grant understand they are not his friends so that is one reason i love this. one reason grand cut his communication with washington. the telegraph lines when grant is in mississippi, the nearest telegraph is memphis. you want to get a telegraph like washington wants to gripe that him they take forever. ..

>> yes? >> [inaudible] >> bedforest, a major character in the shiloh book, and one of the characters is a yellow lieutenant who rides with forest, a young man from memphis, and he comes back in the chattanooga book, but he was more into tennessee. he was further, sort of east of where shilo is today, and he was raising cane, doing a lot of good work for the confederacy, but not directly involved in the fighting around vixburg. he was too far away. grant is very aware where forest is. he wants to know where he is because grant suffered at the hand of old van dorn in holly springs in northern mississippi,

and grant experienced calvary destroy his supply depot, capture trains, wagons, and that cost grant the entire campaign in december of 1862. he's not making that mistake again. he keeps his eye on where forest is, but forest focuses more on tennessee at that point, and, of course, like i said, he comes back in the next book with the fight beginning ant chattanooga because forest is a key player just prior to that. >> [inaudible] >> oh, not at all. >> [inaudible] >> not at all, no. i mean, you can say, gee, would have been nice from a confederate point of view had he been there, what might have been. one of the complaints that john had is joe johnston took the calvary. they didn't have eyes in the countryside how grant did. he didn't know where grant was or what direction they were

going in. he had less than a thousand call ray rimen to support the army, and that was not doing. grant just penned them in, nothing to do about it, but that was a serious, another -- talk about joe johnston, he took all the calvary and took them into tennessee. it felt like he needed them there. there was not forest's fault. that was joe johns ton's fault. anyone else? well, you -- yes? >> of all the characters you've written about and about to write about, who is your favorite? >> if you're talking far beyond civil war, you know, i can tell you -- >> civil war. >> okay. well, civil war, there's two. one of them i had to kill. that's -- one -- you know, when i wrote "gods and generals," my first book, i never did it before, i didn't know what it was like to get emotionally involved with the characters,

and that's what it takes. i have to feel i love these people in order to get into their heads. someone said to me how dare you put words in the mouth of robert e. lee. point taken. if i dare to do that, i have to believe the words are authentic to the character or you don't believe it and the burke just won't work. that process involves getting in love, falling in love with the character, and one of them is stonewall jackson. i love the character of jackson, and i always knew there's going to come that time when i'm going to reach the time line and may 10th, 1863, when i'm going to have to kill this man. that's one of the toughest days of my life. i was bawling all day. that chapter went in a way i didn't expect taking me in a direction that totally surprised me, and that's one of the magical things that happens to writers every now and then, and

every writer knows this. that was amazing, but that was hard. jackson, clearly, the other one is grant. i mean, i talk about grant a lot, and i realize where i am. i understand that. you can want deny that grant won the war. there's a lot of other people who lost it, but grant won it. lincoln understood that. lincoln understood he finally found the right guy to put in charge, and i give lincoln credit for that. when grant knows east, it's all over, and it's just a matter of time, and grant sayings that, actually, those words, i use that in the last full measure a lot where grant says it's just a matter of time. he's got the guns, the people, the strength, the power, the food, the horses, and lee doesn't. it's just a matter of thyme. you've been patient. thank you. i'm going to sit here and sign the books. thank you very much. [applause] >> for more information, visit the author's website,

jeffsharra.com. >> i'm the beneficiary of a right total hip. i had daily nocturnal pain. if i didn't know better, i'd think i had prostate cancer, cancer to the bone, and i saw the best surgeon, and i got a wonderful procedure, right total hip. that was, by the way, just seven weeks ago, and a week ago, i played nine holes of golf. that's how good it is. i would challenge anyone in integrateed medicine to say, could you have done that? if they have pneumonia, you need pencil lain. if they have hiv or hep titus c, you neat the right medications, some fracture a bone, you need a sling and a good orthopedic surgeon so western med sip does amazing thingsment don't forget that. somebody needs a liver transplant.

