her no no. no it's global that with deadly consequences dozens were killed in the worst ever attack on the u.n. workers in afghanistan today by demonstrators protesting the burning of a koran in a florida church so is it all fun and games until somebody to me pays a price for their life. let's get a good look at all of these rubbish let's give them a chance to fight and to win the country goes to war so does the u.s. media going to take a look at how wars are good for business and the press and how journalists seem to be leading the march to battle.

and the war in libya continues to dominate news headlines but is our focus there misplaced the thousands marching on the streets of yemen we're going to examine just what's at stake the regime of that country's president and america's covert war on yet and sort of. good evening it's friday april first five pm here in washington d.c. i'm lucy catherine up and you're watching our team now it's easy to forget that our actions can't have unintended consequences until events like today's come along and on march twentieth a florida evangelical preacher decided to make a statement of sorts but burning a koran at a service and his church today dozens of people paid with their lives for their action afghan protesters furious over the burning of the koran stormed a u.n. compound in the normally peaceful city of mazar

e sharif killing up to twenty people in the worst ever attack on you and workers in that country now for a look at the blowback effect of our actions here at home and policies abroad i'm joined by lieutenant colonel anthony shaffer he's the author of this book right here the operation dark heart and he's also the senior fellow at the center. advantage and defense studies sorry i started letter that intervention there but it's a great but everyone got caught out and get it should we be surprised that that this burning resulted in a drop off for i'm frankly surprised it's taken this long this was a huge issue and i think one of the reasons that the individuals who wanted to burn the books backed off because he was warned that potentially consequences of this nature would happen i think the ultimate background because president obama and others almost personally have to go and say is just not a good idea and frankly it's just not a good idea any way you cut it i don't care if you're a druid or a a christian the idea is it's always in your best interest to respect any relation and so any man of the cloth who claims to be religious probably should not embark

on this with that said this happened we're talking now about a circumstance which is tragic and this is why we have had the problems we have in afghanistan this is this is a smaller issue this is a metaphor for the larger reason we've seen the slide into chaos over the past eight years we don't fundamentally understand our culture and therefore when we have people who will poke at them without understanding the potential consequences this is what you see when you say we do you mean the american people or the military that's on the ground i'd say anyone who is seen as a westerner relating to that society clearly if you intend to say something bad about religion you know it's it's never there's going to be consequences with someone and i'm sorry this may upset your audience they've talked about the muslim faith being the religion of peace you know things like this well i don't i don't

see it that way with that said i think it's important for people to understand that you need to respect all religions and that you know while i think christians would have probably seen the bible burning very badly i don't think they would kill people and there's a well i think there's bad apples and other isn't going to force a crusade what shall i do or. i think and i agree it but to move beyond the five or the koran burning talk a little bit about the glow that our policy is in our actions abroad happened we can even bring up for example the unfortunately much overlooked story in the mainstream press the rolling stone story on the afghan taliban which arguably could have had a lot more of an impact well i think i think so well i don't think that that the effects of the rolling stone article hasn't shifted its ways in the middle east and like the thousand photos or something that happened on fire i think we're still going to see that coming with that said yeah fundamentally the researchers are my think tank of kind of through the research proving that our policies have led to a great deal of the uprising we see right now and this is going to be a great are we talking of russian t.v.

about this a lot of this goes back to the cold war when with the cold war ended we kind of let the rest of the world go and i thought he was on our side we took the pressure off you're in the europeans go do what you want you know the pacific road we always kept it's going to sound awful pressure on the leadership of the middle east we always sided with a lot of these leaders who were not on the underside of their people therefore the people have naturally seeing us the americans and the west don't forget the french british and germans of all but in this have seen the west as as allied with the very leaders who have suppressed them so therefore you're seeing now an inevitable outgrowth of the suppression of freedom and expression so i think that's why we're seeing a lot of snaps why we get a lot of the blame for it which is exactly what we're going to talk about in our next segment when it comes to yemen but very briefly if you're talking about our policies having broader blowback if i can actions of individual soldiers how do you think for example the intervention in libya without getting into whether what we should do now to where there how that can be perceived in the middle east and

