good evening and welcome to the loaners show where you get the real headlines with none of the mersey work coming live out of washington d.c. i'm lauren lyster in for alona so as we come up on the ten year anniversary of nine eleven tonight we'll talk about what has happened since with the trillions of dollars of defense spending thousands of lives lost erosion of individual rights and perpetual state of war has meant for the country we'll talk to colonel lawrence wilkerson about that his former chief of staff to colin powell and also jake hugo he's host of the young turks but first what do the mainstream media miss. so as the anniversary of nine eleven years on sunday we are seeing mainstream media coverage all over focused on the events of that tragic day and the memorials for

the lives lost does the nation prepares to remember its worst attack ever from new york to the pentagon the pennsylvania things here in new york are moving along toward what will be a day to remember as they formally unveil the boreal location here two of these sites where the towers used to stand that ship naval ship was built from steel that was taken from the former towers in new york city what was formerly known as the freedom tower but it's now called one world trade center. and in honor of the tenth anniversary of being and war started in response to nine eleven the mainstream media decided now would be a good and appropriate time to drop a correspondent into afghanistan to show americans that oh yeah we're still there and look at these great things that the u.s. is doing. ten years after the nine eleven terrorist attacks and the start of the war in afghanistan the u.s. mission to train afghan troops is intensifying you have thirty years of war it that

this country has been engaged in and so there is a generation that has lost what we've tried to do is build an army quickly and you know we're on track to do that through home afghanistan is it a critical turning point is future uncertain. the problem is that the u.s. has been involved in war in afghanistan and iraq every day for close to ten years now not just on the tenth anniversary of the nine eleven attacks and in that time more than sixty two hundred u.s. troops have been killed in iraq in afghanistan that's according to iraq coalition casualty count that's more than twice as many as were killed in the world trade center attacks but if you watch the mainstream media at all maybe you have noticed as the folks at pew research certainly have coverage of the afghanistan war is limited to say the least and according to pew more than violence or events on the

ground it is policy decisions in washington they create spikes in coverage so this would explain why in late two thousand and nine when obama announced he would be sending thirty thousand more troops to afghanistan covered spight it captured twenty seven percent of the mainstream media's attention in what was an anomaly and it also explains why we haven't heard as much sense when afghanistan has made it into the top five stories that pew research tracks on the mainstream media it captures three to five percent of their attention and that's when it registers at all and iraq i mean iraq's not even mentioned it doesn't even appear to be registering much of a blip at all anymore so for more or less ignoring the ten years of war that the us has been involved in and trying to make up for it in one day of coverage on the anniversary of the attacks that were terrible but used to justify them that is. what the mainstream media missed.

now what we've been talking about the casualties of these wars that doesn't count the money that's been spent too so we want to take a closer look at that in the decade since the twin towers fell in new york city our country has dedicated a huge portion of its resources to counterterrorism efforts both here and abroad but exactly how much has the us financially dedicated to this cause let's break down the numbers so since two thousand and one the u.s. has spent how much six hundred thirty five billion dollars on homeland security and remember it created the department of homeland security after nine eleven add that to our defense budget and america has dropped a whopping seven point six trillion dollars since the september eleventh attacks now believe it or not this is a huge increase from what the u.s. spent on its military a decade ago so let's take a look at that if you look at the defense budget from fiscal year two thousand it

was about two hundred ninety five billion dollars just under three hundred billion dollars it has grown by eighty six percent and the government requested seven hundred billion dollars for the d.o.d. in two thousand and eleven so let's break down those numbers a little and look just at our war budget according to the national priorities project the u.s. has spent one point two trillion dollars on wars in iraq and afghanistan to break that down seven hundred ninety four billion dollars has gone to iraq and afghanistan we've seen four hundred fifty one billion dollars dedicated and how exactly has our country's trillion dollar war funding been divided up well the report from the congressional research office shows that the total war funding breaks down into three major categories ninety four percent of it right year that huge chunk you see goes to the department of defense this includes military salaries training support. that is funding new war related programs military construction and of course acquiring new weapons just five percent this little

