Transcripts For RT The Big Picture 20240713

On this weeks show while the Mainstream Media distracts us with wall to wall impeachment coverage neo cons are beating the war drum for regime change in iran r t has sources in the region meanwhile kim jong un threatens President Trump with what he calls Christmas Present but 1st a bombshell report about the war in afghanistan that one ups the pentagon papers and documents how we have been lied to for 8 teen years holland cook in washington this is the big picture on our to america. Since last weeks show we have been to jesting that meticulously detailed and mighty disturbing report from the Washington Post the afghanistan papers at war. With the truth this week 2 perspectives from players who were in the pentagon and in theater Michael Maloof worked for the secretary of defense as the u. S. A. s longest war was unfolding and matthew hoh is a former u. S. Marine he later resigned from the government over the escalation of the war in afghanistan his work now includes peer support for Mental Health and Substance Abuse disorder gentlemen welcome back thank you the newspaper describes it obgyn it as a confidential troll of government documents obtained by the Washington Post which reveals that senior u. S. Officials failed to tell the truth about the war in afghanistan throughout the 18 Year Campaign making rosy pronouncements that they knew to be false and hide in unmistakable evidence that the war had become on winnable the post sources more than 2000 pages of previously unpublished notes of interviews with people who played a direct role in the war from generals and diplomats to aid workers and afghan officials and its one hell of a read michael then matthew in that order in the weeks since this drop how does the Washington Post description of this document within the pentagon and how must it strike troops who served there michael then matthew well its not anything new weve weve known it for quite some time and its and its weve known its been an unwinnable war for ever since we took our eye off the ball right after we chased the taliban out in 2001 then we switched over to iraq and we saw how that war went its its its its tough today its going to be its the taliban are going to be taking over theyre just waiting this out even if they were to take over i think that the concern that i have personally. There will be warring tribes that will disagree with the bomb because they only control about 52 percent of the country now whereas back in 2001 we actually had to go on but but the reality is that i dont think the Afghan Government that we installed there will last very long especially if the us gets out nor can the tele bon assure us as our negotiators are trying to extract from them a promise that al qaeda or isis will not use afghanistan to launch attacks against the United States theres no way that they can guarantee that matthew to veteran this report has got a stink does it surprise. It doesnt surprise at all i mean maybe that surprises that the post published this because the post like so many other United States Corporate News sources in the york times or c. N. N. Or whoever has done. Incredibly done a credibly poor job of doing adverse journalism during these wars as michael said all this information has been known for years now but the importance of it is that we do have documents that show that a 100 so i mean this report is not about a few people its about hundreds of people who just sat systemically and continually lied about the war to the congress to the media to the American Public as a matter of fact because that was it that was the way these institutions are the lying within the u. S. Government the u. S. Military has become institutionalized and for so for i think the veterans and for their families i think the idea must be in so many had to certainly in my head and i work with a group called veterans for peace and we just put out a statement about this that there needs to be some accountability ok if we know these people lied then what are we going to do about it you know there is a saying that went around for a while about how you know if a private in the army or the marine corps loses his weapon he is punished much more severely than the general who loses the war or who lies about the war so i think for a lot of us we want to see some accountability some some form of justice. For those who lied about the war in honor of those who suffered through the war well 3 Star Army General douglas lute served as the white houses afghan wars art during the bush and obama administrations and he told government interviewers in 2015 we are devoid of a fundamental understanding of afghanistan what are we trying to do here we didnt have the. Obvious notion of what we were undertaking michael even if the post report were not as meticulously sourced as it is this general lute statement have the ring of truth oh yeah hes right on we we never really understood what we the complexities and the culture of the country and the and its people. We we went in there in a sort of a scorched earth with trying to take up all of their take away their livelihoods and in terms of the growing of opium which was their cash crop and that that did not ungracious at all we didnt find an adequate substitute also there are reports how billions and billions of dollars went into afghanistan all unaccounted for to this day usa id the cigar s. I ga our group which out of the pentagon did did analysis of trying to trace where these billions of dollars went for Infrastructure Development it would all just hit brick walls they there was taliban and and everybody else was in on the take it was corruption and to this day we cannot account for where those dollars have gone piles of cash disappeared matthew how clear or ambiguous was our Afghanistan Mission to troops deployed there. Well you know i think for the men and women who go there who are carrying the weapons you know who are wearing the uniform they focus on one another you know and if you are noncommissioned officer or youre an officer and you have responsibility for men and women under your command you follow your main priority and many times your only priority is their safety