to live on one hundred thirty three bucks a month for food i should try it because you know how fabulous bad luck i got so. i mean. i know that i'm sitting seems really messed up. in the old three so actually. the. worst we're going to go live now to the. radio guy and four minutes from the click. i want. to give you never seen anything like this until. they guy is i'm abby martin and this is breaking the set so this past weekend the

national rifle association held its annual convention in houston and aside from speeches from politicians like sarah palin and rick perry there were some stirring items for sale one of which was an ex-girlfriend target that believes when you shoot it check out the before and after images to see just how realistic this target looks frankly it's disgusting especially in a world where women are all too often the victims of domestic disputes in fact in two thousand and twelve one six homicide victims were women and sixty eight percent of those victims were of domestic violence or to violence policy center it's a serious problem an epidemic even but it turned the n.r.a. vendors think it's cute to sell the believing dead ex-girlfriend target the gun toting americans maybe not the best way to bolster the honor is image but hey it's just me let's break.

made a wave of attack shook iraq today you know these two dead and dozens injured just. this month seventy one people have already lost their lives in iraq a death toll that seemingly not slowing down from april which is the deadliest month the country had seen in the last five years here in america people see headlines of this ongoing violence on the lower third of their t.v. screens are back page in the newspaper all in a very detached and abstract way in order to fully understand the magnitude of the chaos and empathize with the iraqi people we must see this reality through their lands from outside the empire looking in my next guest has just released an hour long presentation called iraq a decade of hell which aims to do just that his name is the stuff on my new host of freedom in radio and he joins me now from ontario canada thanks so much for coming on stefan. thank you it's a pleasure so as i mentioned april was the deadliest month in the last five years in iraq seven hundred people died and now that there is no u.s.

troops there the country's sovereign once more what does it look like in terms of infrastructure safety and health at this current time. will it genuinely is catastrophic gabby this is one thing that those within the empire kind of shielded from the reality of what's going on outside and it just shows up in what seems like random attacks like the recent bombings in boston and it's wretched i mean the first thing to remember is that you've got to multiply iraqi statistics by about ten to gain an equivalency in u.s. numbers right so since the coalition invaded in two thousand and three we've had about the estimates are about one point five million deaths as a result of that if that invasion that's about fifteen million equivalent or two thirds the population of texas so that those kinds of numbers staggers the imagination the tolls on families has been on believe it will almost three million iraqis displaced again that's like the entire population of texas ending up in mexico because they had to flee conditions that was so horrific between eight

hundred a million iraqi children have lost one or both of their parents as a result of the coalition invasion again by. when eight in ten million american children losing one or both parents the infrastructure destruction is is staggering the hospitals sewage plants the amount of environmental destruction forty percent of ghana stands forests have been completely vaporized and of course during the invasion this was but the first gulf war there were massive fires set to oil wells and so on the white death as the iraqi physicians call it the result of nearly a thousand radioactive weapons being used against tanks and other infrastructure in iraq has resulted in a six fold increase in leukemia because of course it has a half life of about the life of the planet over four billion years the stuff atomizes into the air goes into the lungs typhus is up ten fold because drinking water and cleaning water fish between facilities have been destroyed the country is a smoking wreckage and this is not something that we see and until we see it i think it's going to be really hard to rein in foreign policy if you can see the bloody footprint on the face of the world absolutely and i think another really

under-reported part as much as i've researched iraq i didn't hear this quote from a from a senior strategist army veteran who said we didn't have a plan we had a theory to invade in the post-war build building up and rebuilding iraq was virtually nonexistent stuff on which you point out very clearly it's just amazing to go in and invade a country and destroy it completely and not have any sort of plan of how to restructure this i mean of course it's not about that it's about the money but let's back up a bit i want to pop an interesting point that you made in your presentation reset from january to september two thousand and one the number of global terrorist incidents was one thousand one hundred eighty eight the same period in two thousand and six. five thousand one hundred eighty eight what does this signify and what does it really mean. well it signifies that shockingly a government program called let's bring peace to the world is achieving the exact opposite of its intended goal unlike all the other government programs you've ever heard of the reality of course is that if you want to understand why america is

