well i'm tom foreman in washington d.c. and here's what's coming up tonight on the big picture our military presence in afghanistan has brought bloodshed and one roused as well as economic woes and tremendous financial burden for so should we bow out gracefully now before things worse for both us and the afghan people a california man has three small children are already in their home by a group of federal agents and the spotty department of education was behind the bust and they aren't saying why it happened but it could have something to do

a student loans so it could be the feds be headed for a door near you and the escalating problems at the fukushima daiichi plant in japan pose a serious question if a nuclear meltdown happened here in america handle the disaster. you need to know this not only is our war effort in afghanistan struggling so is our humanitarian effort according to a new senate foreign relations committee report nearly nineteen billion dollars we've spent in aid to afghanistan over the last ten years more than any other country in the world has been mostly ineffective squandered away by corruption

currently foreign aid and military spending accounts for about ninety seven percent of afghanistan's g.d.p. and the senate report warns afghanistan could suffer a severe economic depression when foreign troops leave in two thousand and fourteen unless the proper planning begins now. around the clock right so not only have we brought a decade of war and death to the afghan people we've also propped up a pool a corrupt political regime and turned their two billion dollar a year g.d.p. economy into a massive thirteen billion dollar a year war bubble that's about to burst so why should they think it's now or later here offer his take on the issue as well as the big picture of what our military involvement has meant i had it in our nation's perpetual war on terror is here at puerto investigative journalist and policy analyst on u.s. foreign military policy as well as the author of four books including perils of dominance in balance of power and the road to two war in vietnam gareth welcome

thanks tom great to have you with us based on this new senate report if we leave afghanistan's economy will crash and if we stay we're screwed but we do but i think we have to start phasing it out if that's the only way that you can prepare the afghan people in their economy for the crash that you're talking about as it is what this aide is doing is essentially corrupting the entire society and there's no question about that this is been well reported well i should say it's been reported well by certain reporters not widely but by the u.s. news media what's been happening is that the u.s. inevitably picks out warlords and powerful people locally to do business with in other words to help them with their economic development plans as well as their military security efforts and those warlords essentially make out like bandits which they are on the basis not only of the military aspect of this but the economic assistance as well and that obviously turns the local people even more

against the government and basically fuels the insurgency to tell its let's let's define this and in terms of numbers that hopefully are easily understood before we invaded and correct me if i'm wrong and these numbers because i'm i'm i'm right. memory here as much as anything else but my recollection is before we invaded afghanistan the g.d.p. of the country was around two billion dollars a year sounds about right ok. my recollection is that the first year that george bush was president like a couple of months into his presidency there was a major problem with afghan opium getting as heroin hitting the streets in europe and the united states price was really low action was going up in russia as were all these countries and george bush went to mullah omar and said we'll give you forty million dollars my recollection would be forty million dollars you pass it along to the opium farmers and ask them are in their fields moammar took the money actually did distribute most of it to the opium farmers and if you look at the spike of opium production from afghanistan there's this huge drop bush's plan

actually worked this little tiny bit forty million dollars point zero four of one billion was enough to shut down the opium and still people had a living that's night or so as well so if that's the case if that small amount of money given that you know just given that way through the local system as it were why don't we just get all the military out get all the foreign aid out and with a fraction of what we're spending cycling money through halliburton and k.b.r. and all these other companies just you know empower though and say ok you want to build a house but you want to build a school here and the answer is quite simple that would not be consistent with the interests of the u.s. military the pentagon and the political interests the contractors of the story behind this war so that's why it's not going to happen unless obviously there is sufficient pressure from the population of the united states but bear in mind there is also a very direct military role in this assistance problem and that is that the military has one billion dollars this past year to play with locally each local commander

can dish out of money to his favorite afghan people and use that to try to stem the tide of insurgency and what happens then of course is exactly what i. talked about is that local potentates local powerful individuals are the ones who inevitably clean up from this program that the u.s. military is doling out and that's probably the biggest single program of u.s. assistance in afghanistan so the military is the one that has the greatest stake in keeping that money flowing right now that's not good you we have just two minutes left you recently wrote a piece a pakistani journalist saeed saline shazad who was he why should we know about his story he was a unique journalist in the afghanistan pakistan region because he had a unique access to al qaeda strategies for the last several years starting at least

in two thousand and four he was getting regular interviews with people like ilyas kashmiri the guy who has now twice been reported as being killed in drone attacks because he was so important apparently he was not killed at all and other top level commanders of the al qaeda and what he learned from these people is now been told in his new book published just a few days before he disappeared and then his body was found with signs of torture just a few days ago in that book he says that what he was told by the al qaeda leaders that he spoke with is that they wanted to get the united states into afghanistan very badly that's why they decided to attack the united states homeland because they figured the united states would in fact invade afghanistan and that would be the biggest thing could happen the best thing you could happen to al qaeda for its global strategy of trying to turn the populations of islamic countries against the

