welcome to the lone show where we get the real headlines with none of the mercy or who live in washington d.c. now it's american speak with rolling stone contributing editor michael hastings about the massacre of sixteen civilians in afghanistan that lead to a faster pace withdrawal of u.s. troops then are we becoming are we moving towards becoming eight cashless society or you speak to one author who experimented and went without using hash for an entire year i don't remember that supreme court case that would have decided it

corporations can be liable for human rights abuses abroad looks like the court has decided not to answer that question so we're going to talk about why all that and more for tonight including a dozen of happy hour but first some to look at the mainstream media has decided to miss. right so as we hear nonstop election coverage coming from the mainstream media we also keep hearing a myth perpetuated by pundits g.o.p. candidates that rising gas prices actually has something to do with who's in office now all the things you can argue that have an influence right be it speculation commodities trading supply and a man who was president in america is just not one of them and so the current president has recently been repeating a line to the press regarding the fear mongering overwrought the beating the war drums might be another reason has an effect or a lot of things we can do whether translates immediately and lower gas prices at

the pump the biggest contributor right now that is rumors of war in the middle east were just part of the reason i said a couple weeks ago let's stop with the loose talk about war. and so when we think of where we hear and feel all this loose talk about war let's be honest right it's often on the mainstream media cable networks that something else that i'd like to bring up today that also fits into this entire equation of this puzzle the i'm not sure if these ads play all across the country or maybe only in specific markets but if you live here in washington d.c. and if you're watching news on one of the cable networks and you are constantly bombarded with political ads advocating for the ne k. and x.l. the running group to be delisted from the state department's list of terrorist organizations here's an example. is a ron's democratic opposition working for a nuclear free iran sounded on human rights unjustly listed a terrorist group and we can use the secular. rocky islands

europe has to listed. and in two thousand and ten the us court ordered a review iranians u.s. lawmakers and former senior officials demanded listing secretary clinton for democracy and freedom in iran to list. right so we've spoken about this group before on the show many times most recently i make a were in the news when n.b.c. reporters wrote and they have been behind the assassinations of nuclear scientists in iran and were financed by the sought and i make a wants a change in the power structure in iran right or not supporters of the government there so do a lot of people in washington and we've also spoken about before on the show is that there are a number of politicians officials that have been paid by the m. e. k. to give speeches to advocate on their behalf push this notion patiently be listed as a terrorist organization and all this is pretty dubious considering that thanks to

a two thousand and ten supreme court ruling known as holder versus humanitarian law it is illegal to provide material support to terrorist organizations and material support is very broadly defined in this ruling as advocacy performed in coordination with the we spoke of. this ruling when it first came down as an affront to the first amendment he also brought up numerous times the hypocrisy the people like rudy giuliani howard dean fran townsend ed rendell can take money from the ne k. and yet because they're in positions of power the laws don't apply to them he it's not a matter of it's not a matter of whether you agree with the ruling or not or whether you believe that any case should be diluted or not it's a matter of principle here if this log says that are we all treated fairly under this justice system or not i mean stream media has been pretty complicit in completely ignoring the have pocker see in this case well having these ads play nonstop on our networks so it's been left to people like glenn greenwald the salon dot com that does at the center for american progress just to name two other examples to remind everybody they something just doesn't seem to fit so it's also

not surprising that we haven't seen the mainstream media that plays these ads all the time and not mention that ed rendell former governor of pennsylvania and in fact an m.s. and you see contributor as being dell is being investigated by the treasury department's counterterrorism division for the speaking fees that he's received from the enemy. but just an interesting development to say the least well they go after others too and we see an example of made out of some of these people so now i doubt that ed rendell howard dean or rudy giuliani are going to be given fifteen year sentences but a sign of elite immunity won't be upheld by this administration in all cases perhaps and we'll see that although of course there are plenty of other examples out there where they've allowed it to slide while street being his most obvious example but i do wonder if the mainstream media's going to cover these investigations at all the same way they cover political sex scandals the same way they beat the drums for the wrong the same way they fanned the flames of fear when

