headlines marty a ten pm moscow time stolen trucks caught fire after being driven inside a british base in afghanistan where the plane of the defense secretary was unharmed but. the near future is an attempted attack barack obama me times hosting david cameron in washington with both saying their afghan military policy will remain the same just days after the massacre of sixteen people by u.s. soldiers. broken news journalists who've resigned from al-jazeera accuse station bosses of fabricating reports to broadcast their views rather than show what's really happening in conflicts on syria. be urgent need to slow down.

political crash just as desperate europe wise up aging as a potential cash cow. i'm kevin zero in here and r.t. h.q. in moscow divides thanks for being with us and again now to our studios in washington d.c. for tonight's alone a show. we're going to be alone a show where we get the real headlines with none of the mersey are going live in washington d.c. now and i are going to speak with rolling stone contributing editor michael hastings about the massacre of sixteen civilians in afghanistan could lead to a faster pace withdrawal of u.s. troops but are we becoming are we moving towards becoming a cashless society where you speak to one author who experimented and went without

using cash for an entire year i don't remember that supreme court case that would have decided if corporations can be liable for human rights abuses abroad a looks like the court has decided not to answer that question so we're going to talk about why all of all that and more for you tonight including a dozen happy hour but first something like what the mainstream media has decided to me. all 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 things you could argue that have an influence right the speculation commodities trading supply and a man who was president in america is just one of them and so the current president has recently been repeating a line to the press regarding the fear mongering over iran the beating the war drums might be another reason that has in effect. a lot of things we can do whether

translates immediately and lower gas prices at the pump the biggest contributor right now the vast it is rumors of war in the middle east which is 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 see all of this loose talk about war let's be honest it's often on the mainstream media cable networks listen they also i'd like to bring up today that also fits into this entire equation in 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 any k. and running group to be delisted from the state department's list of terrorist organizations here's an example. here's a ron's to my credit card this is working for

a nuclear free iran sounded like human rights unjustly listing the terrorists and he is the victim of. the same. rocky islands europe has to be listed. and in two thousand and ten a us court ordered a review iranians u.s. lawmakers and former senior officials demanded listing secretary clinton for democracy and freedom in iran d. list. so we've spoken about this group before on the show many times most recently i mean hey we're in the news when n.b.c. reporters wrote and they had been behind the assassinations of nuclear scientists in iran and were financed by the sun 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 any k. to give speeches to advocate on their behalf push this notion that they should 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 so we spoke. 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 and rendell can take money from the enemy k. and yet because they're in positions of power the laws don't apply to them and you see it's not a matter of it's not a matter of whether you agree with the ruling or not or whether you believe the any case should be to listed or not it's a matter of principle here if this logs this in are we all treated fairly under this justice system or not and the mainstream media has been pretty complicit in completely ignoring the hypocrisy in this case by having these ads play nonstop on their networks to the left of people like glenn greenwald the salon dot com with

the center for american progress just to name two other examples to remind everybody that a 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 not mention that ed rendell former governor of pennsylvania and in fact an m.s.n. b.c. contributor is being dell is being investigated by the treasury department's counterterrorism division for the speaking fees that he's received from the and. this is an interesting development to say the least well they go after others too and we feel example of made out of some of these people so now i doubt that howard dean or rudy giuliani are going to be given fifteen year sentences but a sign that elite immunity won't be upheld by this administration in all cases perhaps we will see that although of course there are plenty of other examples out there where they've allowed it to slide wall street being just the 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 floor of the run 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 that they're going to choose to miss. all right so let's continue talking about the fallout from the massacre of sixteen civilians in afghanistan legibly one a thirty eight year old u.s. army staff sergeant now all the name has still not been disclosed president obama promised a full investigation and defense secretary leon panetta said that the death penalty is a possibility in this case this is an unnamed source this as an unnamed source said yesterday the soldier had suffered a traumatic brain injury some time in the 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 now obviously somebody decided to leave 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 that 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 them 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 they can as you suggested well within the white house there's been great trepidation about the strategy there's been fears beginning that it's going to be a huge mess it's going be a political mess of president obama as well as the tremendous cost it's going to cost and life and and treasure so so again we're seeing that play out now i mean i was at an upcoming 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 with a kind of really tried to say we're in this for the long haul and i think that's going to be different this time around. so this point 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 machine that we see coming

from within the pentagon specifically from those at the top from the generals but do you think 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 there's some kind of progress or is it over is the public completely. spin is their best weapon right i mean you can actually point to anything on the ground is as you know the kind of ground dana davis very clearly documented is a recent report 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 and generally they are i mean you have asked into the being killed all the time but usually it's it's kind of flies under the radar and 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 illusion 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 want to get our best let's get home. i want to show you a clip of something that john bolton had to say about this. race and. then 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 new white house is sort of playing this double game where publicly they're going to have to continue to say no we're in this for the long haul we're privately they're clearly sending signals that they're not in those signals that we started 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 afghanistan and he's sticking to that what hasn't sunk in in the pentagon is that he's serious that 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 u.s. ambassador to afghanistan ryan crocker and this is i mean i guess you could 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 at about because we start 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. 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 taliban. isn't that tired and badly damaged would be able to regenerate the taliban took the country over again. but our relationship 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. you know i have a lot of respect for a master crocker and i'm sure he's regretting the fact that he came out of retirement especially 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 idiot sensual insanity of the policy has always been why are we having thirty thousand american troops in kandahar prevent some kid from kinetic kid driving to times square to set up a bomb the answer is 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 investor crocker can can come out and say it and maybe maybe they truly believe that you know afghanistan will be somewhere al qaida 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 the people we fight would never pose a threat to the u.s. homeland so it's you know and as i was 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 fatigued it's a question of it's clearly not working well you know and also there is i think the question there's the question of multiple appointments psychological effects that has on the troops as well. you know the civilians actually live in afghanistan and of have to deal with ten years of war only ten years by the u.s. the time around let's not forget of course before that and so here i think we have to question about one of the things that president obama said today when he was giving a speech in the rose garden. the united states takes this as seriously as it was our own citizens and our own children former. i hate to be cynical but there have been a lot of civilian deaths. throughout the years in afghanistan do you think that