subject to repeated attacks all you have to do is cast your mind back. to september eleventh two thousand and one and remember the rage and anger frustration and desire to lash out and attack and bomb people who were responsible for the the twin towers and other of the attacks that occurred during that day well human beings all over the world human beings all over the world if you drop drones down people's chimneys if you destroy their infrastructure if you cause them to not be able to get any medical supplies as well as the u.k. u.s. led coalition sanctions throughout the one thousand nine hundred in iraq that people are going to be angry people are going to be upset if you blow people up if you destroy their lives destroy their families destroy their cities destroy their infrastructure they're going to be angry so this is just a natural thing if you go around poking fun at cessna around the world you're going to get stung in a very terrible way and until we understand that we really are not going to have any success in quality these miners and of course the army what if the army the engineers the capital they don't build malls they they break things and blow up

people how on earth could they possibly rebuild something is like asking a wrecking ball to be an architect or a of war to get terror i mean war is terror so it's just an absurd concept to be fighting a war on a tactic that we are the biggest perpetrators of in the world the global had your mom let's talk about money because we here as timid still stuff on that the iraq war cost eight hundred billion dollars maybe a trillion dollars i mean that's you rarely hear that i mean what is the true cost of the war really. well let's compare it to what was claimed at the beginning fifty to sixty billion dollars so if you remember it was all going to be paid for by all the oil they were going to get out and all that kind of stuff which of course made no economic sense at all i mean as churchill pointed out when during the treaty of versailles after the first world war if you go and strip all the germans of their goods and ship it to england all you do is put in just manufacturers out of business all the free oil would have just been destruction to the oil oil legitimate oil interests around the world but the cost of the war is truly staggering close to fifty thousand dollars per household and that's of course not counting all the interest it's going to accumulate so one point six trillion

dollars has been spent to date the total cost to twenty fifty three is considered to be. over six trillion dollars i think that's a little more than half the g.d.p. of america and this doesn't count all the opportunity costs of what the people who are in the war and whose brains and bodies have been mangled might have done with their productive energies had they not been so traumatized so the cost of the war incalculable what bothers me so much obvious that all the people who are waving flags and cheering as everybody went off to war and who were cheering the nintendo fireworks of this war have now turned away from the consequences of their patriotism and i find that absolutely morally met reprehensible everybody who supported the war needs to go online and have a look at the pictures of what is going on over there this is the result of your allegiance to power this is the result of your desire for vengeance this is the result of listening to the lies a few leaders we really need to wake up as citizens and not be so blindly swallowing and accepting of the stuff that the media portrays or in this case doesn't portray by keeping us shielded from the results of our own enthusiasm for

violence and i share your anger and especially in the buildup as we're seeing the propaganda being repeated about syria iran we definitely to be completely aware of what we're being told question everything and demand accountability and let's talk really quickly about why we're being shelled and i mean not even to mention the deaths people need to just watch a presentation iraq a decade of hell because it really breaks down someone reported point but why do we still hear not i mean we don't hear the million death toll this is this poll that was taken in two thousand and eight from opinion research business the most comprehensive poll ever done on the ground why don't we hear this number still which of course is probably astronomically higher now and will be for generations the poisoning why are we being shown from this information and how can we extend empathy for people to really care about this. do i have thirty seconds. on this question ok well look there's a few reasons the first of course is that we have a democrat in the white house which means the antiwar movement has been castrated by its own moral hypocrisy it turned out to just be an anti bush movement rather than antiwar movement all of those avenues of people protesting against the war

mysteriously vanished when you have a democrat in the house so people need to look in the mirror and recognize it. not about who which party is in the house it's about what's happening overseas and get off your butts and get back out there and start protesting all of this immorality the second is that we do have this kind of knee jerk reaction happy to say what we have a problem let's go to the government to solve it and when we look at the most horrendous and hellacious aspects of government policy the fact that our government leaders are condoning sanctioning encouraging continuing this unbelievable catus catastrophe overseas i think what it does is it gives people pause about whether government really is the best agency by which we can solve all our complex social problems and i think looking at the evils that the government is capable of brings people like flared up against that it may not be the best place we want to go to to solve things like children's education and old age pensions and health care and so on that if they're capable of doing this they're not really the first place you want to go to solve social problems but that really goes against our whole propaganda about you know we need to state the state is good state without the state everything would be terrible so i think it contradicts people's beliefs about

the author and they spending trillions of squandering all the money and having none to build up this country is a huge problem thank you so much that finally no freedom in radio everyone check it out thanks so much for coming on. thank you. all right guys we're taking a quick break but don't go anywhere i'm actually talking about the extension of. the post nine eleven world.

