mission is for now in the palm of your. will tonight in our t.v. halls to end the war in afghanistan are growing louder as the p.r. disaster schemes piling up president karzai is saying is enough is enough with a top general overseeing the war well he says that effort is on track and we're going to bring you the very latest in these troubled relations. and the afghan war may be costing billions but students american students are drowning in the millions of dollars worth of debt that's not news sadly but this is college loan rates are about to double been explained what that means for you if you're how one woman is fighting the system. that really should choose to keep you.

going to almost zero standard whatsoever it's really just a brain fart and a brain fart one hundred forty characters at a time apparently a global revolution twitter is a sense of conception sixty years ago twitter has taken over the way that we communicate and the arab spring to reenter gave british show you how allotment he said in less than one sentence. good evening it's wednesday march twenty first it's eight pm here in washington d.c. i'm lucy catherine up and watching our team well the u.s. commander of ghana stan the afghanistan war will be back on capitol hill tomorrow in order to weigh in on the decade long conflict that hearing the senate hearing couldn't have come at a more politically sensitive time scandal after scandal has rocked the country increasing anti-american sentiments among afghans and turning. more and more

american citizens against the war were first came the photos of the marines u.s. marines urinating on afghan corpses then troops and burned the koran at a giant wartime prison prompting nationwide riots and a shooting spree allegedly by a soldier u.s. soldier last week left sixteen afghan civilians that the taliban meanwhile suspended peace talks with the u.s. and afghan president hamid karzai has proclaimed himself a quote the end of the rope with washington and finally this weekend a new report suggests that detainees arrested by u.s. troops were tortured after being transferred into afghan custody but never mind all that if yesterday's house hearing was of any indication the message that you're likely to hear from general john allen tomorrow is that this war is on track well the pentagon may have a vested interest in selling a rosy war outlook however reality on the ground is what i'm after and that's exactly where my next guest spent much but the past four years now the agency is an investigative journalist who recently came back from the country he reports for

a number of publications including harper's magazine the atlantic and g.q. and joins me now in studio welcome to the program and yes. these assessments by the top general is there any indication that this actually reflects what's happening on the ground or as the generals rosie says it is pretty how to move forward here and right now in afghanistan but we've seen consistently that the military only plays one note when it comes to their susman on the war which is that it's on but i think it's interesting to compare general allen's testimony to a secret nato document that was leaked in february last month. and we challenged on the state of the taliban report which is essentially a secret document compiled by u.s. special forces team that interrogates detainee and it provides a pretty frank and unvarnished assessment of the war wasn't over consumption and it's shockingly testament pessimistic to be frank it notes that the taliban are.

more optimistic than ever the more all of us has ever been and they're pretty resilient in that even in the face of this massive military campaign that the afghan government is increasing these seeking the straight deals the taliban sort of individual members. and so on and so forth so i think that if we look at that document probably have a better idea of what people on the ground even in the military are actually seeing right now or that you know as we said the general might have a vested interest in portraying the war is going well but if the military has access to this kind of information because the facts on the ground don't add up to this rosy account wouldn't that be a reason to change strategy is anything going on behind closed doors that's making you think that that's the case i think the military is locked into the strategy that they set down at the beginning of the surge which is that they would wage as counterinsurgency campaign in afghanistan which means clearing the area of insurgents and sticking it in their place and afghan security forces so right now they just want to be able to fight and train as long as they can which means

keeping as many from the place until two thousand and fourteen as possible which is i think really what they sort of testimony is aimed at it seemed it was for in public opinion. for keeping troops there as well as possible and so if our objective now is to sort of train these afghan soldiers the security forces put them in place one stat i read was that it cost as much to maintain this force as the entire budget of the country of afghanistan how in the world is this drawdown actually going to play out well there is no one has really come up with an answer to that obvious numbers get up to three years or three hundred thirty thousand strong afghan security force in the works and it's completely unsustainable for the afghan government to pay for the level of the military and so supposedly the plan is that nato and the u.s. will keep paying indefinitely until that military is no longer needed until the war is won but again. you're seeing a lot less enthusiasm not just in the u.s.

