super capital if you want to send me an e-mail please do so because a reported r g g w well i saw this in accessing bio. book in the lower shell or you look at the real headlines with none of the mersey are going to live in washington d.c. now it's only been a few days since the u.s. killed osama bin laden but many questions still remain one of the biggest in our current war in afghanistan and we're asking are we done yet then rumors are flying as to how torture may have played a role in the hunt for bin laden so tonight i'll speak with military blogger jim hansen to figure out what we've heard is really fact and what's fiction then all

the economic front i'll ask if the u.s. has gone bankrupt searching for al qaeda is never want or is in iraq and afghanistan the cost of homeland security all of these factors have weighed heavily on our national purse so when we realize we can't afford any more war answer in marks the fortieth anniversary of his significant protests that took place here in washington d.c. so on this historic day will investigate why there are any large scale protests in our country like we used to see and decades past and we love this segment so much but we've expanded it to cover every day this week it's happy hour i'll be joined by jim hansen and producer jenny churchill discuss all the stories that are making a buzz but that fun is going to have to wait until the end of the show up first our top story. less than two days after osama bin laden was killed by the u.s. there are still a lot of uncertainties surrounding the war on terror while some hail the death of osama bin laden as the end of an era others question of taking down al qaeda

figurehead really changes anything at all artes gynae can has the story. of the great been dead a moment shrouded in secrecy while the symbol of america's war on terror seems to be done with the war on terror itself is not it is death does not mark the end of our effort there is no doubt that al qaeda will continue to pursue attacks against us we must and we will remain vigilant at home and abroad the u.s. has been long chasing all kind of beyond of his land borders in yemen those of being who were throwing strikes in pakistan they were overt and widely criticized for the scores of civilians killed in the attacks but question some ask now is could the success of killing bin ladin in pakistan give the u.s. more of a carte blanche were carrying out strikes in other countries it will be used to justify further wars greater repression and more acts churchward

judicial targeted assassinations against opponents and this is true whether and libya and iraq and pakistan and afghanistan and many analysts say merry christmas or on terror so far has been a double edged sword that involves fighting terror and provoking terror at the same time the war waged by ally forces and led by the united states has left of ghana's then as unstable as ever the war on terror has the ability to allow the u.s. to carry out military operations that since two thousand and one have taken the lives of more than a million civilians. in iraq in afghanistan now in libya and of course that leads to an escalation of resistance of hatred of revenge and so in terms of keeping the american people save that's a ridiculous notion the us has

a track record of policies that backfired like arming and training the afghan mujahideen in the 1980's in their fight against the soviet troops subsequently the same with jackie the militants turned their weapons and training against the us among those supported by the us was osama bin ladin whose group eventual evolved into al qaeda one great program. and. we're still seeing great success. long lesson was learnt victory over evil makes great television and approval ratings for the man in charge. obama said that he had known about bin laden's whereabouts seems august last year but only last week had he given the order to take him it's been two weeks sees obama an ounce his reelection plans he's been slipping in the polls over inconclusive wars overseas and economic woes at

home it's actually led to the president of the united states being beatified almost more than the you know the pope's you know kind of accolades to john paul this is you know obama is cashing in on this ok everything for everything that it's worth and you'll notice that his speech last night he kept stressing several clive's i ordered i promised i's such and such it was clearly done for you know this statement was clearly worded for political advantage and it unity and joy over the death of these evil man americans have been missing the bigger picture in the last twenty years the war on terror and the way. it has earned them more enemies than friends i'm going to shake that will. argue. one of the immediate responses coming from many americans after receiving the news of osama bin laden's death was ok can we bring our troops home now it's been clear for years that osama

bin laden wasn't in afghanistan anymore that iraq had nothing to do with nine eleven and that we're not bringing democracy to afghanistan but rather we destabilize the country and made life for civilians more dangerous but our politicians and our military military officials have made repeated calls in the last few days for us to remember that despite the laws death the war on terror isn't over yet even though there are maybe one hundred two hundred al qaeda left in afghanistan total we must stay so they don't return but a new survey a usa survey poll shows that sixty percent of americans suddenly think we're winning the war on terror so will obama can obama use this moment to get us out or a signal out prolonged war because people think that suddenly we're on a roll joining me to discuss this is jack rice former cia agent and criminal defense attorney jack thanks so much for joining us tonight her starters ok so as some of bin laden has been killed he was in pakistan and he was in