regimes quote i mean that was some of a strategy when he blew up the federal building was he thought that bill clinton was so clamp down on guns and militias that the militias would rise up and take over the country bill clinton did he said this guy's a criminal george bush the. walked right into it if you walked right into it just incredible girth thanks so much for being with us tonight and for the great radio reporter doing this fiasco in afghanistan started ten years ago when on the day after nine nine eleven president george w. bush treated the terrorist attacks as an act of war instead of a crime we could have embarked on a path of global police action with the world as our allies capturing top al-qaeda leaders in the same way we got bin laden and saved trillions of dollars and thousands of american lives stead bush was down a path of endless war and today our nation is in worse shape than it's ever been since the great depression and al qaeda is still a threat if we only had a time machine or if only in two thousand there'd been a different supreme court. it's

time for our daily poll your chance to tell us what you think here's today's question the one nine hundred billion dollars we've spent in aid afghanistan much of it has been squandered away by corruption is it time to come home your choices are yes not only is our war effort in afghanistan struggling so is our humanitarian effort or no we've turned their two billion dollar a year g.d.p. an economy into a fourteen billion dollar war a bubble that's about to burst log on the town are going to let us know what you think the pole be open till tomorrow morning. a california man received a rude awakening this morning kenneth wright awoke to his door being knocked in at six in the morning himself getting dragged out into the yard and arrested in only his underwear and his kid scared to death at the hands of federal agents acting like a swat team so what was kind of guilty of to deserve this excessive police force

you see a crime came pin running a million dollar drug ring was he an illegal arms dealer with a cash machine guns was he a mass murderer on the loose. no he wasn't in fact he wasn't guilty of anything federal agents busted it was providing kind of a morning from hell because his a strange wife wasn't even. apparently had defaulted on her student loans or at least that was the original story as you heard the federal agents acting like a swat team were dispatched. for something that had to do with student loan debt we've we've heard several stories on this right now take a look at this in my underwear in my underwear for i get to do i hear and say hit it and i get ready to hit the door they hit the door they almost hit me so i say hold on they hit it give us a homo they come grab me by my neck and drag me out my house for right here in the great me in the backseat of a police car over six hours from six o'clock to twelve thirty they had me

handcuffed in a back of a police car would never know what my reply to what if they ripped in the yard the department of education which were teen which reportedly issued the search warrant is giving a different account of the story that are his press secretary issued a statement today saying that the department does not executed search warrants for late loan payments however the deal we did see didn't say exactly why the agents were sent in then claiming only that it's an ongoing criminal investigation so this is a routine thing now we department of education dispatching a swat like tina catcher captured broke students just last month another controversial swat team rate went down in arizona this time leading to the death of a former marine and team said they were looking for marijuana but found none they did however manage to unload sixty rounds into jose grana killing him say a load. or

so of these two incidents symptomatic of a change in america are we moving in the direction of a police state for more on this i'm joined by jim cavanaugh columnist reasoning contributor to hit and run jim welcome. good to be here tom thanks it is part of education so go ahead. they i mean it sorry that's on such under such terrible conditions the story of. in arizona is just absolutely an incredible tragedy if i might correct two point one one point it wasn't sixty rounds in him it was seventy one rounds just discharged only twenty two of which hit him we got some photos yesterday of where the rest of the bullets went they went all over the house including the back bedroom where a four year old was hiding amazing now in this case today the department of

education says it was a student loan raid the debt that led to the raid but what can possibly can anyone possibly do to the department of education i mean these are the people who issue student loans that would justify this kind of force and yeah i don't know i mean this is what's going to happen to children who get left behind from now on or something it's it's incredible what could it be if it's fraud or embezzlement let's say it is i mean we don't want to presume anything but let's say that there are the words that they didn't say were at issue here they just mentioned that we also conduct raids about fraud and embezzlement let's say it was fraud and embezzlement that's a crime that supposed to end with the inspector bringing everybody into the drawing room to say who's guilty it's not supposed to end in a swat raid this is this is really the it seems the militarization of our police we now have swat you know twenty years thirty years ago swat teams were unknown and now they're hitting in american cities every day just how routine are these swat

team actions now on america. there. they are under the rubric of the war on drugs their constant care to have their happening every day i mean there is a new swathe rates you hear about occasionally when a dog gets shot or when a person gets shot but literally every day in the country they're going on how does this move from a civil liberties state thirty years ago to a militarized police and patriot act state today happened one of the things that drove this it seems to me that that i mean well for example website i've read a number of news stories about how local police departments are getting all these surplus military equipment because the military is generating all this surplus equipment because the lobbyists for the companies that sell it to the military are getting the military to buy extra equipment is is that the main thing driving this or is it just the whole fear there's a lot of things stimulus drove some of it some of it was stimulus that went to the

