but can they learn a show where you get the real headlines with none of the mersey actually live in washington d.c. now time to speak with colonel lawrence wilkerson former chief of staff to colin powell going to ask him about everything from our troops leaving iraq and our tough words to pakistan to the death of moammar gadhafi then we'll continue our coverage of occupy wall street for the feelings coming from both right and left towards the movement pretty clear by now but what about those that are in the middle could occupy wall street influence the growing number of independents in this country that welch is going to join us for that one and is the government trying to smear anonymous trying to make us believe that these hacktivists are dangerous to critical infrastructure all just to undermine them our guest tonight argues with that it's true we're going to have all that free tonight and war footing a dose of happy hour but first take a look what the mainstream media has decided to mix.

all right so there are a number of big foreign policy stories out there today with the announcement that all u.s. troops are going to be leaving iraq by the end of this year and of course the death of moammar gadhafi yesterday in libya now i railed on the mainstream media yesterday for having a giant celebration without any analysis any questions as to the legality of this entire war but today they only continued to ignore those larger questions and of course they started playing domestic politics with the situation as usual because they just cannot help themselves so today the biggest question for the mainstream media was one of credit. after four decades in power and months of fighting to keep control wal-mart forgot the it's gone he's a living is a liberation indication for president obama's foreign policy how much credit can the administration actually claim he's just a small any real drama administration from your perspective deserves a lot of credit for this is will do. what i think you deserve credit for how the

death of moammar gadhafi adds to president obama's growing list of high profile national security what you're hearing from the white house is that this is a vindication for their strategy in libya as white house believes the death of a gift traitor ronald reagan once called the mad dog of the middle east indicates obama's intervention in the country for the president. to tout the tough re-election is taking shape. our queen our just come back down to earth for one little second here you have a war the president of the united states got us involved in without ever asking congress unconstitutionally you got a nato coalition the way into the country based on a u.n. resolution that only allowed for the enforcement of a no fly zone and protecting civilians and yet what resulted was obviously an attempt to get gadhafi and no civilians were to be protected by the drone the fire to hell fire missile at the convoy in sirte yesterday if anything their lives were put in more danger but while nato and the u.s. claim that they didn't know it could off he was part of that convoy they were trying to kill him it always stood by the statement that if he happens to die in

one of these airstrikes so be it so we see a total lack of honesty there as usual and all that raises the larger question of course that's what are already ever allowed trying to take a foreign leader out i mean is there somebody signing off on that decision or is this just some kind of an unspoken agreement are we going to do this all over the world a serious assad next is yemen sali these are viable questions people and yet none of the mainstream media even tries to bring any of that up they're obsessed with domestic politics with this issue of credit and whether republicans are properly giving it to the president or not i mean clearly you know u.s. officials are warning that off the way in which the cheering part is analyze as to who cheered war who cheered who the twisted rhetoric what a bizarre and insular way to look at geopolitics look at wars look at death but i guess that's what happens when you're part of a corporate needs free media that lives in a little bubble but only covers washington d.c. and new york when it comes to having

a touch of reality that's where the mainstream media gets a big miss. and i just a few days ago we told you about a conflicting situation is sociate of press had reported that sources had said that u.s. troops would all be leaving iraq at the end of this year the pentagon then quickly refuted that report and said that wasn't true and today we found out that it was president obama announced that indeed all u.s. troops would be leaving iraq at the end of a year as previously agreed to in two thousand and eight and apparently he had iraq's prime minister are totally on the same page. he spoke of the determination of the iraqi people to forge their own future we are in full agreement about how to move forward so today i can report that as promise the rest of our troops in iraq will come home by the end of the year. and now all the president may

want to sound like this was his plan all along like the u.s. and iraqi governments are on the same page it was just recently that we heard u.s. military officials including the former secretary of defense robert gates pushing for some troops to stay and negotiating those details but quote our almost nine year long war in iraq now be finally coming to an end or is a long contract her presence i mean that it's only a superficial and discusses that means lawrence wilkerson retired u.s. army colonel and former chief of staff to secretary of state colin powell lawrence thanks so much for joining us tonight so what do you make of this announcement i think a little bit shocking because we know the u.s. government has been putting a lot of pressure on the u.s. military on iraq to allow our troops to stay and then now you have the president acting like this is a campaign promise has just been fulfilled but let's face it iraq told them get out you hit on the two dimensions of this and maybe there are more the first mention of course is that we've been playing a tit for tat game with the iraqis they want a status of forces agreement which would have to be in place for us to leave troops

