how about a leader in talks for months with the afghan government was an impostor that's coming up next. for the feast we've got. the biggest issues good voice face to face with the news makers. welcome the low to show that the real headlines with none of the mersey were coming alive out of washington d.c. don't article out of the new york times revealed today of the taliban leader who was in talks with the afghan government wasn't fact a fake it took at least nine months to figure out that this alleged shopkeeper was fronting as a second ranking member of the taliban but not before he was given a lots of money according to reports so is this just more proof that the u.s. is not winning we're going to speak with blogger robert farley there then there's

a lot of economic news today consumer spending helped the economy grow in the third quarter but international problems with europe north and south korea also led to a drop in shares on wall street alternate economic out of there zach carter will join us with his take on the ups and downs next to member how fall out shelters were a way of life during the cold war despite the warnings from politicians and pundits that we still face nuclear threats today nobody really seems to be preparing in the same way anymore archie's preassure they're investigating and she's going to join us to talk about the legacy of the fallout shelter then forty five activist groups are teaming up pressing congress to investigate the conduct by the federal law by federal law enforcement the group claims that they were wrongfully targeted by the f.b.i. and had their homes raided computers confiscated so i'm going to speak with someone who's calling for the investigation by writing a letter directly to president obama believe it or not she's done it again sarah palin has a new book out today and surely it offers up plenty of material worth laughing

about so who better than comedian stephen smith to come on and give us his take. on sarah's writings but we are saving all of that for the end of the show now let's move on to day's top story. you really couldn't make this story up for months we have been told that high level taliban commanders were negotiating with the afghan government and nato officials but this was proof that general david petraeus the strategy was working and that we were taking away their momentum to the point where the taliban decided that they had to negotiate all this of course despite well omar the top taliban official vehemently deny anything of that sort then today the new york times reported the man going by the name of mullah muhammad months sort who is believed to be the second highest taliban commander and whom the negotiations have taken place with well we found out that he was in fact a fraud a phony a fake an impostor a lowly shopkeeper from quetta according to some officials not to make it even

worse not only had afghan and nato officials held three meetings with the man from whom they secured roadways flew to kabul on nato aircraft into the presidential palace they also according to officials gave him a lot of money i told you you really can't make that story up but now the money's gone now that our intelligence has proven to be embarrassingly inadequate and all hopes of peace talks have been demolished can we please just admit the we're not winning now joining me from cincinnati to discuss it is robert farley a blogger for lawyers guns and money robert thank you so much for joining us today now before we get into the beef i guess you could say you know the meat of this article just tell me what your initial reaction was when you when you read this story just oh my god awful are you kidding me that's what i thought at least it's a real embarrassment and it really indicates how badly or cold it's feeling in afghanistan right now that we were almost totally unable to determine even who we

were talking to a group we were giving money to. and i mean the. have to be a lot of people in the. in the u.s. military and in the u.s. intelligence community who are going to be severely embarrassed by these revelations and i think the same thing is probably true of the afghan government because the afghan government of course should also have a sense of who exactly they were talking to i mean reportedly this guy met with president karzai although of course i think denies it but my my initial reaction was was was shocked just shock and amusement i guess because it is kind of a funny story even though it has tried tragic overtones. but remarkable that we paid somebody and negotiated with somebody who we had not the faintest idea who it was not to mention that they really didn't tell us how much money was lost they basically just said that we gave them a lot of money and i don't know of some you know military official terms and who knows that could be millions of dollars and i know that you know where we're kind of in that process that we've done it before we we pay people off we did it in iraq

but it doesn't kind of deceit the purpose of the peace talks of negotiating if you have to pay the person to even show up. well not not necessarily i mean a lot of times you'll pay an army to intermediaries for contacts you'll pay people in order to effectively to get them on your side or to sort of vested interest so that they will be your agent but of course those things only work if you're talking to somebody who actually has the potential to have leverage over whoever your opponent is and so while the practice of using money to buy off insurgents or to buy off elements of the of the enemy isn't and it's off absurd even though it can be kind of sketchy at times the actual execution in this case of figuring out who we were paying off was obviously the failure and again there has to be some substantial level embarrassment in the intelligence community about about their failure regarding which guy and you know he really is just a lowly shopkeeper like some officials are saying then wow he has made off with

