with feelings of chaos and violence across the country in response. u.s. president barack obama tells top iraqi officials by a video conference that all american troops will leave iraq by the end of twenty eleven things for to keep several thousand u.s. military personnel in the country as a training for something they try to despite a ban on a drop of continuing violence and. makes its first step into space a russian soyuz rocket to the inches at the european satellites from a spaceport in french guiana the key components of that and missions your pain medication system to rival under the edge. of the headlines up next the show today discussing u.s. military policy and also what impacts the occupy wall street movement is having on u.s. political thinking. welcome

to the lower show where we get the real headlines with none of the mercy or can live in washington d.c. now it's not going to speak with colonel lawrence wilkerson former chief of staff to colin powell when i ask you 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 and 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 matt 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 that it's true we can have all that free tonight and war clearing

a dose of happy hour but first take a look at what the mainstream media has decided to miss. 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 rarely on the mainstream media yesterday for having a giant celebration about 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 more market off the it's gone is a living is a liberation of vindication for president obama's foreign policy how much credit

can the administration actually claiming this morning the obama administration from your perspective deserves a lot of credit for this is well done i think they deserve credit for shall the death of moammar gadhafi adds to president obama's growing list of high profile national security here what you're hearing from the white house is that this is a big occasion for their strategy in libya as white house believes the death of the dictator ronald reagan once called the mad dog of the middle east indicates obama's intervention in the country for the president their victories to tout as a tough re-election is taking shape. arik we all just come back down to earth for one little second here you have a war that 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 un resolution the only allowed for the enforcement of a no fly zone and protecting civilians and yet what resulted was obviously an attempt to get gadhafi no civilians were to be protected by the drone the fire to

hell fire missile of the convoy and search yesterday if anything their lives were put in more danger but while nato and the us claimed that they didn't know it could off he was part of that convoy they weren't trying to kill him they've 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 as to what all forty ever allowed trying to take a foreign leader out i mean is there somebody up 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 is syria's assad next is it 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 mourning that off these deaths but the way in which the cheering for it is analyzed as to who cheered war who cheered who the twisted rhetoric what a bizarre and insular way to look at geopolitics to look at wars to look at death

but i guess that that's what happens when you're part of the corporate mainstream media that lives in a little bubble but only covers washington d.c. and new york when it comes to having a touch the 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 the associated 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 the year as previously agreed to in two thousand and eight and apparently he and 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. now while 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 we finally coming to an end or is a long contract our presence i mean that it's only a superficial and discussed as a means lawrence wilkerson retired u.s. army colonel and former chief of staff to secretary of state colin powell or thanks so much for joining us tonight thanks for having me so what do you make of this announcement i think it was 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 that's 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 dimension of course is 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 to typical status of forces agreement where we have mostly control over troops who would do the iraqis some but not all well 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 it's not total immunity but it is some of the unity 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 to pretend that 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 it's going to be very difficult i think for him to walk back from that so now you come to the second dimension. of the one you mention we have a battalion and a half in the embassy alone and in terms of contractors we probably have several but how humans over there my son was incur kook working with the iraqi air force all of their support was contractors their logistics their maintenance their training everything was contractor 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 than it is state armies so this is a this is very much in vogue this is very much that 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 large contract and look at what's happening with iraq 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 how car kook's oil will 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 percent sixty percent control and twenty year contracts are exxon mobil royal dutch shell chevron total 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 but 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 our duty calls still of use have subsided to the point where you could say now that it's a low simmering conflict and if the government do what i think they're going to do which is become increasingly all forward tarion 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 the rat 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 upon 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 on persia it simply is it's just not going to happen now of course so you mentioned the plenty of oil that there is in iraq but let's talk about libya because there's been a lot of news going on there were there to plenty of oil there as well and so if

you look back at the situation right mean at one point and i brought this up with one of my guests yesterday at one point say that coffee was the pariah then we suddenly 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 what 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 is going to be or selective in what it does and what it does is usually go to be wrapped around the oil and is no question about it's wrapped around the world in libya it's also wrapped around a low hanging fruit couldn't do yemen couldn't do ballroom certainly couldn't do saudi arabia couldn't do syria wow here's libya gadhafi is hated by arabs hated by africans hated by the world we can do libya we did libya it is also questionable i think what calms 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 we do see some sort of democratic government beginning to build but you've got on there underneath that you've got to have the culture of the social institutions and all the things that go into a wall time to build and that's very difficult to imagine and. as it is difficult to imagine and many of the middle eastern closely you mentioned you said that we went for libya because we could do libya and we couldn't do yemen we couldn't do bahrain you know 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 a no fly zone that was in force and humanitarian intervention does that open the door to say now we could do it we could do sol a next i don't think so because syria is a very different problem saudi arabia is an enormously different problem bahrain is that what about yemen 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 of it 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 wanted to you for now i want to i want to ask you something to 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 a lockie now he was a part of an operation i guess you could say that took out well mark it off he 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 bone of 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 if you don't those two purposes of governments making war and rewarding the rich are going to devastate this republic and that's what people are going to want and the two thousand and twelve 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 but is there no question of accountability i just find this so bizarre and i said this as well in my you know my mainstream is that we have this weird conversation going on about credit and who gets credit for what yet 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 that it 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 and it goes to killing people around the world your dog. i don't think anybody in

this town and saw the bill way 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 a secret committee on the end of it which has 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 of j. saw for example which would be the entity that would watch the reapers watch the predators that would do the assassination in conjunction with the 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 lawrence i want to thank you so much for joining us tonight drew. still ahead as occupy wall street rages on in numbers really show that alarming rate at which poverty rose across the u.s. last year that welch editor in chief of reason magazine joins us to discuss these issues.