oh. let me let me let me ask you a question. here. is one thing we have our lineage. to believe is the site of the spanish staying there again here in the situation where the talk about the surveillance. the of.

the latest destruction across the corporate media this week is the case of the three missing girls that were just found and the moment they were found was for. news happy they're alive it's a crazy story indeed but did it merit this study. found alive is a story made for the movies playing out in real life story one of many kidnapped separately as just two years ago. this is a special edition of starting point we are live in cleveland and there are burning questions this morning about the living hell that three women were forced to endure during a decade in captivity we are continuing to follow the breaking news out of cleveland today amanda berry one of the three women in cleveland who was held as a captive for nearly a decade has just returned home three women who are missing for about

a decade are finally free you know that after allegedly being held captive at a home across the street for understanding is that white house lights go on the porch there is breaking news tonight in the condition of at least one of the women held for nearly a decade. it's all sharp and you got to chill out man there's a lot more crazy stuff going on anderson i hate to burst your bubble but every single new detail that emerges about the victims is not breaking news you know it is breaking news a tsunami a forest fire giant earthquake not every time someone adds another balloon to this family's front porch yes it was breaking news when these girls were found but literally every time i look at the news now this is breaking news with a non breaking news story i'm going to think that you all don't even know what breaking news means anymore you're taking the flavor of the essence out of breaking news it really means all of the twenty four seventh's coverage in the corporate media perhaps nothing is as ridiculous as this split screen conversation happening between ashley banfield and nancy grace on c.n.n.

just just watch this for a second because it becomes obvious the more you look at the feed that there are at best only a few feet from each other you can see the same exact cars passing behind them in the frame i mean really guys do you think that we're this stupid. but really the reason i've been pointing out this absurdity is because once again it's a perfect example of the corporate media's obsession with sensationalizing tragedies instead of providing real content they exploit every story for days on end until the next distraction becomes available meanwhile providing us with no real information about what's happening in the world and why and how we're all affected by it but hey at least fox's shifted their focus back to what they did harping about. bombshell testimony from three benghazi whistleblowers is set to get underway tomorrow brand new hearings into the terror attack that will take place tomorrow morning this is new questions are growing about what then secretary of state hillary clinton and her staff knew that night about how things were playing

out in the assault that killed four americans and we are less than twenty four hours away from what is expected to be a potentially explosive hearing benghazi. you're going the body and good. morning this could be the day we get answers this morning a house committee holding a key hearing on what went wrong in benghazi as we hear publicly now and in some cases for the first time from whistleblowers who say more could have been done to save american lives yes yes yes been gazi honestly guys how much work we possibly speculate on this story seriously this isn't even worth addressing so what did we all miss while the corporate press was busy stocking the family of the three kidnapped girls first off as the case of a mississippi man named willie manning who was awaiting execution yet there is d.n.a. evidence that could potentially exonerate him however the state refuses to see it claiming that even if the d.n.a. isn't manning's other evidence proves his guilt only problem is that this other

evidence consists of one eye witness testimony and one f.b.i. agent who says the hair fiber found at the scene came from a black person yeah that doesn't really sound like evidence enough to sentence a man to death for but cases like these aren't what the corporate media likes to cover look the fact of the matter is that over one hundred thirty people on death row been exonerated through d.n.a. evidence that proved their wrongful convictions and this country is one of the few industrialized nations that still practices capital punishment so stories like this matter because they reveal the flaws within the justice system and should serve as an opportunity to rectify so many wrongs look at the very least doesn't it potentially innocent man facing death at the hands of the state deserved breaking news. looking for a never seen anything like that.

