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tv   [untitled]    March 12, 2012 6:00pm-6:30pm EDT

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this once again flared up. and these are the images the world has been seeing from the streets of kandahar. for asians around today. welcome to the lone show at the real headlines with none of the mercy to live in washington d.c. now it's not we're going to take a look at the horrible event from the weekend u.s. soldier allegedly killing think fifteen afghan civilians including women and children in the middle of the night massacre but will host a panel discussion with our monday hangover talk about everything from voter id laws to crashing the justice system and the difference between democrats and republicans when it comes to the prospect of war with iran and as greece implements
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the biggest debt write down in history we're going to speak with william black about the dangers of losing economic sovereignty what other options are out there that should be discussed so have all that and more free tonight including a dose of happy hour but first take a look at the mainstream media has decided to miss. so to start off today's show first want to go back to yesterday so if you watch the news this morning you'll see that the mainstream media is for once actually covering the war in afghanistan due to this gruesome massacre of civilians over the weekend allegedly by one u.s. soldier was unfortunate but it takes an event like this to get the media to question whether or not the war in afghanistan is a failure after ten long years but that's what it's come to so now it's go back to yesterday to something to happen on wimple sunday morning talk shows where the issue of the targeted killing of u.s. citizens came up that's something which the media thus far has
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a really considered to be that big of a deal and i fear that it's going to take ten years other horrible events for them to realize that thanks to the war on terror the fear that we've all been fed the constitution and the protections afforded within it have been completely trampled on anyway here's candy crowley talking to democratic senator harry reid about attorney general eric holder's speech and how people are arguing if the president needs to get this is of course in holder's view people are arguing that the president needs to get permission from a federal court before taking action against a u.s. citizen overseas. he said this is just not accurate that due process and judicial process are not one in the same do you have and this is creating quite a stir do you have any problem with that do you understand what that means exactly you know i don't but i do know this the nonsense that the american citizen been killed overseas who are carers and frankly if anyone in the world deserved and killed those three gives his right to be killed and these are the three that were
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killed in yemen and understand that but just are you in slightly uncomfortable with the idea that the united states president whoever it may be can decide that this or that u.s. citizen living abroad is a threat to national security and kill them well i don't know what the attorney general meant by saying that i'd have to study a little bit of never heard that term before but i think the process is and ploy i think it's one that i think we can live with and i think with the international war on care of this going on now we're going to have to make sure that we have the tools to get some of these people who are very bad and comply with american law and you think that the president should be able to make that decision in conjunction with the folks in the administration without going to court without going to you all and there is a war going on. there's no question about that he's the commander in chief and there are guidelines set and if you follow those i think you should be able to do it. all right so let's walk through a couple of details of this horrible exchange harry reid first says that no he
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doesn't understand what the difference is between due process and judicial process i don't care is about understanding the legal language of this in ministration tries to use the right because directly after that he says with certainty that these three individuals who are american citizens who have been killed abroad deserve to be killed now as far as i know the legal memo that the administration used to justify killing them are a lot he was only shared with a very small national security panel so unless harry reid somehow got in on it how can he say these people deserved. to be killed not to mention of course if hillary read actually gave a damn about the constitution the laws in this country it wouldn't matter because they would know he would know that they have protections that should guarantee their day in court regardless of whether he thinks they deserve to be killed and finally the three individuals that we're talking about here on our lobby samir khan who was killed in the same strike as a lot he and. that's anwar lottie's sixteen year old son he was killed in an air
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strike in yemen last october along with eight other people u.s. officials have never said why the only thing that officials have said anonymously of course to the press is that he was at the wrong place at the right at the wrong time but according to harry reid this is sixteen year old american citizen deserved to be killed that's quite a statement to make that is quite a horrifying reality of how our government functions these days and how completely out of hand this war on terror has become not only do we have democratic leaders fully supporting policies which they apparently don't understand yet which anyone with a basic knowledge of our constitution could figure out is illegal but we have a press that also let that slide i'm happy that candy crowley asked him the question but you think a little follow up question of being order as to how he so sure that these people deserved to be killed without ever having seen a day in court especially a sixteen year old and so here once again ladies and gentlemen we see why so many of these dangerous policies are allowed to slide why this war on terror is
