where did it take them. how can they allow to show that the real headlines with none of the mersey are can live out of washington d.c. and tonight we have a special program for you on the reported death of osama bin laden. president obama addressed the nation late last night with breaking news tonight i can report to the american people and to the world that the united states has conducted an operation that killed osama bin laden the leader of al qaeda and a terrorist who's responsible for the murder of thousands of innocent men women and

children it took nearly ten years to get america's enemy number one but just because he's gone u.s. officials are already making it clear that we shouldn't expect the war on terror to end even as we mark this milestone we should not forget that the battle to stop al qaida and its syndicate of terror will not end with the death of bin ladin maybe so much to tell the hundreds if not thousands of americans who came out on the streets of new york and to the white house last night and cheer about bin laden's death. so the devil merica has long been waiting for the how long can a celebration really last osama bin laden may be gone but al qaeda and terrorism are not here is more from our tease and he's now a. the man want to defend all mine for a decade is gone the united states has conducted an operation that killed osama bin

laden was you can hear some of that cheering going on right now right near the summit was a moment of victory for others a movement of the barest means president obama is in fact dead it was a u.s. strategic i'm sorry but there's one moment analysts say should not be overlooked osama bin laden may be dead but the threat of terror is very much alive frankly doesn't make much of a difference that bin laden is dead people here were convinced a long run at least for the last two years to be very convinced that the al qaeda figures or people in this region who by the way cannot number more than one hundred are incapable of carrying out any major attacks instead it's russia now kind of linked terrorists that have made the most recent remarks on scales metro blast an airport bombing two of the ranger school bill tax masterminded by to mystic church in terror leader dr morrow we're yours has been trying to serve bin laden's role as

the face of international terrorism qaeda leaders demise is expected to remain a significant symbol while having little or no a fact in the fight against terrorism it could create graves elsewhere in two thousand and one right. george bush's approval rating was going around fifty percent within twenty four hours he sharply ninety percent so watch for obama to come from this and now of course an opening has been made for the new face of evil first it was a sock and was with the russian federation in the summer been larger than saddam hussein and these days of course. the. next one will come we're certain whenever rises. that was our tease in the finale now we spending the majority of our show tonight talking about the implications of osama bin laden's death for the world for

the u.s. why ask if justice has been served if the war on terror is any closer to being over and at the end of the day if you look at the wars that were involved in the policies of torture or throwing out due process indefinite detention the u.s. spying on its own citizens we have to ask if osama bin laden got exactly what it is that he wanted joining me to discuss and we have lawrence wilkerson a retired u.s. army colonel and former chief of staff to colin powell matthew just political policy analyst and director of middle east progress at the center for american progress as well as jordan secular director of international operations for the american center for law and justice and from our studio in new york jeremy scahill national security correspondent for the nation magazine who's also been reporting on the elite military unit that killed bin laden for several years so i want to thank you all for joining me tonight i have a feeling it's going to be a good one jeremy to start with you over there in new york and one thing that president obama said last night when he was addressing the nation is that justice

has been served justice is done especially for those families for the victims of the attacks on nine eleven do you think that's true. well i think for a certain segment of the world's population that's true i think that there are a number of people who lost loved ones nine eleven that probably feel that way and i'm sure that there is a great number of americans that feel that way but if you're talking about justice in a more universal sense let's remember that the people of iraq had to endure endure an invasion of their country killing hundreds of thousands of people that had nothing to do with a government that had nothing to do with osama bin laden so if we're going to talk about justice here let's remember all of the people that have died over these past ten years but if you want to just reduce it down to was justice served on osama bin laden the mastermind of nine eleven well yeah either kill or capture him was what america always said it wanted to do i think many people are questioning why he wasn't captured and brought to trial rather than killed in this part of that assassination but at the end of the day i mean justice is in the eye of the beholder for the iraqis i don't think this is any justice for

a lot of americans or probably is perceived that way so it took nearly ten years we did finally get osama but did we is the damage almost worse now ten years later considering our wars in iraq in afghanistan hundreds of thousands of civilians have died not to mention of course the thousands of u.s. troops as well. no i mean i would argue that the policies that were pursued after the bush administration launched this war on the world further endangered us made us less safe as americans created an al qaeda presence in iraq where there was none before and as you have inspired a whole new generation of people to have an actual motivation to kill americans with the drone strikes that have killed civilians the night raids that have killed civilians i mean i think they realize that we really have to look at the ways in which the way that the bush administration responded to nine eleven actually inspired more acts of terrorism around the world and more people to want to sign up to fight and kill americans and those are questions that a lot of people don't want to ask in the united states well that's exactly what we're asking here right now the winds tell me do you think that we are perhaps less