afghanistan and this is where i've actually said several times american media not picking up on as much as i like into we should be enabling countries like cutter cutters said and publicly we don't feel the saudi arabians are really living up to their responsibility leading the. community great wonderful instep in arab something arabs what a great concept this is where i think we made a mistake the way we've handled it so far we should have been there to help but not be the ones doing it i mean it it they talk about this being the the springtime of of the revolutions well the ides of march still look a lot like nato in the us so i think we've got to really look at enabling and encouraging and let's be brutally honest here we're not talking about pro countries cutter has a lot of money. all these countries have good money so we should be written courage and arabs to help arabs there by taking us out of the center stage and allowing them to do what's necessary to basically unable all countries who want to be free

to go on a path ariel unfortunately that's not something we i did before the tomahawks and i'm like and thank you so much for your tank your patience. anyhow in this country there are some wars that do make headlines iraq afghanistan the so-called kinetic military action humanitarian intervention war that is libya and then there are the others the quiet and declared wars that raged safely beneath the radar of the mainstream press and while the us media was busy debating the latest antics of charlie sheen or whoever and just one day before missiles rained all over libya this scene unfolded in the capital of yemen of the of. the with of the of the. traders who had gathered as they had for weeks to protest the rule of president ali abdullah saleh a person ordered in cold blood killed by yemeni forces with weapons paid for in

part by you and i with the backing of the united states regime has lasted for more than three decades first as an ally in the cold war and now as our partner in the war on terror and the growing unrest in what rages on as we speak in that country cannot be separated from america's secret war on yemeni soil now that quote close relationship between the smaller regime and the u.s. is the subject of a major new investigation by journalist jeremy scahill in the nation magazine and he is the author of this book here blackwater the rise of the world's most powerful mercenary army and he spoke to us for earlier today from new york and i asked jeremy to break down the secret war in yemen and why americans need to be paying attention. but we're seeing unfold in the middle east with what appears to be a contradiction in the way that the u.s. is approaching libya versus saudi arabia or syria or yemen is actually a consistent u.s. policy of supporting ruthless and brutal dictators as long as they are doing the

bidding of the united states and so while we see this military action that actually is a war against libya unfolding what we're seeing just a few hundred miles away across the red sea in yemen is that ali abdullah saleh is allowed to snipe or shoot his protesters in the head and is allowed to use u.s. weapons and training to fight his domestic political opponents in training that's been given to him offensively to fight al qaeda forces in that country and you see the defense secretary robert gates saying that it's not the business of the united states to intervene in the internal affairs of yemen the fact is that the united states has been waging a covert war inside of yemen for the past ten years and it has been ratcheted up dramatically by the obama administration in december of two thousand and nine president obama authorized two very deadly airstrikes against yemen valving tomahawk cruise missiles with cluster bombs that can shred human beings and the alleged target of those air strikes in december of zero nine were members of al

qaeda in the arabian peninsula in reality though one of the strikes killed twenty one children and scores of others civilians and another strike that the u.s. did killed an important tribal leader in yemen who in fact was trying to work out a mediation program with the members of al qaeda in the arabian peninsula so as long as ali abdullah saleh the president of yemen allows the united states to his country to kill people inside of yemen and he himself will take responsibility for those actions as has been revealed by the wiki leaks cables showing that he conspired with david petraeus and other u.s. officials to cover up the u.s. role the united states isn't going to say much about the widespread human rights violations taking place there or the killing of protesters here. you reference the sort of ideology or the reality of you know the enemy of our enemy is our friend but the fact of the matter when it comes to yemen is that you can't undo history you can't undo the cold war and our support of this regime during the cold war and now that a.q. a.p. . in their arabian peninsula is established in yemen it seems that we can't simply

pull out and just hope for the best so what could the possible outcome. well i mean i think part of what you have to understand here is that americans are very afraid of the power of nightmares you know if individuals have the ability to take down an airplane certainly that's something that's frightening and it's scary but it doesn't represent an existential threat to the united states and so what the obama administration has done is really use a hammer in these operations when they probably called for a scalpel and the reality is that there are really only by most estimates three hundred to six hundred core members of al qaeda in the arabian peninsula so defense analysts that i've talked to people with from within the cia the d a and the special operations community all question the wisdom of approaching yemen strictly through a military strategy the fact is this is the poorest country in the arab world it's going to actually run out of water in the near future much of the country is choose this drug caught there is very little opportunity for employment and so instead of