a hell of a lot of money that's going to get him far in afghanistan but you know i mean there are a lot of effort guys and. like you said it's not only embarrassment i mean this puts our entire intelligence operations into question i mean if you if you listen to our intelligence officials if you read bob woodward's book you get the impression that they know everything that's going on in afghanistan they know every face and here they sat across the table with someone on more than one occasion you know looked him in the eyes and still couldn't tell that he you know supposedly call themselves the number two taliban commander that's incredible and so then you know that i think you have to start questioning well when we go out on night raids when we say that we're reading a home where we think it's not civilians but in fact insurgents how do we know that there are civilian casualties aren't ten times higher than we think. right right and i think i can remember who exactly it was but somebody made the observation that we claim to be able to kill taliban leaders and other insurgents from a thousand miles away or even eight thousand miles away we kill them from about it

with unmanned drones and the logic of that is we can identify these terrorists and then kill them with these robots but in this case it was made clear we couldn't even figure out who the taliban was when we were sitting across from them when we misidentified somebody as a member of the taliban who apparently wasn't a member it will be interesting to see the agencies in the u.s. government fighting over who precisely is responsible for this the cia still has a pretty black eyes from the assassination of seven of us believe it was seven of its members in eastern afghanistan who were conducting the drone war in a very similar situation where somebody had purported to be a double agent and had ended up simply being a supporter of the taliban and it will be interesting whether the cia is also responsible here or whether it's more of the military organizations who are participating i think i suspect we'll see some infighting pretty soon about where the responsibility of law is but you know it opens up serious questions because our

entire strategy is based on intelligence based on being able to gather intelligence about who we're fighting it seems apparent here that we were able to gather the most basic forms of intelligence yeah and you know and in terms of strategies here recently general they have betrayed us has been touting his campaign of ramping up the bombings in the you know the night raids as something that's working something that really is putting increasing pressure on the taliban to the point where you know they made it seem like they decided they had no other choice than to start peace negotiations despite the fact that mullah omar always denied this and well you know here we find out that in fact it's true that there were no kind of peace negotiations involved and we do you feel like this is an ideological battle that we're fighting the people that we're fighting they don't want to negotiate there is no mistakes for them there are no regrets they will just keep going. and so you know will this get through their heads after this. i mean it depends on and i am i'm not one hundred percent sure yet that there's not a negotiated position for the taliban or somewhere but i think that's now in

serious question whether there is a element of tell them that is worth or that is worth talking to that is interested in negotiations right now or whether we can carry out those negotiations it's interesting that you mention the airstrikes because of course the airstrikes are utterly dependent on on intelligence and again we know how serious reason to question whether. whether we have that kind of intelligence and i think you're right in extending this to a larger set of concerns about the entire war in afghanistan whether there is any sort of partner on the afghan side whether there is a moderate taliban or even a non moderate element could be you know negotiated with in some fashion and if not what implications that has war the united states and nato are leaving afghanistan at some point in the future i mean i think this whole fantastic questions that this article really sort of brings to the fore a very stark way yeah i mean after nine years you think that you would at least be

able to identify who it is that your enemy is and you know here we're seeing that the really that isn't possible so i guess all we can help is you know there's going to be a new strategic review of the war effort that's taking place in december and you know prior to this prior even to the nato summit we had heard that there wasn't really going to be any kind of a review that they were going to start you know telling the exact same line that this is working and you know they're putting pressure on them and now i hope that they actually start were viewing it and raise all of these questions or otherwise to help rob thanks so much for joining us thank you for having me. still to come on tonight's show fallout shelters they used to be a way of life during the height of the cold war so where did all that fear and hysteria. there has more on rethinking bomb shelter in the area excuse me when we come back and then we have the economy just a series of ups and downs the state's consumer spending is up but wall street is hurting out for news of european debt and the collapse of the irish government with

global turmoil in the koreas and ireland somehow the dollar still staying strong so we're going to speak with alter net's economic advisers that carter after the break . was that similar to the do you consider. mark lee. in we're to go from here do you wish you would try to find peace settlement among the palestinians and israelis. remain you believe something in. the realm of. the future. well there's a lot of economic news out there to cover today the third quarter reports show that the u.s. economy grew at

