as the as the u.s. pulls in through both troops out of iraq some former soldiers say they've been abandoned by the country they've fought for now volunteers are stepping up to help veterans adjust to civilian life. the u.s. is also trying to speed up the process of extraditing alleged russian arms dealer victor boot bangkok and has reportedly already dispatched a special plane to collect him. to sell some. that i don't think will at the pain itself will never ever leave me women's rights campaigners sound the alarm over the rise in the number of female genital mutilation cases in the u.k. all of the practice is illegal in the country no one's ever been convicted of a crime and thousands are considered to be at risk in cheated. time now for you alone to show up next alone a look so why the sex scandal surrounding the wiki leaks founder is described as a distraction all that and more coming up on the a lot of.

well convey a lot of show that the real headlines with none of the mersey are coming live out of washington d.c. now today we keep hearing that word distraction coming from the mainstream media when it comes to the wiki leaks scandal and the islamophobia crisis but is this word being tossed around a little too easily well get salon's glenn greenwald's take on these issue and ask why the media deems them unworthy next we'll ask is the u.s. too quick to resort to bombs seems like bombs are the weapon of choice if we decide to go after iran but why does a topic of mass murder and destruction seem to go over so well in this country we'll speak to radio host tom hartman and is there a communication breakdown the u.s. has pledged billions in aid to pakistan since nine eleven and millions in severe

flooding in the region again however most pakistanis think that they have been completely neglected by the u.s. so we'll speak with a filmmaker about how the country really views america then we'll bring you more bad news when it comes to the economy housing prices are still down unemployment still at a high so could this really be the end of the american dream as we know it's or could the news be better for us in the long run well the reasons anthony ran down to weigh in on what it all means and as the tea partiers arrive in d.c. this weekend planners have given visitors a list of do's and don'ts to follow wait until you hear what is on this list it's so outrageous in fact the we had to bring in comedian seton smith to help us hash all out but now it's move on to today's top story. recently the word distraction has been coming out of many media mouths and keyboards and essence there are some stories that media pundits while being forced to discuss them alternately deem

unworthy of that discussion you know i agree there are a lot of examples out there but the two that i've heard use the most recently are completely unwarranted for starters we touched upon the debate over building a mosque two blocks away from ground zero yesterday and we showed the following video which i think proves that this is not about a single building but about the rise of islamophobia and hate towards muslims in america. but don't. look at the way the old god. was. thank god. that is not a distraction neither is the continuing debate over wiki leaks and whether they are a criminal or her roic organization i think we all have our moral opinions but from a legal perspective criminalizing wiki leaks could be dangerous for all journalists

in the future so again why is the media who would be affected calling this a mere distraction or earlier i caught up with salons glenn greenwald and asked him why he thought that were a distraction is applied to those two stories. i think calling something a distraction is a way of getting rid of a story bad people don't want to be getting attention in the case of the mosque i think there's a perception on the part of democrats and progressives that this issue has been politically harmful to president obama and to the democrats in going into the midterm elections and so even though in my view it raises some of the most critical questions that american political culture has to face involving religious freedom in how we treat muslims and how we think about muslims and who to assign blame to for the september eleventh attacks there's a temptation to call it a distraction hoping from the democratic perspective that people will start

ignoring you i think with. we could expose a serious threat to the ability of the government to conduct itself in secrecy it highlights how atrocious and brutal american wars are and so there's a tendency to try and dismiss its importance as well because there's a desire not to have those issues now of course anything that you know doesn't look too good for the government we definitely don't want to touch and go to distraction you know i want to get into the wiki leaks story here and the you know the recent revelations essentially are that we can leaks as if they offered the pentagon the option to look over these afghanistan files so they could read back names if they wanted to and they refused according to wiki leaks now unfortunately you know there were some names at the end of the day published that a lot of critics have said should have been taken out of there and as of now even the pentagon has stated that no one has been hurt because of the release of these documents but let's just you know hypothetically if someone were to come in harm's way you know then who do you think is more fault here is it with the leaks for the