it comes to investigations of support for terrorism when it comes from say a lone wolf twenty year old muslim living in the midwest of course not i predict people are going to choose to miss. all right so let's continue talking about the fallout from the massacre of sixteen civilians in afghanistan legislate by one the thirty eight year old u.s. army staff sergeant and was name has still not been disclosed president obama promised a full investigation and a pencil terry leon panetta said of the death penalty is a possibility in this case this is an unnamed source this as an unnamed source said yesterday of a soldier had suffered a traumatic brain injury some time in a past deployment for the bigger questions liar of course how this tragic event falls into the war effort as a whole despite reports of the obama administration has been discussing an accelerated pace of troop withdrawal at least an additional twenty thousand troops

by two thousand and thirteen according to the new york times in public the president the secretary of defense the u.s. ambassador to afghanistan they've all been warning against a rush to exit so are we seeing an internal battle again between saving face and just seeing the painful truth and how much more will americans be willing to put up with it joining me to discuss it is michael hastings rolling stone contributing editor and author of the book the operators the wild and terrifying inside story of america's war in afghanistan michael thanks so much for joining us tonight and i guess first i just want to get your take on this report right that obviously somebody decided to leak from within the administration where they say that there is a discussion going on as to whether they should accelerate the pace of withdrawal and to me it kind of looks like something we've seen before when they were trying to decide if there should be an afghanistan troop surge it seems like you know joe biden on one side maybe some of the other civilian leaders versus of course the military that says let's keep him there as long as we possibly can. exactly this is

been a long running policy battle that we've seen play out over the last three years this is sort of round three you could say where again it's the white house versus the pentagon the pentagon generals want to stay as long as possibly can as he suggested well within the white house there's been great trepidation about the strategy didn't fears beginning that it's going to be a huge mess it's going to be a political mess or president obama as well as the tremendous cost that's going to cost and life and and treasure so to again we're seeing that play out now i mean i was that did end up coming nato conference. in may where i think there will be it will be a significant difference in tone from the nato conference that i've attended in the past where that kind of really tried to say we're in this for the long haul and i i think that's going to be different this time around. so that's why do you think that it's become impossible i mean you know one of the things that you've written about for a long stoner in the last book you write about is this new media machine that we think coming from within the pentagon specifically from those at the top from the

generals but do you think that it's going to be impossible for them to spin their way out of this war you know can they still keep trying to say is there some kind of progress or is it over is the public completely spin spin is their best weapon right i mean you can actually point to anything on the ground is that you know he's kind of going to daniel davis very clearly documented is recent reports spin is their best weapon it has always been their best weapon and it will continue to be their best weapon as long as american soldiers aren't being killed in large numbers and as long as these sorts of high profile incidents are kept to a minimum in general they are i mean you have you have afghan civilians being killed all the time but usually it's kind of flies under the radar then then then they can just keep saying it's going well it's going well and all the policy makers in washington want to buy into this solution the white house certainly for political reasons want to buy into the illusion the republicans want to buy into it too because they have been supporting this sort of policy from the beginning and the general american public you know when they do look at it they're sort of

repulsed by it and so they'd rather just say yeah we won we did our best let's get home. i want to show you a clip of something that john bolton had to say about this little. race and. he did he let's listen to it and we'll get a response. for these leaks stories to favored media outlets by the ministration i think it's just the president obama's people trying to have it both ways saying no we're there to stay but signaling desperately they want to get out. what do you think yeah i mean he has a he has a good point right the white house is sort of playing this double game where publicly they're going to have to continue to see you know we're in this for the long haul we're privately do clearly sending signals that they're not in those signals we sort of we've been seeing that really over the past eight or nine months that there really is not much appetite for an extended campaign in afghanistan but