a rate of two forty five per cent more what was expected and thanks primarily to a rise in consumer spending wages and salaries also rose giving hope for the upcoming holiday shopping season but most of this was overshadowed by actions of broad as north korea lobbed dozens of shells into south korea's waters and onto an island killing two soldiers injuring civilians and of course the news ireland is now formally seeking a bailout sparking new concerns over european debt these international developments led to a drop in shares on wall street with investors on edge but a rise in the dollar so just. why the slow and weak u.s. economy do is say that today's events prove that the dollar still where people turn to for stability or is that not even really got inside it here to discuss it with me is that carter alter net's economics editor sack thanks so much for being here so again like i was saying you know we see the turmoil around the world investors seem to be. uncertain and the stock markets falling and yet at the same time the dollar always goes up do you think that that's good news that means that we're

stable people still believe in it it is in a sense it's good news in that it does believe the sort of deficit hysteria is a little bit overblown. when when interest rates are very low as they've been for a long time it means there's a lot of confidence in the dollar but when you have a lot of international turmoil that we've had people fly to quality and they're flying to the dollar the drawback is that one of the big obstacles to economic growth in the united states real economic growth not just these anemic two and a half percent quarterly burst is a strong dollar strong dollar is actually impeding that because it encourages companies to send jobs overseas and when the jobs go overseas there's just not anything to be any work to be done here so we actually need to have a weaker dollar in terms of the global situation but the good news is that if congress really wanted to they could pass some sort of fiscal stimulus plan and spend a lot of money creating those jobs so. we're going to say though that you know the fed latest actions in terms of q.e. two also weaken the dollars stand over the there clearly designed to do exactly

that but he was also sort of like handing handing congress a interest free credit card it tells congress you can spend billions and billions of dollars to create jobs and it will not affect interest rates at all because we're going to be buying up these treasury bonds from the banks so if congress would step up and actually spend that money approve that kind of package q.e. two could be really really effective unfortunately the republican party has just been just was elected in the house made very clear that they oppose government spending in just about any form whether it helps the economy or not but then of course we have the third quarter report that came out today that said the court the economy grew by two point five percent better than the egg. expected two percent which is your right that's the new make and that's sad news for the u.s. economy but it's growth at this point and it was largely led by consumer spending which you know that's not government created that's not jobs created it's consumers going out and you know wanting to show off it's like saying you didn't die but you just had all of your limbs amputated i think it's really really not particularly good news if you look at the big numbers that jump out in that report it's the

corporate profit numbers which is very high relative i was getting to getting as a percentage economy but the profits are driven by expense cutting which is slang for economists for layoffs they're firing people and long term that's that's simply damaging that means there are fewer jobs in the economy so there's less money in the economy so these companies who boasted big numbers this quarter aren't able to make those big numbers again later because no one's got the money to spend well that is of course the discouraging part because you're right the corporate profit was at a record rate i mean is since the end of the sixty years of the government's actually been tracking corporate growth this is the highest that it's ever been and at the same time our unemployment numbers are not going down from what we've seen the highest it's ever been if you don't adjust if you don't adjust as you have this legacy but it's still it's still very high you know really the sound is going to say that it's still high i wrote i mean i think you know in the one nine hundred ninety s. . there something like eight percent now they're at eleven percent it is it is significantly higher than trend but it's higher for the wrong reasons if you want to see it corporate profits go up because people have money to spend on useful

things that produce social value and so they go out and do it that's not actually what's happening companies are just laying people off well what's going to happen i mean of course the holiday season is coming up shopping season black friday everyone's been talking about it tell me how that might skew some of let's say the fourth quarter report you know i mean because you're assuming people are going to go out and shop even if they're struggling right now they're going to go out and get their gadgets and they're going to trample each other to get into wal-mart at four o'clock in the morning but then you know so the fourth quarter we're going to get surprising numbers to try to make it look like everything's fine and dandy and then we drop again well funny thing about the way they calculate. and i mix to sixty typically they're seasonally adjusted so there's some sort of. sort of fix for the fact that you know december is a little bit different from february because of the crazy shopping sprees that happen around christmas and this year i think it's pretty safe to assume that christmas is not going to be quite as merry for a lot of people as it's been say a decade ago so those those numbers could actually end up looking really really bad

just because we expect such a big boost and we get only a slight boost from the spending on a seasonally adjusted basis things look really bad i don't know i mean there's a lot of deals out there i think wal-mart is shipping everything for free you know sales are lasting longer if they're going to i mean we talked about this with guest before is that it seems like you know despite the fact there might be real you know large disparities in america you're still going to go out and buy just those little gadgets that maybe make you you're going to go buy an i phone you're going to go buy an i pad or just some kind of m p three player because that you know gives you a false sense of i don't know i don't equate the word nobody by gives this time of year they do it and they find some way to make something work but they're not going to they just don't have the same money they had three or four years ago even people who have been kicked out of their homes to foreclosures you know we have this absolutely record crisis level of foreclosures that's been sustained the united states for almost four years now even people who have been kicked out of their homes have seen their home values plummet dramatically which means they their household net worth has gone down as well they've seen their retirement plans decimated by the stock market crash and in two thousand and eight they just don't