i had a patient who required a hundred units of blood and survived the liver transplant, and two years later ran the boston marathon so compliment ri and integrated medicine that has a major role in preventative medicine. how do we prevent obesity, depression, can we cure, but there is a limit to it, and as an adjunct -- [laughter] and i pr face this by saying i disagree, but there is a role. i've actually experienced -- i had outer skopic knee surgery, and out of the blue, my knee was swollen, and i had canceled the golf i was going to play that weekend, very depressing, beautiful spring day in boston, and i meet a friend who say you

mentioned you got relief from your back pain. i had a herniated disk, and i went and saw the lady, and my knee was hurting, swollen, and then she got out of the car in the parking lot of the country club and kicked her foot into the air, see how good it is. the next day friday evening at four o'clock, i had a hiatus, and i called the lady in the morning, saw her, she did the acupuncture, and got up, and you could compare one knee to the other and suddenly the swelling and pain is gone. i don't believe it. i don't know how it happened, and i called home, my wife was not there, i called her on her cell phone, and she was going to come home two hours later, she was doing some shopping. i went to the country club, played nine holes of golf. [laughter] i've benefited from acupuncture

and things of that sort. i'll pass it on happen barbara dafoe whitehead >> i've benefited from the practice, and i don't take medications, never had surgery, never been hospitalized, but i agree with what he said, but i want to answer your question because you asked specific questions how medicine is practiced. they come from harvard medical standard. here's some statistics. 40% of parties suffer from the disease which means disease that has been a result of medical treatment. 80% of pharmaceuticals are of optional or marginal benefit meaning if they didn't use them, it didn't make a difference of

the natural history of disease other than save your medicine from side effects and some money. next time you watch television, lo a the medicine for pharmaceuticals whether it's migraines, it starts with sexual impotence and could cause death. [laughter] in between is the -- also, the most common heart surgery is coronary artery bypass. it doesn't prolong life in more than 2% of people, but it's the most common procedure. the second most common procedure for heart is angioplasty and doesn't improve life for more than 3 #% of people. they are alarming statistics, but surgery is done everywhere, okay? back surgery, 98% is useless.

hysterectomy, 95% is useless. we're talking about huge amounts of money that are spent on procedures, okay, my father, our father made the neurological diagnosis with precision. today, if you have a headache, go to the emergency room, and if you don't walk out with a cat scan, an mri, you're lucky because nobody has the time to do it so we have a crisis. what we call health reform is not health reform. it's insurance reform. it has nothing to do with health crisis. most of the expenditure is end of life care, okay? nobody's allowed to die in the house. i just made my will, and i aid sim not going to die in the hospital. i'm not going to have any of the resuscitative procedures. i've been in community hospital where there's the same standards don't apply, and i see doctors directing something called an

aberration in electrolytes which if not corrected would cause cardiac arrest and patient would die and they keep correcting it, even though what's that has no life there. we call prolong prolongation of survive of viefl is really prolonging suffering. this has been a huge problem. i discussed it with politicians and brought it up to our president, okay? but we have a system -- we have a system -- [applause] we have a system, and it's, again, nothing to do with the gold standard where sanji practices. [laughter] we had a system where every congressmen, there a 28 lobbyists in washington, okay? their only business, they are either medical industrial

complex lobbyists or military industrial, so, you know, where do we think the country makes money? does that apply to pakistan, to afghanistan, does it supply to india in they go to dubai and trade. we have huge problems when the incentive for treatment becomes money, and it becomes the corrupting influence. you know, if you go to a baker, what's he going to sell you? bread. what do you think -- how do you think chemotherapists make money? for every chemotherapy they give. my thing is you shouldn't have chemotherapy? not saying that. i think question. i ask everyone here to be a difficult patient. question your doctors. get the statistics. go to google. get the information. [laughter] you will know more than the average medical provider.

[applause] >> watch this and other programs online at booktv.org. >> i like to have two books on hand, a pleasure read and more brain food to read during the commute. my pleasure book this summer that i started on is "the interestings," and we're following a group of teenagers into adulthood as they strive to be exceptional people, and the protagonist, as she gets older, starts questioning the idea of balance or lack thereof between ambition and happiness. an interesting theme, one that i think is pertinent to washington, d.c., and that's what i'm reading on the beach. in terms of the brain food, i'm going to be reading "the

unwinding" by george packer. he's a great reporter for the new yorker, and number two, i think it's interesting to see his story telling. he's using different venn yet -- vignettes in america including in youngston, ohio, where i'm from, to explore bigger themes about the decline in america, increasing polarization, lack of trust in government, and how that progressed. it's pes miss tick themes, but i think it would be interesting to see how he ties it together. >> tweet us @booktv, post it on our facebook page, or e-mail us at booktv@c-span.org. >> now on booktv, jeremy talks about the secret war against terrorism being fought around the world by elite soldiers serving with the cia's special activities division and joint special operations command. this is about an hour and 15

minutes. >> i'm pleased to welcome you all and introduce our guests this evening. how is it, you may ask yourself, that a constitutional law scholar and nobel peace prize winner can have individuals kill that he and his personal advisers deem threatening to u.s. security? decisions which are made in your name and hidden from the light of day. in his new book, "dirty wars," jeremy tells the story of how president obama came to wield this power, how covert government forces carry out killings, and what these secret operations mean for our democracy. he's the best selling author of black waters, the rise of the world's most powerful mercenary army, twice won the coveted polk award for writing and reporting, and the national security correspondent for the nation