chunk year goes to the state department and usa id now this is for international development this deals with reconstruction in iraq and afghanistan for a day programs and funding for embassy operations and the last tiny sliver what's left the little bit right here one percent goes to veteran affairs now this is involved for a vote veterans involved in both operation iraqi freedom and operation enduring freedom so when we hear about the u.s. war on terror and winning hearts and minds in afghanistan it looks like the bulk of that money to achieve those goals goes to the ninety five percent that is military weapons and personnel so that's something that maybe can make you think so with one point two trillion dollars going to our war efforts let's take a closer look at how much of a chunk of that is it makes up our country's discretionary federal spending so take a look at that huge chunk that fifty three percent in this paragraph that's defense spending so what else is left not

a whole lot housing assistance transportation education and health six seven five and five percent respectively so it's pretty obvious where i park priorities lie and keep in mind all of our shadow wars you know the ones that president obama doesn't actually label as war and even though we don't have boots on the ground in libya we know the u.s. has been involved and it is spent eight hundred ninety six million dollars in libya now there's also some stats we can't give you we don't know how much we've spent in yemen somalia and pakistan countries where the united states is engaged in drone attacks and in some case missions so you can see the u.s. is throwing a huge chunk of cash into its defense look at that four point seven percent of g.d.p. but how does this compare to other countries let's see how it looks next to our next biggest competitor china two point two percent of g.d.p. . in two thousand and nine france's military makes up how much two point five percent of g.d.p. is on their military and in the u.k.

it makes up two point seven percent of their g.d.p. so check out the staggering difference between the united states and its next biggest competitor china a recent report shows the u.s. spends six times more on its military than china does so with all of this spending done in a post nine eleven world where does this leave us now ten years later. that's a question that we would still like to answer let's talk about what the money and casualties have cost the u.s. and what it's achieved ten years later has it been worth it to talk about that lawrence works in colonel lawrence wilkerson they retired u.s. army colonel and former chief of staff to colin powell we're so happy to have you here so in the reports that i've been doing we kind of compare the deaths between iraq and afghanistan and the world trade center so sixty two hundred u.s. troops have died in iraq and afghanistan that's more than double that were killed in the world trade center is that an appropriate cost for any response to the to

the attack of the twin towers that's why i said when george bush said we're over there so they are over here he was right but not in the way you mean why would al qaida come to the united states when there was a target rich environment in afghanistan and iraq and as you pointed out other places to do so in that sense george w. bush was right but in the sense that you're asking the question how in the world can anybody think that it's cost effective. how can anybody pronounce or do anything other than preposterously nonsensical to take an attack by the laudanum is a watery which cost about five hundred thousand dollars and spin trillions in order to combat it how can you say that's cost effective how can you say it's even rational it looks completely irrational to anyone standing and looking at it and saying if i were all mars and i said what is a country doing i would say it is spending itself to death for the use of its military so then why does it seem rational to lawmakers on both sides of the aisle right here in washington because the military industrial congressional complex has

made it very very lucrative for them to vote for military defense spending it's also made it lucrative in a sense that's very pertinent right now for example if you were to look at lockheed and say i'm going to number one defense contractor i want to reduce your budget by so much from a douche your income best jobs that's jobs. texas oklahoma new mexico ohio that's jobs all across the country same with raytheon same with boeing same with other military contractors so it's even more sensitive right now but we're going to have to do something about this and you're hit you're hearing it within my party now the republican party you're hearing from people people from the tea party for example and others finally talk about if we're going to really do something about the deficit we cannot leave military spending out do you really think within your party we're going to see real political will to make dramatic cuts i think you're going to this always happens and it's happened since world war two and it's going to happen again the people who most go after the military in terms of draconian cuts