safe than we were you know did we do a greater disservice to the world oh i remember secretary of defense rumsfeld i seem to question if we're recruiting four or five for every one we kill kill many are winning and so i agree with jeremy in the sense that this sort of action satisfy and i certainly agree with jeremy too that there are some people who probably feel like justice has been served and i can empathize and sympathize with them still steven wallace piece recently about why do they hate us what we've killed two hundred eighty eight thousand of them and they've killed ten thousand of us so that's a pretty alarming statistic and i think walter got a point there and his conservatism is two hundred eighty eight thousand very conservative too and there are bigger challenges there are huge challenges confronting us right now not just in this limited world of managing terrorism but also confronting the united states for its overextension of its forces its presence on the periphery of its empire and so forth so yeah ok this is good great powers

don't revel in revealed great powers or magnanimous great powers or humble and we've got a lot of challenges confront killing bin ladin simply doesn't do anything about her don't want to talk to you because i know that you were incredibly excited about this news last night. no you were your usa t. shirt to work today and you know i think that you know this proves that if you want to mess with america they will go after you like you and i do i think all right then i think that it shows that even if you're kind of forgotten a little bit that you're not as powerful as you once were which i would say about osama bin laden's true that will still hunt you down will still use our resources and at the end of day if we have to put a bullet your head even while you're trying to drag a woman in front of you to use a human shield and he'll die a coward i think that is justice i also think it's closure for nine eleven families when i talked to a couple today and it's not as if their family members are coming back because osama bin laden was killed it doesn't change the personal tragedy but it is a bit of closure that the ringleader was killed by u.s. troops by a u.s.

bullet in his compound today and so and i don't honestly believe that the techniques the procedures that the bush administration put in place are the reason why we got here today and president obama continued many of those procedures and was able to utilize the information that was received under those and enhanced interrogation methods at guantanamo bay used unclean shaikh muhammad to get to this point that's been widely reported today and if that all shakes out to be true and accurate i think it underscores why the bush administration did what it did and why there are some of us who wish the obama administration keeps on that track you wish the obama administration would keep on their track of people opening secret prisons around the world detaining people indefinitely in guantanamo bay perhaps maybe they should even revert back to the bush days and start torturing people like i don't think it's a reversion i'm not sure i the obama destruction used information during the untanned enhanced techniques to get this lead i mean that was that's been widely reported everywhere today if that's the case and it took going that step to get to

bin laden then absolutely we continue to use those methods so that we can get the next bin laden and certainly as lauren said the threat is not over the war against terrorism the fight against international terrorism islamic extremism continues today and this is just one small victory i think for the day united states can be excited about happy about that do you think that in that. the bush administration has been vindicated if they got the nickname for the guy that was the courier how many years back it took them four years after mohamed admitted it to get the guy's real name you know that until two thousand and nine when they finally found his location that was long after they stopped waterboarding right i mean just in point of fact it's been widely reported today is that this initial maemo this courier was was gotten was generated at a time when the bush administration were using these waterboarding enhanced interrogation techniques we don't know yet how it was generated whether those techniques were used and that's very very important i would agree that there it's important to get bin laden i think this is reestablish is to some extent america's

deterrence when we know for the last almost ten years it has been the policy of the united states to kill or capture osama bin laden and we have failed to do that that means a lot for a great power not to achieve its policy goals like that but i would going just back to the bush administration as. as mr wilkerson and jeremy both said i mean the decision to go into iraq is the single most important factor why we have waited this long to get osama bin laden and beginning in two thousand and two a massive diversion of resources and attention was taken from afghanistan to iraq that allowed the insurgency that allowed to escape from tora bora allow the insurgency to regroup and going to regenerate itself in afghanistan and that's why we're still there so i think president obama certainly does the deserves a lot of credit for refocusing america's national security policies on pressuring al and generating the information which finally led to locating and killing that you're going to say it's you know we kind of jump right into the bush stuff in the more heated discussion but let me just say all praise for president obama for the

