how do you think the u.s. will respond i think that the u.s. probably won't have a lot of options i think that very quickly depending on what happens the u.s. could be drawn into an escalation that results from that we don't know how the iranians would respond there's a possibility that they would respond in iraq or in the persian gulf in areas where the u.s. is very vulnerable and to think that you know our closest ally in the middle east would give us only twelve hours notice if that and put us in such a dangerous position put you know american diplomats american troops in danger is very you know it's unconscionable and. i think that you know folks that advocate for these strikes by israel understand that israel can't take out iran's nuclear capability they can maybe delay it by a year maybe two years but what that is going to create is this long term military confrontation and the u.s. is going to be a part of it. some of the reports are saying the motive behind israel saying that

they're only going to give us this small amount of time is that they're worried that president obama is going to try to prevent an attack on iran and why would it be and the u.s. in the u.s. interests to prevent an attack i mean especially when it comes to oil prices. a war with iran would make the last ten years of military adventurism look like a cakewalk in comparison it would drive oil prices up you know who knows one hundred fifty two hundred two hundred fifty dollars a barrel send shock waves through our economy send shock waves through the european economy and like i said this would be a long term confrontation that we would really have a difficult time digging ourselves out of a lot of people say that you know you you can't actually shutdown the rons nuclear capability without a full scale scale military occupation and that's going to be you know u.s. troops involved. in that we've all seen what the wars in iraq and afghanistan have

done to the economy and to the stature of the united states in terms of international prestige and power so i think that we would see that in on an even larger scale and that's why the president has indicated that he's not in favor of premature military operations against iran i would say that we're pretty far away from the point in time where we would have to make a decision to do that but the israelis are indicating that they're threshold is lower than the americans very interesting pleasure to have you on the show as always that was jamal of the policy director for the national iranian american council. well as u.s. troops prepare to leave afghanistan a recently leaked reports suggest what america fears that the most not only is the u.s. pulling out of afghanistan without a clear victory but the taliban is poised to rise back to power this proves that a decade long war may have had little impact in actually defeating the taliban at

least not enough to have a real lasting impact now this report called state of the taliban two thousand and twelve was produced by a secretive u.s. military ops special operations unit it was leaked to a couple of news outlets and reportedly is based on the twenty seven thousand interrogations of four thousand taliban and al qaeda prisoners despite this u.s. and nato officials are dismissing it so what does this all mean for relations between the u.s. and afghanistan and why isn't it being taken seriously now to talk more about this i spoke to matthew aid intelligence specialist and author of the book you see right there on your screen the secret century the untold history of the national security agency and i asked him why u.s. and nato officials have deemed this report to be irrelevant take a listen. it's not that is irrelevant it's that it is the report we're certain so significant parts of it directly contradict the pentagon's official position that

progress is being made in the war the report in fact suggests and this is based strictly on what the taliban are telling their interrogators at the grob airfield north of kabul they think they're winning the war they're not defeated they have every intention of fighting through to victory they have absolutely no desire for can any conciliatory measures no negotiations nothing i mean this is not the attitude you would find from a beaten enemy and talk a little bit more about what this report has revealed that may make washington i'm comfortable. well i mean the the top if i was writing a lead for an article the lead would be. taliban and feisty still strong and expect to win. the vast majority of the the taliban prisoners who were interrogated and made of that they took terrible losses in two thousand and eleven

but that's nothing new they've taken care of the losses for the last ten years and yet they keep coming back their one of the most resilient insurgencies the us military has ever faced and maybe we haven't given them the credit that they deserve for being that tough and the report bears out the fact that they are in fact resilient that they are and they really really believe despite losing thousands of people they expect eventually to win. certainly a resilient seems to be the word after a decade long war over there and still no clear victory there report also reveals taliban prisoners and their collaboration with the pakistani military talk about what this means with for u.s. relations with pakistan well our relations with pakistan are so bad right now it doesn't really harm. our diplomatic relations with the pakistanis any more than it