but in european capitals for maintaining the sort of massive level of billions in expenditures every year or so but at least i was that the germans and the brits pay more for unfortunately for killed civilians there's that waiter's report that said it was two hundred fifty dollars apparently there are lots of billion of the us pays up if you know the germans and the kill less of them so maybe they can afford to pay less to do more of that is perhaps that's the case but i want to bring in the greater of what i said at the afghan forces and sad at the way that afghanistan has been sort of preparing itself to take over once we pulled out there was that report suggesting essentially that u.s. detainees arrested by the u.s. handed over then into afghan custody or subject to torture. there are legal mechanisms in place to prevent that from happening if the u.s. did this knowingly there are some serious consequences should we have been surprised or perhaps prepared for the possibility that detainees would be tortured

in afghan hands no you shouldn't come as a prize anybody was reporters actually sort of follow up to reporting that the u.n. did in october of last year which revealed that there was systematic torture taking place in the afghan police and intelligence prisons often of prisoners that were transferred there by the u.s. and myself have done some work on the subject i wrote an article for the atlantic in the november issue which showed that a major u.s. ally in kandahar in southern afghanistan has been torturing civilians i interviewed young men into seeing men who were tortured by his forces in the governor's mansion in kandahar but he was responsible for a massacre in two thousand and six that the u.s. state department including one of its reports yet we've continued to back him d y well you know the thing is that. what they would say is that there are military imperatives that we have to work with the ones that we have that on the ground

there that you know there's not a lot of good options in terms of you power power is going to be about guys that there are guys exactly and so that might be true but i think as the this reporting shows it's not a question of whether you sacrifice your strategy for an absolute commitment to human rights whether you incorporate human rights at all in your decision making and we've seen time and time again when it came down to it to make a choice as to whether the whole people we found militarily useful accountable for corruption or human rights violations. it hasn't even been a consideration we bear we've barely care at all now what happened in the late fall i think sort of at the same time that the trace left and alan came in as well as the new ambassador ryan crocker the u.s. military actions and it transfers to a number of these prisons because they got reports of torture that was happening out of legal concerns they suspended transfers now they've resumed those to most of the prisons over the winter after recertifying them as being suddenly torture free

what this new report is saying is that actually torture is still happening and that the problem has been addressed in a sort of systemic way and yes i think first and foremost i mean there's this notion that human rights aren't at all a consideration is pretty chuck it's not shocking if you consider the fact that the people who make the real decisions in afghanistan on the ground tend to work for either the military or the intelligence services and for them when they look at the war they see you know very straightforward military calculations and it's going to war exactly and so you know the don't really take in account these sort of things are not trained to take into account these sort of things and diplomats not into account that their civilian counterparts might take into account so you know when you have we know little you have as a. hammer everything looks like a nail and that's i think one reason why the decision making is for all this continuous pattern of gases because that we have an overwhelming military presence

with a tiny civilian presence as an appendage and what can afghans i mean i know this is one of those absurd broad questions that you probably get asked that networks but what do afghans on the ground want i mean do they see a difference between american so-called invaders and you know afghan forces that the u.s. the u.s. is essentially been paying for that commit crimes under our payroll whether with our knowledge or not do they want us all to leave do they see us as being the cause of the problems what's that's the sort of general perception on the ground it's hard to see because there's not really any way to get a sense of what the afghan population as an aggregate level and we're seeing as of the cause of much of the problems there are we see them solution we can come to associated in the minds of afghans with the criminality with the abuses of the warlords who are in power now because even though we now keep saying that if afghans as a sovereign government they appoint as police chief they decided to you know

prosecutors corruption trial or not it's our money that's funding them we put them there in the first place and so the fiction that we're not responsible for what they're doing is not when the afghans buy it is it too late to change that is a possible even to change that novel time that we have of the drawdown continues it's pretty hard to new undo ten years of damage but there's always things that you can do at the margin and that is never too late to stand up for some sort of accountability for human rights or some sort of accountability for corruption especially since we are at the point where transferring control of the country or planet transferred into all the country in large part there's an afghan army that we've built in this i can tell it in service that we've built and if the torturers and if the conduct system of human rights abuses then that will in fact be her legacy in afghanistan and that's a pretty horrendous thing to contemplate and speaking of our legacy in afghanistan moving. to afghanistan yeah well i'm going back in less than two months in a move there because i think that it's

