They're burning kids alive over here!

Hey Joe,

Thanks for posting the message from Pablo on your website ("After Iraq, will any American be innocent?"). As a Chilean, he has experience in exactly what I worry about -- how many crimes is my government hiding, and how can I know?

Your audience, more than most, is probably aware of how much of what passes as "news" in the U.S. is actually government propaganda. Yet, being told lies is actually better than what we are never told -- the stories that go completely unreported. As Pablo points out, we hear little or nothing about civilian deaths in Iraq, and any concerns expressed are dismissed as invalid -- either motivated by some pathological hatred of the current Administration, or based on unverifiable figures.

The fact is, to quote our late unlamented Secretary of Defense ...

(Honest to God, Joe, as I'm typing this, I'm overhearing a conversation by some fellow in this corporate office where I'm a contractor -- his comment, and I quote, is "Do you know anybody in the Air Force? Because my brother is over there and he called me and said 'They're burning kids alive over here!' We gotta find some way to make people hear this.")

Okay, that was disturbing, but it makes my point. To quote Rumsfeld, "We don't know what we don't know." The news media, from NPR to the Washington Post, is owned by the same corporations that are supplying weaponry for this occupation. It's the stories that AREN'T being covered that are the most important.

Are Iraqi children being burned alive? If the news refuses to report it, how would we know? Are American citizens being disappeared? If the news doesn't carry the story, we would not know. Even when we know of people being disappeared, such as AP photographer Bilal Hussein who has been held almost two years without charges, is it the lead story in the news? Or is it barely mentioned anywhere?

Why not? Because the corporations that pay for the elections of our Congresspeople and that run the news organizations and that supply the weapons in Iraq, these corporations don't want us discussing Bilal Hussein at the water cooler. They want us discussing Lindsay and Brittney and Madeline McCann, safe, non-political issues.

(Wow, this is weird. Now I just got a text message from a very conservative, non-political friend of mine: "23,000 civilians died in Iraq in 07. Worse than 06. how does this make the usa better than sadham. Geez. Terrible." All original spelling.)

I dunno, Joe. I started this message intending to reiterate Pablo's warnings. But what I'm experiencing is that some of us DO know what's going on, and we're finding our own ways of communicating that news, independent of corporate-owned media. Maybe that's what it takes -- going AROUND the bastards.

But it has to start with awareness. We need to tell our friends and neighbors that the news media is a wholly owned subsidiary of the military corporations. We need to bring up Tass and Pravda and explain that ALL news organizations, not just Fox, are exactly the same. And then we need to go to overseas publications, or Democracy Now, or just text each other messages so we get a better idea of what the truth might be.

Hopefully that will make us mad enough to then do something about it.

Apologies for the slightly incoherent nature of this email. It was odd to keep getting interrupted during writing by unusual events on the very topic about which I was writing.

Here's a link that you might want to visit, which was sent to me today, another anxious communication from another friend regarding the fate of America and that thing we used to call Justice:

Journey to the Dark Side: The Bush Legacy by Tom Engelhardt. Here is one paragraph from this article:

"After 19 months of imprisonment and torment at the hands of the CIA, the agency released him [in Yemen] with no explanation, just as he had been imprisoned in the first place. He faced no terrorism charges. He was given no lawyer. He saw no judge. He was simply released, his life shattered."

I ask again, why isn't this front page news? The answer is because the media is owned by the corporations.

Thanks for fighting the good fight.

Bob
Minneapolis