magazine. he's a puff foundation writing fellow reporting from afghanistan, iraq, somalia, yemen, and the former yugoslavia. he's the screen writer and voice of the "dirty wars: the world is a battlefield" coming out in philadelphia on june 21st and in anticipation of the release, we'll run the trailer of the event right now. by "event" i mean movie. [laughter] >> i got a strange phone call. someone from the inside reaching out to me. someone close to the heart of the president's elite force. >> there's hundredings of covert operations. multiple causes it. the -- ♪ >> it's hard to say when this story began. >> greetings from kabul,

afghanistan. >> this was to be the front line on the war on terror. >> what's the name of this village here? >> but i knew i was missing the story. there was another war missing in the shadows, a night raid. >> so there's the two men in the guest house where the first people were killed. you saw the u.s. forces take the bullets oft bodies? >> on your face, on your face. >> who were the men who stormed into the home and why go to such horrifying lengths to cover up their actions? >> their strength is target killings. >> how would a covert unit taking over the largest war on the planet? >> you're dismissing that you've done. >> how are you still alive? are you paranoid? oh, he's dead, what happened? he had an accident. >> the list of raids read like a map of a hid p war. >> the right guys get targeted, and other times, the wrong people get killed.

>> syria, thailand, jordan. >> what we've essentially done is created one hell of a hammer, and for the rest of our generation, this force will be continually searching. >> despite whatever conspiracy theories, there's nothing to it. ♪ >> if they are dangerous, if they are too strong, definitely has a missile. >> it's important to know when the president can kill an american citizen and when they can't. ♪ ♪ >> american knows war. they are war war mon gulls. >> please welcome jeremy.

[applause] >> wow, thank you very much. welcome. it's an honor to be back here in philadelphia, and, particularly, an honor to be here at the free library of philadelphia. what a great institution this is. i understand that the drone issue now has a very serious local connection here in pennsylvania with the decommission grove air force base that's going to be converted into a drone command and control center, and, you know, i know guys who are drone pilots. they get offended when they say they are unmanned aircraft, but so people understand, i'm sure you worked on the issue locally know how this works, but you have individuals who are in trailers or in command centers, one of them is in the southwest of the united states, and they drive to work every day, and

they get into the box where they're operating the aircraft half a world away in the skies of pakistan or yes , yemen, any engage in warfare where they are playing an essentially a video game in their trailer or command center, but the people targeted are real people being killed, and at this particular base where i know a drone pilot, he told me when he gets into the car, and he drives off the base after having been involved with operations, sometimes lethal, sometimes surveillance, and there's a sign when he leaves that says, buckle up. this is the most dangerous part of your day. he has a greater likelihood of getting hit in a car accident of he does than being killed even though he's involved with bombings in countries around the world. drones have been a trail component of what the obama administration calls the counterterrorism strategy. there's been a dramatic ease escalation in the use of drones

to strike not just in pakistan, yemen, occasionally somalia. the u.s., under president obama, is very much building up covert capabilities on the african continent. when i was in the airport on my way here, i ran into a young guy who said he was going for deployment. i said, where are you going? he said, i'm going to a place called jay booty, and the u.s., of course, took over an old french military base there, and out of that base is the conventional u.s. military under the offices of africom, but there's militaries and elite commandos from the command that use that as a staging ground to run operationings into somalia and elsewhere. they train forces from ethiopia, uganda, and burr ruin dirty wars. the u.s. is contemplating building another base in mali to target another group in the al-qaeda.

you have a base in ethiopia and a relatively new base across the water on the arabian speans la in saudi arabia, and i think we're going to see an intensification of covert u.s. actions, certainly in africa, and we've already seen it happen in yemen. we're living in a moment where we have a popular democratic president who is a constitutional lawyer by trade and training, who won the nobel peace prize, and who campaigned on multiple pledges to reverse the excesses and abuses of the bush era, said he was going to close guantanamo, going to end torture, shut down the cia so-called black sites around the world, but what's happened under the popular democratic president who won the nobel peace prize is many of the most egregious aspects of the apparatus built up by bush and cheney and their cohorts have been intensified or

continued. some of them have been rebranded, and there's an attempt to legitimize policies liberals would have opposed had mccain won the election, but because it's president obama, he's getting a free pass. you know, we don't have anything vaguely resembling a credible challenges to the policies in the congress because the democrats have checkedded their conscious at the door sitting out these two terms of obama when it comes to asking key questions about how far we've come since 9/11. you know, that in the week after september 1 # 1th, the week after the attacks, congress passed a bill called the authorization for the use of military force, the aumf. basically, what that did is give a blank check to the bush administration to wage a global borderless war, and it authorized the u.s. to send forces in to aniy that it deemed had a connection to al-qaeda or the 9/11 attacks, and that they could hunt down any individuals who were connected to the 9/11