so i can tell you as someone who was both as a marine in war and as a state Department Officer and war. There it was vastly different when i was a marine off. Sir in iraq i didnt think about the big picture at all because i only cared about those 153 marines and sailors who i was responsible for and was for responsible to their families for but as a state Department Officer i didnt have such responsibility and so i could think about the larger picture but i think now that many of these men and women are home and theres been 2800000 men and women who have been in iraq and afghanistan with the u. S. Military i think not having that responsibility for the safety of your of your comrades the safety of your subordinates allows you to think about it and i sure im sure this will primarily from again problems that these men and women have with understanding what they were told to do with what they did with taking part in the killing you know with having with being wrist with having the risk of being killed and seeing their friends suffer as well of course the afghans suffer so this will have a very damaging effect on a lot of people michael talk about heaps of cash just disappearing and the estimates of how much weve blown on this war approach a trillion dollars heres a gut punch geoffrey eggers a retired navy seal and white house staffer to president s bush and obama asks was it worth a trillion dollars after the killing of osama bin ladin said that osama was probably laughing at his watery grave considering how much weve spent in afghanistan the United States flooded the fragile country with far more than it could possibly absorb matthew how obvious was this hideously excessive spending to troops on the ground over there. Oh you know not just the troops on the ground but also to the Afghan People people wonder why the Afghan People dont support the Afghan Government or the u. S. Forces unless theyre on the actual dole of the u. S. Government or on the dole the Afghan Government is. They saw all this money coming in and this money evaporating this money not being used for the purposes that was intended not improving the lives of the Afghan People you know schools are supposed to build hospitals suppose they built minutes past the buildings and roads and they if they were built which many times they were not but if they were built they were so shoddily constructed they often fell down within a couple years or too unsafe to inhabit so it was right in front of the eyes of the men and limo over there how this money was being distributed and then of course the idea too is they come home and theyre being told that theres no money to spend on Infrastructure Projects in their hometowns back here but were spending all this money in afghanistan yeah well like vietnam the war in afghanistan has been spun all along john sop coheads the federal agency that conducted all these interviews and knowledge of the posts that the documents show the American People have been constantly lied to at the outset the us invasion of afghanistan had a clear stated objective to retaliate against al qaida and prevent a repeat of the 911. 00 attacks yes the Washington Post reports that the interviews show as the war dragged on the goals and mission kept changing and a lack of faith in u. S. Strategy took root inside the pentagon the white house and the state department fundamental disagreements one unresolved some u. S. Officials wanted to use the war to turn afghanistan into a democracy others wanted to transform afghan culture and elevate womens rights still others want to reshape the regional balance of power among pakistan india iran and Russia Mission creep or mass confusion i got about 30 seconds michael it was both whats the mood inside the pentagon back then you had a yell back then it was back then when i was there we were winning we kicked the. Taliban out i left in 2004 they we had installed a government there and things were working but then we as i said we lost focus we lost focus toward toward iraq and we now know how that war went about 5 or 6 trillion dollars later there whether this aster and its actually more than a trillion dollars in afghanistan frankly and when you consider the number of lives that have been lost by our own folks and also by afghans its been a total a mitigated disaster im telling you even if taliban is just waiting to see if they if if tribes at the end of the end of it all tribes will start bickering with one another and were going to probably see it descend into another matthew hoh thanks again for joining us here on the big picture and coming up Michael Maloof stays with us and john said levys joins the conversation as we update the other hot spots that may be getting hotter this is the big picture on our to america. Each simulating civilization would be able to run using a tiny fraction of its resources. Hundreds of thousands millions of runs through all of Human History almost all. Beings with our kinds of experiences would then be simulated ones rather than none simulated ones conditional in that they are good we should think we are for the one of the simulated ones. The Mainstream Media are in full blast impeachment mode they are not reporting about roiling threats to world peace when they met recently u. S. Secretary of state mike pompei oh taught openly about iran regime change with israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu who has his own domestic political issues these days meanwhile United States navy carrier Abraham Lincoln has moved into the persian gulf and economic sanctions threaten to fray u. S. Alliances north korea north pole cryptic kim jong un warns President Trump of what he calls a Christmas Gift and why is china buying up the u. S. A shick an industry what in the world is going on lets welcome back our contributor and former pentagon official Michael Maloof and john said lisa geo political strategist with Trilogy Advisors here in washington he is a consultant to the u. S. State department michael you are in touch this week with contacts in the region and youre told that things are quiet now in iran a little too quiet i think its a low before the storm the but what we saw activists burning down burning