to give them a lot of control over our troops we don't want that we want is typical status of forces agreement where we have mostly control over troops would do the iraqis so on but not all but let me break that down just for one minute when you talk about control over the troops because isn't part of the you know the place where they're not connecting here is when it comes to legal immunity but lord over us water status of forces agreement is all about taking is not a normal thing it is a very normal ok for example in japan we give them already over certain crimes we have authority over other crimes and we debate from time to time that's a status of forces agreement is not total unity but it is solemn duty the rockies don't want as i understand it to have any of you and we want to have some immunity and so we can't meet and this is tit for tat and we're putting pressure on them by saying we're going to leave totally now that the president has weighed in and puts a new dimension to it that are going to be very difficult i think for him to walk back from that so now you come to the second dimension. which is the one you mention we have a battalion and

a half in the embassy alone and in terms of contractors we probably have several battalions over there my son was in care of working with the iraqi air force all of their support was contractors their logistics their maintenance their training everything with contractors so there are plenty of contractors over there and i will say this right now the future in conflict over gas and oil and so for and so on is probably going to involve more private armies then it is state armies so this is a this is very much in vogue this is very much a thing to do to leave private contractors in a position where you don't want to leave state sponsored forces so there's definitely to be a last contract and look at what's happening with the right look at what's happening to all the oil is being apportioned out right now even though there isn't a parliamentary agreement there is no agreement between the kurds and the iraqis for example with regard to have her kook's oil would be shared but maliki is signing like he were a tyrant he's signing contracts contracts with china malaysia and underneath those

contracts with sixty to sixty percent control and twenty year contracts are exxon mobil royal dutch shell chevron health and other national or private oil companies so the oil the two hundred billion barrels that iraq may have which rival saudi arabia is going out. so some private force is also going to have to be there to do it to ensure that it stays safe and so in that sense and we hear all of this i mean i've seen some really funny pictures today even of president obama superimposed over the famous bush mission accomplished moment the war in iraq isn't over just because our troops are leaving is it you know what i do thirty crossfire will do sort of subsided to the point where you can say now that it's a simmering conflict if the government do what i think they're going to do which is becoming increasingly authoritarian then we're going to have not saddam hussein return but we're going to have more control over what's happening inside of iraq they're going to be forced to do that i think everyone thinks he's going to ally

himself with with iran that's preposterous but they're going to be forced to think this is going to mean that now we have less influence over the iraqi government because of this entire tangle or you know tit for tat over the troops. i think our influence is going to be limited at best unless we are willing to do something rather harsh from time to time and that's going to be dependent on the conditions in this country and the conditions there the president and so forth but i do think our influence is going to be considerable and i think it's going to be enough to balance iran if not more than iran because iraq is not going to fall into the open arms of persia it simply isn't it's just not going to happen now of course you mentioned the plenty of oil that there is in iraq so let's talk about libya because there's been a lot of news going on the oil there too and plenty of oil there as well and so if you look back at the situation driving at gunpoint and i brought this up with one of my guests yesterday at one point say that because he was the pariah then we got me started shaking hands with him our senators started going over there he opened

up his oil fields and how quickly all of that changed as soon as the arab spring started to spring up so do you think that sends a message that the u.s. is a fickle friend but i think it sends a message very strong messages being interpreted by that in the rest of the world the arab world that the united states can be bridged elected and what it does and what it does it's usually going to be wrapped around the world and is no question about it's wrapped around the oil in libya it's also wrapped around a low hanging fruit couldn't do yemen couldn't do bottom line certainly couldn't do saudi arabia couldn't do syria wow here's libya gadhafi he's hated by arabs hated by africans hated by the world we can do libya we did libya it is also questionable i think what comes post gadhafi my guess would be i asked a group of europeans to whom i was speaking this morning i said what's your view and the consensus there i think fairly summed up was that we'll have another khadafi who looks better in ten years that's probably a good estimate of what's going to happen in libya i hope not what we do see some