attacks. that is still the law that president obama and his administration cite when they bomb people in yemen. in some cases, bombing people who wered to -- were toddlers on 9/11. the bill is for those who targeted 9/11, but this is killing toddlers when it happened. president obama said in the second inauguration, second inaugural address he didn't want the u.s. to live in a state of war, but his policies indicate he wants the opposite. that's exactly what he wants, wants the u.s. to be in a perpetchewable state of war. there was one member of congress that voted against the aumf. imagine what that would have been like. we remember the days after 9/11, the fear, hysteria gripping the country, and it was this one member of congress, barbara lee

of california, and she stood up -- [applause] i think young people should, in particular, all of us, but young people in particular should watch the speech. find o online. barbara lee was trembling when she gave the speech. imagine the conch it took to stand up, and what she said in the speech is we cannot use these attacks to engage in retaliation across the globe, and engage in actions that undermine our democratic principle, and we can want wage a war that doesn't have an end game, and you know what? she was right. she was so prophetic in the fission in the way feingold, the lope senator against the patriot act, saw something so many of the colleagues on capitol hill were either two blind to notice or willfully chose to embrace a rollback, a massive rollback of our civil liberties. you see, to have the courage to ask tough questions at a time there's mob violence takes real

backbone, really courage. we're in that moment today where we have a popular democratic president who won the nobel peace prize. it's easy to oppose policies with villains like dick cheney in control, and i do imagine him in the lair plotting the destruction of the world for stocks to go up. only slightly kidding. [laughter] but when you have the actual courage to say the same principles that applied when bush and which i yi were in power applied when president obama is in power, that actually is where your principles are tested. we have an expansion of the drone strikes. we have the use of secret prisons not run by the cia, but being run by other governments and their human rights abusing forces and shipping prisoners off to be tortured in prisons in countries like somalia in the basement of the national security service, and i documented this when i traveled.

this is change under president obama. we closed the cia black sites in poland and thailand, but then we start using somalia where we are interrogating prisoners, cia operatives and military officers interrogating prisoners, some snatched off the streets of third countries. in one case, i documented a young guy from kenya snatched out of his home, taken to wilson airport, shackled, hooded, and flown to smoal ya put in a bedbug infested underground prison with no access to light, no access to the outside world, no access to lawyer, and could not tell his family where he was taken. that action happened under president obama. when i called the u.s. government for comment, they said that sounds right. it's natural we want to cooperate with the somalia-kenya authorities in fact fight against terrorism. most americans were under the impression when obama issued the three executive orders that he

did a couple of days into the administration that he was going to be dismantling it, not rebranding it and recasting it as a more legitimate form of running the same program, but that's largely what happened. renditions continue under president obama. assassinations has been normalized as a central component not as though we have not had the history before, but it's normalized by the exon called america's national security policy. i think that many liberals would have been up in arms had john mccain tried to assert the right to kill american citizens without charging them with a crime when they are not on an active battlefield shoots against american soldiers, but when president obama did it, there was three u.s. citizen killed in a two-week period in the fall of 2011, there were two responses in washington: silence or enthusiastic support. hillary clinton sounded like john mccain in the statements that she issued.

70% of self-identified liberals said they support drone strikes and the support for the strikes dropped only negligentble when the tart was an american system. we're at a moment where we crossed a line and difficult to roll back, particularly when there's no credible opposition or credible questioners of the policy on capitol hill. we recently had two sets of hearings on drone strikes and targeted killings, and one of the hearings, there was a young yemeni, i know him, i met him, he's an impressive young man, invited to testify in front of the u.s. senate. six days before he came to the u.s. to testify, his family's village in yemen was bombed in a drone strike, and he live tweeted the texts he got from relatives who were near the scene and comes in front of the u.s. congress, and with had the opportunity to have someone who could explain firsthand what the

impacts of those strikes would be, not just for yemen stability, but for our own. what happens to people when their family members are killed in a drone strike, when the intelligence was bad, and, oops, we killed a group of teenagers because we had categorized them as military-agedded males, and there was an elegant statement in front of the senate. instead of asking him relevant questions, democratic and republican senators alike asked three academics sitting next to him who could have walked to congress any day of the week theoretical questions, spending endless minutes whether it's a drone or uav, and you have a yemen whose village was bombed who could have answered the questions and told us about the impact the strikes are having, so i don't put all this on president obama. i put a lot of this also on congress. there's a culture in washington where figures go to capitol hill, members want to know if we