really believe there's something. some real in. the future however. walk by 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 as the time keeps going

by the momentum grows we watch to one side of the political field do everything they can to lock in to 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 than any other politician out there but the occupy movement isn't a partisan one fact if 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 well give us a good clue as to why in two thousand and 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 what are 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 thanks so much for being here thanks for that so yeah it's been a while since we've had you on the show and in fact the last time that you were here we were speaking about your book the declaration of independence the growing

number of independents in america and so i think you take that and look at the occupy wall street movement right and this you know this energy that we see that's angry with both parties with the entire political system i think the most independent way to look occupy wall street is just to remark that this is happening under it's a leftward movement there's no just like people. 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 partiers are themselves will tell you did not do and they feel a little bit embarrassed by it but it's a left wing movement what it will what about it makes it so obviously you know it is so specific that makes it a left wing resume it's a heavy it's totally because they have you know i covered the nader two thousand campaign in 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 i mean they released one as far as i know official sort of statements

and it was a pattern in the declaration of independence instead of the he for king george it is the they of corporations and they posit that the government is just a subsidiary of the 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 was really fascinating a sociologist i believe at 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 there are on some levels trying to emulate consciously and saying that will very well 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 wall street which is why i find it so interesting that the two 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 did 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 in between there's going to be different ideas about how you got there but both sides are completely against corporatism it's no accident i think that the only two republican presidential candidates who have said anything remotely positive towards this are wrong paul and gary johnson the libertarian types the other thing the romney tried to flip flop a little bit better somebody who was pretty lame attempt 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 dissatisfied with the status quo period and so there's different ways to talk about that but the but they are 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 ism sentiment the question will be will there other sentiments get in there and kind of distract away from that or will the the occupy movement do as successfully as the tea party thing and i don't think they will focus on a single issue or single very limited number of issues and then use independents as a weapon tea party movement used independence as a weapon against the republicans to make republicans do what they want can the occupied movement to do that with democrats that's the big question going you 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 get away i mean that's the point is 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 dynamic party i mean we 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 this 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 and democrats you don't see seventy thousand partiers straying in those negotiations while in fact they're influencing it in ways that maybe you don't like they're part of the. well i mean the to the extent that they are actually pushing for limiting the size of government in ways. that will be but i don't wishing for 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 that there have been some stories out there about the tea party nation trying to convince business is 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 as 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 despite what it might mean for the rest of the country i don't think that but i don't know but i don't think that's like the overwhelming desire among tea party people i

don't think they 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 before 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 when they're in power govern in a similar if not the same way in the bailouts started under bush the stimulus was 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 they 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 do we get asked for if anything and then how do we want to change behavior of people that we are otherwise semi aligned but do 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 do it 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 less apt they are to actually vote to be a part of the political system they're no longer a 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 right and to think this author ill 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 then the question is what goes next i think where i suspect and fear just having been down the road with a lot of these same people some of whom are very close friends of mine that the kind of consensus model the drum circle model of you know 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 find 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'm not going to 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 always 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 the word doled out to the big banks directly following the financial collapse now americans receive no such help banks are 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 b. of a received twenty five billion dollars in capital from the tarp funds and just

a year later b. of a came back for twenty billion more in government money after 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 has seen its share of trouble recently was looking to the government for help once again let's 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 and 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 let me explain the roundabout way in which they're doing this so 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.d.a. so practically speaking what does that mean well mean for the f.b.i. see and in turn the u.s. government is now backing most likely trillions of dollars of toxic derivatives and

i thought a little complex but it's essentially a really sneaky way for b. of a to cover its own ass if the bank of america goes belly up or if the derivatives market collapses taxpayers are once again on the line for years of being evasive bad financial decisions because now they're actually insuring them which is exactly the opposite of what the f.c.c. is 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 they just came out of the red this past you know after holding a negative balance for seven consecutive quarters and finally carries three point nine billion dollars of net assets but here's the icing on the cake the fed knows that. bank 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 up bailed out bank 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 and if they need money they can get it from the government in some form or another the only reason this information is even come to light is all thanks to a whistleblower who thinks of the public has a right to know what's going on here but keeping all that in mind it's no wonder that there are thousands of people demonstrating in zuccotti park against the big banks overly cozy relationship with the government is the latest example bank of america's behavior shows that as long as the government is there with taxpayers' money as a safety net then b. of a is going to keep making those bad decisions and the vicious cycle will continue. now still to come tonight the state of the u.s. with respect to this on using cash to buy and sell goods and have more of that and still time segments of the h.s. is saying that anonymous and may want to launch attacks on critical infrastructure that's just a move to discredit the hard to this collective dive into the topic interest of the .

military and. the story. dynamics. and again this is the headline. the u.n. calls for an investigation into the death of condo could be up to greece and critics suggest he may have been executed by lynch mold major says it may be leaving because. by the end of the month that is accused by russia of abusing the u.s. the u.n. mandate to protect libyan civilians. does nato cheers the colonel his demise there is relief and some cautions that these secrets dealings with the west will go with him to the bin laden will be revealed to the nation even these are the men.