already stands the pakistani foreign minister has already said this is basically old wine in a new bottle to paraphrase her her comments so the pakistanis are doing what they have done for the last ten years when confronted with evidence of complicity with the afghan taliban which is basically to deny deny and then throw blame elsewhere. you know the report does contain some new details. one is that the every one of the prisoners interrogated knew about the the collaboration with the pakistanis. but what came as a bit of a surprise the fact that the. taliban did not like their pakistani handlers very much they thought they were very patronizing and bossy which is i guess you know a client relationship gone sour so i don't know what that means for the future but i i think the relationship is now pretty well defined i think everyone in washington knows that pakistan has been covertly so supporting the taliban it shows

that the white house refuses the say it publicly well there certainly is more proof of that another thing the report shows kind of suggesting that all terrorists at least in their eyes are not created equal the taliban that they don't like working with al-qaeda and so i mean what has this shake up some perceptions that the u.s. has about relations between these two groups well it's again this is not so much a secret. back in two thousand and eight when i went to afghanistan and pakistan for the first time i was told by a book called i'm cutouts for the taliban that they viewed al qaeda as anathema meaning basically that. they said look the al qaeda had its day in court it had their time they drove us from power by their presence in afghanistan they brought the us troops in force this you know into hiding and we've never forgiven

them for that fact this is what i was being told now all those four years ago it was clear from my interviews four years ago that there was there was deep tension between the two the taliban thought they were better fighters with the al qaeda they termed to be sort of weekend soldiers they didn't really do a lot of fighting this and most of their time hiding out in diligence in northern pakistan but you know this report basically confirms what has already been known that which by the way you know the import of this is that remember president obama justified the doubling of the size of u.s. forces. in afghanistan back in two thousand and nine on the presumption that you know we're going to keep afghanistan from going falling back into the hands of al qaida well isn't him again a stand in the taliban confirm that. some parts of this report have been leaked to a couple of media outlets want to point out a specific quote here that is quite telling quote many afghans are already bracing

themselves for an eventual return of the taliban the afghan government continues to declare its willingness to fight and many of its personnel have secretly reached out to insurgents seeking long term options in the of that of a possible taliban victory so this shows that the taliban may be working with our allies and i can imagine that these arguments going behind the scenes is something that the u.s. isn't very happy about this is the one part of the report i've been told by friends of mine at the pentagon this is the one part of what has leaked out about this report that has the u.s. government especially the pentagon. furious. any suggestion that our homey karzai government and the militant in the afghan military and police are covertly working with the taliban is a diplomatic disaster but again this is one of those it's an open secret if you go

to afghanistan and talk to any u.s. soldier they will to they know that the ask in their afghan army or police partners they know there's a secret agreement with the local taliban unit a report came out in may of last year by a man named dr jeffrey boyd in which nobody has picked up on where he lists all the like the talk in peeves of u.s. soldiers in afghanistan and at the very top of the list is the fact that the soldiers that were fighting them dying. and were dying in part because our at. our lives are feeding the taliban with information to facilitate the attacks and this does not bode well for the fact that these are the soldiers this is the government and these are the soldiers we are going to turn the country over to when we start withdrawing our troops later on this year. matthew eight intelligence specialist

and author of the book the secret century the untold history of the national security agency and be sure to stick around for the alone the show a new poll is out today showing that a shocking number of democrats actually support using drones in wars and keep leaving the one ton of a detention facility open not alone oh well dig into the numbers but that is going to do it for the news right now for more on stories we covered you can head on over to artsy dot com slash usa and you can also check out our youtube page it's youtube dot com slash r t america you can also follow me on twitter liz wall we'll see you right back here at seven o'clock the ilona show that's coming up in a half hour.

mr. lemon issues three going to take should free zones for charges free

arrangement three. three. three little download free broadcasts live video for your media project a free media john darche dot com. and you can. start. playing. polo in a welcome across town peter lavelle facebook's initial public offering is being called a very big deal and many hope the i.p.o. will lift the entire tech sector but is the i.p.o. a good one public ownership of facebook negatively impact the company's success and is it a profitable investment. led to keep. playing