are winning, which is such a false question. they want metrics to define it, body counts is how we define victory. how many terrorists have we killed? we're doing something in yemen and pakistan now called signature strikes. there's two kinds of -- basically two strikes. one is a personality strike with a known individual, and you decided that you're going to take him out so i'm, you know, the no , ma'am mall head of al-qaeda in the aftermath of bin laden's demise. he's a personality strike. if the u.s. finds him, they take him out or the leader of a pakistani taliban killed in the drone strike in 2009, but then we're also doing things called signature strikes, that sesh region of pakistan and yes , yn determined to be hostile zone and any military-aged males in the area with a remote connection to the u.s. flagged as a potential terrorist, maybe they went to the same mosque as

them, delivered food to a house, maybe they were on a phone call with someone. if that individual is in a group of other military-aged males, u.s. policy is to assume they are terrorists and kill them. it's like a precrime like the movie "minority report," we kill people intentionally. this is important to listen to each detail of this. we kill people intentionally whose identities we do not know and against whom we may not possess intelligence that they are involved with criminal or terrorist plots. think about what that means. that's murder. that is murder. when you are saying we are going to say this group of young men, because of their age and where they live and because somebody was on the phone somebody we think is a terrorist, we're going to just say they are terrorists and kill them. you know, i've been on the ground examining the aftermath of the strikes, not just the drone strikes, but the night raids done by special operation forces, and i've come to the firm belief that the united

states is now creating more new enemies than killing terrorists or those plotting against the united states. there's going to be blow backs for the policies. there will be blow backs. we are giving people a legitimate reason to want to attacks united states, to avenge the death of their loved ones or the destructions of their livelihoods. that's a sobering thing to say as an american or realize as a country or to realize because after the heard for the 15th or 20th time someone in a different country, heard in yemen, afghanistan, smoal ya, someone say to me, i used to think very differently about the united states, but i see you as a terrorist now. none of us love al-qaeda. none of us want them in our territory, but what we want less than al-qaeda? you and your drones. we encourage people to adopt the mentality of the enemy of my enemy is any friend ignoring the impact of our poll sate our own

peril. it's shameful in our society the only people that have to pay attention to what's going on abroad in these wars are military families with loved ones deployed in the war zones. they think about it every single day. they worry that that their son or daughter's going to come back in a body bag, and they pay attention. many people in the country go about their business. you know, the real housewives of new york and whatever wine they drink, that's reality television, and then the real widows of baghdad are an afterthought if they are even mentioned at all in the newspaper. we -- [applause] we destroyed iraq. we created a reality where suicide bombings are a normal part of daily life in iraq. we built the largest embassy in the history of civilization there. you know, it's this massive clone ya fortress.

the cia is ratcheting up activity inside iraq, special operation teams returning to iraq. that war has not ended. now we have the added reality of the constant state of war and u.s. does hunting operations inside the country. in afghanistan, as we draw down the troop presence, there's an increase of special ops team that kill down the list. we don't know who we are killing anymore. in afghanistan, we killed so many senior commanders of the taliban that i wonder how that organization still exists if you were to believe the u.s. press releases. i don't know how many times we've killed the number three man in big al-qaeda. i know that the number two guy in al al-qaeda was killed 11 tis this year. he was killedded weeks ago before issuing an audio tape

references current events. you know, when you don't know who you are killing, and you are so far down the kill list that the people you are targeting are like local farmers who organize an uprising against you because you are in the valley, it's time to really rethink what you are doing remaining in the countries. they were doing unlawful, unconscionable actions every moment of their time in office. [applause] that's easy to oppose. what's president obama doing? he's a hawk ire democrat who doubled down on a lot of the policies, and what's most damaging about is it that it actually seemed to have stuck as a good idea in the minds of liberals. people look back five to ten years from now and ask how were we so silent in the face of the

legittization when a they did them years earlier. [applause] for me, we crossed a serious line on september 30th, 2011, with how far we've come since the 9/11 attacks. when president obama was faced with a decision of whether or not to execute a u.s. citizen not charged with a crime with whom no public evidence was presented, and this individual was a u.s. citizen born in new mexico in 1971 #, and obama had decided he wanted him taken out and choosing the time of day, and he didn't waiver in the decision. he cherved as the prosecutor, the trial happened through leaks in the media, never in a courtroom. servedded as prosecutor, judge, jury, and executional, of not

just him, but the other american citizens with him. now, i don't have any love for him. he said things i found to be reprehenceble calling for the assassination of a cartoonist in seattle issue washington who drew a demeaning picture of the prophet mew hamid saying someone had to kill her. she had to go underground and change her name praising the massacre in texas when they shot up more than a dozen of the fellow soldiers wounding scores of others and paralyzed himself, saying he was a hero and called on others to engage in similar actions. he met with the underwear bomber who tried to set his gurnet pants on fire in the plane over detroit christmas day 2009. i'm willing for the sake of argument to concede that everything that every wild