they ministerial so it's clearly not true i mean i mean that's obvious that they look if an afghan man went to a small village in texas and killed an american family and you know nine women and three three and whatever the number is plus you know seven other people it would be it would be such outrage would be on cable news for three weeks you know 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 the family gets a half a million dollars so even 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 any compassionate 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 now is 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 happens we also have to find secretary leon panetta saying that the death penalty might apply in this case and so that's how it really does differ you know you mentioned that there are in the sense that it's high profile but definitely not the first time that we've seen civilian deaths cover ups in the past or even with the you know afghan kilty and last year when it came down to punishment i think it was a couple months that the leader of this killed team got and 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 yeah they will if he is just acting alone they will make an example of him in some of the other cases you 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 case actually most reminds me of something happened in two thousand and six in iraq when a small unit of guys they say executed 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 it's just one guy who decides to kill everybody sort of a high profile excuse remember the 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 rich who killed a bunch of people in the legislature would eventually go into detail he was also

let off but i think in this case the guy's going to get hammered. on the show. my death as to whether we are really big response around the country. or the same way that we thought of the koran burning and if we don't want to live. 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 these sorts of events are happening on a regular basis i'll be in much smaller numbers it's not that surprising there was a novelty and absurdities to the koran burning burning as well as hitting along these traditional. very very sensitive issues of religion that helped to inflame the population where 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 people 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 blackouts over. hard time for a great break when we go back live show and tell and then the cash and carry obsolete i discussed with author david wolman after the break. touches that so much of. which of course is right on it's own terms of. the lessons of the company crisis to learn the speculation control the markets and can free markets do better things than regular in. this respect to the british gentleman's choice was. to leave jackets and old frisky

. a much younger wife. and more than twenty years of intelligence service in profits of the soviet union. buildings choice on party. archive in time for show and tell on tonight's program last week we sat down with congressman dennis kucinich who just lost a seat house race on super tuesday so i want to know who you thought would feel issues pick up the regressive mantle in congress let's go to producer for truth in a sense and find out what you have to say. i'm on the streets of d.c. to tell people in the nation's capital whatever viewers had to say on twitter you tube and facebook and see which comments we should keep or delete. some of. them.

he won the democratic congress do you think you need the new leader of the progressive cause now miles said it is impossible to work out who in congress will be the next to pick up the progressive mantle because of past 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 keep what's going on and all the other states comment that is that is kind of true because i was thinking to name the woman legislator from poor florida who i love or forget her name though so that applies to me i don't i can't give anyone honestly i don't fall down or 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 it or delete it and then we. laughed about him 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 derek wrote in to say there are not many good guys left do you want to

keep it or do. i 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 don 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 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 let us know if you think on facebook twitter and you tube and who knows a response just might make it on air. so of 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 more 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 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 grids going to 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 the coming cashless society david thanks so much for joining us tonight and so i guess first start is do you think that it's inevitable here we have to be are we going to be a casual society. well that's the question and where we're quite close already but but what does that final mile look like you know cash is this incredible technology that's been with us for ages but hasn't really changed that much in a long time and you know most of our financial lives are conducted in the digital

realm now and yet where you bring up this idea of going cash was that people really sort of recoil and they 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 we cling to and what are the costs of cash and sort of do an honest accounting of whether it is worth trying so hard to keep you around. because we also say this is kind of a. first world argument right there is a lot of people in this world that depends on cash not having cash or 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 those are luxury is there 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 reporting out this book but the reality is that cash is the most punitive 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 i imagine you know most of your wealth is not socked away under a mattress somewhere but when you're does not already. were the cost of a bank transactions you know that's really punitive stuff the cost 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 theft or destruction in a fire and it's also extremely hard to save and build the any financial stability in your life so that any little shock you know broken down a 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 is argument right only smartphone users are excited about this but in fact there's this huge push by the private sector by governments via non-profits like the gates foundation they're

trying to encourage these technologies for using her mobile phone as a way to send money back and forth or as a way to access banking here not because it's gimmicky but it's actually a life saving tool are but let's talk about some of the other concerns that it might bring up. privacy if i could be. a she would that mean if we just look at the way banks function these days every time and the new car has many regulations. and you need to try to make up for and earn more money and then if everything is online what happened to fall back crashes one day and we have nothing to fall back on actually the last one is the best defense of that at present you know about on the west coast we have our emergency preparedness kit for earthquakes and you know the american red cross as you should have some small the nomination bank notes in your kid there but you know i wonder if the 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 transacted 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 routes but scrutiny from the credit card companies loans or capital p. privacy those are real and serious concerns but they exist already today and will kill your 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 ready 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 the old fashion are we sure we want to keep it around and i guess all the more reason to bring it up so we can

realize that if we're heading in that direction perhaps a way that we should consider that we need to approach it from problems we need to solve for and really quickly if you can just tell us you know you live for a year without using cash or 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 global money technology and you know before the plane even hit the ground in india 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 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 now i've got my going to take a while there david thanks so much for joining us tonight.