have a lot of money to spend in to the extent they do they're spending it on debt on things like credit card debt paying off that debt paying off mortgage debt and actually finally money on our credit card debt a little too well but they're but they're basically funneling money back to banks that in turn do not lend to support the economy what's wrong with this very quickly if we just watched the politics for one second so corporations now have you know record profits they have a lot of money to spend and they're making it pretty clear right now that they're not going to find all that money to barack obama to the democrats i'm twenty twelve that was very clear during the election cycle certainly mostly the outside spending as they call the independent corporate expenditures went overwhelmingly to. republicans and they elected republicans who are very very much in league with the with corporate elites in this country particularly wall street so i don't need to keep doing it i mean i was worried of reading our reports today saying that you know they're sick of being called names by the obama administration and so it's kind of scary to think it is the more money they have the less is going to go to and remarkable that something what they're upset about is being called names by the president not not any of the any specific policies because you actually look at his

policies they've been sort of what wall street wanted all along there's been a few things what wall street who thought that they were so sensitive they just like any names that thank you so much for being here thanks for having me all right moving up the threat of nuclear war with the soviet union was once considered the united states' greatest fear the u.s. attempt to repair the paper by performing drills and setting out fall out shelters across the country but today despite our politicians talking about the threats of a nuclear iran or a nuclear north korea we don't see anything in comparison to what was once mass hysteria are there has the story. it was the first and foremost fear of a generation. let's face it threat of hydrogen is the greatest danger our nation has ever known the american way of life was under

attack and everyone had to have a plan of action the key to survival is adequate shelter that's why the federal government has a nationwide shelter program. in the event of a nuclear strike the government had thousands of fallout shelters ready and stocked to protect the american people factory. apartment house and. provide shelter inside you'll find can to water to last you at least two weeks you'll also find a flashlight with batteries and medical equipment to assist your fellow citizens. in the nation's capital thousands of shelters existed but now only a few hundred of them are still noticeable there are about a thousand shelters originally but today all of the interior shelters most here adam irish is a history buff who has made it his mission to find the shelters today we're trying to preserve the signs as a memory to the area where there are an error that bill brown remembers very well i

was a junior high school student here from fall of one nine hundred sixty two and told the spring of one nine hundred sixty far more was well underway children here i'm sure like myself would here like a fire fire and think it was an air raid siren sounds that hammered home the nation's greatest fear i think everybody in our young impressionable age had great concerns about this you know it caused a lot of paranoia. but if washington was ever attacked a room full of beans and cots wasn't going to do much for the residents of the city it is important to know that these shelters are only meant to protect people against fallout and not the blast itself fall is the term for radioactive particles that fill the air in the aftermath of a nuclear explosion billions of them would fall from the sky. releasing radiation that could cause sickness or death in the area where they will follow wasn't a real threat because the city would have been first on the job but despite the

pointless preparations people like brown felt it was better to do something than nothing we were just doing what we were told to do you know it the idea that you know the fly ash was the important thing in the shock wave would have wanted to be away from where would you be when the atomic bombs fall. but today you can secure your family's future by reserving a spot in a state of the underground falls from bolton what was the nation's greatest fear and the protection against it have become a distant memory only to be poked fun at in video games and movies. if washington was bombed with a nuclear bomb would you know what to do you know. no not at all just go as low as . you know what that sign means behind you i would assume that it's an actual through there and that if there was some kind of nuclear attack you could hide there but i've never noticed it before so i would assume it's also dated and probably then are you worried that there could be

a nuclear war to mando no why not just just let in the cold just have it and if it happened would you know what to do. probably like everybody else not really getting these are bright with your head but has the threat of a nuclear strike really disappeared back then it was mutually assured destruction so no one fired missiles at each other today you know it's just a terrorist group that has a missile it's nothing to stop. something to stop a reasonable recognize the threat to our way of life. but while people might still face a nuclear threat with no specific anime many believe it's pointless to prepare for preassure either party washington d.c. . well prius here in the studio right now to tell us more about this story you know i guess it's kind of funny to have you and i talking about it because we're both too young to really remember those days when the you know the threat of