national security team he has for armed forces this is to me not a parson issue at all there's a discussion that's obviously going to follow but today and last night no i it wasn't about politics it was about parties and i was just excited that we had killed osama bin laden i think that's for the majority of americans and conservatives or republicans who don't like president. much they're all happy and excited the presence of the well i'm with you there i don't think there's anybody out there that isn't excited that osama bin ladin is dead but jeremy we go back to using for a minute i wonder if at the end of the day you have to say that osama bin ladin though one in the sense that he got exactly what he wanted he got america involved in the prolonging wars at the same time and now it's changed to who we are as a country what we allow our country to do what we allow our government to do in terms of torture in terms of putting american citizens on assassination less indefinitely detaining people throwing it due process out the window in terms of all of us accepting that hey the government illegally spied on us but now we think that that's the only way to stay safe. well yeah i mean someone on twitter started

an account called osama and hell and he said i've taken your civil liberties with me so i mean i think you could make a case that some of the aims of osama bin laden to chisel away at the fabric of u.s. society were successful but i think also the other winners of this war of these policies were the huge defense contractors that reaped incredible profits beyond their wildest imagination not just from the no bid contracts passed out during the bush administration but the obama administration has doubled down on some of the worst bush era policies not only the targeted assassination not only the extension of some of the worst provisions of the patriot act but also with the the use of mercenaries and other forces in afghanistan and using them in iraq as well to fill positions that were once held by u.s. soldiers and to guard this army of diplomats that are in our colonial fortress over there in iraq so you know the obama administration i think it would actually agree

with something that jordan said which i didn't think i would be doing i think the obama administration has really continued some of the of what i found to be the most offensive aspects of bush era policy the obama administration has authorized orders for the u.s. to go in and bomb yemen to go in and bomb somalia the world is a battlefield was considered a neo con doctrine well obama has doubled down on that so i think that conservatives like jordan and others have have a good reason to rejoice that obama is the commander in chief because his foreign policies look a lot like bush's except he actually succeeded in taking down osama bin laden and not running on a wild goose chase in a country that had nothing to do with nine eleven i'm just wondering how important is it for obama to release. a video anything of that actually gives as visual proof about the fact that osama bin ladin is in fact dead because you know that there are a lot of doubters out there. anybody answer here and i think would be great to say

i mean i think it would put in for the islamic world in the international community for many americans throughout the day here the body was dumped off the side of a ship within twenty four hours if you put to rest some issues it would stop everyone no but it would be it was a nice to see but i think good for those of us who can bat the conspiracy theories out there well i wanted to know i wanted obama to walk out with his head it has cut off a i you don't have an exit wound the corpse and i don't want to just go back to what their average used to do you know let's put their heads on spikes outside the castle walls i think i mean come on i'll just say look here and leave in this is that was the order that was the order that cofer black who is someone who colonel wilkerson served with cofer black who was the head of the cia's counterterrorism operations after nine eleven actually told the jawbreaker team that went into afghanistan initially from the cia to bring his head back in a box on dry ice so that this isn't just some rhetorical thing i mean that what that what those were the initial orders why that why he wasn't killed there well

that's a whole other part of history that we could talk about for the next you know five years and i'm going to we're going to get into i have to take a quick break but we're going to come back and take a break and we'll continue this panel discussion on the killing of osama bin laden and what it means. that we. want. we have a. safe ready because their freedom.

hey guys welcome to show and tell on the ellen show we've heard what our guests have to say on this topic now i want to hear our audience just go on to you tube the video response wanted to twitter for thought of the questions that we've posted on you tube every monday and on thursday to show your responses we've played your voice in. you know so good to see a story that seems so. you think you understand it and then you give something you know here's some of the part of it and realize that everything you. don't.