fact that they published these papers or is it the pentagon for the fact that they were offered the chance to take names off and yet they chose not to. being both parties bear responsibility for their own actions i think we really ought to have been some of more careful in redacting names of innocent afghans are people who had cooperated with the americans who then may be in danger as a result of exposure but ultimately i think the brunt of the responsibility lies at the pentagon and i think that for two reasons one is it's much easier for the pentagon to redact those names and it is for weak you expose because we he doesn't know all the names in those documents you are cooperative with americans they don't know where to find them and most of all they don't have the resources to go through may need two thousand documents and redact them all i mean it's a credibly time consuming and resource consuming and expensive they're a volunteer organization the pentagon is much better able to know what needs are

exacting and to actually do the redactions and the other aspect of it is these are afghan sources who cooperated with the united states military and ultimately the responsibility for protecting them allies with the pentagon and so i think it's legitimate to criticize we do eat for exercising insufficient care and redact in these names but the fact that they offered the pentagon the ability to at least have input and about god refused i think means that the pentagon bears the brunt of the responsibility for any consequences right now insufficient care you know that's one way to put blame on making leaks you could say morally also that someone might be opposed to the fact that they've released these documents but give me a legal perspective you are after all lawyer you know in any way is what we keep leaks did as this third party non-governmental organization julian assigns as a non american citizen did they actually break the law in some way you know in america can they be called criminals for what they did. well it's

a very difficult question and the reason it's difficult is because in the american legal system there is almost no tradition at all of prosecuting people who are not government employees for transmitting classified information in general the only people who have a duty to keep cross by information secret are people who work for the government i mean newspapers all the time publish classified information and they're not prosecuted for it because there is generally it's perceived that there's no duty if you're working for the government to keep the government secrets now there is a statute that was an active one nine hundred seventeen called the espionage act which some people suggest impose a generalized duty on everybody to keep secrets and that makes you a criminal if you don't but i think the much better argument is that that that statute really was designed to prohibit the transmission of secret information to a foreign government in other words espionage acting as a spy not people who publish cross about information in order to bring about

accountability or transparency to the government and then as you suggest there is the added question of how can it be of a foreign national there's not an american citizen and he was not on american soil possibly as a bound by the pentagon's creed's about what is and is not secret so at the very best these are complex legal questions but i think the real danger is from deciding that we're going to start now prosecuting third party non-governmental actors for publicising for publishing classified information that would mean that every media outlet could be prosecuted as a criminal as well. well yeah i'm happy you said that i was just going to ask you if you thought that this does set some kind of a dangerous precedent you know for for journalism as well in this country if they do decide to make an example of wiki leaks now i have to ask you another thing you know this this this fear and this always wanting to contain all of the information keep everything secret do you think this is a result also of this post nine eleven attitudes that you know these days

everything in america is perceived as a threat. bad stuff only a part of it although i would hasten to add that essentially since the. foundation the formation of what has become known as the america's national security state or what dwight eisenhower called the military industrial complex secrecy has really been the linchpin of everything that this faction i mean the ability to operate without transparency and behind a wall of secrecy has been fundamental to you everything that it did and that's because once you vest the power of secrecy in a group it becomes addictive because not only do you then give yourself the power to be able to act illegally illegally or criminally or abusively or corruptly but there's also no accountability even for your inept decisions and your incompetent decisions because nobody knows what what you've done and we really now accepted the idea and it's certainly intensified in the aftermath of nine eleven with all the

bush and the obama administrations that anything remotely connected to national security is almost i'm a parent lee but worthy of secrecy and what we've gotten as a result is what the washington post called top secret america basically an entire incredibly consequential faction of the united states government that literally operates in the dark and you know exactly we have now top secret america and we have muslim hating america and neither of those two stories are things that i think are distractions and don't deserve the media's attention and glenn thanks so much for joining us. my pleasure thanks robert. still to come an american man convicted of torturing afghan citizens is making headlines again we'll tell you where the self described terrorist hunter has turned up now and we'll ask the question why is the prospect of bombing always on the table in american political discourse i'll get some insight from radio host tom hartman a return. for the feel we've got.

