taliban

Osama bin Laden was the reason given for invading Afghanistan in 2001--but he was found in 2011 in Pakistan. Meanwhile, the Afghan people have dealt with ten years of occupation, and Malalai Joya has been speaking out against it for that long. Malalai joined Laura in studio before the death of Bin Laden was announced, but in a later email she told GRITtv: "One of the main excuses of the US occupation is now gone. The struggle for independence, democracy, and freedom should get easier, but it won't. Not without an end to occupation." In other words, it won't change much from the picture she presents here. The circle of life doesn't end when people begin a life behind bars. Incarcerated women give birth; others become gravely ill. Do prisoners have the right to comfort as they approach death? If so, who will provide it? These are real questions that many working in the prison system have ignored--but not everyone. Our documentary of the week goes behind the walls of the maximum security Iowa State Penitentiary, where a prisoner-staffed hospice program has been touching the lives of patients and caregivers alike. Filmmaker Edgar Barens spent six months embedded with program participants, and the resulting film is the intimate Prison Terminal. We've followed Vermont's struggle for single-payer healthcare for a while now, and this week the grassroots movement saw victory as the State Senate passed the bill, which now heads to Governor Peter Shumlin for his signature. Last week, Sam Mayfield attended a rally in support of the bill in Montpelier and sent us this report on what Green Mountain Care means to the people of that state. Comic Hari Kondabolu has a few words for people who don't realize that "African" is not a language. Distributed by Tubemogul.

"NATO is losing the war in Afghanistan in every quantifiable way," says Rick Rowley of Big Noise Films, recently returned from a reporting trip to that country. And what's more, he notes, what's clear from the WikiLeaks cables is that the coalition governments are not as deluded as they would like their people to be about the reality on the ground in Afghanistan. Rick joins us in studio to discuss the realities he saw on the ground in Afghanistan, the death of special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan Richard Holbrooke, and more.

"The US has basically already lost the war in Afghanistan, if they even knew what victory was defined at in the beginning," says Jeremy Scahill, just back from two weeks reporting unembedded in that country. The Taliban there are not unlike the Tea Party here, he notes, not popular in themselves but rather as a protest against the failures of the current regime.Then, this week, two bombs were found in packages in cargo holds on two planes from Yemen. Is this a new front on the "war on terror"? Jeremy fills us in on the ongoing conflict in Afghanistan, the soft war in Yemen and other countries, and why the wars have been conspicuously absent from this year's election campaigns.

So a couple months ago it came out that we, the United States, in all our wisdom – are funding both sides of the war in Afghanistan. BOTH sides. We are paying hundreds of millions to the Taliban so that they will let our trucks through to supply our troops. WHICH MEANS – we are paying the Taliban MILLIONS so that we can fight THE TALIBAN. Distributed by Tubemogul.