allegation made by officialses in the press is true. i don't think it's true, but i concede that for the sake of argument for the point it's not about who he was or what he did, but about who are we as a society because we -- we are not judge. no note is judged by how you treat the popular and powerful in the society or law-abiding citizens, but judged by how you treat the least of the citizens, the poorest, and the most reprehenceble. that tests how strong jr. judicial system is and tests your values. the story is very much a story of what's happening to us, but i want to tell you about the story because i think it's speaking to where we are. he was born in new mexico. i remember seeing him on television soon after 9/11, and i tried to book him. i was a producer for democracy now, and i trieded to book him on the show because he was speaking in a way that the voice was such an important part of the dialogue happening in the country. on the one hand, as a religious

leader in the muslim community, he was condemning the 9/11 attacks saying al-qaeda perverted the religion of islam and the united states had a right to go to afghanistan to bring the perpetrators of 9/11 to justice. he was decrying and denouncing hate attacks against muslims and muslim businesses and taxi drivers and rounding up of muslims for questioning. the opening of the guantanamo prison in cuba, and he was sort of a media celebrity helping media outlets, washington post, new york time, and talk of the nation, npr, news hour with jim leher, and he was invited by the pentagon to give a lecture inside the pentagon as a luncheon about the state of islam in the world. a sense of how bad the intelligence was at the time in the pentagon, among the

sandwiches served was one with bacon on it. you invite him to the pentagon and have bacon. no wonder it went to swimmingly. he was a guy who didn't come from a radical family. his parents are upstanding, amazing people, still are. his dad is one of the most respected academics in yemen. he came to the united states on a full ride scholarship, created the department of agricultural engineering with us-aid and american firms in yes , yemen g to solve the water crisis in that country. they didn't raise him to be the guy you saw in the youtube videos wearing the camouflage and calling for armed jihad against the united states. he was radicalized by the u.s. wars abroad and at home and eventually leaves the united states and spends time in britain, goes to yemen, his family's homeland, and starts

recording sermons on cds, audio tapes, and they are popular in the english speaking diaspora around the world, and the u.s. is concerned that his speeches are going to insight young muslims to commit acts of terror in britain, canada, united states, or elsewhere in europe, and so the united states cliewdz with the yemen regime to arrest him in 2006 in yemen on charges he intervened in the try ball dispute, put in prison for 18 months, and of the 18 months, 17 are in solitary confinement. the united nations investigated the imprezment saying it was legal clear that the united states played a role in the imprisonment. from my reporting, it was john who, at the time, the director of national intelligence and knows about dirty wars from his time in central america in the 80s where he was a major player in fueling the contra war in

nick raw gray, there was a meeting while he was in prison with the senior yes , -- yemen official saying he be released because it was a problem for them, and so he held the yes , -- yemen official that he has to be kept in prison for four or five years to people forget about him. that's why he remained in prison. he comes out a jail a changed man, radicalized, and his -- he starts a blog and begins taking on discussions about if suicide bomber is acceptable under the teachings of the koran, and the u.s. is putting pressure on yemen to rearrest him, and he goes underground, and the head of intelligence service comes to the father and says in may of 2009, if you don't get your son to come back into our prison, the americans kill him in a crone strike. this is before the underwear bomber or fort hoot, anything.

they hold the family, if you don't get him back in prison where here's not charged with real crime, we -- the americans are going to kill him in a drone strike. his father goes and finds him saying, tells him this, and he says what are you, an american agent? working for them now? i was born free, i'll die free. i'll not position my head. he leaves his family, a wife and three children, with his parents, and goes on the run. the u.s. tries to kill him more than a dozen times by my count. in one of the early times that the u.s. bomb yemen, in fact, the first time that president obama authorized the strike on yemen, they hit a village based on bad intelligence there was a senior al-qaeda figure, and they killed 14 women and 2 # 1 children. it was not a drone strike, but a cruise missile attack, and they used cluster bombs, flying land mines, and the village -- when we were in the province where the village was, we had the missile parts videotaped, and you see clearly they were

