of all things japanese was not a ruling passion of my childhood but only because japan was absent from our lives. there was nothing japanese in our house. we did not buy their product. we avoided the only japanese restaurant in our part of town and the japanese ever came to dinner. in the end are followed my own path to hiroshima, drawn to the world my father rejected vehemently. in 1979 as an editor i published

unforgettable fire, the drawings of your sheila residents lived through that they. the first time any sizable number of images of the human damage made it into mainstream american culture. i visited japan in 1982 thanks to the japanese editor who took to hiroshima and experienced myself unable to talk about. this became part of the silences my father and i shared. this would seem relatively simple. two generations face each other across the chasm of the war and the act that divided them. the story we although and yet there is my third character the japanese boy who drifted back into my consciousness after an absence of four decades only a five -- a few years ago. i know longer remember how we were put in contact in the 1915s. like me, my japanese pen pal must have been 11 or 12 years old. of we exchanged photos i have no memory of his face nor does his

name come to mind. i remember writing my own address at that age. new york city, new york and the usa. the solar system, galaxy and the universe. i can't remember writing his. i knew by the end at a place called albany was the capital of new york state but the york city seemed to be the center of the world and in many ways i wasn't wrong. even as he lived in tokyo my japanese pen pal could have had no such illusions. like me he had undoubtedly been born during world war ii. perhaps his first year of life he was evacuated from one of japan's charge cities. for him that disastrous war would not have been a memory. if he went to movies with his father he might have seen godzilla, not the u.s. air force. he might have hardly remembered the difficult first years of american occupation but he could not have imagined himself the center of the universe.

i have a faint memory of the field of his letters. undoubtedly meant to say in phantasmal mount of weight and some money. we wrote in english for much of the planet or universe was beginning to operate in that universal language that seemed to radiate from my home city to the world like the rays of the sun. what i most remember the exotic stamps that arrived on work in his letters. my father was an avid stamp collector. sunday afternoon my father and i prepared stamps and consulted their catalog and faced the demand. in this way the japanese section was filled with that boy's offerings without comment and without protest from my father. we exchanged letters none of which remain for a year or two and then who knows? one interest of mine or his overcame us. only the resistance boys have to writing letters. in any case he too entered a

realm of simon's only now remembering those quiet moments of closeness one my father and i worked on our album is july know he existed briefly and without discussion in our lives. he existed for both of us in the ambiguous space of time. now i wonder what kinds of nuclear dreams my father may have had. for all of us the earth is knocked off its axis on august 6, 1945. in that one moment my father's war ended and the cold war began. in my terms it seemed so much messier than that. we continued to live in the same world together accepting and embroidery each other's silences. when i think of him now. when i realized that he, my father and i had the same story in silence, a strange emotion rushes up in me which is hard to explain. the bomb runs like a fischer,

like and attracting current. a secret unity through our lives. it was deep and the generational divide given the experience of those growing up on either side that any story would have to hold the way of the grant and harder to fathom in which we live through altogether in pain, hatred, love and silence. [applause] >> very quickly there. give us one moment to set up the mike here. [inaudible conversations]

>> okay. thank you very much. tom was reading the second essay, i heard you read it before. i looked at other war scenes we all experienced collectively over the years. the reality that we are living in. we remain a world on fire. you started by talking about the fire of the nuclear bomb but we are in a world on fire. the uprising in the united states, the occupy movement. the situation in syria deteriorates by the moment. the reality from libya the united states believes in regime change by force.

and expanding air war in pakistan, yemen and somalia, and expansion of special operation forces and we remember the pledges president obama made as candidates obama. how he was going to dismantle the bush doctrine and 3 engage the world. the first several executive orders he issued dealt with dismantling parts of the torture apparatus in the united states but to close guantanamo. the united states doesn't torture but he gave that speech at the national archives. if we fast forward to where we are now and we look at it, how big of a break have we seen from the bush doctrine when it comes to foreign policy? >> until recently there was relatively little break.

in the bush did ministration we saw a break from the bush doctrine. the first. years and then the gate stop which was a management doctrine. when obama came in the signal was he took gates and the national security adviser and john mccain. in a sense we knew. one thing i can proudly say is two weeks -- don't let barack obama break your heart. we used to call for an policy where he was going and the continuation of the latter period, the latter bush years. ongoing two wars. ratcheting up of counterterrorism. we have gotten to the point,

something is changing. all of the tectonics moments partially because it is a word nobody likes in this country generally but we were defeated in iraq. the greatest army on earth. we can do anything. it could destroy a lot and in the end it had to leave. it left iraq and we have seen the other day it was cut by half. we can see iraq just weft. a total mess closer to iran that it had ever been so iraq is broader in that sense. you can feel the urge to get out of afghanistan. not special forces people and so on but afghanistan going too.