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perpetuated why do probably only get much worse when one day the press corps realizes that hey there's a problem now unfortunately they continue to choose from this. it's not let's talk about this gruesome massacre of sixteen civilians in afghanistan killing nine children and three women an american soldier there are some conflicting or poor. it says local say a group and heard simultaneous shots at u.s. military officials insist that there is no evidence that there was more than one shooter a story so far from what officials have released shows like this around three am on sunday morning thirty eight year old army staff sergeant left a coalition out outpost in the punjab my district of south of kandahar he moved through a number of homes where he shot and killed sixteen civilians some of the bodies he later piled and burnt from the shooter then allegedly walked back to the post and
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turned himself in the horrible story that's received condemnation and i can president hamid karzai who president obama called after releasing a public statement expressing condolences and shock and apollos weeks of protests and violence in afghanistan after the inadvertent burning of korans also and photos of marines urinating on taliban corpses that came out at the start of this year and the afghan parliament is demanding a soldier be put on public trial so could this actually be a turning point or how the public already realized that the war effort was joining me to discuss it is retired lieutenant colonel anthony shaffer senior fellow for the center for advanced defense studies an impact america also author of the book operation dark heart and i'm also joined by david axe freelance work correspondent and i want to thank you both for joining me tonight and david i want to start with you what do you think of this the fact that there are conflicting reports here that the u.s. military saying that it was one rogue lone shooter and locals are saying that they
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feel that there was a group. i'm not sure that the locals have better information than the military does at this point the the attack apparently happened early in the morning and the press reports i've read had some of the neighbors of the victims racing to the crime scene after the shooting it's taken place so i can only assume that you have folks he heard but did not see the acts and are or are projecting from what they heard assumptions about the numbers shooters if you see an automatic weapon it may have sounded like more shooters and were actually present you know terry says one shooter and until we have more information but it's his fear buyable i believe that i don't think there's anything suspicious about power does that make sense to situations like this you know for him to do what he did i think he had to be very stealthy i mean the idea of leaving post at that ipad hour of the evening was not
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easy to do he had to probably tell someone he was doing something totally live but one guy said do proving out by himself is probably the way it would have been done i do this. let's talk about obviously there's a lot of conversation about perhaps psychological trauma the idea of our soldier serving multiple tours because this guy wasn't a newbie he had already served three tours in iraq he came to afghanistan in december and so you know i what other possible questions can arise as to that because it's not like this is somebody who's never seen war before never you know how to deal with it face to face are there differences between being in iraq and afghanistan or clearly there was a point in iraq and afghanistan huge differences doesn't excuse the action i was actually on b.b.c. last night without knowing the details you know today i predicted this guy would have been on his third or fourth tour so we know that the stress of multiple to words has a huge weight to additional factors that this guy had that others did not perhaps regarding afghanistan secondly he's been working special operations forces out. it
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works for a game working with the afghan public i think that that is a good moralizing sort of missions because the afghan people really turned her back on the whole mission secondly along the same line is the fact that the afghan military who were working with his turned to be a good partner by the fact you had a koran burning who you were so this is u.s. soldiers shot in the back of the head and this is not the first time this has happened you have infiltration of the very people who are trying to help by the taliban by sympathizers and frankly it's got to be difficult for the u.s. soldiers to wake up every morning to go face this very difficult bar but i think that plus the stress of the other two wars now expects using what he did but i'm saying those things did have a huge impact on his mental state i think that resulted in him breaking down i want to get your opinion on what you think. you know we can say about the reaction because after there was inadvertently. at the president we saw protests we saw riots we saw
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a lot of violence in afghanistan but spend weeks after this we saw early from the reports that i've read a couple hundred people gathered outside the outpost to protest but do you think that we're going to see riots do you think that we're going to see violence in the same way is there a big difference for afghanis when it comes to burning a koran versus women and children being killed. i do believe that the reaction will escalate a lot of this news is going to spread by word of mouth especially in some of the more isolated eastern southern communities where folks that where the visions already exist between the locals and the coalition that sort of facilitate a wider middle violent reaction so i think given given a few days we're going to see a pretty big sponsorship is that they could equal the the riots in the wake of that bernie. i i'm i'm reluctant to mince on the distinction between afghans
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reactions from iran burning versus the reaction to these murders. i tend to believe that it's going to be a pretty violent reaction in both cases on what i you know you know we're not going to see anything we've seen probably the worst of it already i'm going on a limb here obviously but i think the reason is this we've already seen a sort of thing happen before we've seen the american strike brigade i mean sport killings a couple of years of last year to convict these guys this year you know we're spots we had her mckiernan who was relieved over the abuse of use of force and killing civilians again no no major protests so no i don't believe that sad as it is i don't think we're going to see much of a bump reason being is that for better or for worse the value of life and the core of the world is less than ours so this would be tragic but this is one more trend that we've seen happening for years now and as sad as it is i think it should be something to tells us it's time to step away and let the afghan people see their own future without a single us service they're saying perhaps that these are two cultures that either