. to cross-talk facebook's i.p.o. i'm joined by jay ritter in gainesville he's a professor of finance at the university of florida and in toronto we cross to peter leeds he's a financial analyst and publisher of the peter leeds newsletter or a gentleman cross-talk rules in effect that means you can jump in anytime you want and i really very much encourage it if i could go to peter leeds in toronto on the face of it is this going to be a good party good i.p.o. will be successful and is it a good long term investment. this for me on the show peter i think first the price is going to go up i think to be successful i.p.o. on first glance but then you're going to have to look at the valuation ratios you know it's going to one hundred times earnings twenty five times revenues that's way too high we think a lot of people are going to jump into it just because it is facebook and we think it's going to other pressed further and at the end of the day this over time will start coming back down jay what do you think about that i mean more hype than

a common sense being. made here when we look at this i.p.o. i mean obviously facebook is very very popular but is its popularity reflected in its valuation. i think peter's scenario is very plausible with the huge brand name recognition it's possible that investors are going to drive up the price especially since a relatively small percentage of the company is being sold at the valuations that people are talking about one hundred times sales twenty five hundred times earnings twenty five times sales the long run upside for investors that is a limited ok if i go back to peter in toronto i mean last year facebook generated i don't want three point seven billion dollars eighty eight percent from the year before those kind of numbers are not sustainable are they. well what's going on in north america you have to divide it between developed nations and

developing nations development north america for example europe they've pretty much got critical mass there they're not going to get a lot more people anybody who's on facebook is going to be on facebook is already there there's a lot of room for growth all the growth is coming from developing nations now russia india china but the problem with that is that they're not able to convert that into the same degree of revenues from the advertisements it's in tory's for not driving as much advertisement spending i've been dollars and so a lot of the growth may be behind facebook and going forward it might have a little bit of trouble getting to the next level ok jane look who's going to buy this stock i mean you can see institutional investors i mean pensions i mean individuals who do you think it's most attractive to it because you know institutions are not really represented on facebook i mean people are ok is it the people that are on facebook to be interested in the stock do you think. this is some of them with over eight hundred million users it doesn't take

a bit very big percentage of them to be interested but the reality is institutional investors if they are going to buy buy a lot more shares an individual might buy one hundred two hundred even five hundred shares but an institution might be buying a million shares five million shares and a lot of institutions are going to be buying ok peter i mean is there some precedents out there we look at the tech sector and the what the most well known ones are google and america online which way what president do you think facebook might follow or will it be just unique. it's going to be unique but they are going to have a lot of competition from google plus google's decided to get into the social media space and they're going to do that pretty aggressively and overseas they've got a lot of competition too from brazil and china india you know these are these are

nations where they have a platform there that they're going to start leveraging their platform to potentially to users away from facebook facebook's tori's problems trying to get into china at all so you're going to have a lot of people who more choice going forward they haven't had a lot of competition yet with those days are ahead of them and now they're going to see you know we have to see how they're going to react to that it's interesting you point that out in russia facebook is not particularly popular it's here but there's a russian version that many people are very attracted to jail if we could if we can look at the emerging markets one of the interesting things is and we advertising dollars is a big part of the future of any company like facebook in emerging markets people do not necessarily are attracted to the to the ads because they're there they're spending ability is much more limited than let's say in north america or the english speaking world i mean is this something that's being played into it you can grow the numbers but you're not going to get any revenue from them. well there's

both the issue of how many users and then the revenue per user the per capita income growth in certain emerging markets does result in a lot of long term upside potential. lower middle income consumers rise to be middle income and higher middle income consumers the bullish case for facebook is actually based upon the google model where google has demonstrated that a lot of money can be made on targeted search it's a very efficient form of advertising and google has been able to grow its revenue per user very substantially facebook has a lot of that upside potential as well but things could go wrong. while america online had

a very large market share fifteen years ago and largely faded research in motion with blackberry had a very big market share a couple of years ago and they've run into some tough times so with facebook they they've got a wired and growing potential market a case can be made that they're going to be as successful as google generating profits. of nine point seven four billion dollars just thirteen years after being founded but on the other hand they could fall off of that growth path as well and that's the problem with the very high valuation that people are talking about that that it's that optimistic growth path built into the price and it doesn't.