war on drugs and went to the war on terror is that a lot of political police forces you have to think about the economy from the standpoint of a local police force if you say that you've established a new special weapons and tactics group or you've established some new drug you know unit that's going to particularly go after all the kingpins or a special crimes unit or whatever you want to call it you get eligible for a bunch of funds under the war on drugs under the war on terror under the stimulus and you can you're going to make money and of course you're going to do that this this was going to be the outcome this was going on a lot before the stimulus bill but i give you that short but short no absolutely if that is not a bad bill and war on drugs and it goes back to the war on terror in particular that you know the end of the war on terror with a great but nannes a for local police jim our government was is now routinely wiretapping grabbing internet e-mail from pretty much anyone they want where could this go and how can libertarians like yourself and liberals like me form

a coalition to do something about. well we could start on just the basics that you know the right to be secure in your home and your purse and your property. seems to be the last time i saw this the sort of coalition you're describing was probably around that hilo decision that the supreme court did where the people in new london all had to vacate their homes so that pfizer could come in supplies or subsequently drop out another is nothing where those homes used to be but you know that's where we do say these are this is not the poor versus the rich or anything like that these are just ordinary americans in their homes are not secure and even this is it me this is a perfect going to be this one is going to be i think going to have some way because the department of education who even knew that they had the armed police forces at their disposal whether they're full time d.o.a. employees or whatever they turned out to be the stockton police in california have been trying to back away from this now say they only provided one officer and one squad car for this action so it could it could go anywhere they could find any of

it in miami it could be prostitution sure and or or just whatever i mean it could just be a guy in the street we just have thirty seconds here in miami a guy was shot in the street the guy filming it we only know about the film because he's stuck the memory card his mouth how long is this trending going on he's going to be people filming it. yeah well you want to you might want to go to our site look for a great video we have and a great magazine article on the war on cameras the efforts by police to confiscate all cameras i'm working on a security right now in san bernardino county where cameras were confiscated at the scene from multiple eyewitnesses to the death of a civilian at the hands of the sheriff's amazing jim cavanaugh thanks for being with us tonight thanks tom great to be here you know there was a time in america when police state tactics were unthinkable and the rule of law was respected as one of our most beloved and iconic shows illustrates this from the

one nine hundred sixty s. . but who's to break sal you why are we putting to selling our last tape recorder let's listen to a socket and listen to that but i can't listen to that i'm not permitted part of you don't understand ok i can't listen to this i told you about eavesdropping but paul this is different he says one nurse you overheard a conversation it was supposed to be private now i can't be a party to that a kite you just listen to don't think i can't question your research that's what i mean to do you book a conversation between a lawyer and his client. now that's fine a lady won the most sacred rights and i see. no pots helps cut off opiates the law can use this time. because motherland this guilty or else we have to find that out i do process of luck.

coming up japan is literally at the mercy of their ravaged nuclear plants and the tables are turned with america be able to overcome the nuclear meltdown. let's not forget that we had an apartheid regime right here and. i think russia may be the one to well. we have a government says they're going to keep you safe get ready because you're going to their freedom.

you know sometimes you see a story and it seems so. you think you understand it and then you glimpse something else and you hear see some other part of it and realized everything you thought you don't. charge is a big issue. three

months after the catastrophic earthquake and tsunami in japan there's still no good news coming from the melted down for regime a nuclear reactor a new report suggests that not only had three reactor cores of the crippled plant suffered meltdowns but they may also have melted through the containment vessels a scenario that if true would yield far more devastating consequences than just a meltdown also just yesterday tepco the operators of the fukushima plant admitted that radioactive fallout around the plant in the first week after the earthquake was twice as high as previously reported the conclusion of this latest report is what we are all beginning to see japan was wholly unprepared for

a nuclear situation of the severity so if you and wasn't prepared are we. unfortunately we may find out sooner or later as just this week a nuclear power plant omaha nebraska is declared a state of emergency the fort calhoun nuclear plant is bracing for flooding from the nearby missouri river not only that the same plant suffered an electrical fire yesterday and had to briefly turn up the cooling pumps that prevent a meltdown officials of the nuclear regulatory commission claim that no radiation has been released at the imperial plant joining me now to talk more about the risks of nuclear power and the latest coming out of japan is dr arjun markey johnny president of the institute for energy and environmental research and author of numerous papers and books including carbon free and nuclear free a roadmap for u.s. energy policy dr matas johnny welcome to the program thank you so much i'm so glad to have you with us today. how is a melt through more serious than