this lieutenant colonel, daniel davis got a lot of attention. everything military people were saying in afghanistan was a lie and he said i have been on the ground for a year and i have seen not a bit of success. that got a lot of attention. what didn't get attention was that his peace which was whistle-blower piece appeared in the armed forces journal. that tells me a lot of people in the military to know that afghanistan -- the answer is we head into a new period, we are heading off shore. in the sense that it will be the navy off shore in terms of the air force but as i wrote recently we are heading offshore

of national sovereignty signed to create new american way of war that has been coming for a long while. wherever we are we can go into any country in the only -- >> one of the key moments in the history of the obama administration's foreign policy with no me the attention is when general david petraeus was the commander of u.s. central command in the area of operations for central command consenting to the entire middle east and the arabian peninsula and for a period now with 4 period included east africa so it was somalia and the u.s. and they took over from the french and reform this into a special operations to strike inside somalia but when david petraeus was the commander he issued,

authorized the al qaeda network execution order in 2009 and it was a limited view the personal paper only quarter that authorize commanders in the field have greater latitude to conduct lethal operations outside the battlefields of iraq and afghanistan and what it represented was obama administration cosigning an earlier order issued under bush. that piece of paper was the key moment in september of 2009 when the obama administration said we believe in the right of the united states to militarily attacked in any country anywhere in the world where we determined a terrorist threat. part of the military justification given to congress when the military strikes in

yemen. there were cruise missile attacks in 2009 after the order was issued that killed tremendous numbers of civilians. they missed the target. those were military operations. they were not briefed to the intelligence committee. a circumvention of any effective oversight. move toward where we are now, president obama signed a legal authorization or lethal binding to conduct a targeted assassination of the united states citizen in yemen. he killed another u.s. citizen who was the editor of inspire magazine, english-language publication put out in the arabian peninsula and two weeks later the strike killed the 16-year-old son of anwar al laki a who had not talked to his father in three years. i raise that because i spend a lot of time battling on twitter

on deadlines for real stories. i engage with somebody with three followers and fight them for an entire afternoon. that is how deep in the trenches are will get. if the point is what is incredible to me is the number of well-intentioned liberals who are so willing to defend the white house's right to assassinate a u.s. citizen who has not been indicted in a u.s. court and is not shooting at u.s. soldiers. if john mccain had been president people would have been up in arms. glen greenwood would not be a pariah. we would be saying -- he is a constitutional -- blin greenwald as people know is the columnist in a wonderful mind, he would be viewed as a serious person and

he has become a symbol of irreconcilable -- he has normalized policy for a number of liberals including giving our own citizens. >> a recent washington post abc poll showed that among some figures it was a lot better and showed that 83% of americans including 50% of liberal democrats were in favor of drones' strikes. with a higher figure than that. 80% for killing al laki. maybe 65%. those were striking figures. 50% of americans did not look for withdrawal from afghanistan and definitely from major

drawdowns. it looks like the easier, cleaner, less casual the person in a way it looks that way to the obama administration too. what it has done is to turn the globe. in vietnam there were certain areas during the vietnam war called free fire zone this you could fire at anything if you ran american soldier in an american plane. the obama administration -- this is the new thing that has been happening for a while. they are turning the globe into a pre fire zone. to pick up on general david petraeus, beyond 2009, portrayed in washington, america's savior in iraq and afghanistan and got out of both countries just-in-time but he got more

publicity than any general sins macarthur. he then was made -- in terms of american politics, was made the cia director. you have not a civilian but a military man being made cia director and he went into the shadows. no profile the general david petraeus. he goes up and testify as now and then but it is remarkable how he has dropped out of the news. what you have increasingly behind the scenes what in the 60s they called in the shadows. we see american war going into the shadows. general david petraeus was part of that. he is a man who relies on iraq and afghanistan on special operations forces, hunter killer teams and drones. the cia specializes in drones

and hunter killer teams and so on and so forth and clearly coordinating with the military. to add to that, one thing, this is an area you are deeply into. when we talk about osama bin laden and the elite seal 16 we think of some little group that the special operations forces, 60,000. a secret army like the cia and developing in the military itself. >> you have different tiers of operators. the vanilla special operations guys. other than seal team 6. effectively operate and the

commander in chief, some molly pirates taken down in april of 2009 that was obama on the phone with the seal team 6 commander of a rising that kill in progress. what happened was a world of people in the 1980s when the u.s. was engaged in all of these wars in central america, dirty wars in guatemala and elsewhere they existed in the shadows and no one wanted much to do with them and they were not going to elevate the chain of command. when general stanley mcchrystal, commander of the joint operations command was appointed the commander of u.s. operations in afghanistan president obama took someone who was regarded as the shattered figure and put him in charge of an entire work