this is been president obama's position from the beginning he started out. policy by saying we don't want to do a ten year nation building in a stand and he's sticking to that what hasn't sunk into pentagon is that he's serious and he might actually sort of finally call out so you know bolton you know house has a point but i guess a broken clock is also right twice a day i will say in that sense and i want to take us to a statement that was made by the u.s. ambassador to afghanistan ryan crocker and this is i mean i guess and say he's not within the pentagon right this is from the diplomatic arm and the other week when it was the koran burning incident he signaled that this should not mean that anybody should rush for an exit out of afghanistan because we saw to fight al qaeda here is pretty much i going the same state. i understand that people are tired of this war after

a decade and. you know i'm tired too i've been deployed to afghanistan pakistan and iraq. going on seven years now since nine eleven so. believe me i understand what feeling tired means but these are the stakes. if we decide to we're tired of it that we don't want to do it anymore well the taleban. isn't that tired and badly damaged it would be able to regenerate and if the taliban puts the country over again. bizarrely sure i get of logic error right i mean i think it's pretty obvious that we're not going to rid afghanistan of the taliban you know when you make a statement like that it sounds like that's saying we have to stay forever. yeah i have a lot of respect for ambassador crocker and i'm sure he's regretting the fact that he came out of retirement essentially to go back and take the ambassador job but this is the rhetorical game that's been played forever conflating the taliban and

al qaida the essential insanity of the policy has always been why are we having thirty thousand american troops in kandahar prevent some kid from connecticut driving to times square to set up a bomb the answer's no just having thirty thousand troops in kandahar prevent someone from putting explosive material in his underwear and getting on a plane from nigeria and coming to chicago the answer is no i mean this is this is the tragedy of it which you know a u.s. official like a cracker can't can't come out and say it and maybe maybe they truly believe that you know afghanistan will be somewhere they can regenerate but that's just not how terrorism terrorism really works so we've been spending all this time fighting taliban and local insurgents you know ninety nine point nine percent of people we fight would never pose a threat to the u.s. homeland so it's you know and as as investor crocker said he's tired he's been doing this forever and we're all tired and and it's not

a question of just being pretty good question and it's clearly not working well you know and also there is i think the question fatigue there's the question of multiplying mental psychological effects that has on the troops as well as you know the civilians that actually live in afghanistan and have had to deal with ten years of war only ten years by the u.s. this time around let's not forget of course the decade before that and so here i think that we have to ask a question about one of the things that president obama said today when he was giving a speech in the rose garden we're going to take a listen to the united states. it was our own citizens and our own children. i had to be cynical but there have been a lot of civilian deaths. throughout the years in afghanistan that's a material you know it's clearly not true but i mean i mean that's obvious that it

look if if an afghan man went to a small village in texas and killed an american family and you know nine women and three children whatever the number is plus you know seven other people it would be it would be such outrage you know dionne cable news for three weeks. just on the value we place on afghan lives just from an economic perspective when we kill an afghan accidentally we give the family a few thousand dollars when an american soldier gets killed a family gets a half a million dollars so even if you you can even quantify the value we place on their lives but but i i believe you know president obama sentiment is surely real that you know any compassion or human person when confronted with such a tragedy as we saw in the past few days in afghanistan has to feel for the afghan people but if we truly respected or actually cared about the afghan lives then we would not have decided to wage a ten year long war there and that was the war of choice. now what afghan officials

in the parliament are asking for is a public trial in afghanistan for this one soldier i don't think by any means that happening we also have a sense like a very leon panetta saying that the death penalty might apply in this case and so this has really does differ you know you mentioned this earlier in the sense that it's high profile it's definitely not the first time that we've seen civilian deaths of coverups in the past or even with this you know afghan kill team last year when it came down to punishment i think it was a couple months that the leader of this killed team so you know how do you think punishment is going to be laid down here are they going to try to make an example of this guy because it is so public yet deal they will if he is just acting alone they will make an example of him in some of the other cases who have there been civilian massacres are arguments very persuasive arguments within the military and the american public were made that well they lost a buddy so that's why they killed x.