down banks and and tearing up the place and but you also have Peaceful Demonstrations. Though those demonstrations the violent demonstrations have ceased you still are having regular demonstrations but they are Peaceful Demonstrations meantime you have a parliament about ready to. Meet and in iran and to have elections yet the rouhani government is doing nothing about trying to do something with the economy thats creating the problem thats for the folks even though we have there under severity very severe sanctions now this this meeting between netanyahu and and and tom pail was very telling in that they were talking regime change again which is not what President Trump was talking about and it made me and others wonder if the neo cons are beginning to rear their ugly little heads again and trying to go their own direction and push him as they did before into a corner and were also seeing not only Abraham Lincoln going into the gulf were also were also seeing putting in more troops into saudi arabia and all of this is going on during the impeachment inquiry and now now the whole debate about that so all the worlds attention is focused on that while all of this other is going on watch the other hand john the world is watching at least distracted by the prospect of war how much does the threat of usa iran conflict disrupt whats going on elsewhere it all depends on the decisions that are made by the fiachra see in tehran and the theocrats chickens are coming home to roost essentially they were given 150000000000. 00 in frozen assets going back to the 1979 revolution in 2015 into the Prior Administration and they squandered a good part of that on propping up the hardest activities in syria in iraq in yemen the stabilizing lebanon on attacking israel attacking saudi arabia instead. Providing for the kind of Economic Development that can bring prosperity and some type of flourish meant to the iranian people and what you had really was a 50 percent gas high gasoline price hike several weeks ago thats erupted into this wide scale series of protests throughout the country thousands of protests where we have now hundreds of iranians killed by their own government thousands wounded tens of thousands arrested and i think that there is a fundamental crisis inside of iran that theyve been a very good job of masking over the years and over the decades but i think right now the people of iran see whats happening in their region and around the world and they want to part of that prosperity that their own government has denied them for 40 years nothing like jacking up the price of a gallon of gas 50 percent only amounts to about 52 percent 5052 cents but its still a lot some of that money is supposed to be going to the lower. Income folks which is there which is the concept but its really because their money is not worth anything right its making it much much more difficult for all of them wider angle shot on the Economic Situation there because the usa is imposing sanctions right now whacking the Iranian Airline and shipping industries which have been accused of transporting weapons but michael doesnt that consequence of these sanctions and tangle our friends as well it can and i would add to that this latest bit of sanctions on the airline that. Is also includes humanitarian aid many medicines and germany of course is one of the largest countries that takes iranian aircraft and if they if they service the aircraft its ok if they try as a transit if they try to service it or anything like that they could be subject to u. S. Sanctions as a consequence. Its and that also means they cant get spare parts theyre using old boeing 707 and 730. Years ago and its makes it much more then you have a safety issue as a consequence sure well john the deal con warhawks are relentless and michael reckons that they like how impeachment has us watching the other hand how does a peach mint play around the world. I think for the most part its a fascinating experience for people who are paying attention and im not sure that many people around the real world are really paying attention to impeachment i think political leaders are Corporate Leaders are but every day people around the world are too busy taking care of their own lives to really care about this political circus here in washington d. C. And you know beyond whats happening with impeachment there are some major achievements are taking place right now including a bipartisan agreement here in washington d. C. To secure support for the us Mexico Canada Free trade agreement we may be on the cusp of at least a limited trade agreement between the United States and china and the American Economy still doing extraordinarily well so all of these things are happening while this political circus is playing out but i think for the most part most citizens around the world taking care of their own lives but leaders who are necessarily involve with the u. S. Here in politics diplomacy or trade theyre concerned about how this is going to play out over the next several months but by february this will largely be done itll be a matter of history well deadline north korea frustrated by u. S. Sanctions after 3 donald trump kim jong photo op summits ominous kim follows what he calls a Christmas Gift if he doesnt get concessions by year end here is a United Nations ambassador kelly craft the d. P. R. K. Has threatened to take a new path in the coming weeks and has used its public statements to hint at a resumption of serious proclamations. In practical terms this would mean that the d. P. R. K. Could launch space vehicles using long range Ballistic Missile technology or that they could even test launch intercontinental Ballistic Missiles which are designed to attack the continental United States with Nuclear Weapons well scary stuff if its for real tough talk or real trouble and i think i think shes laid it out pretty well. And i you know i dont know what the answer is personally but clearly. North korea and the United States are approaching denuclearization from 2 different perspectives and this is the problem what do we mean and what do they mean they mean they have us all out of there out of the peninsula they want to and including stopping any