a nuclear war really existed even though today like i said we have pundits we have politicians that are talking about the threats of a nuclear iran nuclear north korea or you know nuclear weapons getting into the hands of terrorists i don't really feel like i'm ever at risk of getting a bomb dropped and i think it's pretty clear that the other people on the street that you spoke to felt the same way you do you ever have those fears yeah it's really hard to kind of relate to that mass hysteria that was going on in the sixty's you know i was talking to bill brown about it and he said people really were afraid they would walk around on the streets and you know they would know what to do they would see the fallout shelter signs and they would keep those things in mind and you know i can't exactly say why people today aren't so afraid about these things i think that perhaps you know there's more skepticism in general people question things that the government says you know you don't say you don't just take it for granted that oh you know because they say that this is a threat that could happen tomorrow that you know maybe it actually could and i

also think another major factor is the twenty four seven media cycle you know we're afraid of spoiled milk we're afraid of planes getting hijacked were afraid of you know all kinds of things so i think people in this day and age just realize that you can't really live your life you know worried about what's going to happen in the next fifteen minutes you kind of just have to live in the moment a little more i guess you could say yeah i think we i guess we you could say definitely we're a little desensitized because there's something you know is going to give you cancer whatever you touch whatever you. anything could go wrong at any given moment but what's interesting too is with these fallout shelters i mean it's pretty obvious that they would not have protected people from you know from the impact of a bomb from the blast there but how much money do you know that the government spent at that time fueling it into thousands of these shelters you know in the cold war and general defense you know they were spending bill you. dollars obviously building tanks all kinds of weapons but with the follow specifically initially they set aside two hundred eight million dollars kind of setting aside basements

stocking them with food medical supplies things like that and as you saw in the story especially in cities like washington d.c. or new york city they would have been on the top of the hit list and if a blast was actually to happen in a city like this it wouldn't protect anyone from anything because those shelters really only protected people from follow which is kind of the cloud that happens in the aftermath and so you know it's really interesting because they had all these elaborate evacuation plans on how to get all these federal government workers out of the city and in reality we would have only had fifteen minutes to get everyone into a shelter to get everyone away from washington d.c. which you know think about that obviously you can't evacuate an entire city in fifteen minutes so i think that's another reason that people aren't so concerned about these things anymore because when you look back at the sixty's and you look back at the civil defense you know they're kind of a joke today you think about movies like blast from the past with elisia silverstone you know i mean nothing's going to happen if there was

a nuclear attack to there really isn't much you can do well tell me this i mean has the government changed their game plan at all if you look at literature today on their websites do they have in all the you know an alternative strategy because there is definitely one the i've heard of not one that's been advertised yet it's really interesting i was very curious about that too and so i was kind of googling around i found things on the web site on the department of homeland security and they actually still to this day talk about follow shelters even though as you saw in my story they don't even really exist anymore but same types of things you must evacuate the city everyone must get on these you know hypothetical buses but i think if you asked a random person out on the sidewalk if they knew what to do if something like this were to happen they would say i have no idea so i mean there are periodical plan where these buses. tell me what to say you know very quickly so what is left of the shelters we just saw some of the. is that what i was reading so there were thousands of follow shelters in washington d.c. most of them the sign is the only thing that's left but in other parts of the country people have still found supplies in there all the way back in the sixty's

and there is actually one here in washington d.c. in dupont circle where they found a bunch of crackers like ten years ago and sent them over to starving people in bangladesh so well you know if you can get used to it. still to come on tonight's show it's been a while but our favorite little crier on t.v. wins our tool time award tonight we're going to tell you what stupid thing glenn beck has done this time and forty five civil rights human rights peace and environmental groups are after the f.b.i. they want the agency investigated for its conduct its over speaks to our executive director of the bill of rights defense committee about that just a moment. you're

watching r t seven thirty in the morning here in moscow and you are the headlines for this hour police across europe round up twenty six people suspected of plotting a christmas campaign of terror those detained reported to be linked to international terrorist networks and militants in chechnya. the impact of the u.s. wars in iraq and afghanistan is becoming more visible on home soil as of late a recent report shows a record number of young men are committing suicide in march. north korea attacks in our lead in the south with a barrage of birth guillory far but small confirms its forces had earlier fired shells of exercises directed west not more russian urges called from both sides to avert a lot more. danish authorities trying to whistleblower recent weeks to find.