the on the targeted killings some would say that the united states has an obligation to try to support the building up of civil society and. some of the intelligence committee called it draining the swamp taking away his reason for being there the fact is that ali abdullah saleh corruption his relationship with the u.s. allowing the u.s. to bomb his country using u.s. weapons and trained forces to kill domestic political opponents has contributed greatly to this destabilization there so the united states may have to withdraw its forces from yemen if the next government is not science as has been and relocate them to djibouti in north africa which is really becoming the hub for u.s. military operations throughout the middle east but jeremy if you look at these that trouble areas like yemen for example i mean if you build outs that a society you're still essentially promoting and perilous policies but more humane lines and you're involving yourself in i mean obviously right i'm not saying you i mean that thinking so what's the endgame for the united states when it comes to

these and similar regimes that obviously do have terrorist implications. but we can't necessarily afford to you know intervene in all of these countries that have potential threats well i mean look at the fact the fact is that one of the main motivators for al qaeda is the fact that the united states has supported the corrupt moderate key and saudi arabia brutally ruthless regime there in bahrain as well all throughout the gulf of supporting these dictatorships either through civil aid or more commonly through military aid so i mean i think that the whole industry that's been built up a counterinsurgency counterterrorism industry thrives on this much in the same way that these sort of cold war years were probably depressed when they saw the berlin wall come down because their relevance was going to be thrown out the door no more books no more contracts no more think tanks and i think that you know there's a lot of vested interest in keeping these conflicts going for the recording industry let me moving on to the broader middle east i want to ask. if you look at

all of these different things and obviously the american people may not know all that much about our involvement and specifically but this is ministration does so what do you think goes into the thinking in these people's minds when you make a decision to go to war in libya at a time when the outcome in iraq remains uncertain afghanistan remains uncertain they know what's going on in yemen and the instability there what do you think goes through their minds when they make this decision to you know get involved militarily in a hot war in another country. yeah well i mean i think in the in the case of the obama administration they've really doubled down on some of the worst bush administration policies that we now are addicted to this notion in the u.s. counterterrorism world that we can kill our way out of a problem we see this war of attrition happening in afghanistan and i was just there recently where the u.s. forces are doing all these night raids and killing their way through the command structure of the taliban and they think that they're going to just be able to kill

everyone and eventually that's going to bring peace well it's not going to bring peace it's only given further motivation for more people to join with resistance groups or insurgent movements you know in the case of libya i think that we saw an incredible reactionary policy put into place by the obama administration think it was a lot of blackmailing and cajoling that went on at the u.n. security council and the fact is that as much as people in the united states talk about how obama got this legitimacy from the u.n. security council five of the major powers in the world russia china brazil and india and germany abstained in those votes and they represent a majority of the citizens who are represented on the security council so you know this is a part of u.s. policy when it's convenient to use the u.n. security council the u.s. government will use it in the case of the kosovo bombing in ninety nine russia and china vetoed the resolution and said no you can't go to war against kosovo or against serbia over kosovo and so what the clip administration did was to go to nato and use that for quote unquote legitimacy you know the fact is these are all

sort of rogue operations because moammar gadhafi need to be stopped yes he needs to be stopped i oppose what the u.s. is doing not on moral grounds but on strategic grounds i think we're going to make it worse and we're getting involved in a civil war and unfortunately it seems like robert gates the defense secretary is probably the most same voice in the administration right now he's he's sort of openly saying he didn't think this was a good idea to get involved in libya this way that's fascinating he's on his way out the door but he's been around for a long time he was a gunner during the mujahideen wars in. afghanistan he has a cia background a special forces background and is the defense secretary but that's a pretty big split i think within the administration and a lot of people are saying that robert gates is actually the most honest voice in this debate right now within the the discussions taking place at the white house and i had to say i found it's that they musing clinton was honest acting as the babysitter when he did the media blitz on the sunday shows but we've been to a lot of these countries you've been to afghanistan you've reported widely in iraq you've been to yemen for this story talk about the blowback factor how are we