think. we are back to lawrence wilkerson former colonel and former chief of staff to colin powell had to leave us but i am still joined by matthew das policy analyst and director of middle east progress of the center for american progress as well as. director of international operations for the american center for law and justice and from our studio in new york jeremy scahill national security correspondent for the nation magazine who has been reporting on the elite military unit that killed bin ladin now jeremy because you have to leave us next you're going to start dropping like flies like i said i do want to quickly touch upon your reporting that you have been doing on these units this team of six who apparently are the most dangerous people on the planet as general mccaffrey said today. do you think you

know that we're going to start seeing more of these elite teams more of these operations with the obama administration as we move away from land wars move on to air and sea as we've heard robert gates say. well i mean in fact these operations have really been hidden in plain sight for years and the obama administration has heavily utilized which is essentially like an all star team of the most elite soldiers and sailors from various entities within the u.s. military apparatus the people that took on the pirates that seize the maersk alabama in two thousand and nine were from j.c. the people that are leading many of the night raids in afghanistan are j. sock is a force that has operated for years covertly inside of pockets they've been hunting so-called high value targets in yemen and somalia and elsewhere this is the new face of u.s. warfare and in fact it's somewhat of an old face because it's reminiscent of the

phoenix program during vietnam where you have the targeted killing program as a centerpiece of trying to stop an insurgency and these forces you often don't hear about their missions unless they go wrong as as former chair of the joint chiefs of staff hugh shelton told me they're the quiet professionals and they don't run around tooting their own horns but the fact of the matter is that under the bush administration these forces were largely unaccountable their activities were greatly shielded from congress and one thing that president obama has done is to bring them back into the fold and put them on the same page once again with the cia and i think that's probably one of the reasons why you saw this action go off against bin laden the way it did because you have the cia and j.c. working hand in glove once again after a real disintegration that was caused by primarily by donald rumsfeld's tenure as a defense secretary where he basically waged a war against the cia in favor of special ops forces but i can tell you they weren't working hand in glove an early so it doesn't seem the pakistani

intelligence service matter what the hell is going on inside a week i think i was in a cave apparently he was in a mansion his living it out in a town outside of islamabad a town where there is a military a university school maybe. a couple of blocks away a couple hundred feet away how could it possibly who is just somebody really high up. well clearly i mean he's got sympathizers and supporters throughout the i.s.i. in pakistan and that really is one of the big issues here is the nature of the u.s. is current relationship with pakistan and especially i says intelligence services that is a relationship shot is never going to be the same i know it's. the say it's in difficulty and it's very complicated but the fact is as difficult as it is and as double dealing there is going on i think trying to work with this very strange very difficult relationship with the pakistanis is better than just throwing up our hands and walking away i think some influence some measure of leverage house

however small is better than none at all and it's a complicated relationship and shown by the fact that they weren't tipped off we just went in without letting anybody know because of course we were afraid they would have to. have starting our team we have an office in pakistan and there's a sense of embarrassment on both sides here on one side of just normal law abiding folks who don't like osama bin laden kind of embarrassed that their own military let this happen which they believe right under their nose in the side that it took the united states coming in to do this but i you know i would say that one thing i think we have to flush out on the legal issue because you heard some pakistani leaders say this was a violation of sovereignty former president had said that and the truth is america we have all these different agreements with pakistan with pakistan about going us to use these troops there sometimes they come out and complain about it saying it's time to cancel a time it's time to stop but the truth is certainly with these agreements hold one of those was that if we find bin laden we can absolutely go take care of it without violating some kind of international law or pakistani law and we do have those agreements and we we were working on those agreements the entire time with the

pakistani government still they have the space to go out to their people and say absolutely not these are the americans violating our national sovereignty but at the same time i think behind the scenes you want to see any kind of retribution against the united states in the legal community or the united nations last year after we give them billions. of dollars every single year then of course that's not going to happen now if osama bin laden is out of the picture unfortunately this isn't the kind of world where we only have one bad guy so i want to know who do you think is going to be the next number one enemy of the world is the way the us media likes to portray you could say of america of the west you could say that china russia have their own you know perhaps and militants that they have to deal with but who's going to be the next number line mahmoud ahmadinejad has been kind of on deck for a while and so i think bill bill tried to teach him up but i mean he's he's he's having some real difficulty with the supreme leader in iran right now and there's a lot of questions of whether he really has any future in the iranian government so clearly he'll be another villain there's also or are

a lot of he who is the leader of our. region peninsula in yemen who as an american has a special amount of you know significance to especially homegrown terrorists and there's a lot of fear there so i think one of those two guys will be clear i do agree with ed iran the islamic republic of iran is definitely the next rising threat i'm not sure i would say you know it's awkward in the job himself but the ayatollah is regime is certainly going to take a prominent role i think in the next national security debates and also the situation without walking i think you know it's a major threat to the u.s. because he's hitting us right here at home and he's using us citizens to do it so can i just can i jump in here absolutely for most of all for it is absolutely categorically false that he is the head of al qaeda in the arabian peninsula that is that is rank ignorance he is not the head of al qaeda in the arabian peninsula he's not even middle management of al qaeda in the arabian peninsula talk to people in u.s. intelligence and they will tell you he is not even middle management he is scary to