force and you saw a dramatic inspection in the number of kill operations that were going on in afghanistan. that made them the premier part of the u.s. war machine rather than the team of last resort for the guys we dare not speak of. they are at the vanguard of the whole thing. at the beginning of the bush should ministration george bush and donald rumsfeld and dick cheney in particular view of the cia as a liberal institution that needed to be put in the quarter. they dismantled the cooperation between the cia and special operations and created a beast in doing that out of gentle operations. general david petraeus brought it full circle at the cia so obama has full spectrum dominance with those forces. trying to devise. sins that is the reality we are

in right now i want to point something out. might be outside but you covered the dispatch. the discussion about israel attacking iran and the fact that we are seeing all of these iranian scientists being assassinated with sophisticated explosive devices, the scientist is then killed. a story that has not gotten the attention that it should but happening at a time when there's a lot of discussion whether or not israel will attack iran. >> i wrote a piece recently in which i took what we have done and what israel has done and reversed it. imagine the aircraft carrier. iranians don't have an aircraft

carrier because we are on a 1-way planet. imagine the aircraft carrier khamenei of the florida coast and drones over the united states and some kind of skilled teams in the capital or in las alamos assassinating u.s. scientists. viruses being sent into our nuclear system or worm is being sent into our nuclear computer system. if you start to imagine it for us, there was one recent story in which it was claimed that a texas car salesman had gone to the mexican cartel with money from an official iranian group for the assassination in washington, may or may not be an accurate for real story.

[talking over each other] >> when this hit here, we send the saudis to the un and there was a resolution. there were headlines. beyond all human bounds. this stuff in iran nobody says anything. program against iran is startling. on the other hand, the left has spent talking about an attack on iran since 2003. 2003 or 2004. dick cheney couldn't pull the trigger. the u.s. military doesn't and for everything the israeli said, for them to go into a war without a green light from the united states could make them the least popular country on earth and would be very

dangerous. there are restraints. this is a dangerous situation and the real danger is not somebody deciding to go into a war but there will be a miscalculation. iran is factual lives as a weak regional power but people in iran are the hard-line part of the fundamentalist regime partially thanks to policies we carried out over the years. if you were in washington today and thinking about this, you wouldn't touch iran. everything has flown back. we installed the shaw leading to ayatollah khamenei. in the 1960s we sold the first nuclear reactor to iran which created the problem we're dealing with. saddam hussein's invasion -- you

can run through this -- is crazy that we're doing this. back from here, europe's economy, if something goes wrong the blow back on the u.s. economy is going to be staggering. unbelievably stupid. i find it amazing. >> something i mentioned earlier, i was just in yemen and one of the things that stunned me was the degree to which people spoke positively about arabia--the iranian peninsula and simultaneously dismissed them as anything -- perplexed why the united states takes a threat so seriously. numerous important tribal leaders said to me don't you realize when you bomb here and hit a village full of people that you are pushing people to

support their agenda? it is not that people want to bring down american aircraft over detroit for want to send parcel bombs to jewish community centers in chicago. the united states has supported a dictatorship in yemen, gave him weapons leader of military aid and built units that were turned against the many people that used against them when they rose up and even when they weren't rising up. the government needs to provide services and you have people affiliated with al qaeda that have said the united states is going to treat human as the next afghanistan. the united states wants to turn humans into the next afghanistan and what do we do?

start bombing yemen. in the eyes of a lot of people there saying -- we don't even have trash collection. no such thing as a court of law. i am going to go with the people who say sharia law is the only way to bring law and order to the community. what i saw there and in somalia was not people flocking to al qaeda the people's indigenous belief systems starting to emerge closer and closer to that of the al qaeda political message so the united states is creating the very reality that didn't exist but they claim to be fighting and making it real. you have to extend that to the world. >> when you start to talk about what we're doing militarily it can sound awesome.

the new version of our military policy is going to turn out to be another disaster and it is worth remembering to go back to the demonstrations, in the 1990s we send out our economic jihadis to flatten the world. they helped create -- there were many disparities in the world but they help to increase those disparities. in the next decade we send our military first people who blew a hole through the middle of the middle east. these two attacks created the stage -- what they globalized was protested. they created a planet on which everybody weathered was yemen or egypt, everybody had 1% or 99%

and worse than before so we are now on a planet whether you are in a rear square or occupy washington or wherever -- you have different issues. the obama doctrine whatever it turns out to be will increase. what it will do in pakistan or wherever, this is what it is going to do. this is the only place on this planet that has counted up the number of wedding parties. we talk about fear. the fear of terrorism. study in the times yesterday. 14,000 murders in the united

states. the number of islamic extremists, zero. common sense count of through 2009 the number of parties blown away by u.s. airplanes. .. i guess it was late 1997.