sort of democratic government beginning to build but you've got an air underneath that you've got to have the culture the social institutions and all the things that go into a long time to build and that's very difficult to imagine in. as it is difficult to imagine in any of the eastern let me mention you said we went for libya because we could do libya and we couldn't do yemen we couldn't do bahrain or we couldn't do syria has this now opened up the door because there was a un resolution that was passed and nato decided to go in and actually take out the leader even though it was only supposed to be an old fly zone that was in force and humanitarian intervention is that open the door to say now we could do it we could do sol eight x. i don't think so because syria is a very different problem saudi arabia is an enormously different problem for him is that what about again yemen we seem to be sort of watching to see what's going to happen we don't want to get involved in that i don't blame the administration for not want to get involved and it is an absolute mess and the saudis have more strategic interest in

a stable yemen than we do actually in terms of regional stability so the saudis need to take care of the yemeni problem and as far as i understand they are doing what they can to try and take care and however they take care of it i'm sure that we won't really say anything about it just like we didn't say anything when their troops went in to bahrain and i want i want i want to ask you something to you you know in terms of president obama and his foreign policy if you look at it so here it we are he's taking out osama bin laden he went and he killed on while locky now he was a part of an operation i guess you could say that took out the market off he may not be transferring detainees to guantanamo bay to be tortured anymore but this is a president that's just he's turned into a killing machine the united states of america has two purposes right now in terms of governments to wage war and reward the rich that's got to change i say to mr president obama right now you've made your national security go to the days you've established them by god let's get busy doing some of the other things you promised to do some of the progressive things you promised to do some of the things you

promised to do to help the middle class in this country because you don't those two purposes of governance making war and rewarding the rich are going to devastate this republic and that's what people are going to want and the twenty two election . if you think about it president obama can say that he has so many victories under his belt foreign policy wise but it's not going to matter because there's no question of accountability i just find this so bizarre and i said this is well in my you know my mainstream is that we have this weird conversation going on about credit and who gets credit for what you get if you look at you know the assassination of anwar a lockie an american citizen there was a secret legal memo that even the president doesn't sign off on because so you know so they can never come back against him and he can be protected from it why we have you have to sign off if you're a governor if there's an execution in your state but not when you're the president killing people around the world you're talking about serving i don't think anybody in this town and saw the bill other than maybe half a dozen people low the reality i personally having been there having seen this sort

of thing i personally cannot believe that we have any kind of program being run by the n.s.c. staff or secret committee on the unit which is happened many times before eisenhower kissinger and so forth without having the president's imprimatur on it and that would be a presidential finding authorizing this committee oversight for example which would be the entity that would watch the reapers watch the predators that would do the assassination we're going to have her with that's the only way i can see it coming down so i have to come back to my supposition that the president has authorized his right mind and i thank you so much for joining us tonight truly. still ahead as occupy wall street rages on the numbers really show that alarming rate at which poverty rose across the west last year that welch editor in chief of reason magazine joins us to discuss the issue just.

getting a lethal weapon is. not a concept that nobody seems to know. if it will persuade the face of the argument that they're being overly dramatic. you know. so. see some other part of it and realize everything.

i'm laura mr.

occupy wall street is now in its second month and we've seen the movement spread to cities across the u.s. we even saw global day of action on october fifteenth and at the time keeps going by the momentum grows we watched one side of the political field do everything they can to mock and discredit the movement and we've seen a lot of people on the left including the president himself try to hop on ride the wave and of course hope that nobody puts two and two together that he still receives more donations from wall street and any other politician out there but the occupy movement isn't a partisan want it's a plague on both houses it spits on the entire system and some staggering figures on poverty released by the census bureau yesterday give us a good clue as to why and twenty ten poverty rose in almost every single state that congress can't even get a jobs bill passed in pieces and the supercommittee is reportedly in gridlock over whether to start the one point two trillion minimum in cuts so how do those in the middle libertarians see this movement joining me to discuss it is matt welch editor in chief of reason magazine and co-author of the declaration of independence how

libertarian politics can fix what's wrong with america now thanks so much for being so yeah it's been a while since we've had you on the show and if fact the last time that you were here we were speaking about your book but declaration of independence the growing number of independents in america and so how do you take a look at the occupy wall street movement and this you know this energy that we see that's angry with both parties with the entire political system i think the most independents way to look occupy wall street is just to remark that this is happening under it's a left wing movement there's no just like tea party is a right wing movement without any question but it is happening under a democratic president which is something of a tea party which many tea party souls will tell you did not do and they feel a little bit embarrassed by it but it's a left wing movement why what it will what about it makes it so obviously or you know this so specific that makes it a left wing. maybe it's totally because the good news no i cover the neuter of two thousand campaign and some of the world trade. organization stuff in the late