maneuvers that we do with south korea and were talking about them cutting out their Nuclear Weapons and their missile tests so and they they they they see that as their leverage that for survival i mean this is from kim jong known he sees that as his leverage for survival the other side has much room to move though plenty of room for mischief we have olympics coming up in tokyo john similar question the last one i asked you how much is u. S. A north korea being watched around the world well i think especially with some of the harsher rhetoric coming out of pyongyang in recent weeks theres a lot more attention being paid but i would be careful to not limit this to a bilateral framework i think china is watching very closely whats happening here especially now that we have this limited trade agreement that hopefully is about to be signed over the next several days but i think china wants more than anything else in that part of the world they want stability they dont want this kind of ratcheting up of rhetoric that could lead to a possible escalation or any kind of a miscalculation by north korea that leads to a response by the United States or any other country in the region so i think the chinese are actually going to play a helpful role where is they may not have been very helpful over the last year and a half basically head. Regarding whats been happening between the u. S. And north korea but i think the chinese can be a very important partner here and this really is a multilateral framework in which this issue has to be resolved not purely biological Something Else in china came out at the epic times talkers Magazine Forum in new york this week talkers publisher Michael Harrison kicked off the discussion saying china has been able to control the narrative on what americans think about china although macroeconomics can seem ambiguous panelist doug stephan whom youve seen here host of the American Family farmer radio show reported detail relatable literally to the Kitchen Table he observes that in a very specific way china has been buying up the means of production for food theyre about to buy bumblebee which is known as tuna brand but is also big and chicken and crab and the chinese have started to have liaison discussions with mega chicken producers tyson and perdue to grow chickens for china these corporate buyout some long Term Contracts are among the tactics used by china to gain economic advantage so john when we hear war we think bombs but arent these economic moves also weapons i dont know if i would classify them as weapons i mean keep in mind the most important priority for the Chinese Communist party is to provide for the continued economic wellbeing and social stability of Chinese Society Food Security for 1400000000 Chinese People is one of the most important objectives of any Chinese Government and remember they got hit with the african swine flu that decimated their pork industry and now theyll be importing pork products from the u. S. And other countries and they also had the avian flu which is decimated the poultry industry and we had a 2015 ban on poultry imports from the United States its good news for the Chinese People and its good news for us poultry processors that we have this opening now and were able to sell chickens to china on bumblebee i dont know about whats happening to his tune. Yeah but i wouldnt be surprised if the Chinese People want to have processed tuna as well to be able to enjoy that kind of a high protein diet in preserved format fingers crossed for the china trade deal let it be a nice Christmas Present for the market. I think it will be but to go back on the north korea china thing i think china has come to realize it doesnt have control that much as it used to over kim jong on in so weve got to watch that we sure do Michael Maloof john said levys thank you for stepping back in to the big picture and thank you for watching the big picture if you see us somewhere else you can now also watch r t america everywhere else were live at you tube dot com slash r t america if you have direct t. V. You look for us on channel 321 on pluto t. V. Channel 279 and if you have a dish dish where 280 all of our shows are available anytime anywhere on any device at youtube dot com slash the big picture r t m holland cook in washington and at holland cook on twitter where if you follow me ill follow you back next week same time meantime question more. The u. K. General election with the predicted large majority this would be the biggest majority for the tories since the days of Margaret Thatcher and labours were showing in about 80 years it would seem getting breaks it done did the trick this is a win for bojo but is it for the u k. Is youll be a reflection of reality. In a world transformed. What will make you feel safe. Isolation if you dont see. Are you going the right way or are you being led. What is true. Is. In the world corrupted you need to descend. To join us in the depths. Or a maybe in the shallows. Hello and welcome to. Me sophie shevardnadze. With technology is evolving at a cost make speech and Artificial Intelligence no longer just a hollywood dream as a path ahead of us a dangerous 1. 00 will our lives still be real while im here in Oxford University to ask all these questions to one of the most prominent thinkers in this field nick bostrom. Its really great to have you with us so youre a philosopher or author who writes about whats going to happen to us basically possibly so one of the ideas that you put forward is this idea of a world right so correct me if i were wrong but if i get this correctly its its basically that humanity. They may come up with a technology that may do this to extension and therefore we would meet computer surveillance while that might be an oversimplification but the vulnerable world hypothesis. Is the hypothesis that at some level of Technological Development it gets to be said to destroy 6 basic this so that by default one civilization reaches the level of development. Will get that a stated. A couple of different ways in which this could be true one maybe the easiest way to see is. If it just becomes very easy at some level of Development Even for a small group or individual to