number of civilians or you know this this case actually most reminds me of something happened in two thousand and six in iraq when a small unit of guys basically executed a family and raped a fourteen year old girl they got punished for that because there's no plausible excuse i mean to kill team guys again you have a unit they're all doing these sorts of sort of shady things but again you don't have the sort of smoking gun or a finding it's just some way it's just one guy we decide to kill everybody sort of a high profile if you remember the also the other case in iraq with seventeen civilians killed by blackwater guards those guards all got let off and the other case recently from iraq as well but frank would reach killed a bunch of people in a legend he killed a bunch of people and he was also let off but i think in this case the guy's going to get hammered. on the show we had

a debate amongst my guests so whether we would be a really big response around the country to the same way that we saw the koran burning you know if we don't so what they're saying well we might but if we don't the reason is because this sort of behavior sadly is expected right we don't hear about afghan civilians being killed pretty regularly in the united states but if you're in afghanistan and if so it's events are happening on a regular basis i'll be in much smaller numbers it's not that surprising there was a novelty and it's thirty three the koran burning burning as well as having a long discourse a traditional you know very very sensitive issues of religion that that helped to inflame the population were as you said you know this is a country that's been accustomed to years and years of war so the bar is quite high to get really really fired up about other more people being killed but i think the

sad part of that too as i said is that there's an expectation that this sort of stuff goes on all the time. michel thank you so much for joining us tonight thanks for having me the media blackout over. our time for a quick break and we get back show in style and then cash becoming obsolete with author david wolman after the break. people calling like you said for free and fair elections. and we're still reporting from the summit as you can hear behind me allow dissolutions.

gave. a. you know sometimes you see a story and it seems so silly you think you understand it and then when something else you hear or see some other part of it and realize everything you thought you knew you don't know i'm sorry welcome to the big picture.

our guys have time for show and tell and i program last week we thought dallas congressman dennis kucinich who just lost his seat house race on super tuesday i want to know who you thought would fill his shoes pick up the regressive mantle in congress let's go to produce appropriate on a sunday find out what you have to say. i'm on the streets of d.c. to tell people in the nation's capital what our viewers had to say on twitter you tube and facebook and see which comments we should keep or delete. them.

in the democratic congress do you think you'll be the new leader of the progressive cause now miles said it is impossible to work out who in congress to be the next to pick up the progressive mantle is about majority of americans don't know who the vast majority of democrats in congress are going to keep it or delete it keep it. so i don't people will own and all the other states comment that is those kind of true because i was thinking to name the woman legislator from poor florida who i love i forget her name though so that applies to me i don't i can't begin to. honestly i don't follow the democrats very much anthony said given that dennis kucinich lost that primary in iowa he probably wasn't progressive enough i always thought of him as a left leaning libertarian do you want to keep married alina i did make that one laugh about it from what i understand he was going to keep their delete it i'll delete that one. just because i don't think that people are really as progressive as they say they are garrick wrote in to say there are not many good guys left do

you want to keep it. think there are good people there i mean we elected him we put him there are so few there are not many good guys left do you agree i would completely agree with congressman dennis kucinich bond it looks like the people who wrote in the people we talked to here in the nation's capital are unsure who the next congressman will be to pick up that progressive mantle. our guys thanks very responses as usual and here's our next question for you coming up right now on the show we're going to speak with an author that argues that physical cash will play less and less of a role in our lives in the coming decades but could never become entirely obsolete so we want to know what you think if we could ever become a cashless society we think on facebook twitter and you tube and who knows a response just might make it on air. so let's get into it have you ever wondered if one day cold hard cash will simply cease to exist the reality that some say that

we should accept some our transactions are carried out via credit on line on your smartphone greenbacks and coins to become an inconvenience or question i want a full year without using cash with a few exceptions when it came to using public transportation or traveling abroad we would have a serious concerns that we need to address the questions we'd ask before we head into becoming cashless about privacy corporate abuse even larger divisions between rich and poor and of course the idea of electric rates going down it's going cashless more dangerous than we think joining me to discuss it is david wolman author of the book the end of money counterfeiters preachers techies dreamers and becoming cashless society david thanks so much for joining us tonight and so i guess first start is do you think that it's inevitable do we have to be are we going to be a cashless society. well that's the question i mean we're quite close already but but what is the final mile look like is this incredible technology that's been with us for ages for it hasn't really changed that much in a long time and you know most of our financial lives are conducted in just the