ninety's which again happened underneath under a democratic president and many of the signs the concerns of the focus on corporations are going to be released one as far as i know official sort of statement and it was a pattern in the declaration of independence and said that he for king george it is the they of corporations and they posit that the government is just a subsidiary of corporations this is this could be like cut and pasted from what i was watching in one thousand nine hundred ninety two thousand so a lot of the concerns we had jonathan haidt is really fascinating a sociologist i believe the university of virginia analyze signs of the protests here and there is a consistent emphasis on fairness and caring as he puts it which are traditionally liberal kind of notions however all that aside there is as you point out this is there is an attempt to make sure that they don't get co-opted by the democratic sort of usual suspects there is a strong dissatisfaction with the status quo the question to me will be will they

like the tea party who they are are on some levels trying to emulate consciously and saying that will be a way you could say originally had the exact same concerns when it came to being you know angry about the banks being bailed out angry about the collusion between the government and was free which is why i find it so interesting i think you have to hate each other so much or at least i think it's more coming from you know from the from the right way and we had a tea party here on the show and i kept trying to ask him well you know does don't you line up here in terms of realities don't you line up here and he want to talk about how classless and dirty the lineup is here it's corporatism and in between it was going to be different ideas about how you got there but both sides are completely going to corpus and it's no accident i think that the only two republican presidential candidates who have said anything remotely positive towards this are ron paul and gary johnson the libertarian types the other thing the romney tried to flip flop a little bit but it was pretty lame attempts but the other thing in common is just that the economy really sucks i mean it's it is as you were referencing with the

poverty statistics people are really going. satisfied with the status quo period and so there's different ways to talk about that but the but they're tapping into one of the reasons why this thing has resonance and it's building it's growing is that that is a widespread kind of sentiment as is the anti bailout anti-corporate is i'm sensing that the question will be will there other sentiments get in there and kind of distract away from that or will the with the occupy movement do as successfully as the tea party can i don't think it will focus on a single issue or single very limited number of issues and then use independents as a weapon the tea party movement used independents as a weapon against the republicans to make republicans do what they want can the occupy movement to do that with democrats that's the big question here i don't think they should right you think they have to work within the political system we think they have to somehow become a wing of the democratic party trying to not let me go to work i mean that's the point of the tea party has not become a wing of the republican party it is try to elect people who hate the republican party like rand paul and have been successful that way it's

a very weird kind of going to the party i mean when you talk about you look at what's happening right now right in terms of this super committee that is in absolute gridlock you look at his jobs bill that the president was trying to get passed you couldn't do it all in one now he's trying to break it up in tiny little pieces it's still for the most part republicans versus democrats you don't see so many tea partiers straying in those negotiations what in fact their influence in ways that maybe you don't like but they're part of the. well i mean to the extent that they are actually pushing for limiting the size of government in ways that. gridlock so that nothing accurately done i mean so in some ways you know i mean isn't that that kind of philosophy and you know there have been some stories out there about the tea party nation trying to convince businesses just not to hire anybody so the economy can get even worse just so obama doesn't get reelected you know you start thinking about these things do you want to get as bad as it possibly can just because you have these political convictions and you don't want this guy

to win again you know just fine. and what it might mean for the rest of the country i don't think that and i don't know but i don't think that's like a overweening desire among tea party people i don't think you wake up in the morning like how can we make this worse it is how can we have our values expressed turns out their values are expressed in a way to basically stop stand the word governments and yell stop for the moment which is on satisfying for a lot of people for reasons that are kind of understandable but that's that's kind of what is happening here the parties are going to have to change the way that they respond to their own constituencies because both of them essentially wonder and power govern in a similar if not the same way in the bailouts started under bush the stimulus has started under bush these bad statistics are ten years older not four years old you know we have had net job loss in the private sector for ten years this is true even before the recent unpleasantness in the economy so they're going to have to change the way that the address their core constituency and so the question i think for the occupy movement is how do you want those values to be reflected just in terms