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we just can't understand tact absolutely also what about the fact that these people have lived with a constant occupation and lived in war for the last ten years because you know we talk about of this americans say this is been america's longest war but it hasn't been happening on our soil well let me hit record in zero three or four when i was there i was a tipping point michael talks about it we were there as as basically the. they're right to spend it we are doing what was necessary to achieve our military objectives with with ten thousand troops one tenth of what we have there now we're being successful because we were trying to push we were giving to the afghan people hobson's choice we were trying to say we've got to pick the karzai government are going to pick a color we want them to get the tribes that they were or the world order they were now we've made them pick and i think that's why we've become the issue and that's why the afghan people are now railing against us they have no tradition of a central government even though they've been occupied the british have tried it the soviets and tried it and it doesn't work you can't form a central government were there is a culture that does not want some for government or the culture does want and i
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guess we say the afghan parliament wants right now they want some form of justice and so they're actually calling for a public trial of this soldier if it is just the one to be done in afghanistan which i can't really imagine the u.s. military allowing for that to happen but i mean you know what's your take david what do you think the chances are of that is that something that would appease afghan civilians if they saw something like this carried out publicly sure it might but it's never going to happen the military and the white house will allow that but i'd like to revisit the the last bit of conversation a better bet assessment that he had the two of you seem to agree upon that life means less in afghanistan than it does state here elsewhere in the world i don't think that's true the there's a little town in eastern afghanistan called mars' back in about six months ago the taliban murdered a single person in that town and that's a pro taliban town after that murder that's how to lead you to join the coalition and form a volunteer police force and invite in the army the u.s.
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army to go to troll base a simple murder can be a big deal afghans to do value life and if americans are coalition are perceived to be murderers equal in brutality to the taliban that is going to have a profound influence on the course of this war. by the way i'm asking the questions here i'm not agreeing because i have not you know i haven't been to afghanistan i said it loses why i bring you guys on to talk about it good so if we want to talk about an influence on the course of this war whether there really will be a turning point do you think they're well there's a new a.b.c. washington post poll that came out this weekend that shows that sixty percent of americans don't think that this war is worth fighting anymore over fifty percent said that we should basically cut and run not finish the training mission and leave and this was actually before any of this happened so we seeing some kind of turning point where was that was the public opinion already there beforehand as it already is the course is already set in stone and on its way i think the american public are wise to what's going on there classified reports which back up the idea that we
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need to change what we're doing i'm not going to cutting and running i'm saying would you change your mission from one that we're losing this the coin strategy to one that we were winning on can win again which is the anti-terrorism strategy lower footprint focused on only what we need to achieve to achieve national security not of making it more like us with that said the latest being we do think that you can compare this to the my lai massacre and we're not going to iraq going to be that there's a lot of parallels in the vietnam war recently. but i just said you know we saw you you know progress being made it was almost the westmoreland life you know the top that's how deceived our leadership regarding this war they're getting good intelligence telling them the national intelligence estimate says we're not going to win bastra crocker said in the class the popular will thereby knows about it says because we've never addressed the safe havens in pakistan treasure never going to work the white house has all this shit they pretend otherwise. david what's your take care and say before we wrap this up do you think of this is really going to be a turning point not only for the way that it's perceived in afghanistan by the
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civilians but by the american public and i think that we already see in terms of some of our politicians here nuking great right this is become suddenly a popular position for one of the g.o.p. candidates to take is that we should leave immediately but what about for everyone else i think we've seen the end of the war i think recent events are going to add to the political end game. game in the sense that. people are going to want to remove troops immediately are going to they're going to say ok go along with the plan it's already there to be out by twenty thirteen or twenty fourteen immediately it's not possible with just speaking. withdrawal most regular troops but initially fourteen could be accelerated and i think you've seen enough in the rhetoric to make that possible. we can't move out any quicker than a year best case you've got to switch some troops out bring others in i talked to the former commander of central command on this directly and you can't move much
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faster than twenty thirty without said if you're telling the taliban you're leaving those who are left there to take on this thankful mission will be left in more danger than ever i think we'll see more of an unfortunate like this unfold our general allen thank you so much for joining us tonight and definitely another horrible event from this war thank you. our guys aside for a quick break but when we come back from firm i'm a hang over for gas whether or not americans should crash the justice system out of which is just ignore all that pesky u.s. intelligence when it comes to iraq. same. people calling what you said for free and fair elections. and they're still reporting from the letters right as you can hear behind me loud explosions.
