The media tends to have this lust
for war, and now that Biden
has decided to pull troops out
of Afghanistan, and yes, there is
chaos on the ground as people
are trying to flee the country.
You're seeing more and more of
these White House press briefings
where reporters are asking
questions pretending to be so
concerned about various countries
that they have
never shown any concern for.
They certainly didn't show any
concern for all the civilians who
were dying on the ground in
Afghanistan through our drone
strikes and signature strikes, but
now all of a sudden,
Tajikistan, what is going to
happen to Tajikistan?
Can someone please tell me?
Here's what happened during a White
House press briefing recently.
>> Would you say that there is no
interest for us having some
presence on the borders of Iran,
on the borders of Pakistan, on
the borders near China, Tajikistan?
Would you say that we should just
give that up?
>> I would say that the president
does not believe that
the United States should be
fighting and dying in a war for
the purpose of sustaining American
military boots near Tajikistan or
Pakistan or Iran.
No, I would say
that that is something that is not,
what you just laid out
as a national security interest,
we would not agree that it is
right to ask American soldiers to
risk their lives for
the purpose of maintaining
a presence near Tajikistan.
>> Now, Cenk, I mean,
I don't know that reporter might
really have a point here.
Are we really going to give up
to Tajikstan,
the border of Tajikistan?
>> Yeah, I've been worried about
this for decades, what's going to
happen to the border of Tajikistan?
>> They need our troops,
they need our troops right there
on the ground at that border.
>> Look, we would withdraw of
course, if it wasn't for
the interest of the Tajik people.
I have to confess, I don't know
what the actual way to refer to
the people of Tajikistan is.
And I'm Turkic, just like they are.
So I don't dismiss them as
irrelevant.
They're human beings like
everyone else.
But you're telling me that that's
why we need to stay in Afghanistan,
because all of a sudden, the
American Empire is obsessed with
protecting the people of Tajikistan
and the integrity of their border.
That's beyond absurd.
I mean, look, and why does the
media participate in this farce?
As we told you last week,
one of the reasons is,
we get to be even handed, we told
you things about Trump, because we
couldn't help it because he was
saying insane things right on TV.
There was no way to cover for him.
So now we want to be able to say,
no, we hit Biden hard.
And this fits in perfectly because
they're all neocons.
Yes, I'm talking about the press.
And so they're all in favor
of the military-industrial complex.
So they're like, great,
we get to help the establishment
while pretending to be unbiased.
And the same reason it's just
flat out money, as we
told you earlier in this show.
Meet the Press, so
many other outlets, take money from
defense contractors as
advertised on their programs, and
then they have generals all over
their programming, and including
Fox News too, of course, right?
And by the way, Intercept wrote
a great story about it.
We'll put the link down below.
I mean, Jack Keane is
a former general and
is another great example.
>> I do actually want to share that
example because it gives you
a sense of just how biased these
individuals are as they give their
expert analysis on cable news and
all these conflicts of
interest they have.
So Jack Keane is a perfect example,
General Jack Keane.
Just to give you a sense of what
his financial interests are,
he's a former board member at
weapons maker General Dynamics.
I'm sure that plays no role in some
of his commentary.
>> All the millions he got
from there, no, no role at all,
or his current roles.
>> Is a chair of AM General,
the company that makes Humvees.
>> Used in the wars.
>> Exactly.
>> But I'm sure that the money that
General Keane is getting, he
would never be influenced by that.
He's saintly, that's why they never
even revealed that he's actually
a defense contractor as he's on
their air 24/7 >> And
that's the thing, at a bare
minimum, the responsibility of any
organization that claims to be
a journalistic one is to disclose
to the audience what the potential
conflicts of interests are, right?
I mean, if they have to have this
person on, fine, I guess,
I think that's unethical as it is.
But in the very least,
you should disclose this
information to your viewers.
But this man has been on Fox News
several times since Kabul was taken
over by the Taliban, and
no one knows,
no one in the audience knows what
his conflicts of interests are.
He also sits on the boards of
Cyalume Technologies, Inc,
which manufactures military
chemical lights and
other technology deployed
on the battlefield in Afghanistan.
And the Institute for
the Study of War, a think tank that
publishes defense policy proposals
with the aim of, quote,
developing the next generation of
national security leaders, and is
backed by the CACI International,
Inc, General Dynamics, and
other defense contractors.
In other words, people and
corporations that stand to profit
off endless wars, but the audience
over at Fox News would have no idea
because this information hasn't
been disclosed to them.
You need real reporters and
real journalists like the ones over
at the Intercept to disclose this
information on Fox News' behalf.
But by the way, Fox News isn't
the only offender here.
Okay, you see it everywhere in
Fox News.
I was just watching an interview
that Katie Couric did with
disgraced General David Petraeus,
someone who had
disclosed classified information to
his mistress while he was working
under the Obama administration.
He's talking about how
we need to maintain troops on
the ground the entire time.
We need to have a permanent number
of US soldiers on the ground in
Afghanistan.
Well, Petraeus serves on the board
of Optiv Security, a large
cybersecurity firm that contracts
with the Department of Defense, and
is a partner at KKR and Co,
a global private equity firm with
assets in the defense sector.
He also called the Afghanistan
withdrawal a Dunkirk moment on
Fox News, and told the BBC, quote,
we should literally reverse
the decision, adding, quote,
I feared we would come to regret
the decision and we already are.
There's no good outcome unless
the United States and
its allies recognize that we
made a serious mistake.
>> Yeah, okay, so guys, these
former generals, the media is their
biggest ass kissers, and so when we
tell you, when they take millions
of dollars from financial interests
tied to the wars, that's a fact.
We just showed you some of
the connections, and like I said,
the Intercept has even more details
on more generals, etc, right?
Meanwhile, the mainstream media is
like, how dare you?
These are beknighted angels of
human beings who only care about
the border of Tajikistan.
That's why they're doing it.
Now who do you think is
telling the truth?
So David Petraeus and
Jack Keane are corrupt.
You can't see that anywhere
else in media.
You turn on cable news and
you'll be fired instantly if
you said that on cable news.
How dare you question
former generals,
current defense contractors?
Don't you know they rule this
country?
Yeah, I do know that, and
that's the problem.
So as you saw there,
Petraeus is on Fox News,
but also BBC, Richard Haass,
guy used to work for Colin Powell,
he's on MSNBC,
all saying the same thing.
Petraeus and
Keane are both on the Institute for
Study of War.
That is the think tank that Ana
told you about.
That's a think tank specifically
designed to create more wars and
perpetuate wars for
longer periods of time so
that defense contractors that fund
that think tank can all get rich.
And now the liars in the mainstream
media will then tell you, no,
defense contractors,
they don't care about profits.
No, they care about the good people
of Tajikistan.
Billions of dollars in contracts?
A giant public corporation?
No, it sounds conspiratorial to say
that they would care about profits.
No, of course not.
There were doing all of this out of
the goodness of their heart.
No, war is a product, and
people like General Keane and
General Petraeus and Richard Haass
are the spokespeople for that
product, they do the marketing for
that product.
And so they sell you snake oil,
but in this case, snake oil doesn't
kill one or two people, it kills
hundreds of thousands of people.
And the people who help them market
that without ever telling you
the truth is mainstream media.
Everybody from Fox News to MSNBC,
they're all lying to you, and
on purpose.