americans because he speaks english he is not a military commander of a q a p he's scary to us because he speaks our language the fact of the regular what americans do every report of these recruits americans that's pretty scary to americans if they know that there's a big difference. there's a. a difference between inspiring already twisted and disturbed individuals to that kind of action if you're talking about the underwear bomber or the young man who shot up the army recruitment center in little rock arkansas there's a big difference between an adult using him and being and and being well that that's actually far more complicated a dramatic oversimplification to say that our rocky somehow was responsible for what happened at fort hood you actually go back and you showed me the evidence he was responsible for that and i'll admit it i was right and i think i think i think kerry makes a great point and i know i would definitely agree with that but i mean the question is who is going to be with the street or your other guest as the new leader so i think a lot he was not the leader and i get a lot of that jeremy's point i think it's a very good one well then i jeremy say what is the truth and of the area because

what i think has happened and i saw this in my recent trip to afghanistan with the way that the taliban is changing is that you have a new generation of young radicals who have grown up watching these wars over the past ten years that are far more radical than their predecessors that certainly is true within the taliban now where you have a younger generation of people that consider mullah omar mohammad omar not radical enough in terms of of the taliban in afghanistan and with al qaida you have these disparate groups that are spread out in somalia in yemen and elsewhere in north africa that i think they are freestanding cells that don't have the ability to take down skyscrapers of manhattan but they could potentially take down aircraft they could potentially blow up hotels i think i think the threat is now smaller scale acts of spread out terrorism not a centralized bogeyman like osama bin laden that in a way i think is is is is the real threat that we need to start looking at when we're talking about international terrorism versus who's going to be the successor

to osama bin laden agree and i think this also goes back to what if you look at original goal in carrying out attacks like nine eleven if you look at the entire model he had for for his kind of plan to take down the united states was the success of the f. . and would he be in afghanistan and he believes that it was the afghan intervention and the humiliating experience of the soviets had in afghanistan was responsible for bringing down the soviet union and unfortunately if you look at what he what the nine eleven operation cost him if you look at what these other smaller operations cost them the underwear bomber all these other things and the exorbitant cost to the united states for dealing with these problems trillions and trillions of dollars his plan hasn't exactly failed like that is that area in which everything is well it's that osama bin laden kind of helps get americans educated about all these different factions inside the terror world how they're not all united because people start paying attention to terrorism globally even if it wasn't touching you don't really think that americans are agitated about i think

they haven't had you know they're going to break. the taliban now they've been able to sit in front they do i think people who actually care to follow the news they can understand that there's this is from shia iran and sudanese and what's happening in north africa and the difference we what's happening in north sudan and south these are issues that pay a little attention to you can you can understand and i think that's because people started actually caring about what these international groups were doing now and that they're not all united we understand that now they're not on the same team as well that is a scary thing in germany want to give you one last word before you leave us here too so how's that bogeyman going to be portrayed for us if you watch fox news or if you listen to some of our senior u.s. officials certainly we are in a war on terror with the entire world that seems. well i mean unfortunately people like attorney general eric holder have reinforced the idea that he could be the you know the next bin laden he's actually compared to bin laden said he was on the same level with him the fear mongering about iran i think is really misplaced i actually

agree with with our senior intelligence officials in this country that the greatest national security threat facing the united states is our economic situation and the fact that we have spent billions upon billions upward of a trillion dollars on these wars particularly the war in iraq that that was just nonsensical and criminal in many ways and i think that if we don't start looking at the way that we've used these wars to the detriment of our own society then we're going to have a far more serious national security crisis than anything any crazy person in yemen or somalia could dream up of the united states and we don't talk about war and the economy nearly enough in this country and that's actually the real national security threat that we're facing yes osama did cost at least at least a trillion dollars up until this point i had you wonder if the guys are going to get the twenty five million dollars reward on his head now we have to take one more break jeremy scahill any of yours jeremy scahill is leaving us tonight gary thank you very much for joining us and we will be back in.