manufactured by general dynamics, made in the united states. one of the cluster bombs unexploded went off days later and blew up more people. the u.s. would have never taken credit for that strike, but for a brave journalist in yemen who went to the scene and exposed that it was an american strike. he took pictures of the missile parts, sent them to amnesty international and other groups, analyzed them by ammunition experts saying they are u.s. missiles, not missiled provided to the government, but only owned by the united states. what had happened in the aftermath. strike is that the yemen government took responsibility, and issued a press release saying the air force attacked an al-qaeda base killing 34 terrorists, and the u.s. sent congratulations to the yemen government. we now know from the wikileaks cable that general petraeus, the commander at the time, went to yemen and hatchedded a conspiracy with the president of yemen to start bombing that country and have the yemen government take responsibility

for the strikes. at one point in the meetings, the deputy prime minister joked with pretrace i just lied to the parliament saying it was our attack, and they laugh about it. the president of yemen says, you know, you can continue to bomb as long as we can say the bombs are ours, not yours. president obama initiates this intense coming campaign. cruise missiles, drone strikes, at times using special operation teams on the ground to unilaterally no and hunt people down. one of the main targets was anwar. bin laden gets killed in may of 2011 #, and then the u.s. tried to run the deck and start intensifying the drone strikes and narrowly miss killing him, and then a few months later, they find him in a location in northern yes , ma'am -- yemen where i start the story. in 2011, they have a choice to make. while there, his eldest son who

has not seen him in years is being raised the normal teenager by his grandparents. they are getting ready, want to send him to the united states for college. he just turned 16 years old. he's into hip hop, comic books, hung out at the square with the uprising against the dictator. the kid is 16 and wants to find his father who he has not seen for years and feels he's 16, he's crossing a line in life, and so he sneaks into his mother's bedroom one morning, goes into the purse and steals $40, and packs a bag, and goes to the bus stop in yemen in the old city, and he takes a bus to the province where family's roots are, and the scene of repeated strikes, attemptings to kill his father, and goes there to wait to see if his father finds him. while there waiting, his father is killed in the north of yemen where the u.s. had never done a strike before, and it was a

surprise he was there. he's killed. there's celebration in washington. a republican congressman said about the killing, if he was not a target, it was a bonus, it was a two-for. these are two use citizens, neither charged with a crime, killed in an assassination, a direct hit. you have lawmakers celebrating it as a triumph. the only people that said anything in washington in opposition to this were the usual suspects, dennis and ron paul, the only two people that said anything about it. [applause] he's killed, and the son is stuck in the village, there's an uprising, the roads are blocked, and grandparents call him and say your father's debt, it's over. come back. they were raising him. he said, i'll come as soon as roads clear, but i have to wait. he waited a couch l weeks. he's having dinner with his cousin he was 17 and other young

people in the tribe and sitting in an outdoor restaurant when a drone flies above, fires a hell fire missile, and blows the kids up. the obama administration never, ever explained why that kid was killed. was he killed because of his last name? no one's ever provided any evidence that kid had anything to do with terrorism. you know, if you look at the facebook page and see what interests were up to the moment he dirty died, this is a perfecy normal teenage nothing in common with his father, and the kid is killed with his teenage cousin. after he's killed, a u.s. military official leaks to a major u.s. paper that he was 2 # 1 # years old, that the family produced his colorado birth certificate saying he just turned 16 years old. said he was at an al-qaeda meeting, producing the list of the dead, showing he was with his cousins, all teenagers, at this restaurant. well, he was meeting in the

arabian peninsula. who was the target in the strike? why was this kid killed? when harry reid was on cnn, the majority leader, the senior democrat in the senate, when he was on cnn after the three americans killed in a two-week period by the president of the united states, he's on cnn, and he's asked by candy crowley about the killing of the three american citizens. he said i'm not talking about classified intelligence, but if there's three americans that deserved to be killed, it was those three. i went after reid's office demanding they explain what he did, why did he deserve to be killed, the 16-year-old kid? robert gibbs, who was the former white house press secretary, when he was serving as the senior surrogate for obama in the 2012 reelection campaign, he was the chief spokesperson for the campaign, he was asked by a young reporter about the

killing, and she said, you know, he was killed with no due process, it was an american teenager. he said, he should have had a more responsible father. there are few things i can think of more shameful in life than blaming the killing of a child on who their parents are or father was. robert gibbs should be ashamed of himself and shouldn't be able to appear in public without someone asking that man why he made that statement. [applause] i don't hang out with powerful officials. i'm not invited to the dinners. and laugh about drones, only time he speaks about it is when he's on john stewart or google hang out, but i'm not invited to the supersoaker parties, but i ran into a former senior official recently, chased him across the parking lot -- [laughter] true story, and i was trying to ask questions about someone deeply involved in the kill