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and. gave the. you know sometimes you see a story and it seems so. you think you understand it and then you glimpse something else and here's some other part of it and realize that everything is ok. i'm sorry there's a big. storm
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going to. be. our guide this monday and we have quite a few things on our plate to discuss now wrestle out after this big weekend as the obama administration walks in texas a voter id law and the pay is taking their case against a voting laws all the way to geneva before u.n. panel that an author pens and an author penned an op ed in the new york times
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suggesting that if everybody actually refused to play out insisted on our sixth amendment right as guaranteed in the constitution to a trial and the entire justice system would crash and a new poll shows that there is a difference between democrats and republicans when it comes to what they think the likelihood is of a war with iran so you're in this class with me is about welch editor in chief of reason that. and said july communications an outreach coordinator for united republic and writer for united republic's blog republic report gentlemen thanks so much for joining me tonight. ok voter id law this is something we brought up a lot on this show because right now there are fifteen states since last year that already passed these new laws i think over thirty states that are trying to make it specifically a voter i.d. law and so what do you think that just going to texas is going to have to do in the sense of this texas law they said that this would risk it disenfranchised of thousands. of voters and so are they just have to go state by state i mean this is
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going to be a trend they did it before i presume so i mean bill you go state by state or try to get some kind of broad class action kind of thing going on here the problem with the political discussion of this is that you have one people on the side of the issue saying you know of course this is been a historical way to blunt the aspirations and to deny voting rights to especially african-americans but on the also the issue regards anything else the voting system in this country sucks i mean how many times have you gone to the polls and seen your name twice or some dude living in your house there's a powerful emotional argument for saying hey look shouldn't you have a system that's a little bit more airtight so that this will be a political issue for as long as we still have that kind of voting system that isn't there another way to try to reform or at least fix i guess you could say our voting system rather than requiring everyone to have a government issued photo id if there is i think twenty one million people in this country that don't have one of them because they might not have the proper
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documents in order to get it or because of the fact that it costs money right the if you go to the d.m.v. to get it and then i. think very few people argue the voting system i mean you have so many people turning away every single year because they're on the right thing they didn't know where to go their name wasn't listed and that's why you know better idea ends up being you know sort of burdensome sort of way to handle the problem i mean i think there are. definitely ways to reform the system even there some states and districts are actually going to start experimenting with online voting and sort of online verification for voting a lot of especially elderly people who tend to be disenfranchised with voting id laws they like to use their like medicare card or social security card. for registration for id so there's a number of ways to tackle the problem but you know i think just today it was constant judge threw out their voting id law so i think these laws are very divisive and honestly they're kind of a solution searching for a problem because there really isn't any sort of rash outbreak of sort of voter fraud i mean it's mostly just mainly factored. well i mean it's true he talked about that on the show too you know it might be frustrating or he might you say how
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many times have you gone and seen your name written down twice it's never happened to me and i've never been able to but if you did i think you know that since it takes don't show that voter fraud really is a huge problem and what it does it undermines people's confidence a member saying great power to you might have in your show once or twice before the two thousand and four election saying very confidently we know that they've stolen the election the only question is if we're going to do it there is a built in belief that the whole system is rigged against whatever faction that you're part of and as long as the voting system has sort of you know swiss cheese irregularities to it you'll have that but it's also a reflection of our federal system we don't want a one size fits all federal solution to voting and i think that's actually pretty good i mean it allows for experimentation and kind of regional differences within other broader kind of fourteenth amendment issues yeah i mean i guess what bothers me more is the fact that we have an electoral college that i feel that some states get a little more say than others do or certain votes were you treated better we want to point to this is an ivy let's move on to you and michelle alexander is an author