a critical time for the country and for afghanistan president karzai terms and we need to as a fourteen us are transitioning out i think things have flipped on their head many times over which is very interesting for a journalist so perhaps the story is only beginning or at least the second chapter of it i met a can think of so much for your time here there was not a ins investigative reporter who's been working on the ground in afghanistan where private prisons may be recession proof but the cost of college a college education sadly is not thanks to congress just got a hell of a lot more expensive try on that degree now in july interest rates on federally subsidized loans will double forty three point four percent to six point eight percent in a congress and step in as many as eight million students are going to be affected and so you borrowed twenty three thousand dollars that's the maximum amount of money you can get in student loans if you take a decade to take that money back your debt is going to go up by five or hands take twenty years to pay that back if you're going to zero eleven thousand dollars and

sadly that problem is simply part of a larger trend college tuition prices are skyrocketing and so is unemployment for recent grads and outstanding student debt hit a trillion dollars last year and americans more own more money for their school loans than they do on their credit cards or even carloads now my next guest knows a thing or two about this issue firsthand last time you heard from her she was a twenty three year old unemployed college graduate who was struggling to survive she was armed with a master's degree in geography and one hundred thirty thousand dollars in debt at that time she told us she couldn't even get a job scrubbing toilets children food stamps and sold textbooks on e bay in order to make money well since then she's been on a campaign to get private loan lender sallie mae to offer deferment payments for the unemployed we spoke to steph gray earlier today and here's her take on what's going on in the student debt issue. so things have changed quite a bit since november i'm still unemployed but i'm twenty four now as of last week so that's another thing that's changed but my campaign has really taken off when we

last spoke when i spoke to marina november my change other petition against unemployment penalty fee had only said it three thousand signatures now it's talk of one hundred fifty thousand signatures and i can't believe the success it's seen after going viral so far be it a partial victory in which sally mae has decided to tweak its policy a little bit which i'll get into a little later but what is the sign employment and explain that. basically if your federal loans directly through the federal government. means for you if you're unemployed if you're underemployed if you're waiting tables and a reason why you have an economic hardship and you can't make payments on time and in full the income based repayment system is sort of a safety net that'll allow you to postpone your payments as long as need be or adjust your payments quoting to your income you sometimes get back on your feet now if you have private bank backed loans through lender such as sallie mae they don't

offer that sort of safety net there's no guarantee if you're unemployed and your phones to sell you may what they demand is that you pay a fifty dollars per loan fee every three months just to prove that you can't make payments and meanwhile interest still crews this is. not all i mean you are you know you graduate you have your degree you can't find a job and you have to pay extra because you can't find it all. absolutely and for me because i had three different loans to sallie mae and they took away the option of consolidation in two thousand and eight that means that they're demanding one hundred fifty dollars every three months just to prove that i can't make payments meanwhile prior to my petition that this one hundred fifty dollars every three months did not even go towards make that whatsoever now because of my position success they'll put the money towards your that if and only if you fulfill certain stipulations and that's not good enough for me i don't want there to be any fee whatsoever anymore it just seemed like it just started talking about it just seems

really a logical to me because we're having you know we're in a situation where school choice winds are skyrocketing right loans to more and more students are going into debt when you have student debt you can't get rid of it in bankruptcy court and it seems like there's not a lot of action from either the politicians or the big corporations here. making it easier for americans to get access to education is there something fundamentally wrong with the. well there's really no incentive for any sort of change i mean first of all financial aid offices to a terrible job of differentiating between federal and private loans sallie mae america's largest private lenders a fortune five hundred company that's painted as a benevolent nonprofit or a subsidiary of our government this is not true whatsoever it is for profit company and they do service both federal and private loans so there's a lot of these safety nets such as income based repayment that apply to federal loans but are not available at all for private loans secondly there's just no

incentive to help borrowers because with the lack of bankruptcy protection as you mention the lender stupid shit off of defaults you know but at the same time some might say well you know you're graduating this wonderful degree with your wonderful degree and increased earning power it should be a complete breeze for you to pay back all that debt right. right but if there's no way to adjust payments in accordance to your income or postpone payments while you're facing economic hardship or get a job that are in place for federal loans or get a job that's true you're just going to slip and fall and defaulting and if you default on a student loan which will happen if you fail to make payments for several months in a row you may never be able to buy a home you won't be able to rent an apartment you'll be able to even buy a car if your credit is completely wrecked and sixty percent of employers check credit when hiring so how are you even supposed to get a job to acquire way back out that hole and stuff how hard was it when you were going through this i mean were you really sort of at the bottom of the barrel