the biggest issues get a human voice face to face with the news makers. an american who's appointed himself as an international terrorist interrogator has surfaced in mexico and his name is jonathan damon and according to media reports he's holed up inside of a house in the small mexican town of. it's not really clear why dave was in mexico but police were called to the home after a person told them that they had been raped and deprived of their personal liberty inside but i need to give you a little bit of a back story here on who this jonathan really is he was convicted in september of two thousand and four for running a private prison in afghanistan and for torturing afghan citizens and appa time damon had been portraying himself as a u.s. government sponsored special forces operative on

a mission to apprehend terrorists and the u.s. government has repeatedly denied any such claims and he was granted a pardon by afghan president hamid karzai april two thousand and seven so he only had to serve three years of a ten year sentence now when he was first arrested i had three afghans in his custody all were blindfolded and beaten and strapped to the ceiling by their feet five others were found tied to chairs in a small dark room nearby and the room was littered with bloody clothing he reportedly went to afghanistan in two thousand and one to do humanitarian relief work but a former associate told the new yorker magazine that he damon said he was going there to kill every thing afghan that he could see now the pentagon did confirm at one time that they had a contact with the deva but they rejected his offer to help capture terror suspects . so now he's turned up in mexico and nobody knows why he's there but with his history i think it's pretty safe to say that he's being a commando and doing

a very very messed up and disturbing things all in the name of suppose of humanitarianism how the hell did someone like this serve just three years of a sentence for torturing innocent civilians the story is just more and more disturbing but he's definitely someone that we're going to keep our eye on as more reports continue to come out. now back in two thousand and eight arizona man planned a massacre outside of the super bowl and sent threatening letters to six different media outlets only to end up getting cold feet and ultimately turning himself in instead of going through with this plan curse it william have locks sent out death threats letting the media know his plan and saying i will slay her children i will quote shed the blood of the innocent now fast forward to today where have logs been charged on six counts of mailing threatening letters and sentenced to a year in prison but have claimed that he committed no crime at all and in

a two to one decision the u.s. court of appeals has agreed with him the judge claimed that under the threatening letters statute the letters have to be addressed to a specific individual and since have logged only said letters to the media and the corporations and not to a specific person within the corporation he didn't commit a crime now this ruling as a lot of people can view is and to be honest we are to according to the court of appeals a corporation isn't a natural person earlier this year i think we all remember the supreme court's declaring that corporations are people too they said the corporations are like people because they're created by people not by the state so therefore they are extensions of people so now that we've called out this contradiction in the judicial system i'm just curious what they're planning on doing about it my guess is that the supreme court is going to run to defend the rights of corporations then

why not remember cording to them corporations are so special they are people too. now america is the only country in the world that has use nuclear force to this day nagasaki and hiroshima are two looked at as to the darkest days in history the cold war is also long over and the idea of a nuclear stalemate was thought to have passed with it yet for some reason in american political discourse the prospects of dropping another bomb have never come off the table and these days with the threat of a nuclear iran the idea of using nuclear force has once again come to the forefront so we have to wonder why in this freedom loving democratic nation the idea of bombing and annihilating other populations always remains ok and in some minds even necessary well joining me to discuss it from portland is radio host tom hartman tom thanks for being here first of all you know the reason i bring this up is because lately we've just been hearing too much from the john bolton's and the jeffrey

goldberg of the world and now you know there's a new article by robert kaplan in the atlantic those reverting back to henry kissinger's book from one nine hundred fifty seven in which he talks about limited nuclear war as the best deterrence. do you think of these guys are a little too bomb happy. yeah but to put it in a word yes absolutely there are there are always going to be elements within every society who gravitate toward the u.s. or terror and toward the violence and for whom violence is the easiest solution and and there are going to be always intellectual snobbery society who are going to route violence the easy solution of violence which frankly typically isn't actually is a solution going to wrap it in an intellectual mystique and justification kissinger did that with it nom so i frankly i think unsuccessfully he's a i think most of the world judges him as a war criminal and and suggested that we should even consider nuclear as you point out back in the fifty's suggested that we should consider nuclear limited exchanges