or ultimately my party the republicans when it comes time to actually go after them they will go after them with a vengeance. they will since world war two we have never seen the country demilitarize we heard eisenhower in one nine hundred sixty nine i saw him warn about guarding against the military industrial complex and that didn't happen are we just going to see eisenhower fall to military every day of his presidency and eisenhower eisenhower director there is no you gawd help this country if and when there are things sits in this office that doesn't know the military the way i do right and since then we haven't seen a demilitarization are we going to never see a deep counterterrorism. you saw a massive cut in the armed forces of the united states after the end of the cold war and when you when bill clinton came in you saw an even further cut on that which is one reason why we're having trouble with ground forces in iraq and afghanistan and elsewhere in the global so-called global war on terror so it's not true that we haven't cut the armed forces before we have we've got them

significantly in certain periods in our history and when the defense budget really comes to be an issue when it's through school sanity or physical insanity the republicans will be in there cutting the defense department as fast as anyone so you know for a day the republicans are going to do that you're going to do that are we going to see that now is that the tipping point now when we see. then making cuts you're going to say you are going to present a deal you're going to see increasing pressure to get out of iraq and afghanistan you're going to see increasing pressure on the republican leadership from the tea party to that effect you're going to see them increasingly have to answer to the american people about why are we still doing this and you're going to see it happen as we start the fourteen months now but you're going to see it start happening as we start the general election maybe not in the primaries because that's going to be the extreme right engage in the primaries but in a general election you're going to start you are to see it start happening and the president is crazy if he's or he doesn't take advantage of this and go after the

republicans on well let's let's break from politics and talk about what happens in afghanistan if we see that drawdown and we see that pullout i was reading an interesting commentary from a columnist who was saying that afghanistan in two thousand and four there was this hope and this excitement and people were excited about the fall of the taliban but that in the years since then that hope is decayed they have foreign troops on their land they're sick of it they have a corrupt government and their country is gone backwards is afghanistan going backwards i think afghanistan is on the little boy in the sense that we would say we want a victory that says a b. c. and d. absolutely i think that because three conditions one you have sanctuary for the enemy that you can't go into pakistan principally two you have a difference in objectives we're fighting a limited war they're fighting a total war to the last man we're not about to fight to the last man as you pointed out less than one percent of this country is bleeding and dying for the other ninety nine plus percent we have a foreign legion of people don't care people don't even know that iraq is going on in afghanistan is gone except occasionally when the mainstream media. as you

pointed out very well tends to focus on it which is very often and the third reason is that we simply cannot afford this we simply cannot afford it in the congress woke up after ten years in vietnam and use the power of the purse eventually they're going to wake up and use the power of the person here in the the in. but since it's ironic that the tea party in libertarians within the tea party in particular are the ones who are starting to talk about you've got to go after the defense budget if you're going to restore fiscal sanity to this republic and they're right and we'll have to see if that happens if afghanistan is and when a bill if it is going backwards and the u.s. pulls out and the situation deteriorates a taliban takes power something is that the outcome that that the u.s. should accept after spending the billions of dollars there and losing more than seventy what do you know why was the united states this is twenty twenty hindsight what we should have done was gone over there did what we did in the first year come out and said if you do it again we can do it again it would cost us maybe fifty

billion dollars to do instead we've lingered there for eleven years on successfully getting worse all the time pakistan is the real issue in about to implode and we are scared to death to leave afghanistan because we want to be there if pakistan does implode but we've got to leave we simply cannot afford these wars on the fringes of empire which are bleeding us to death both literally in terms of our young men and women and also their school in terms of our dollars as you've pointed out and i don't think you went deeper no you better not really use that word son and i look at that as a you say it's a way worse but what about you mentioned the media you mention the political class you think that the police actually have some political will to cut but as far as the word terrorism which we are seeing all over the mainstream right now as we talk about the tenure the decade that has passed since nine eleven is using the word terrorism for america's political only and media elite is that just

omnipotent and justifying wars and the patriot act and spying and infringing on civil liberties today just as much as it was in the aftermath after nine eleven we have painted ourselves into a corner in that respect and you've summed it up well we have indeed done that but i see the american people awakening to the fact. we've gone there and saying ok we're more resilient than that we know we may get hit again we know it may be a catastrophic attack we know that it will happen some time in the future so what let's get on with business let's get on with building more jobs let's get on with restoring our infrastructure let's get on with building our economy back because that is ultimately the essence of national security not standing around in fevered into supply of another terrorist attack so you're saying our country's priorities are all wrong i think they are and i think the american people are going to shift it and i think they may throw every single member of congress who is serving now