possibility that they're going to fall off of that growth path targeting advertising is very interesting peter because on facebook particularly there's the privacy issue in people getting more and more sensitive to that issue and targeted advertising is the contradict is a antithetical to privacy is this something that investors should be worried about and thinking about because the the users of facebook want their privacy or at least most of them do and of course the advertisers want to know as much as possible about these people and you know that facebook is going to have to make a decision maybe even make a compromise which could also hurt its image and maybe its popularity. that's an excellent point peter what's going on right now think of it like a seesaw where on one side you've got google or facebook trying to maximize their advertising targeting by watching everything you do on the other side of the teeter totter you've got people who are tired and weary of all their actions being tracked and most recently you've had all sorts of backlash in terms of privacy issues with the issues and with the google problems and now you've got you know facebook's

tried to address this by having you know twenty or twenty years of audit's with the f.c.c. for privacy they've also change their privacy laws but at the end of the day people don't trust the internet when they go on there and when they're going around on facebook it's tracking what books you like what videos you watch who you are who your friends are and it's going to be a little bit too much i think and people are starting to have a little bit of a backlash against it when you think about that jamie it's the flavor of the month right now but as we go down i mean people are going to invest in this company because they want to make money not just because they like facebook maybe there's an overlap of the two but people get to go in there and they don't want to be very aggressive we don't want this company to perform in the valuations are very high they want the valuation to meet expectations do you think that you know this is facebook's going to have a real challenge in dealing with the privacy issue and with sales because there's high expectations here like we haven't seen for a while. well with the privacy issue. there's kind of and non

amiss lack of privacy and terms of it doesn't bother me if. google or facebook or linked in. able to tell some advertiser i mean one of forty seven thousand and nine and this ip addresses that have some of the following characteristics in terms of my age a rough guess for my income level and the fact that i subscribe to several business magazines and do a lot of international travel and. you know if it's not identifying me by name does it bother me that some targeted ads get sent my way and that i don't get that i have absolutely no interest in. you know in terms of that and an image just

a number that doesn't bother me. the other hand if you've got some government that is demanding. we want the names behind the. dresses that's another issue ok peter jay told me before the program he's not. on facebook and you're on facebook i mean do you check any of the ads you click on any of the ads on facebook. i never have i never enjoyed dressed your guests last point in. it in the very you know you could be on facebook is tracking what you like and what you do at work somebody walks by and sees you want facebook on your monitor and on the side is a whole bunch of ads that are going to be related to what you like you might not want that person to know that you are interested in overseas vacations or whatever it may be and so there's a bit of a privacy breach there i think because it's going to put ads that are appropriate

to what you're looking at on your facebook page for people to walk by and see ok gentlemen we're going to go to a short break and after that short break we'll continue our discussion on facebook state park. and. see.

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imagine france talking i'm going to about two minute we're talking about facebook's i.p.o. . and now we're joined by its very in philadelphia he's founder of market tamer dot com if i can go to you first gareth in philadelphia thank you for joining us here one of the things we're talking about earlier in the program is the facebook's ability to expand one thing that's very interesting about the eight hundred forty million forty five million users that half of them go for use the facebook from mobile instruments you know i got an i pad or something like that and facebook gets zero revenue from that if people are accessing it from their telephone is this going to be have to be the next major breakthrough for us for facebook and other social networking because i'm not going to pay for advertising on my telephone i don't know anyone who will. well i think what's interesting about facebook

is they can actually generate money even if people are not clicking so they can generate from brand awareness just by impressions being placed on phones so if you are looking for example at the numbers four hundred million plus mobile users that set to increase. the rate they're generating returns from the regular platform which is about five dollars close to five dollars per user if they can figure out how to monetize that channel that's potentially another four hundred million times five that's two billion dollars in returns and revenues to the top line that they can generate which would increase their revenues from current levels by almost fifty percent you know that would be very good news peter if i go to you you know when we look at the business model that facebook has right now and it's been very profitable very successful but it.