WikiLeaks' Most Terrifying Revelation: Just How Much Our Government Lies to Us

[Demeter]

http://www.alternet.org/story/149393/wikileaks%27_most_terrifying_revelation%3A_just_how_much_our_government_lies_to_us?page=entire

[xchrom]

1. I dated someone like that once upon a time. If he said 'good morning' -

I looked out the window to see.

[FormerDittoHead]

2. I didn't need Wikileaks to find this out.

I found this out by watching a seminar on CSPAN that had the Pentagon discussing the "embedded reporter" program prior to the 2003 invasion to Iraq.

They said that Vietnam taught them that they can't win a war with public support, so part of winning a war (and consider how much money we're talking about) is controlling what the American people think about it. To do so they had to embrace the media rather than shun it...

Since then I recall the news reports which were produced by the Pentagon which were then "fed" to local news TV to be picked up as if they were real reporters.

The thing which a rational person must consider is what else that kind of thinking implies. What ELSE does that position of controlling the public media lead to?

The frightening thing is that, thanks to the pro-military (support our troops!) media, it's become quite easy for them to do so, and that line separating the military from "the fourth estate" has been all but destroyed.

[Demeter]

3. I am beginnning to think that the US must demilitarize

the Founding Fathers' injunctions against standing armies was based on intimate knowledge of the consequences--abuse of power. With the government corrupted and co-opted by the Corporations, another threat the Founding Fathers sought to bar, we must also de-corporatize.

Then we might be able to return to the path they intended, the Great Social Experiment, that Shining City on the Hill which Ronald Reagan spent his career besmirching and undermining.