. kaplan now suggesting something similar with the round or at least that having the substantive threat of it i think is. is is dangerous we really need to consider why you know why iran why what kind of relationship when you get out with why i think you know what really worries me about it and scares me about it most is the need to always act preemptively you know kaplan also goes into quotes from henry kissinger as book where kissinger says that are in parasitism dooms us so the fact that we have we think too much before we act is clearly a problem and instead we're always as opposed to act preemptively but i mean that those guys forget about iraq about the fact that there were no w m d's there why is this always the solution. but or even good enough it non was you know the domino theory we didn't stop them in vietnam pretty soon they take all of southeast asia and then boom you know they'd be in hawaii and california the the situation in iraq

and iran and afghanistan and pakistan that that whole region we need to remember that for four years we supported both saddam hussein and iran in a war against each other supporting both sides somewhat differently to get in there was essentially a shia sunni war and the shias are the minority around the world among the muslims of a significantly small minority and iran is a mostly shia state that the sunni is are the people who assuming that all the stories of nine eleven you know for a moment was just assume that the official line is accurate it was sunni arabs it was you know it was the bin laden's it was the saudis it was the egyptians and and having a shia state with considerable influence over iraqis majority shia population even though it's going to. well so far doesn't any government at all that theoretically a mixed government. i think is

a really important thing to have frankly as an ally and demographics are on our side it's high amazon are siding with iran even if they get a nuclear weapon now tell me this thing has the obama administration you know for if you listen to jeffrey call for exactly what a frustrated because you know i think a lot of people would believe that obama one never actually bomb iran and yet you know they themselves say the every option is on the table do you find it odd to hear from a president that on one hand touts eliminating nuclear weapons from this war as one of his top priorities to also say at the same time that all options are on the table. i think that's incumbent on any head of state any any the leader of any government has to be has to say for public consumption and frankly at some level has to be willing to back it up. you know circumstances may arise that would require us to use for any states use its most potent weapons that's i think that

that's. the political reality the the willingness to do it though or the ability to do it is very different from commode in the idea of doing it or even from using it as see you know the the urgency of doing it as a threat that wanders into the area as kaplan as by any insane now tom very quickly i just want to ask you two how much do you think that perhaps you know the media shapes public opinion because i recently was looking at a rasmussen poll where you know fifty one percent of americans said that america should help israel or they believe america help israel if it attacks iran but you know i find it interesting why don't they ask americans if they think iran should be attacked in the first place and they also asked americans how many of them think iran's an enemy why don't they has if you know how many people think iran is a friend you know how does the way these questions are asked to shape your people's perceptions and ideas well you know they certainly do and and the bigger problem

with those kind of public opinion polls is that if you ask them if you asked how many americans can find around on a map it would be less than ten or fifteen percent how many americans know the difference between a sunni and shia and and which iran is probably a smaller percentage than that so i do very very careful about trying to base u.s. foreign policy on polls all right tom thanks so much for giving us your perspective on that. coming up the u.s. is sending millions in aid to help flood ravaged pakistan but is the u.s. trying to buy goodwill from a nation where most of the people have a negative view of america and will it ever have a chance of working we'll discuss that in a moment. since

nine eleven the u.s. government has provided about eighteen billion dollars in civilian and military aid to pakistan make it in the top five recipients of u.s. aid now the country is rigged with monsoon floods which could displace up to twenty million people the u.s. is still sending in millions more but if you look at the polls this doesn't seem to be buying america any goodwill in the eyes of the pakistani public in fact according to a recent pew research poll half of all pakistanis believe that the u.s. gives a little to no assistance to their country and nearly six in ten describe the u.s. as an enemy so what we blame that on is that the way the aid is distributed the people that it's given to you or is it simply the fact that the two countries just don't understand each other or discuss it with me is i should shout writer and