a mansion why do we have a hundred thousand troops in afghanistan again. yeah you know we were asking the same question about iraq where we were absolutely right you know i could you keep it further afield i remember years ago i was in kosovo still another very large base that was in kosovo in the border again reaching into the middle east and there's a real question why we're at a whole series of places joe that's always the problem or what we do no matter how much we matter how many people we put on the ground what i've been seeing and hearing again and again is oh well you know what will create a vacuum if we leave so the argument seems to be we've got to get in there so we go in and then if we leave will create that vacuum so we have to stay longer the real question always has to be if we are there in the first place the second place and the third place do we make things safer more secure for americans for the people in the region the problem is again and again i don't know the answer is no as jack i'm

just wondering if you're with me here and i feel like obama this can go to weights for the president right now and people can either look at this as some semblance of six sas in terms of they've achieved what america has been wanting to do for the last ten years and now all the more reason to play in afghanistan and say that we don't need to be there anymore and at the same time of course you'll have those people that are saying well this is a success which means that we're on a roll which means that we have to stay there or otherwise it's going to get worse again so how does obama navigate this if he really does want the u.s. to get out of afghanistan what my fear is that politics always plays a role here he already has the left ok we know that there is an alternative here the problem is is now that he has the national security credentials he can say you know i have the body you also have the blood and you know by shoulder now we can really go for we need to stay we need to up the ne so you could grab those guys in the middle you win in two thousand and twelve i mean that's my theory here but i think what he could do if he really wanted to take

a leadership role is what he can say is ok we will get him to afghanistan. for a reason it was to go after his mayor now what we do is we separate al qaeda from the taliban or we separate the afghan government and even the pakistanis from all of those and we deal with an individual we don't need a hundred thousand people on the ground in order to do that in fact having the mirror exacerbates the situation the best way to deal with it is to hold those people out if we're going to spend even a small amount of that money actually in trying to help rebuild the country we would save money for the fiscal conservatives it would bring people home frankly for everybody the people there in the people here do you think there is so is going to be al-qaeda left at least in the form that we've seen and now to shelter afghanistan from to make sure that it doesn't become a safe haven again you could say that osama bin laden really was this figurehead and after that now it's a very fractured group there isn't necessarily one leader anymore in the arabian

peninsula is its own now we have an entire network and so you know is there any reason anymore to pretend like a safe haven in afghanistan is really the biggest threat. well the advantage is to provide not just security in terms of being there but actually helping the country do what it is to to itself and for itself we have fundamentally misunderstand afghanistan on the ground this isn't just about a centralized authority and what i've talked about this before there is no centralized authority in afghanistan in frankly there never has been so the idea that we really did create it was the exact problem the russians had the brits had given his code at the same problem this is what new and for whatever reason we seem so blind to this i think we fall back on the three thousand dead it's time perec tribune should that we really need to clear our minds now and say all right we have no acquired the blood we have the retribution that we so desperately felt that we

need now how do we a third if we do what we must do next if the president is willing to actually have that conversation and we could actually talk like adults i think we could come to the right answer but sadly in washington frequently we don't get that but it's been my experience and probably yours to it yeah it sure has now i also want to ask you you know let's talk about this idea of a war on terror that's the way that it's been sold to us the last ten years in itself is not idea little ridiculous when you wage war on terror terror is this it's a sex essential threat it's not necessarily something that's going to bring your entire country down you can pinpoint it to one cell or one criminal or another but is there ever an endpoint terror route terrorism has been around for how long can you ever completely end terrorism. of course we care and in fact i think back to the election between bush and kerry when kerry was saying we need to understand who people in the middle east are we need to be sensitive to this and this was scoffed

at by the right and i don't see this as a left or right question if you would hear from president bush we don't negotiate with terrorists well frankly what happens when some of our policies actually create terrorists create people who want to kill us that's part of the question that's part of the problem and we use this simple concept of you know war on terror can we finally shelve this because many many people who have actually been somewhere in the middle have been driven away from us because of the overreaction that we've seen from the americans and by the way since we've been talking about osama bin ladin specifically and he said this before nine eleven that that was his intent his intent was to drive the americans to overreact which would drive those in the middle east away from us driving them into his hands and frankly we have done a very very good job at doing exactly that i jack i want to thank you very much for joining us tonight and yes we are going to be talking about more of that during