i first went to iraq and what they are consistently from then through the beginning of the so-called shock and hot. and i remember the day that saddam statute was pulled down that path might tel aviv in the united states military whisper trade as iraq is taking down the statue of saddam in federal square. i got all these e-mails from people saying look, you are wrong about everything like it has the right views are celebrating and it's exactly what they said was going to happen and sticking it in my face. i invite them to take a look at iraq today and the horrifying reality that exists for so many. i was told stories by people whose children said that their dad was smarter than saddam hussein and someone comes to the home and cuts the father's tongue out. this is real stuff under saddam.

i was there an other great present was emptied in 2002 because saddam prisoners and people came out chanting because the bat party took over and they've been in prison so long they didn't know who was the president of iraq. so for people to say it was better under saddam is releasing something. but i raised that because the libya, the u.s. libya bombing thursday converted a popular uprising in nato coming in and i think however you view the internal dynamic of libya what overthrew moammar gadhafi was the campaign for more than any domestic insurrection at the library. without the year prior gadhafi would not as fun as swiftly he did. syria has a lot of people

pushing for the united states and nato took away in a bomb. two of my friends who were procyte say that the unit seems to come in and bomb. they point to the ucc from homes and elsewhere, but two is asking the question what comes after. what is dismantled as a nationalism that kept in check some of the forces we are seeing risa. the islamic forces. people been so thoroughly punished by tater ship that they turned deeper and deeper towards religion. i don't get a sense that i'd be curious on what you think, tom, that u.s. policymakers are thinking much further than the new site called and the public pressure seems to be brought on large media outlet or by influential permanent think tankers. >> so much of what we think of his policy overseas is actually driven by what is going on here.

just take a few -- to go back to iran. i mean, we have an odd political situation here where normally a democrat would rule on the issue of jobs and the republicans would rule on the issue of national security. now this is kind of reversed at this point. obama rolls on national security. the polls show people back his national security policy. he killed osama bin laden, et cetera, et cetera priest the the republicans are forced into strange and almost not position of demanding that the one thing they can demand to see attack iran tomorrow in essence. they answered by the way on the war on iran is a camino, one of the republicans did and we really are probably in trouble on that. >> santorum said the crusades got up out of. >> i did see that. but in the same way, obama -- by

what the public and they're doing obama is forced to take a stronger and stronger policy. he himself is being pushed on iran to take an ever stronger policy. this is domestic policy -- domestic politics playing in. i think these guys on the whole the first of all that they may save a coupon that illustration generally is the bush people are visionaries. but they had a vision of the globe, of how it worked and how it should work. they were completely wrong. the obama people are kind of managers and they think they manage just as you say by the moment, by the week, not by the year. i don't think there's any fish vision of what is happening. or am a sister to keep up with events. >> at a time when i thoroughly uplifted everyone.

we'll open it up in a forgiveness and gender equity in the questioning chemotherapy great. we have this gentleman here. >> i would like to ask you if you've heard about and believe that sufficient attention has been paid in terms of the press to the following. in september of last year, christopher edley commented dean at the california law school who was also on the transition -- the hope of a transition team six, he was at a conference where they were discussing law and order and it came up of course his tenure again in this university. what came up was a question about shot the obama administration prosecute those people who committed crimes in the previous administration? and he said he voted along with

six or seven other people to recommend that they don't prosecute the offenders and the previous administration. i guess he was unanimously this reason -- this is the important thing at a thing. he gave his resume that if they did he felt that the cia and the military would manage it to pit later i understand he was questioned further he responded with an e-mail and so far it because the president was asking and mentioned something about justice and he said sometimes justice has to give way to politics. privacy statement. have you heard about it because as far as i know hasn't made much mass media appeared. >> i haven't heard about that, the first of all i find it a little hard to believe. i actually don't think a coup.

the military would have no reason in the united states to launch a coup. it's got more or less what they want. but i would say that the obama -- obama made a decision from the second he came in. he said very early on were going to look forward, not backward. i think actually the striking thing about this moment and i don't think it's a matter of the cia and military that the whole national, what i would call the national security complex is simply passed out of our legal system totally. that is we are still in our legal system. but if you're the national security complex, whatever you do, you will never be accountable for it and no one has been accountable for anything. it doesn't matter whether it's torture. there's only one crime as far as i can see you post the comerica in terms of our national security state and that his

whistleblowing and the obama administration has time and time again gone after anybody who would tell americans what is going on inside the government. >> another important part of this is the united states goes amuck set theory speeches by secretary of state, hillary clinton has been consistently calling for or supporting processes and accountability in other countries in kenya and elsewhere saying there has to be accounting and the logic of it is brilliant in that they are saying the only way to prevent this from happening again is to expose would have been and hold those responsible accountable. that is for the rest of the world. for us we need to move forward. i may try that if i get pulled over for speeding. but i think the most serious ramifications of that policy, which i really question the wisdom that it is -- you have --