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she's written about our criminal justice system the war on drugs how this is all considered the new jim crow and so she has this op ed in the new york times basically reminding us that more than ninety percent of the time people actually don't go to a for a trial with a jury if they're arrested for something they have to just take the plea bargain and usually go you know serve a little bit of time in jail but she says that the system could actually be crashed if everyone took advantage of that sixth amendment right do you think that's true totally one thousand percent true yes of course i mean we don't have a criminal justice system at least as vision we have a plea bargain factory system and that's it so a government says you have committed even some first time offense you've committed this thing we have a jailhouse snitch that pins you at this crime that you didn't commit and you can either go to jail for ten years if you fight it or. we'll give you one year on the side and that's what all of this doesn't like that right i mean there's even
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a supreme court case that said that they're allowed to threaten you with life in prison. with this plea bargain deal and that's totally legal to do you know i think i think the professor she actually mentioned this that in her op ed too that the system as it set up right now is really skewed against particularly poor people and racial minorities and you know god bless them in the only person who brought this up in any sort of presidential forum was ron paul you know talking about particularly systems getting its minority because typically these people don't tend to have the education of their own and the access to this sort of legal knowledge to defend themselves that a lot of these cases they'll just take the police are you know whatever circumstance ends up being and i think the professor was absolutely right it was actually started standing up for their rights and demanding you know what it takes and i mean that and the rest of the bill right to guarantee is that they would crash as well because this thing really is not set up right now to actually deliberate here and simply because is supposed to be a system based on fear where they where they go in and they say if you actually want to take advantage of the rice krispie granted to you by the sixth amendment you might face more time in jail but to seems like the most backwards logic to me
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completely and let's not forget that it's very expensive to for anyone to go through that and every step of the way they have people who sort of punish you for standing firm and holding on to your beliefs but i mean it's easy for us to say oh yeah of course you should fight it but then get there yourself that's happening right guys then you have to risk the possible consequences lastly before we go as you say there's a new poll this is by a poll position found that the peace purse that the fifty seven percent of republicans believe that the u.s. is going to attack around this year attack iran this year and twenty two percent of democrats think that and so it kind of just brings up a little question obviously there are a whole lot of people in between that don't necessarily want to call themselves a democrat or republican but i thought the two questions that one caller asked were interesting and i want your answers are republicans then engaged in this wish fulfillment thing meaning that you know they believe that it's likely because they really want a war and the fact that young people. ages eighteen to twenty nine i actually thought it's more likely that word the internet is that
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a reflection of the last ten years and where you think the war is normalized i think especially the last one is very interesting the young people now at this point are so cynical because we're always going to go to war the interesting number there is that twenty two democrats don't think it's going to happen necessarily any probably don't want it to happen in the rank and file level and it does over the democrats are more in denial because they don't want to listen and matter what they think that is the point it doesn't matter if your faction is is pro-war anti-war you're going to have war you know i think there's just as likely a possibility is that obama would somehow get involved militarily with iran as a republican president would at this point for a president romney at least this year might be slightly bigger chance for romney but democrats cannot impose their own anti interventionist feelings on their own party because they're so quick to say republicans are evil. and we have what we have i mean i think matt has a good point in terms of particularly young people don't see a big difference between the parties in foreign policy and in particular under
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obama but i think you know there hasn't been that big of a difference but i do think it's it is unlikely for there to be a war in the primaries there because the parties have a different philosophy because i like the other countries the united states has gone to war with recently iran has a huge set of deterrents that would cause a lot of pain for the united states and its allies and i feel like this is a little bit more of a turning effect for them versus the other countries that we've gone to war with so i'm hoping that hopefully the young people here are a little too cynical because the world be really really bad for you know us and for iran i hope you're right you know i had my fag kind of fall into this whole cynical category specially i think we had a clip you don't find a plate of henry kissinger saying that screw it our intelligence agencies say run of the nuclear but we shall we go into this is a this is a lot of are you guys thanks so much for coming in and i thank you. i thank for another great week that he said it i read it and then his germany occupying greets you speak with author william black about the plight of green.

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