this program thanks so much thank you. now as the media continues to fuel learned up in the audience that many are wondering how much of a role torture played in this nation's demands will join me to determine what information is fact and fiction when it comes to torture and that as america's decade long time for osama left the country broke a crunch the numbers are derrick rose a brave new foundation to see if bin ladin succeeded in his mission to bankrupt the us empire. we in the heart. we have the dog with the safe get ready because freedom.

hi guys welcome to sharon tell me alone a show we've heard our guests have to say on the topic now i want to hear audio just go on to you tube the video response going to twitter target of the questions that we impose on you tube every monday and on thursday to show long responses to the blog like the.

you know sometimes you see a story and it seems so you think you understand it and then you glimpse something else here's the part of it and realize that everything you thought you knew you don't. charge is a big issue. aside from the wars the lives lost money spent another think of the war on terror and osama bin laden unfortunately managed to do was to bring into question the morality and ethics of the united states to change who we are as a country because we torture or to the facts has led to international outrage national shame and justice being thrown out the window because now we have the detainees that we can't even try because of how we treated that but some people out

there are actually feeling it vindicated by the death of osama bin laden. well i believe everyone knows or not but you you mention the fact that we obtained information several years ago right when from a show about the courier for obama we obtained information through waterboarding and there's some of those you say that waterboarding there's a word you say that should be stopped and we usually get we got vital information would directly was too good. that's right a number of pro torture right wingers are now trying to claim that waterboarding is how we got bin ladin i'm just clarify it for you the nickname of the courier that was osama bin laden's contact with the outside world and who the u.s. tracked to get him was provided by high value detainees clicheed mohamed originally then verified by her eyes al libi and hail some is said to have been water boarded one hundred eighty three times but if you look at the timeline it was presented by the obama administration. didn't provide this nickname until two thousand and four

we stopped using harsh interrogation techniques on him and two thousand and three after that the fact that it took another four years just to get the guy's real name for operatives on the ground in afghanistan and pakistan and n.s.a. get some investigative work then after he made a fatal phone call and showed up on n.s.a. surveillance pakistani informants wrote down his license plate number which led them to the compound which eventually led them to bin laden so i'd say it was technology surveillance intelligence that led the u.s. to bin ladin but not torture can we stop trying to justify it or discuss this with me is jim hansen retired special operations master sergeant and military blogger at black five dot net jim thanks so much for being here tonight so well as you see the proof actually shows that waterboarding did not lead us to osama bin ladin and to the name of this courier so why are people still using torture as a justification of indication of the bush administration in their actions first of

all waterboarding is not torture but will disagree on that going in or even i don't know maybe john views your lawyer that you might think a lot of boring isn't torture but. any other legal scholar out there will tell you that waterboarding is torture if you look at the un you look at international conventions on human rights waterboarding is torture moving we're going to agree on that but the bottom line is we would never have started on the trail that technology later helped us find this guy k s m hadn't been waterboarding and started to cooperate but he started to cooperate right like well like we said let's look at this timeline here we are already stopped a lot of boarding him using enhanced interrogation techniques in two thousand and three so a year later perhaps he finally decides to talk but why then did a lot of warning lead to this if there's no direct correlation when we were talking to him initially he told us i know of terrorist attacks and overcoming attacks and what kinds of things i'm just not going to tell you so we started being mean to we were quite mean to him and he deserved it but then he started cooperating and then he was transferred from the cia secret prisons overseas to club get look and all

this getting clear you know what are you trying to call get medical have a better doing close it's own records of the only thing i've ever heard him line go he would get more as a reward and then because he was cooperating and over the course of that year started telling us things we needed to know like. we were teaching and we were using regular techniques not if they had regular interrogation techniques right let's let's talk about this if you and you know i've read a lot of different accounts from people robin interrogators who don't think that torture is the best way to get information out of somebody what you want to do is you want to build trust with the person whom you're interrogating you want to try to convince them that you can provide them something some kind of protection they have protection for their family and maybe a lesser sentence in order for them to give up this kind of information it is not like he doesn't little guy wants more he wants seventy two goats in heaven and he was a magnificent for his family he didn't care he would willingly sacrifice any blood then he wanted to set it right away because we asked him we asked him for a long time to try regular interrogation techniques and play and i in techniques it