there is no incentive to think twice about doing those things if you're in the field and you feel you can justify. i think there's a lot of intelligence professionals in the united states that were absolutely repulsed by what their colleagues did. i know people within the cia who quietly resigned and there is never a story done about them. those people ably represent the exact majority of people that work in the u.s. intelligence apparatus. i cannot believe they support torture in there at the lack of support for some process of accountability. they may not want the accountability many people mr. macy is sufficient, but i agree with tom there is no need for any kind of a coup d'état. president obama has been so generous not just on a level of supporting them militarily, but also in supporting the agenda,

some of the more aggressive commanders. admiral williama craven who has been promoted or bo mcchrystal got taken down in a different way picking up on were close on the military level. the industrial complex and as the military that had the power brokers to quite well under president obama, accountability or not. >> thank you for speaking, by the way. i especially appreciate the discussion about the japanese. but it actually reminds me was cory might view of the united states, which is still the prevailing law. the law is that you can just committed a race only if it's for the purpose of preserving national security.

i was wondering what the passage of the national defense authorization act what that holds for the future, not only of an american minority, but also keep the abroad. because we were talking about heather zamir. >> i think i would almost just repeat what i've already said, which is simply -- the thing striking in our moment is that whatever the government decides it's going to do -- and the same is now over a decade. it then calls together a group of lawyers and the lawyers create a legal explanation for it, legal justification often at length. we know although we haven't seen it feel lucky assassination is a 50 page legal justification of the justice department's lawyers. it hasn't been released, but we know it's there. i don't think it's been released

at leaves. and once they create the justification, and is called reality and then they do it. so what is point them in the national state -- think of this like a mothership lifted off the american nurse. it is creating its own reality. it is creating a one day says in the basis is terrorism. this is why call my book the united states this theory because it is the infusion of fear into the society created the national security state as we know it. that state is incredible. the cold war state was huge. there was at least a country we called an enemy and i had a huge nuclear arsenal. it had an enormous military. now we have around the world a couple of minority insurgencies, a few thousand g hottie people who to descend into the united states may be. we have a couple of weak

regional powers we declared enemies. and the national security state based on fear is so much bigger than anything in the cold war. it's absolutely staggering. i think the one thing you could say -- go ahead. >> just adding directly trying to address part of what she said they are. when i flew into jfk from yemen a couple weeks ago, i had a nice little chat with the guy at customs. he then swiped -- i told him as a journalist. he is like wow, welcome home, but you're safe from the swiped my passport and ghost world. and i ended up in this place and jfk called area three and had a counterterrorism review interview where they ask me about my military experience come explosives training, weapons training and this back-and-forth and asked me

about previous trips that popped up on their machine. this has happened in the number of times were when you go to somalia you can expect to pull you in person questioning. but the reason i bring it up is because in those rooms come every time i've been taken and always the only white person, always and always the first one to leave. i've seen people get taken into another room. i see people sitting there and sitting and sitting there. every time i leave i feel like i participated in something horrifying. in this particular case in egypt air i was sitting in cairo across before he flew back to the united states from this couple that had two little kids and i was watching them play and i was going on because they just been in this al qaeda controlled area in yemen and i was enjoying zoning out and watching two kids play with parents. that family was in that room when they came there. and they were there before i got there and they were there when i

was leaving. if you look at it, we are a nation that is racially and religiously and ethnically profiling people regardless of who is in power. the hearings that representative your king is held about radicalization is all meant to terrorize the american people. it is meant to make us afraid. the statistics that tom cited i think are very important for all americans to hear about who is killing people inside of the country a regular basis, what kinds of incidents threaten our national security and the sacred cow that no one wants to touch in this arena is the kind of foreign policy would actually make us safer? a war of attrition is it going to do it he is not finite number of bad taste detail and it's over. our policy is creating terrorism and i think that is the hardest debate that people in this country have his first home that an essay which we do about it

now? >> you know, the bush administration discovered very quickly the fear of the very specific sort was a gold mine. i have to say normally when you get ruling groups come in the striking thing about what groups is before they manipulate anyone else, they tend to manipulate themselves. if you look at early cold war documents from the national security council, people writing to 30, 40, 50 other people were no one else will see it come the language can anti-communist language you'd expect to manipulate people out there. but first they convince each other. i'm sure the bush people were there only scared. they found very quickly that fear -- it wasn't just fear. it was fear of a specific sort and i was fear of terrorism. since 9/11 i've taken a look at this and i think you can count somewhere between 25 and 30 deaths in the united states due to anything in it vaguely terrorism that includes the gabrielle giffords killings --

and the other people killed there and the angry guy who plunged his plane into an irs building in austin and killed himself and an irs guy. i mean, this is for shark attacks and not worse than any other danger americans face. but this is what -- i mean, you name it. 14,000 murders. i mean, it's unbelievable. and then there's the real dangers of our world. i mean, if you are to count the number of people. i know this about doing, the number of people who kill somebody because they lost a job or lost their home or kill themselves in the process, it would be an staggering figures by compares sin. but this little thing, the government giving us a 100% guarantee and only one thing come it seems need we don't get