realm now and yet when you bring up this idea of going cashless of people really sort of. don't like the idea too much so i wanted to explore that question a little bit you know what is it about cash that cling to and what are the costs of cash that sort of honest accounting of whether it is worth a try so hard to keep your own are because we also say this is kind of a it way when first world argument right there is still a lot of people in this world that depends on cash not having cash and having a credit card being able to make all your transactions online or have something on your i phone or whatever kind of smartphone you have you know those are luxuries there are a lot of people in this world that need to have the physical cash in their hand. and in fact i think it's the exact opposite and this was something that was really regulatory for me when reporting on this book but the reality is that cash is the most candid and for the poor and what i mean by that is you know you and i can

toggle back and forth between electronic money and cash kind of how we see fit and i imagine you know most of your wealth is not socked away under a mattress somewhere but when you're done you know they're ready. for the cost of a bank friends actually you know that's really punitive stuff because of an a.t.m. fee isn't just something to be annoyed at and when your money is actually just in physical form you know it's subject to beth or destruction in a fire and it's also extremely hard to save and build any financial stability in your life so that any little shop you know broken down moped for example you're just not buttressed against that and so you can sort of be sent right back down into poverty and that's why we're seeing a lot of this mobile money technology in fact it is kind of cool on an i phone and for people in the west and that's sort of the class argument right only you smartphone users are excited about this but in fact there's this huge push by the private sector by governments by non-profits like the gates foundation they're

trying to encourage these technologies for using your mobile phone as a way to send money back and forth or as a way to access banking your not because it's going to be but it's actually a life saving tool arpad sort of let's talk about some of the other concerns that it might bring up the issue of privacy if i have your transactions could be monitored all the time a she would that mean if we just look at the way of the banks function these days every time you threaten them with a new corporate media regulation they immediately start to an action you need to try to make up for it and earn more money and then if everything is online what happens the fall back crashes one day and we have nothing to fall back on and actually think that last one is the best defense of at present you know i was out on the west coast we have our emergency preparedness kit. earthquakes and you know the american red cross as you have some small denomination bank notes in your kit there but you know i wonder if thirty years from now could we all just sort of have red cross dollars stored in that kit in case the electricity grid is off for weeks

and weeks and that's what we transact and because the reality is we've mostly said yes to the digital money proposition already and that's not to say that the concerns you raise about banks or about scrutiny from credit card companies loans or capital p. privacy those are real and serious concerns but they exist already today and what's peculiar about the cash question and actually showcases just how much we love this stuff is that we seem to only really get most of say about these issues when we suggest well maybe cash is done and people say no no no what will cash is an anonymous way to transact and i don't want the bags or the government to know what i'm doing well kind of live in that world already but people it's almost like those late and fears are there but they only sort of come suddenly to the surface when you say hey you know cash is really expensive in old fashion are we sure we want to keep it around i guess all the more reason to bring it up so we can realize

that if we're heading in that direction perhaps there are some way that we can consider that we need to approach it the problems we need to solve or and really quickly if you can just tell us you know you lived for a year without using cash what was the hardest part. the hardest part was going overseas to report this mobile money stuff i was mentioning you know before i flew to india to go interview some guys like in the slums of delhi who are using this know money technology and you know before the plane even hit the ground. i realized you know i need to call a timeout basically on my castle's year experiment because if you want to do anything in a developing country like that outside of your hotel room you're going to need some paper money and you know that was. quite a stark reminder that although it might feel like cash is part of the periphery a member of our everyday lives here in the states you know it's still really dug in its heels in poorer parts of the world you have got my going to take a while there david thanks so much for joining us tonight my.