didn't work he did it we're going to he's going to find osama bin ladin. years and years ago if the interrogation techniques are right the enhanced interrogation techniques were then why in two thousand and three waterboarding him one hundred eighty three times didn't even tell us the full name he didn't really he gave us a whole compartmentalised so that's all i'm giving you the ground you know it you can logon is first of all if you compartmentalize a terrorist organization you can't roll the whole thing up if you find one guy like a senator so he knew that going to gear his alias which was ok wait later we found another guy gave him a little coercive interrogation he confirmed ok so two sets of coercive interrogation gave us the actual it's not just true it's just not true sure if you got this number care after you already started being nice for the guy because he realized you know what maybe he was worried i know it's the enemy territory anywhere i want who wants to be tortured and course nobody know this he was done with that he thought i don't ever ever want to go through this again for i think

it's all they need to know so i'll give them the run around i'll give you the road here is the name and yeah he also told us that there is a nuclear weapon buried somewhere in europe that was going to explode the second arsalan bin ladin was and we confirmed they're not really seeing that happen yet how he's given a legend let's just confirm i want to really have two minutes left so i want to move on to other things that we can also say that it really was it was intelligence it was say it was the cia operates on the ground that eventually did lead us to us . and found out who we were looking for by course you know we're just going to keep disagreeing on this one and the united states of america if we want to be a nation that tortures people if we lot of our morals are ethics our values out the window and we better just say that we torture people and not pretend like we don't do it but the whole point is that we're not supposed to do that you obviously then go on to be an american and this american says he doesn't want to torture people let's talk about these elite units this elite team six that at the end of the day got him do you think that's the best way does not prove that we don't need standing armies we don't need one hundred thousand troops somewhere if we can get

a guy through an elite unit that goes into the compound it kills them into two separate things we need a standing army for threats like the russians. the chinese and others it's like there isn't isn't that type of a threat that can take also when you're. going to put it lets the afghanistan iraq situation particularly if it's the joe biden magic ninjas play we get intelligence from some magic place and we send in the guys the players to take it or if we can get that absolutely that's better than rolling tanks really takes is a bad idea so if we can get intel and send in j. socks in the seals then in delta and the guys we want or welcome. it so that when you torture people when information about going time of day comes out when that ends up recruiting even more terrorist doesn't that she has her leaders were destroying their propaganda now qaeda recruiting videos rarely mention that their number one piece are always us in the holy land crusaders all that stuff us occupying their country but that's another hitler it is. i'm all right jim thank

you very much for joining us i am actually going to see you happy hour it was a little bit later on in the show thanks. now if we continue talking about osama bin laden and how this one figure to change america forever let's get to the money the u.s. is facing a debt crisis fourteen trillion dollars worth of our war in iraq some of estimated will end up costing us around three trillion afghanistan one to two trillion and that doesn't even take into account the money thrown at the homeland security department for which we're already hearing more cheers and terms of money needed after bin laden's death and that's exactly what he wanted to believe the us empire into bankruptcy and we haven't gotten that far yet we definitely seem to be on the path a new poll from gallup shows that for the first time on record most americans said that they don't believe today's young will have better lives than their parents so how do we reverse are dwindling bank accounts as well as our optimism and weeks discuss this is jerry crowe political director of brave new foundation great thanks so much for joining us tonight first of all do you think that osama bin laden did

the end of helping the u.s. . get closer towards bankruptcy exactly what his intentions were. well i don't think there's any doubt at all that our bad reactions in response to nine eleven and in the last couple of years the escalation of the war effort in afghanistan i don't think there's any doubt that that is further in the hole as far as our national debt and our deficits and put us on a path that was counterproductive and extraordinarily costly i mean you pointed this out a lot and said once that all he had to do was run two guys to some remote corner of the world and run up the banner of jihad and the american empire would run over to bankrupt itself by sending hundreds of thousands of troops and unfortunately that's exactly what we did with this counterinsurgency strategy and it was a bad idea then and after his death it's absolutely incumbent on us to turn course to come back home to bring those hundreds of thousands of troops and those billions of dollars home i wonder do you think we really can turn chorus of course the media