it. but we are supposed to invest the airports have grossly gone crazy and they've will -- they've built a structure filled with money coming in now, and it guarantees a small number of people lifetime jobs and everything else. they're never going to go under. >> i will say i was quite pleased though and yemen. every time i got on the plane there was always the person searched the most thoroughly if anyone. i took whatever profile because they were feeding their coaches probably cia. >> this is bill hartung. >> speak up for me, bill. >> jeremy come he talked about sort of jokingly how uplifting the conversation is, which in no way i think it is. but tom, you've talked about american culture, how do we get

trapped in a country were even liberals are saying target destination makes sense, drummers make sense, as long as we don't get hurt. the information doesn't seem to be enough. so where do we get our fighting quakes were to get our traction, not only to inform people, but inspired them to push more? i'm asking is partly because people ask me and therefore of what your answer. >> which i don't have. >> i think that part of the problem of the last several years is that i think we were at a moment where most americans regardless of their political views were sick of these wars. regardless of whether they supported them initially refused on how you fight terrorists, people were getting sick of wars and i think that the economic crisis in the country created a moment where those people that

have been advocating against these wars could also make an economic argument that wouldn't necessarily have been a predominate argument they would've made in opposing the war. but what if residents of the lot where people losing jobs and ms money was still being spent on these wars. i do think that the fact that you have a very popular president among liberals, president obama, who is a social agenda while some on the left side of the democratic party of certainly people to the left are very disillusioned with, he remains extremely popular among the huge base of middle-of-the-road or mainstream democrats. and the fact he is also perceived to be infinitely smarter than bush and i think it's a correct perception has really pulled the rug out from under people arguing against these wars because in terms of the debate is why you see the poll numbers like we thought the

killing of a lucky because people tend to think he's smart. he's a constitutional law expert. he must know what he's doing. and i will say, the obama administration are very sophisticated and trained to pick up legalistically sticking to need some of bush's policies in the unlawful. that was a very -- that is a very damaging aspect of this presidency for those of the antiwar camp who want the u.s. out of all of these places. i do think it's a republican had been president would've been a very different discussion. having said that, i think we have to persevere. i remember -- have all of ninth grade may. so i lived during the clinton era as an adult. i wouldn't act like an adult, but it was an adult. i remember is a dark, dark. when you're trying to mobilize against u.s. bombing, the bombing of japan, afghanistan

come to 78 day bombing of yugoslavia over kosovo was no u.n. authorization. there are. site that when the tentacles of empire extended by democrats and normalized for a lot of the population were in one of those. straight now. i think it's a real uphill battle and i think it's in large part because obama has effectively convinced a large portion of a space that this is the right way to go when he can stand dried down in iraq and afghanistan so people have the perception it's sort of coming to an end but in reality it's a shift in tactics. >> i wanted to say some mean. bill hartung by the way who has done a wonderful book about lockheed martin and has been toiling in the fields of turning out good information for a long time. and i want to say, i think we have to take a longer view. as i sat here and listen to you,

i was remembering, you know, a month back or whatever ways, i was standing at the edges ducati part of a whole bunch of union people -- it was a march and they simply appeared and i was surrounded by these guys and there is a big guy next to me. i forget which union he was from and he was looking down on what looked like a hippie encampment. i was in the 60s and experience in the 60s which was this should be a moment of hostility. he started off grady said you know, this 99%, were talking about the 1% of the 99% for years. i was going to thank my god, now is going to attack them. he said it so great. they put this on the map. i thought this is wonderful. you know, but i thought to myself as well, you know, it is true that parts of the labor movement has been working -- have been talking about the 99%. it just hadn't gotten faction

hit. drones have gotten faction janet and i kind of know why. being against the drone, given how they've been presented generally is like being against an iphone or something. a, perfect weapon. they will be disasters. like all perfect weapons, from the tank on, they never deliver the fabulous things they are supposed to deliver, but they embed themselves into our world and become in the case of drugs become almost everything in the world i'm afraid. but i think there is hope. if we just keep at it, we are not on that old planet anymore. we are now on a planet of protest here and elsewhere and we don't know where that's going to go we don't know when people make the connection between domestic issues than the foreign issues. it hasn't been fully made yet. but it will be a thing. just my thought. >> hi, i was interested in the criticism that shoot out asked

if the media and as journalists and you kind of alluded to the news cycle mentality, where the cycle is just kind of feeding on itself rather than at minimum reflecting reality where words attempting at the sustained analysis of what is going on to the degree to which policy is becoming more reactionary to a new site code rather than maybe a different time at the new site code actually respond to the policy. so i wanted to know what she thought the origins of this media monster might be and then what your advice is for journalists now to do the kind of work that needs to be done. >> that's a good question. >> yeah, i think my birth, the media at the outlets it plays in