of what we can ask for you if anything and then how do we want to change behavior of people that were otherwise if you think that you know civil disobedience the way that they're doing right now occupying being out in the streets is that a way to to live because you know you look at the fact that poverty keeps on rising you know across the united states what is it forty six point two million people are now living in poverty that you know the more people in poverty probably the last half they are to actually vote to be a part of the political system they're no longer the constituent the politicians really have to care about who knows i mean i don't know exactly you know i'm the worst person to ask what's the best way to achieve a political goal of a magazine editor for crying out loud certainly they're getting attention from the reason foundation i think it's not real yeah exactly right it's the irrationality foundation no i mean certainly whatever they have done has changed what we're talking about in the country even paul krugman is right about that one concept and the question is what goes next i think where i suspect and fear just having been

down the road with a lot of these. people some of whom are very close friends of mine that the kind of consensus model the drum circle model of catch all type of complaints and arguments out there has a ceiling of effectiveness i think the tea party punches above its weight because the one thing that it counts that it reinforces over and over again is broadly popular so will the occupy movement mind it's one or two issues that are broadly popular and hit those really hard i mean that would make them more effective than wiggling their fingers in a certain way at the communal got i am and i thank you so much for joining us tonight you mention the drum circle i forgot to talk about the drum circle which at the moment seems to be the most dividing factor you know when it comes to those occupiers in zuccotti park and so i guess you just have to see that something at the end of the day is going to divide them all thanks thank you. now almost nothing is anger the occupy wall street protesters more than the bailouts were told out of the big banks directly following the financial collapse and received no such help

thanks to receiving billions of dollars from the u.s. government and one of the largest recipients of bailout money was none other than bank of america back in two thousand and eight the of a receive twenty five billion dollars and capital from the tarp funds and just a year later b. of a came back for twenty billion more in government money not receiving forty five billion dollars from the u.s. taxpayers you would think of that would be enough but it looks like bank of america who's seen its share of trouble recently was looking to the government for help once again and also not forget they recently got their credit rating downgraded their stock fell rapidly and warren buffett invested five billion dollars to try and bring confidence back up but all in all there is not a whole lot of trust out there that b. of a is by any means a healthy financial institution so this time they're looking for help on the sly so let me explain the roundabout way in which they're doing this in order to make sure the bank has enough money to hold its own for the time being it's transferring an undisclosed amount of its risky assets to its commercial banking subsidiary which has a higher credit rating and which will be backed by the f.b.i. see so practically speaking what does that mean well mean for the f.b.i.

see and i'm sure in the u.s. government is now backing most likely trillions of dollars of toxic derivatives and i thought all of a complex but it's essentially a really sneaky way for b. of a to cover its own ass the bank of america goes belly up or if the derivatives market collapses taxpayers are once again on the line for years of be evasive bad financial decisions because now they're actually insuring them which is exactly the opposite of what the f.b.i. so you supposed to be doing that the i.c. is set up to reward insure individuals that are banking with a certain company not to insure the banks themselves and the f.d.i.c isn't happy about it either mainly because it just came out of the red this past june you know after holding a negative balance for seven consecutive quarters it finally carries three point nine billion dollars of net assets but here's the icing on the cake the fed knows why. big of america's doing when it's moving all this money around and borrowing from its customers in fact they've even backed this measure so now everybody knows the fed will get an earful from already angry americans if they straight of bailed

out of america for the third time so they're working with that bank to find a less public way to provide them with this financial backing of bank of america knows that in the end if they need money they can get it from the government in some form or another the only reason this information has come to light is all thanks to a whistleblower who thinks that the public has a right to know what's going on here but keeping all that in mind it's no wonder there are thousands of people demonstrating in the garden party against the big banks overly cozy relationship with the government is the latest example of bank of america's behavior shows that as long as the government is there with taxpayers' money as a safety net and b. of a is going to keep making those bad decisions and the vicious cycle will continue. that's still to come tonight the state of the u.s. put restrictions on using cash to buy and sell goods that have that frightful time segments of the h.s. a saying that anonymous may want to launch attacks on critical infrastructure the fastest mover discredit the hacktivist collective for a guy with a top interest in the.

east and the love. who he seems to know. it will help us break the face. of being overly dramatic he. you know also going to see a story and it seems so whole and complete you think you understand it and then you glimpse something else hears you some other part of it and realized everything you thought you knew you don't know i'm sorry dog in the big picture.