a meltdown what happens if the ship when you just have melted fuel a nuclear reactor just like a pressure cooker. steel pressure and the radioactivities inside that's a different the fuel is inside the pressure cooker not outside so when you have a meltdown you have very very high temperatures put the melted fuel inside that pressure cooker and so it's contained some of the radioactivity that can evaporate with the volatile radioactive material escape and that's what has been escape gases or it's gases that's right now when you melt through the reactor vessel then you have a primary containment but it's so hot that can melt right through like volcanic lava melt through the containment and then of course you have a terrible mess because you have water in the turbine in the reactor building another reactor building tops have been blown off and then you can get much much

larger release of the radioactivity that's point number one cleaning up the mess is going to be gigantic will be more. difficult because you now no longer have a contained mess this it's going to be a year before it's the end of the beginning and then it's going to be decades after that. where is the you said the the you know it with the pressure cooker you said it over a fire and you have the contents being the vegetables or whatever in this case the the fire is inside the pressure cooker the nuclear material the nuclear material has burned through the bottom of the three of these reactors and is in what sitting on a concrete floor inside a building isn't going to want to go around a syndrome. it will literally be the china syndrome when the worst case it could burn right to the bottom of the reactor building and then through the bottom of the reactor building it's a heart it is very hot that's why you have to keep cooling it and you have to cool

it for a year or two say this is a fire you can't turn off because once you've generated the electricity you've created a lot of fission products that are radioactive and the radioactivity is generating heat all the time so that's why you have to carry away the heat or you get a buildup of pressure in an explosion now it's unclear where this stuff is because you can't go when it's going it's lethally radioactive within minutes and so or less and so it's maybe in the primary containment because they've been able to maintain a fair amount of floor water and they are releasing it and the downside of that is they were releasing radioactive steam and places you know quite far away to become contaminated so it's not clear i don't think there's evidence that is gone through the building on the other hand a lot of water in the reactor building has become contaminated and now it's. true we've got very complicated oceans what about here in the united states of it didn't we get a warning back in the sixty's or seventy's with the fermi plan to detroit and then

another one in three mile island and and we've got new. reactors fault lines and nuclear reactors are among the largest of the consumers of water in terms of producing energy producing electricity they consume lots of water so they're always sat next to rivers or oceans or lake michigan and all of which are like michigan i don't know but the rivers and oceans certainly susceptible to flooding tsunamis tropical storms high tides. we were seeing this right now with this fort calhoun plant nebraska what is the real risk in america could we have a fukushima style disaster what we you know there are two reactors in earthquake zones in california. on the cole you know that there are some combination of earthquake and tsunami is possible there now whether they are high enough and won't be flooded that's another question they say they are and i haven't studied it in and i won't give you an independent estimate about that and what the main thing the

main problem in japan was what's called a station blackout so they lost their emergency cooling their emergency generators they lost the main power coming out now during these tornadoes recently in the south where you had station blackouts so the transmission lines get knocked out generators should work and what happened in japan the diesel generators got knocked out was not be able to log and of tornado for example knock out your main power. and you need a generator gets knocked out then you have a very similar situation because you got batteries for four hours and japan had batteries that lasted for eight hours the shocking thing to me is we're looking at this and no one predicted an accident for three months accidents of supposed to be short now we should learn from chernobyl lasting for ten days what we said all the . different reactor that won't happen here well that couldn't happen an accident

similar with different mechanism and different reactors three months of an. accident means eight hours battery isn't going to be enough if we're looking at this and we haven't decided yet order of the nuclear power plant lesson number two we've got in vermont yankee. we have more spent fuel in one spent fuel pool all the used fuel that very hard but causing so many problems in japan and then all four fukushima reactors put together now we know that dry storage is much might see and we're looking out in front of their some dry storage it was ok even with the even with the tsunami it was ok and the earthquake the nuclear regulatory commission read licensed this plant which is just like fukushima for twenty years ten b.'s into the fukushima crisis i was in or

a month on that day when it happened to live near it without ordering the spent fuel to be emptied into dry storage so it could be safe i was shocked thank you so much for being with us that i think you appreciate it it's i think it's needs what's going on in omaha nebraska is yet another warning sign of the dangers of nuclear power that our lawmakers are once again ignoring we don't start heeding these warnings and it's nuclear power soon like germany just did and switzerland just did and japan just did and what we're seeing on t.v. in japan could be happening right in our own backyards. crazy alert the right to tan republicans in the house are focusing on the important issues facing our nation like the ten percent tax on tanning that's right republican michael grimm just introduced a bill to repeal the tanning beds x. it was part of president obama's health reform law room said this largest.