dealing conflict and also the media ownership at a different time in history. the columnist for the new york daily news wrote a brilliant book that is a history on by a small group of corporations a couple hundred years until the first united states. and in telling the story, he describes how a relatively small group of people have been in control and the same groups of people in charge of deciding in a very fascinating way and the story is great. >> i think the cable news of 24 hour cable news was crossing some sort of the line area and

to a different reality when you could turn on the tv and at any moment some pundit or talking head is pushing their agenda. the think tanks are on their and the army of former generals embedded in the newsrooms of cnn and msn b.c. and fox news who were getting briefings to the pentagon and what they should be saying when they go on tv networks. there is an attempt to manufacture consent that is a concerted effort. joseph ingrid had a sensational addition of news and if it bleeds it leads than you have this sort of rise of aggregator sites that are mercury that. when daily bee started a did their own reporting. "huffington post" has really good reporters. capitol hill and the white house. then sign and ryan grim are both

great reporters. brian greene is a friend of mine industria reporting. but it's also an operation of sex cells, pop-culture sells enough that's flashing at you on the screen. i think in a way we haven't media culture now that wants to see those celebrity moments represented in every aspect, the obsession with celebrity culture and low caste and all that stuff is now a coverage of libya and syria and has to be, graphic, now, now, now. any think part of our short attention span society. if you look at the obama administration serious response to the uprising in egypt, started the flirtation with keeping mubarak on, had it not been for al jazeera, i don't believe that the obama administration would've taken the position of iannelli did i mubarak when it did.

i think it would've taken a lot longer and maybe that was the case for a media outlet did something that hadn't end result result that was good. they have really been pushing for war against syria. almost overtly he wants to make love to do more in syria. he's so into it. take a xanax or something. so i think it's cable news and i think it's the sort of, you know, tabloidization of news culture in this country combined with an industry of think tankers some pendants largely drawn from their former government position and still advocating for whatever their friends within the structure want to see happen. >> and i will just say -- these are almost examples. but i'd still start that in all that. when you read about iraq -- i

mean come every couple of years as an anniversary some income of the invasion or whatever that was celebrated or whatever it is. and always the experts they asked were the experts who admit a mistake on iraq. our wise to invade iraq. i mean to this day, i just never seen in the mainstream somebody who is out in the streets. he could find journalists out in subindustries who were not protesting nation of iraq. you know, it's the people -- i think of as george ball back in the kennedy johnson days they said about being inside an administration. he said you could be a hawk can be run and your cat. the only thing you can't be a speed doesn't be right. you know, there's something about that in the media, too. particularly in the world of punditry is very striking.

>> their chosen to be on the shows. you don't have actual dissidents in the united states. but never call people that, that they are very, very sure people and they're almost never allowed on those shows. they have sunday in front of you. look at the republican debate sponsored by the american enterprise institute where david addington, cheney's former entrant and paul wolfowitz are allowed to ask questions as though they have any business being in the public without some income and confronting them for what they did about iraq and yet here they are asking the question is other ordinary americans are concerned about foreign policy. you don't deserve to be doing that they are. and yet that's what cnn has made to be asking questions. >> there's a journalism website that weekly offers a kind of rundown of what they called this a journalistic term the

newsroom. what was in the news halt this week? i looked for january at the new solider was really striking. the media news poll 41% can't paint 2012. the overall medianews hole and 30 papers, tv, probably the internet, online stuff and so forth. and when you say 41%, very little of that, almost all that is the ongoing republican debate story. and cable news was 64%. that was what was there, you know. and to me, one of the most striking things about that is whatever people write about come if they don't write the one thing that seems most obvious, which is the one thing that comes from this coverage. if you make this election the election of the century, the money that comes in to cable news station owners, if the ads.

if it's out there and it's big and three people assigned to me for $20 million in florida i'm not all comes in mostly to tv stations. as one of the great conflicts of interest. it if it happens in some interest no one would notice and no one says a word about it. >> nyman was not done during the republican debate. people needed something to watch. >> maybe we should call it quits because people have been saying that for a long while. >> you're not allowed to leave yet. >> thank you both for being here. i was wondering if you could address how perhaps one can actually view what iran has been assigned already started and i'm not talking about military strikes. i'm talking about sanctions that have been going on for a while

now. but what the obama administration did in december before new year's eve the sanctions can be considered a war and now we read reports about green shipments being turned away from iran because he's afraid some financial train actions. my understanding is the central bank sanctions aren't entirely complete. i see he's talking about business is absolutely haunting and the screen shipments being turned around. so to think about if you could comment on sanctions, not only creating the path tourist visa happened in iraq, the bush father and then the clinton administration with the sanctions in history and then continued by bush after them. so we see in iran, sanctioning of the central bank is arguably a war, and economical war. but also takes seriously its not

just people descend upon the thieves doing this to not do that. but they also have an operation for war. this is one thing. secondarily, to see you speak with such an opposition to iraq and the invasion of iraq and simultaneously talk about the egregious word of the saddam hussein government. i bring this up now because people are organizing against the war in iran. the one thing that causes me great distress i was just at an anti-iran were sanctions both saturday that a section of the left, maybe they are small, but they're significant and i really think a scourge antiwar movement finishing iranians were simultaneously taking people in a position against war and sanctions. if you could speak to that.