out in the next election will be there as a bold predicts and colonel lawrence wilkerson i certainly appreciate coming on the show and talking about that ten year anniversary of the worst terrorist attack on u.s. soil and still to come right here do american citizens and really know or care about increasing encroachment on their civil liberties in the wake of nine eleven jank you got host of the young turks joins us for that discussion in just a moment. welcome

back ten years after nine eleven aside from and less wars that we have talked about the country has come to accept what someone. call a war on our freedoms we walked there body scanners at the airport and take off our shoes for t.s.a. yesterday's mall cops today are military trained counterterrorism professionals sizing you up as a threat as you shop warrantless wiretapping and spying are provisions passed by congress without much debate obama on the tenth anniversary of nine eleven wrote this and an op ed that appeared in usa today this is part of it he said the perpetrators of those attacks wanted to terrorize us but they are no match for our resilience today our country is more secure and our enemies are weaker while we have delivered justice to a solemn bin laden and put al qaeda on the path to defeat we must never waver in

the task of protecting our nation but just how much do americans have to give up in that task of protecting our nation and is the country really more secure as a result earlier i talked with talked with genk ugur he's host of the young turks to ask if he thought that body scanners and warrantless wiretapping and wars were signs of that resilience that obama is talking about. of two minds on the one hand i think that we have done some good work in. trying to say is we do with osama bin laden and i think that we have really deteriorated their ability to strike us now i don't think that we went about the most efficient way and that's a massive understatement obviously we wasted a tremendous amount of time resources and blood unfortunately in iraq which didn't help us at all it only hurt us in afghanistan we've long been past the peak of the

war helping us in any way shape or form but here internally we've taken some progressions that caching for example some yemenis that were considering putting bombs on cargo on airplanes etc on the other hand our civil liberties have been greatly eroded and and i don't think that's helped us with security. at all so overall i would say i'm disappointed in the direction we go do you think because it seems like this day and age everybody is prepared for body scanners for use by the t.s.a. and people aren't that upset anymore i mean to boot pew research shows that fifty four percent of people say it's not necessary to give up civil liberties in order to curb terrorism but that's not necessarily an overwhelming majority is this a new norm that people just accept in a post nine eleven world. yeah i hope not but you know a lot of those polls are misleading and by the way the reason that some of these

rights are in our constitution is because they can't be taken away by a poll or even an election majority cannot decide to take away not only of minorities rights but even their own rights if it's in shrine in the constitution and our founding fathers were incredibly smart about that unfortunately the fact our current leaders in the government where there was a bush administration or the obama administration of simply just de facto taking away some of those rights such as our right to be free of warrantless surveillance which is a fourth amendment but you know i'm afraid as as you're alluding to this some people growing up in this era don't get that you're not supposed to do warrantless wiretapping that's unconstitutional they don't understand that you're not supposed to do indefinite detentions that's what dictators to where they don't give whoever they're detaining due process rights is profoundly un-american and i hope that as a country we don't lose track of that well so then what ability though do you think

american people have to change that because as you mentioned there seems to be bipartisan support to just pass an extension of the patriot act to give like sample that you just. yes well look we've got to challenge the system overall because unfortunately the people who promises change delivered very very very little of it and so president obama said yeah ok i'll stop torturing you know meeting not that he was doing that torturing the first place it was an attrition was but even they had stopped actually before obama came in office but on an extraordinarily dishes which is kidnappings again they stop before obama came in and obama out of the mercy of the his soul and and goodness of his heart decided to continue not doing kidnappings and torture but outside of that they have done every single thing the bush administration has asked them to do and right now dick cheney . and don rumsfeld brag about it all the time we had obama to violate everybody's