thing that we hear after the death of osama bin laden is that now we could be in more danger because now we have to worry about retaliation and out the homeland security department immediately saying that they need more security that they need more money and scientists don't see how how is this possibly going to stop. well if you look at the reaction in congress there are two camps forming and there's one camp that says look what's happened here has wrapped up the mission in afghanistan at best rightly even if you bought the original rationale for the war that now that bin laden is dead and al qaeda is driven from the country it just doesn't make sense to keep shoving troops at it and you've got this other camp that saying oh no there's nothing to see here folks the worst got to go on but those folks are really bitter enders when you when you compare them to american public opinion the american public has said before and a lot was killed when he was still out there somewhere that this war is not worth the cost and when people tell you that after bin laden is gone we've got to keep dumping two billion dollars a week on the afghanistan war to keep us safe they ought to be pointed out that

didn't laden's dead how does not mean country now if folks want to say that we need to spend more money here at home to protect the homeland that's one thing but there's no justification left even if you bought the original rationale for invading afghanistan or for the counterinsurgency strategy for continuing to put one hundred fifty thousand plus americans on the ground in afghanistan but don't you think that spending this type of money using those types of pure tech tactics on what we need here in the homeland are are just part of that game you know we have an entire agency an entire department of government the homeland security department was created over this we have the t.s.a. i feel like it's going to be a never ending expansion now you know that we have this this gigantic surveillance state which has all become a part of this and that cost us a lot of money too. absolutely the fear based responses that cause us to dump money into security apparatus in the united states can be enormously counterproductive but if you look at the comparison homeland security spending is just a fraction of what is being spent on the afghanistan war and other military first

auctions around the world so if we're going to cut costs the best post cut those costs is with those occupations and if folks want to add their voice to our petition campaign they can go to rethink afghanistan dot com right now and say that we need to bring our troops home in response to this killing of bin laden and that will save us hundreds of billions of dollars a year why do you think it works and what is it about our psyche or the way the politicians really approach americans that makes fear something that makes us want to spend more money right you could also say that our country is in a huge financial crisis right now we're about to reach our debt limit tim geitner is already caving thanks to politics saying that perhaps the treasury can do something to extend this until august second so we don't see catastrophe on may sixteenth as we were expecting before but somehow there just isn't the political will or the political pressure to say that that's really putting us in danger and that's something that we need to tackle head on. well i think you're seeing that political pressure to save it and as nuff form up in congress there are folks

republicans and democrats coming out today saying that now that bin laden is dead maybe we need to really look at the way we were approaching security in this company or security in this country excuse me but to answer your direct question i mean if someone asks you how much is your life worth you almost always say everything i've got because your wealth isn't worth anything to you if you're dead so these politicians keep coming on the airwaves and poking the fear button has led to a lot of irrational decision making here in the united states and we wasted a lot of wealth in this country on things like the afghanistan war and other military actions that haven't made us safer just because some politician keeps coming on t.v. and pressing the fear but what you're seeing now the bin laden is dead is this overwhelming sense among the american people that something has ended that these these expenditures if they ever were justified are no longer justified and we need those billions here at home because the other thing that's not safe is losing your home it's an other things not safe is losing your job there are things that that

are included under the umbrella of security asides you know just running off and starting wars in other countries and we've got to get back to those yanis bethany things that we're seeing right now as i mentioned that gallup poll today that part of the first time on record to people think that the youth aren't going to live as good a lives as their parents had no i guess that's a depressing reality come to terms of perry thank you so much for joining us tonight thank you. now just ahead on tonight's show a young n.b.c. correspondent flubbed his information when tweeting about in months that details his rights to his time segments and say also marks the fortieth anniversary of the major protests here in washington d.c. our people took to the streets to demand an end to the war in vietnam so on the significance they will find out why you don't hear about protests like that anymore i'll be right. let's not forget that we are in the park heard right.