>> i just want to point out the forces were talking about the republican debates and the dissidents is that you have one guy in the republican debates standing there saying being they should send a republican to and that's ron paul who has been saying very directly that sanctions are not devore. the sanctions are not devore. it is strange. you will not find this among democrats right now, but he's the one person i see up there in a major way who is saying that. but obviously they are not only potentially acts of war, but they strike against -- they're not going to strike against the iranian leadership. they're going to strike against ordinary iranians which have been in iraq as well in the saddam hussein years. there's all sorts of things as

well. but then talked about in our world is in iran but not oil slow a trans lucy says. it's good to be worse than the libyan situation. this is one of those nice situation in which they end up with the great recession. the blowback from this could be enormous and so i think it's a dangerous situation. it's something that should be organized again. >> the only thing i'll say in closing about not if there are different kinds of sanctions and there are sanctions that are aimed at cutting off the regime weapons supplied, which is particularly ironic when the united states and simultaneously profiting from the regime's oil

and saying they sanction them on a different level. it gives you a clear sense of deep into the mechanical sanctions hypocrisy of the u.s. is all over. it was in iraq as well encourage oil smuggling of the u.s. is the primary beneficiary when sanctions were imposed on iraq in the primary people punished were of course the iraqi people, not the regime. and so sanctions can be a form of economic warfare and all of sanctions are created equal. people are giving the administration a pat by sanctions that sound like an alternative to war. they certainly were the case that iraq had away that more people die as a result of sanctions of iraq than during the entire u.s. military camp being in iraq, which is stunning if you think about it. i saw first-hand in the 1990s. a lot of people around the world are concerned with what will happen throughout the arabian

nights in the middle east and north africa. would have inside of afghanistan. we're in the world on fire right now. and it's good that they are burning. i mean fires of resistance in the united states and elsewhere in some of them could really reach to a point where it grows beyond control. >> there's one other thing to say about sanctions. here it looks as those sanctions of some kind of global policy that everybody agrees on. in fact the united states agrees on it. israel agrees on it. the europeans have gone on that day because the europeans for the last 50 years have done nothing but go along with u.s. policy. they cannot do that at some level. when they finally do you'll know were in a different world good asia, china, brazil, even turkey which is not particularly friendly. you run through the whole southern world and the asian world and this is a world that is against the sanctions policy.

so it's a complicated situation. >> the book is "the united states of fear." tom engelhardt wrote it. thank you for coming tonight. [applause] >> the republican primary has caused romney to move so far to the right he is off the board. your 10 kennedy appearing in new hampshire. they have a question. the question is would you agree to 1 dollar in taxes for 10-dollar cut? anybody in the civilized world will now that i say that company be that excludes those

cannonade, with the of course i would give you 1 dollar in taxes for $10 in cuts. but not one hand when a. not huntsmen, not anybody. it was a well-kept secret, but i ran for the republican nomination in the 1996 vehicle and i was in new hampshire and there were nine people and the question was how many of you promise to abolish the department of education and eight handspring up continuously. ridiculous question that you can't always the department of education. just can't do it. so here you have her main cane, michele bachmann and one after another, pushing, pushing romney so far to the right.

senators sent four men come up prodigious worker, covered all the counties played right into strength with the evangelical right. but as soon as the people of america found out about and link people to lavina, they are your land. and romney has changed positions on the thames belmar had it right the other night when he says romney has changed positions more often than a movie queen. [laughter] and i am asked to them i going to support in november. i say well, i am not senator or anywhere. and citizen are your and i'm not happy with president obama frankly. this policy in afghanistan is absurd. i spoke out on the senate floor

against 30,000 additional troops. we have no flight with the taliban. there's no al qaeda there. i was part of the delegation that visited president karzai and he's not somebody you can do business with. you have the tax cut, obama extended it. i spoke out against it. should never extend a tax cut for the rich. then you have a point this commission, cochaired by alan simpson on the cochaired national debt, doesn't pay any attention to that. how about romney? well, which romney is going to appear? which etch-a-sketch will we know? but the answer to your question, in my opinion is the primary process has moved the republican nominee so far to the right he's going to have to make a sharp tu,