hurting our policies our image abroad with the kinds of covert and overt wars that are taking place in these lands right now. well i mean i think that you know the biggest blowback that we saw that's taken place against the united states for a long time was of course nine eleven where we had a very similar situation where we went in and we funded people that we didn't do a lot of research on we didn't know what their world view was because we wanted the soviet union out of afghanistan in the puppet regime there overthrown once again the united states is getting itself into bed with rebels quote unquote on the ground in libya that are not known quantities i mean i think it's sort of hilarious that the cia has to deploy to go and figure out who the rebels are it's like a sort of you know covert world online dating service or something where the cia goes into libya to find out who the rebels are wouldn't have been a good idea to find out who they were before you started spending one point four million dollars per tomahawk cruise missile that you launched at yemen five hundred

million dollars already spent on it and reports that the rebels themselves have been committing war crimes so the potential for blowback from all of these things killing of civilians in yemen with tomahawk cruise missiles running covert operations in somalia the philippines and then elsewhere in the horn of africa getting involved in a civil war with libya and then continuing to back corrupt dictatorships like the saudis the bahraini and others i think it gives a great recruitment tool to those who do want to do harm to americans and i think that we need to take a sober look at that in this country our own actions are actually responsible for creating new generations of people we care we categorize as terrorists now jeremy we're almost out of time but i want to end this interview on a more personal now it's a huge fan of your work and you've done so much to bring to light the various injustices that have talked or see is that we've seen in our in our military and foreign policy i mean your book blackwater went on the bestseller list of the near times and your work both in terms of blackwater young men and other pieces that are and you count less interviews and some of the most watched news programs at the end

of the day it seems that the tough questions are still not being asked and and the broader system remains more or less unchanged how do you deal with that. yeah well you know i think that i want to say in response to what you were appreciate your kind words about me but i think the real heroes of the past ten years of this permanent state of war are journalists that no one's heard of there be on embedded journalists iraqis journalists arab journalists who really are the ones risking their lives we hear about it when american journalists are killed or captured or tortured as was the case of the four new york times journalists in libya but we very seldom hear about the reuters cameramen who are killed particular when they're killed by the united by u.s. forces so i view the future and the hope i have in my heart regarding journalism comes from this new generation of young arab journalists that are very bravely telling the story of rebellion and repression every single day with very little fanfare or attention paid to them those are the real heroes of of our society when it comes to bringing the truth to the united states and elsewhere they never get

the credit for it well and they are absolutely shed jeremy thank you so much for taking the time being with us today really appreciate it. now turning from the war itself to the way that wars are covered by the mainstream press right here at home or it's no big secret that the cable channels come with some sort of a bias selling to the right others to the left there's even one specific on that means zero or whatever that means but as it turns out most cable networks share one thing and common for a lot of war and artie's christine for al found out one network in particular not only fights for war but hired the fires of those who speak out against it. it's believed by many to be the most liberal of all cable networks and this n.b.c. pro obama it is clear that it matches what he said about that issue at the very start of his presidency pro-union but conservative rightness country that is so you're nothing but a bunch of pretty roads. it's ok sir and also unmistakably

pro-war. longer filmmaker and former journalist danny schechter says television makes were possible we couldn't have wars in america if t.v. networks didn't glorify them in some way and make them exciting and have action oriented coverage what i call merely. iraq. afghanistan and now. yes the u.s. involvement in libya let's get it done let's show you these rebels let's give them a chance to fight a sentiment also supported by m s n b c's most liberal talk show host rachel maddow out and lawrence o'donnell it seems to me there's a practical war making tactical success that they believe they could have in this

particular country exactly he kept describing himself as sort of acutely aware of the risks and the costs of america doing any sort of military intervention and so. exactly right i think we have to do it it is a moral decision at this point so you might be thinking well that's just because the u.s. involvement in libya falls under a democratic president but as it turns out and as n.b.c. has had a longstanding love affair with war remember owsley banfield oh my god hina she became a star reporter covering the world trade center attacks but in two thousand and three. cans of state university just as the war in iraq was getting started she said about the coverage what didn't you see you didn't see where those bullets landed you didn't see what happened when the mortar landed a puff of smoke is not what a mortar looks like when it explodes believe me there are horrors that we're completely left out of this war and that's n.b.c. refused to let her out of her contract but kept her off air muzzling her happen to

with former independent governor jesse ventura. then a phone call asking if it was true that he didn't support the war in iraq well worked out. for me for all three years. and i could say anything because my contract said i. already knew shows for three years so too did filter prize winning journalist peter arnett after giving this interview on iraqi t.v. it was really. the last. week. in the right of the week the first week. because of the iraqi resistance when as n.b.c. was still up and coming its highest rated show was hosted by this man phil donahue