and one nine hundred forty seven the cia or central intelligence agency was created as a government department responsible for providing national security intelligence to senior u.s. policymakers in other words its sole function was espionage that. something happened over the course of the next two decades the cia took on a new form of course was the role of targeted assassinations and shadow wars the agency began to act like an armed militia targeting foreign leaders around the world such as the attempt to assassinate rafael trujillo dominican republic and fidel castro of cuba after these botched assassinations congress attempted to rein in the abuse of power in one thousand nine hundred eighty five with the church committee but after nine eleven the gloves came off and the cia's power expanded to unprecedented levels well that's exactly what my next guest is extensively written about in his new book the way of the night cia secret army and we're at the end of the earth and joining me now is poulter prize winning journalist and author of this book mark mazetti thank you so much for coming on. so mark did the cia ever really

scale back since one thousand nine hundred forty seven or has it really just always been progressively getting more expansive well it definitely got is to a large extent out of the killing business around the mid seventy's to two thousand and one there were certainly a lot of these sort of shadow wars going under the reagan administration in the eighty's but in terms of targeted killings and hunting the agency was largely out of that until nine eleven and then right after nine eleven president bush signed this expansive order giving the cia broad authority to capture and kill around the globe and you talk about how the cia has become a machine for killing talk about the mechanisms and way in which they do this well primarily. the agency has been using armed drones as its principal mechanism and what we've seen is really since about two thousand and four two thousand and five. and eventually in yemen really have the strikes have escalated starting in two thousand and eight they really escalated from the end of the bush administration through the beginning of the obama administration and so this is really the primary

tool that the agency and parts of the pentagon now use for these targeted killings and what other mechanisms that they use i mean it's not just drones we know that they're doing you know extraordinary rendition and that could result in people dying. so there's been there's there was the period where the cia was doing a lot of renditions and they were doing a lot of. detention interrogation in cia prisons one of the things i point out of the book is that after this period the first few years after nine eleven when there was this intense focus on interrogation and because of the controversies and because of all the all the problems are created within the agency there was a gradual shift from capturing to killing and what we see certainly in the obama administration is a much greater emphasis on remote control killing as opposed to detention and interrogation where you just brought up a really good point which is drone killing and also john bellinger obama's drone architect just came out in a speech to a foreign policy think tank and he said you know obama has resorted to escalating

this drone warfare to just opt in to kill people allege militant suspected terrorists instead of dealing with the bad press of detaining him it get no i mean how sad of a commentary is that that we've simply resorted to killing people without charges or trial and then to deal with bad press i think it's probably more complicated than just that i think it's not totally black and white but i do think that when they make these calculations about capturing versus killing and they look at risks in all the other things about doing an actual operation certainly drone killings do appear a lot cleaner easier to do we see members of congress from both parties cheer the drone strikes and so it's both politically easier and militarily less risky to carry out these killing operations as opposed to capture operations and i think the rule of law definitely is complex it's not black and white but it definitely needs to be followed if we want to be taken seriously as the example our of human rights around the world and be doing this kind of foreign policy tactics you know i'd rather be detained indefinitely than blown up and have everyone around me taken

with me but that's just me let's talk about the normalization of cia policies under obama you just spoke about how the overwhelming support kind of across the board of drone wars some people think that there cleaner more statistic eighty three percent of americans support this as well one were to. talking about kind of taking these policies that bush did and normalizing them and having this public accept its acceptance should we be alarmed at the amount of overwhelming support for this policy when we see eighty three percent of americans supporting it all right it's only until the last few months that you've started there's been really little discussion there was no discussion during the two thousand and twelve campaign between obama and romney on this issue it's only maskell months that there is at least democrats now talking about it but as you said public opinion polls show that america is tired of wary of these long costly wars of occupation like iraq and afghanistan there's something very seductive to this drone these drone operations and people seem to think that it's so so low risk in that there won't be blowback i