rights just like we were doing so i honestly i don't have a lot of hope that we're going to a new democratic certainly not a new republican who's going to come in and say hey this was radical stuff and we should get back to the american norm so i think we've got to do a wholesale change of the system because they rely on the democratic party has been a very false hope so when you say wholesale change of the system what exactly do you mean. you know i always push for an amendment to clean up our democracy because i think a lot of this is the result of money buying our politicians so there's washington post of course today an incredible story on a whole industry that has arisen around homeland security and how of course they make billions upon billions of dollars doing this so they're not going to let go of the security apparatus because they make tremendous amount of money off of it so the only way that we can begin to change any of this and on all of it is to take

the money out of the system now which is extremely hard but i think we need a cost to tional amendment to say that corporations cannot give to politicians as an example why corporations because this is a frame court ruled that corporations have rights to free speech do you not believe in free speech. you. know i'm really is a free speech more than i do i just live in corporations are human beings endowed by their creator with inalienable rights such as free speech corporations are profit making robots they're machines they're not people they don't have freedom of speech rights and no what the supreme court has done is a travesty it's a horrible decision and they've been making these decisions backs at least since ninety seven he says but in reality what to some degree says eighty seventy eight of those tom hartman explains. that wasn't even really true the supreme court did not make corporations people but anyway we need amendment because this right wing

supreme court has grossly violated our constitution the activist judges that they are by considering corporations as people with pritam of speech rights you say that corporations are people they pay taxes does that give them the right to representation. absolutely and listen corporations have special rights and that's the problem ok so corporation is a legal fiction literally so the government gives them rights that protects them from things that normal human beings are not protected from so for example if you're a shareholder in a corporation you are not personally liable for the actions of that corporation so if a corporation winds up killing somebody out of negligence out of pollution whatever it might be the shareholder is not personally responsible if you do that in real life a human being that you would be responsible and you would have to go to jail etc so corporations are created out of a legal construct and they have these special rights they don't get to have both

they don't get to say hey you know what i'm not responsible for any of my actions like all the rights of human beings so i could spend money buying your politicians and totally perverting your democracy that's not how it's supposed to work but you're also not supposed to have taxation without representation in this country so if i was to say to you let's strip corporations out of having to pay taxes and then we'll strip their rights to donate to politics would you be ok with that. i'll tell you what i'll know what i'm not ok with. that my stash well get to it as i'm answering this question tax what we have in this country right now is taxation without any representation for the real human beings in this country ok well because what has happened is the corporations have bought all of our almost all of our politicians so we don't get represented at all the only people who are represented and they're not people is corporations they're the only ones who are represented and look there are

a thousand different things that we tax that don't get to vote ok so for example we have tariff tax so there's every we do it we put a tariff on china so i guess china as a human being we should have all the rights of any american citizen that makes no sense of course we can do taxation on corporations foreign countries etc etc doesn't mean that there are human beings and out with any of the rights of our constitution only us american citizens should get that but unfortunately right now it's topsy turvy we don't get that at all ok well we're almost out of time but just real quick i said i mean yes or no the koch brothers they're people too i mean they contribute a lot warren buffett you know the guy george soros yeah that's fair and there's a whole separate question and we've had rich people in this country trying to influence our politics for a long time on the right side and sometimes even on the left side and i'm not addressing that issue yes the koch brothers are obviously human beings and they can spend money to promote their ideas that is separate from what i'm saying i'm

talking about corporations which are perverted the system all right well we certainly appreciate you coming on and explaining to us why especially as they play such a role which you may not imagine at first when you talk about the anniversary of nine eleven thanks frank. thank you. and coming out a silent protest during obama's jobs speech earns a lawmaker tonight's told time award then will dive into a bomb a jobs plan any of his proposals actually bring jobs to the millions out of work here in the u.s. back in a moment. i

had no idea and this is coming to you live from moscow the headline. as they've been rebel stance storming some of the last proof get out his strongholds and siding has replaced celebration among some tribute residents with fears of only keep growing as the new regime replaces the old. also the direction interior ministry has declared a state of a laser at the embassy in cairo all stormed with the ambassador recalled during a day of protests for political change will send violent. close u.s. major policy is welcome president obama's plan to create jobs but experts say the all the trillion dollar stimulus package might be true as much for the split congress to smaller. as the headlines back not to the i don't know in washington d.c. part.