an outspoken critic of the war so you know i think you know we're all now everybody's right just want to charitable that's where this is we were one. he was doing that he was our us so we have absolutely no more sending our sons and daughters to war to fix that as i say don't doesn't seem fair to me that show was cancelled a few weeks before the war started phil donahue who was an anti were voice on m.s.n. b.c. one of the cable news channels and a memo that was leaked as the donahue show was cancelled is very explicit and said we don't want this to be a face of n.b.c. as united states goes into war looks like to stay on board you need to sound more like. look i am a liberal i am a progressive but that means that we need to stand behind people who want freedom this isn't bush talking this is totally different from the rack it's totally different from any other situation christine for sound r.t.

. and joining me now for more on this is jeff cohen he's a journalism professor at college jeff thank you so much for being here it's exciting to have you back on now can the case be made that some networks tend to eventually have a bias for war and i'm not saying that you know they want to tell the bloodshed or violence but that there's a vested financial interest perhaps in covering conflict. most networks in this country seem to be very quick to support military intervention what's funny is watching c.n.n. and some of the pundits this time this last couple weeks they want so much to support the military action but it's been so poorly explained and they pointed out time and time again. i think when the you know when your set up piece which had some great stuff in it when you talk about m s n b c being the most liberal channel well it's owned by comcast and general electric general electric is

a major war profiteering nuclear power praful clear that. what we get in the us media isn't so much a full spectrum what you get in us corporate media is a corporate spectrum it goes from g.e. to g.m. from general electric to general motors to general dynamics and it doesn't surprise me what you really have is the sort of echoes of the two major corporate political parties you know m s n b c is supporting this intervention because it's a democrat in the white house you know fox news o'reilly will support any military intervention but some of them like an idiot are questioning that box news this same exact thing happened when the united states was bombing serbia and it was under bill clinton and all of a sudden fox became dobbs and they were questioning in there saying where is the congressional authorization and you know it's really silly we have a very narrow spectrum on american t.v. and i'm going to say n.b.c.

by their boosterism obama in the last couple weeks with a military intervention that's hardly explain really shows how narrow the spectrum it you know and just to talk more about the financial incentive to have any talk about the g eight on action etc but it's not just that when we also have the human factor sharing journalists get excited you know they get in bed with the troops and they develop relationships with the troops they get. you know information from their sources in the pentagon and so there's this desire to sort of maintain that relationship and that's that's sort of felt the feeling it's a feeding cycle that just keeps suffer the consequences which is the suffering of the french there's no doubt about it but the main instinct and remember i worked at m.s.n. the during the time i was a senior producer in eldon and i don't know what they expect from you is rah rah rah for the home team we want you know when donahue was the only place on american television questioning bush's lies and all the exaggerations and deceptions coming

out of the white house why we had to invade iraq and invade now and they had this one voice and they kept squeezing him and they kept demanding that he tone it down and they gave us who are producers on the donahue show at m s n b c orders if we booked one guest who was anti-war we had to book two that were pro-war if we book two just on the last we have three on the right at one meeting when a producer said she was thinking of booking michael moore she was told she'd have to rewrite lingers for balance so you know they ruin the show then they cancelled the show and it was the top rated show i mean when you talk about emmett's in the sea i remember olbermann sort of replaced the name when he was pro-war oh and when he started over time coming out against the bush administration was very much a fluke the fact that olbermann ended up like he is there was is very much not what management expected or wanted and while he was doing so great with ratings because

there was no place for progressives to go but his show is on american television there was no r t a few years ago or any some of these other options the you know overman went through the roof in terms of ratings that many open the door for him out of but i think we're really seeing you pointed out the limits of this sense if m s n b c it's not really a progressive. chinn was more like a democratic chair with a democratic white house authorizing a weird unexplained military action you see so many people would have missed and basically said any group or go home to all the limits of dissent unfortunately it is the american people that suffer as a consequence jeff cullen and media critic and journalism professor thank you so much but unfortunately that has it for now for more on the stories we covered please go to our t. dot com slash usa and check out our you tube page it's in to dot com slash our team america and as always feel free to follow me on twitter as well it's at lucy county .