director of the documentary film pakistan inside the tinderbox i should thank so much for being here and you for having me now there's two issues essentially that i want to discuss here when it comes to aid you know it's where the aid actually goes and what's done with it and then where people think the aid goes if they even know that is being given in the first place you know so if we look. at some of those polls that i just mentioned about the fact that half of america's standing is all pakistanis don't even think the u.s. gives an aid six in ten think of the u.s. as an enemy you know what do you think it is that shapes these perceptions why do people think that way well i think a lot of the pakistanis that i interviewed during my documentary i asked them about u.s. aid and they were very quick on their response and they said we're not seeing the results. they think that if the u.s. aid is coming then their economy should be getting better there should be more development their educational institutions should be better and they're not seeing

that and so that's why they believe it's not going to the right people and there is a history of corruption in the country and so they think that it goes into the pot . it's of a lot of politicians and that's really the general feeling among the common folks so in that sense is their anger with their own governments for the fact that their government is corrupt and they're not distributing the money or is it you know out of america for i don't know being foolish enough to give it to the government because if you give it to if not the military well it's definitely split between both parties there's there's a side of pakistan which. blames the government there's the other side that does not want to trust america and does not know where the aid goes because they're not seeing it. you know a lot of people would put blame you know i was reading from a lot of analysts today they're saying you know there's a poor coordination with the pakistani government but there's also

a lack of understanding of pakistan's means in the sense that america when they choose to give aid they also like to say how you're allowed to use it so you know do you think that's a problem do you think that america doesn't really understand pakistan and what it needs i think that is a problem and i think you have to remember that to understand pakistan you need to understand the pakistani people i mean you need to understand all of them across the board you need to understand the poor and you need to understand the elite you need to understand everyone in the middle and each of those groups have different needs they have different goals they have different professions in these floods over a billion dollars of crops have been damaged and so to understand pakistan right now it's very important to really focus on that focus on making these people self-sufficient so they can get back on their feet and back with their lives now you know one of the things that i really found interesting in your film too is you

showed very different sides of pakistan you definitely you know sixty percent of the population there lives on two dollars a day or less and that at the same time you showed us some of this. cities you you were on you know red carpets with with models and with designers that we're bringing fashion week so how do you fuse those two together to you know i mean how one hand it's like as an american when i was looking at you know the fashion week and the fact that there's a mercedes and there's mcdonald's and i think carl's jr harneys or something i saw in one of the images you think oh this is just like us and then the same time how do you understand that sixty percent of the population lives in horrible poverty and that was one of the goals of my documentary i wanted to show his son on on a different level i wanted to show that ok there's there's a there's poor people in the in pakistan and this is what they live in this these are the conditions and also the same time i really wanted to show a more positive image of his son i think the son deserves that there are there are

good things about the country too and that's a lot what the people that i interviewed they really focused on that they were like you know we have good things in this country too but the international media just and focus on it so that's what i went there to ask them tell me those good things and tell me where you think pakistan needs to improve and tell me about united states tell me about the aid that goes there and i think the documentary really brings out different faces do they feel ignored by the media altogether though because on one hand it's the media's covering the positives and at the same time you know what about the coverage of the floods we just have thirty seconds yes coverage of the floods actually a lot of people i've been in touch with and. they're very frustrated that the international media did not give it as much coverage as it should because this is a huge natural disaster over twenty million people have been affected five million displaced and eight hundred thousand people are completely cut off from any type of

relief help so they are frustrated at that and they're doing everything in their power to really spread the word and to help the flood victims open up their arms thank you so much for imbued. great film to go into so hard still to come will name our tool time winner and also ahead of facebook has decided to censor an ad which calls for the end of the prohibition of marijuana and i thought facebook was supposed to be progressive company also will dive into the latest economic news the housing market takes another dive and there are several bubbles that are about to burst to reasons anthony rand joins me in just a few minutes. there was that so much. maybe you would like to have a real treat this system world needs to turn over robin should the rich be taxed more for the benefit of everyone else and what kind of.