program in overseeing these things, and he agreed to talk. i usually don't make agreements with powerful officials, but i want to understand what happened here. he said i'll talk if the name doesn't appear in the article. i don't like that, but i will. i can't say who it was, but it was a senior obama administration official. he said when president obama was told this kid was killed, that he was extremely upset, and that he was told, president was told by the cia and joint ordinary reason and operationed command that this guy mentioned before was alone and that was the target, but what was more interesting is john brennan, now the cia director, at the time was the senior adviser on homeland security and counterterrorism, that brennan believed it was an intentional hit, that either jsoc or cia intentionally killed the kid, perhaps based on false intelligence, and could not be a coincidence you killed the father, two weeks later, kill the son. there was an ordered review. what happened? he says, i don't know, i never saw it. i called the white house and

national security coup sill and they would not comment o me on it or confirm or deny there was a review done, and if there was, they would not share what the findings were. the official assured me, no, no, no, but listen, this is a misunderstanding oom. it was a mistake. the kid was collateral damage. if that's the assertion, and the line leaked, they didn't mean to kill the kid, why not say it then? why not just come forward and say it? what it looks like to most people is you killed the guy's kid because he was his kid. it's hard to wrap heads around how that could possibly be a coincidence. he said, look at it this way, we had just killed three u.s. citizens in a two week period, two of whom were not targets. it didn't look good. it was embarrassing. that was a direct quote. the reason they won't explain where the kid was killed because it would have been politically embarrassing for them? i mean, what planet are we living on right now? you know, i don't care if someone's an american or from yemen or pakistan. there's should be no difference

in our outrage when citizens are killed. it doesn't matter the citizenship. [applause] for me, the principle is this. if we're willing to do this to our own citizens, cross a line and deprive our citizens of the most basic liberties, of the right to respond to your accusers, to see evidence against you, have a trial, be judged by a jury of your peers, if we snatch that away and say for certain people, the mobs can grab the torches and deliver citizens justice, then stop saying we're the shining city on the hill and we're example for everyone else to follow. we should say we're a country that at timesments, in fact, encourages mob violation or extrajudicial killings because that's what this is. if we do it to our own citizens, how do we treat pakistan, somalia or mexicans? these are serious questions that need to be asked of this administration. the democrats are not asking

them. it's left for people to rand paul to ask questions. my gosh, i tried so hard to find something else i agree with him on, and i can't find it. i think he deserves credit for actually asking the questions that day on the senate floor. [applause] i didn't do the whole i stand with rand because i don't. i actually think it's embarrassing that that's who asked the questions, and for a third of that day for about, you know, a third of that 12-14 hour of brennan's nomination, some of the most fame discussions happened on the floor of the senate where reporting of greenwald and others was read into the record. the names said multiple times for the first time, you know, on c-span and the floor of the uses senate. the other two-thirds of the day was a carnival of crazies. just absolute -- michele bachmann inspired craziness with how they are killed in berkley

in a drone strike and tea party magazine offices bombed in montana, just pure craziness. what's happening here is that you've got on the right, people that, the scary black man president is going to come and drone strike us, motivating their fear of it. palin tweeting she's against drone strikes. yeah. if she's let into power, she's be a lover of drones. it's just because obama drones, if obama loves drens, they hate drones. the point i'm making here is we don't have serious people asking serious questions in congress so this stuff goes on unchallenged, and these guys look back someday when they try to challenge this stuff, if jeb bush is president or marco rubio is president, the republicans have field days with them. where were you when your guy did it? chai any is chuckling about the obama presidency saying thank good he cleaned it up for us because we can continue with the

next time we come into office. i want to wrap up so that we can have discussion and questions and interaction here, but i want to end saying what i've seen in the course of myrrh investigation around the world over the years is a healthyscape with war lords on the payroll who may or may not be attached, continue to work with mercenary companies under the obama administration, you know, black water's current academy. they rebranded, still on the payroll, and you got all the rent-a-armies still operating under president obama. back door use of secret prisons, guantanamo is open, hunger strikers force fed, men cleared for release in a prison that obama pled six years ago would be shut down. how much is actually changed

when it comes to counterterrorism operations. how much changed when it comes to the position of the u.s. in the world? the u.s. engaged in regime change in libya and open the door for groups that i guarantee you is a total repeat in afghanistan with the short sided goal of unseating the soviets and the consequences of acts of terrorism from the people you supported in a different point because it met your interests. someone asked the other day about syria, shouldn't the u.s. intervene to help in syria? we're the least credible broker in the middle east second only to israel. [applause] how are we going to intervene in syria where we destroy the its neighbor, iraq? we're helping along the saudis and others, fueling a sectarian war in syria. we have intervened on the side of instability in syria, part of the problem in syria.

.. the new york times rounding out a list of the kids killed in the newtown shooting at you see the ages, 6, 6, 7, 6, 7, just crushes you, it gets you as a person and the reason it does is because journalists actually did their job and told stories of