think that's one of the things that maybe the cia is now looking at is the extent that the pace of the operation the intensity of the drone strikes might cause blowback radicalization where it didn't exist before how do they not know that i mean they've seen the reports on the ground studies in pakistan i mean eight month study harvard stanford study saying that this does cause blowback i mean we're terrorizing people in a daily basis i mean how would they even still such a counter-productive strike well there's the there's been this question of the agency which carries out operations also doesn't alice's and when they do the analysis in many ways they have to sort of grade their work and there's been criticism that the agency has been looking more closely at the effect of what the other part of the agency is doing which is carrying out the operations i think that work is being done now but we're seeing the evidence as you said there's the studies there's holes in pakistan yemen elsewhere whether we'll see more sort of radicalization whether a c. attacks whether it's in boston or anywhere else by people who might have been inspired by american operations overseas i think that's what we may begin to start seeing down the road it is fascinating to see this kind of policy go out in the

light when i when i was a little girl growing up by everyone kind of knew the cia was doing covert actions but to have it so out in the open and so transparent to have so much acceptance behind i guess is a little bit eerie for me but you. no i just talked to jeremy scale on the show about dirty wars which is kind of the same concept of these wars going on he said the war on terror has become essentially a self-fulfilling prophecy and when you look at the counterterrorism strategy the broad that are essentially counterproductive we know that they cause an enormous amount of blowback and the f.b.i. entrapment going on here the terror factory we're creating all of these entrapment cases in the knocking him down do you agree with the notion of it being a self-fulfilling prophecy well i think that there's a sort of a quality that is sort of perpetuating and there's no end in sight certainly to these shadow wars whether it's in pakistan or parts of africa there's a new drone base being built in new share the president obama's second inaugural address said you know the a decade of war is coming to an end but what he was talking about was

a decade of the public wars in iraq and afghanistan but certainly there's the shadow wars the wars that are going on in secret that i write about in the book i think that this is a new model that is going to be waged in the future and that's the new face of the end of the ground wars and that's what that's the danger is the detachment from what the shadows of wars are really doing and with every other past conflict every world war you know anything that's really going on if the rights are taken away whether it be world war two exciter at those rights or resort maybe it's corpus or the japanese internment u.s. troops have been in iraq over a year afghanistan the troops are winding down i mean when it comes to our liberties should we just expect for them to never be restarted it was nine eleven essentially a blank check and definitely well they're now you know congress is looking at those authorities and there are there are discussions about renewing the authorization for military force that was done after right after nine eleven there's concern among liberals that such a renewal will in essence sort of set off another decade you know you're basically

institutionalizing this war and so that's certainly a concern i mean al qaeda as it existed on nine eleven doesn't exist now but there's different affiliates in the question is if you write the rules for these new affiliates. there than giving a new license for down the road right and just to sum it up i mean as a new york times journalist are you disappointed with your colleagues i guess in the corporate media and the media establishment for their unquestioning and almost activist inaugural version of post nine eleven world i don't think so actually i mean i think that you know i have a lot of a lot of my colleagues at the new york times have done a lot of really heroic things far more heroic than i've done in terms of being out in the field and and reporting on what's going on i mean i think that always more investigative journalist can be done but i mean i think that there's there's been there's been a lot of good reporting since nine eleven i would contend well judith miller definitely wasn't a prime example of that former new york times journalist who promoted the b.m.d. theory but i'm glad that you're out there spreading light on these shadow wars really need to be talked about more mark mazetti pulitzer prize winning journalist

and author of the way the knife cia's secret army and the war at the ends of the earth to share time thanks very much. well guys that's it for today thanks for watching the show but if you want to know what i'm doing when i'm not on air you can check me out on the water at abbey martin if you like what you see you can follow me there you'll find all my tweets linking the segments from the show as well as the random thoughts i have throughout the day and also please help us get this show trending on twitter ok janelle throw some hashtags we can get trending on the twitter sphere but only with your help so how did twitter checking out at a martin and that's going to do it for the night guys thanks so much for watching and stay tuned for tomorrow's show and you all have a good night. at

the going down of the sun and. we will remember that we will leave. that. mission free

cretaceous free. for charges free. range free. free. free. old free blog video for your media project free. science technology innovation all the list of elements from around russia. the future covered. the more. expensive. items. in iraq. might come from

a. prime. minister's lock. me. up. if in the early hours of a hot july dawn a group of unusually dressed people carefully tread on to the.