really scraping by to survive definitely because the jobs that i was able to get after graduation were just a few temp jobs here and there but i was able to receive unemployment so i told sallie mae this i told them listen my parents passed away before i turned twelve years old that's why i had no cosigner of my main streets are absurdly high and needed stakeouts in those in the first place i told them how i was struggling to even pay for utilities and groceries and they wouldn't listen they just keep demanding the speed and basically right now my loans are in the little infant stage they're not default yet but they're still demanding hundred fifty one hundred fifty dollars fee or i default there's really no other option here and you know i guess my final question to you this isn't an isolated incident unfortunately there's a lot of people here in the in the u.s. who are in your position. who do you feel it is sort of profiting from from this whole situation certainly isn't the students. oh the lenders absolutely and you

know they spend millions of dollars yearly lobbying congress to strip away the various safety nets in place to help borrowers one thing i wanted to mention is that representative hansen clarke of detroit michigan i had the pleasure of meeting with weeks ago he has a build right now that he's trying to push through congress he. it's called the student loan forgiveness bill and this will cap payments for federal and private loans ten percent of your take home income will allow your payments to not eat up your entire paycheck which will allow students to be able to buy homes buy cars all of these things that allow us to move out of our parents' basements and stimulate the economy there's a lot of other reforms in there that are absolutely wonderful and it's what students have been desperately trying for the past twenty years or so so far the bill is not it's just been introduced it's not being voted on. anytime soon and that was stuff greater meaning us from new york. with seventy six

years ago pardon me today our lives were forever changed the very first tweet was posted on the series of tubes known as the internet since then nothing has been the same for half a billion users and billions of tweets later twitter has become an institution that's altered how we consume information guided revolutions and allowed people all across the globe to know exactly what ashton questionnaire eat for lunch in real time or if he's an associate turkey or explores how twitter has changed our lives and the best and worst of the past six years. six years ago. a little blue bird chirped its first tweet a new era of social networking took off the interview squeezed into one hundred forty characters that tweet really should just be a brand. and you know like it should be held to almost zero standard whatsoever it's really just a brain fart but with half a billion users today from anonymous bloggers to world leaders twitter has become

a much more powerful force than that. the micro-blogging site of the spread of protests during the arab spring but it's also become a tool for manipulating public opinion a book has a higher standard of checking than a column does the fact column is a higher standard than a tweet is the lowest circle of fact during iran's green revolution tweeted i'm witness accounts of government brutality helped boost western support for protestors turned out many other bloggers were thousands of miles from the action. so you thought he's also appreciate the power of a tweet recently occupy wall street somebody who we don't know who posts you know a message that say a cop should be killed ok my guess is the cops post it because then they were the ones that reacted to it made it a story whether for this information or propaganda you have

a very misleading tweet from some of the members of the security council in the sense of like they're kind of using it for propaganda today we shared you know and it's it's it's very selective they don't want reporter to try to find out what happened in a closed door meeting with their tweeting things are often forced from inside them from close doors to private affairs outed reckless twitter posts have seen its authors humiliated and virally hated even fired so whether it's somebody like charlie sheen who can come out and say it's from terrible things about his bosses on twitter and his job or someone like as their client he's now back on him as a b. c. but in two thousand and seven he. on with dan rather and tweeted. crisis on tim russert with an acid spiny test. and you know lost his. contract with imus n.b.c. oprah arguably the most notorious downfall now former congressman anthony weiner's tweeting a photo of his most private of parts we are certainly is one model of what not to

do and i think that if i were ever going to cheat on my wife i don't think i would start by broadcasting it over twitter. but this new broadcasting tool available to all is seductive i don't know if it makes them stupid or if they come to twitter already stupid and they simply use it stupidly and i think probably the latter riskless of the true microblog is a minefield for those not cautious make a twitter account and post you know anything you wouldn't want your mom to see or wouldn't want reported in the newspaper you probably shouldn't go on twitter so what are we putting on twitter and early study found so called pointless babble made up forty percent of tweets news only four percent with five i mean. if you really care what your blog where we are following as a way for you social network. to get. more time is wasted on junk in trivia and information. everyone's made we texting everybody else

nonsense. the world burns at the end of the day you can use it to dumb down you can use it to smarten up it's how you use anything that really matters the sixth anniversary of the first tweet mark billions of tweets already posted and revolutions guided lady gaga is the number one blogger with over twenty one million followers and micro blogs talk trending topics of today include bieber our boyfriend and things i hate about facts from tweeters may well regret that one and for future kyra are actually. it will tweeting special photographs of your private places may be an obvious mistake for most of the world but granted twitter probably has changed other things about the way we communicate in that we've behaved aside from these embarrassments earlier i talked to chris chambers who's a journalism professor at the georgetown university and here's his take on how twitter has changed just in the past six years. well you have to look at it from

the from their perspective when we look at twitter's you look at it it's. actually the company twitters that yes the company twitter so you think you know one hundred forty characters now if they're looking at the world a world consciousness in terms of tweets per second were we as tweeters are looking at it in terms of one hundred forty characters but they're looking at this big mass consciousness and how to commodify it and how to monetize it make money off of it so they're not really thinking about the effect on society they're thinking about themselves the effect on society however is a year we start to get more and more tunnel visioned the good news here is is that this is really isn't any different than what happened with the printing press or radio or t.v. it's just that how are we going to use it you heard the commentators there right it's how you use it and most of it is babble i mean with the gutenberg bible was

pretty press was invented i mean yeah you had bibles being printed but then they started printing porn i mean it is you have babel it's always going to make a huge percentage of it and then the adult portion of twitter is like this much so you know yes it's revolutionized the way we think because of speed and size but it's really just more of the same i mean of course there's always going to be you know the kids are turning to social media for justin bieber silence fell for it but at the same time i don't personally it's been the biggest tool in terms of journalism and staying up to date on breaking most most people are getting a lot of people are professional journalists first of all but a lot of other people are getting their news from twitter or breaking it on twitter there you have a tool that is is really precise and can be there boom and you know depending on the circumstances you know it can be manipulated you heard that right but you know like anything i mean t.v. could be manipulated you know you had. the first appearances of photographs of the

battlefield in the civil war that could be but they were revolutionary that part is really turning our minds onto the possibilities and you can use something like storify to create whole stories from two weeks but be no years justin bieber or you know oh my god tim thibeault just joining the jets we you know when you're talking about millions of these things occurring every thirty seconds you know yeah i mean the precise wonderful use of it is always going to be eaten up by the juvenile crap and in the non juvenile crap. do you see twitter as sort of another nail in the coffin of the traditional media gatekeepers are have folks been able to adjust and so that other people have been able to adjust i think the gatekeepers have done a really good job of co-opting and recruiting people to be you know that you know you have a set of people who are curating in aggregating that you have

a set of people who are repackaging that for twitter i think they're doing a pretty good job of that because if you think about it being the gate keepers they are still people who are doing original reporting because even in the professional wonderful part of twitter a lot of those stories have to originate somewhere so if it's the new york times or it's or a t. it doesn't matter i mean those outlets are going to control what's going on in the ground so that stuff get swallowed up and spit out among people's followers so they're always going to have their place and they've done a good job i don't think that that spelled the death knell of too many publications the way the internet initially came in and flatten them but they're starting to just do that as well although there are some infamous holdouts like harper's as well yeah but i wish we didn't. but you know the one area where i guess it was the most stark sort of example of twitter's usefulness was the occupy wall street movement where you know the mainstream press was sort of late to this and a lot of the ways that we were getting information and you know personally putting information out there was twitter and i think. it was the same for sort of the arab

spring and all of the law on the ground there and that is something that that phenomenon again is nothing new i mean we could go back to sort of hundred fifty years to the telegraph and battlefield photographers in the civil war revolutionizing the stuff but again with the speed and the ability to get a lot of resources online quickly i mean it's been indispensable i mean you know i was watching the tweets you were filing you know what people were getting their heads bashed in in oakland you can't you cannot compete with that even even t.v. cannot compete with that especially with budgets being cut with american media outlets however again it all goes back to that gets overshadowed by the nonsense and even there there are some some positive things have that have like a lead lining instead of a silver lining for example at south by southwest and asked and there was a lot of talk about how the digital divide in the united states between minority.