Being from Kansas and having written guest columns for the Kansas City Star, Dorothy and the Wizard of Oz metaphors come naturally for me. Fortunately for my essay, the Land of Oz metaphor is dead on.
About 40 percent of Americans have now woken up to the unfolding reality that facts regarding the 9/11/2001 attacks increasingly point to complicity at the highest levels of this current Bush Administration (Scripps-Howard Poll). For that 40 percent, and growing numbers of Americans, we now find ourselves living in the land of Oz. We have seen that the "great and powerful Oz," which sent us all scurrying for duct tape and stumbling all over ourselves to give up the precious civil liberties our father's fought for . . . is a manufactured illusion run by a few rather pathetic figures in this current administration, and at the top of our media . . . hiding behind an ever thinning curtain of diminishing credibility.
We see on the Sunday morning talk shows, and the "informed" guests they have on, whether Democrat or Republican, a discussion of a "terrorist threat" that we now know has been largely manufactured by the pathetic little men behind the control room curtains. The discord this sets up in our minds and hearts is hard to bear. We feel our minds pulled back into the matrix. Their flashy TV sets and well dressed "experts" try to help us forget what we know, that 9/11 was an inside job. They ask us day in and day out, to join them in the grand illusion that the "great and powerful terrorist threat," is a reality that really does demand endless hundreds of billions of military spending, illegal wars, and the destruction of our constitutional rights and liberties.
The corruption of corporate media is a long lived reality. Perhaps it began in earnest with Kennedy's assassination. Why did the media choose not to interview key witnesses who saw shots coming from the grassy knoll, and courageously tried to apprehend those shooters before being stopped by Secret Service agents who gave the shooters time to escape? Why did the corporate media begin using the term "grassy knoll" as a derogatory slap at anyone questioning obvious lies our government has spewed upon us for decades? Even now, corporate media often uses the term "grassy knoll" to attack people demanding answers regarding the events on 9/11. Yes, corporate media has been a co-criminal in attacks on American democracy for decades.
In the 1980's I went to work under the auspices of the United Nations World Health Organization in Salvadoran and Guatemalan refugee camps in Central America. In the Salvadoran camp of Mesa Grande, home to 20,000 Salvadoran refugees, I discovered "not one single" person who'd been attacked by the FMLN rebels. ALL had been attacked by the US backed Salvadoran military which had been condemned by human rights groups worldwide for their brutality.
When I returned to my home in California a writer for the Orange County Register newspaper contacted me for an interview. When she asked if there was anything I wanted to convey to the readers, I replied, "The US media is giving the impression that the refugees in the Central American wars are 'caught in a cross-fire between rebels and govt. forces.' This is NOT true. The people there are being attacked by the US backed govt. forces, and not by the rebels. Americans need to know this before they give hundreds of millions of their hard earned tax dollars to this murderous Salvadoran regime we are supporting, and that couldn't exist without us."
Days later the article came out in a full page front page section, and I was excited to see it, until I read the first line of the first paragraph, "Huntington Beach man returns from Salvadoran refugee camps, where refugees caught in a 'cross-fire between rebel forces and Salvadoran govt. forces live.'"
I called the reporter, and before I could say anything, she blurted, "I'm sorry, that was the only way we could run the story. My editor said the story had to lead with that line, or we couldn't run the story." The US media had somehow been given marching orders that editors understood, that no article could openly challenge the distorted reality the govt. wanted us to believe. As a result millions were displaced, tens of thousands murdered, and Americans picked up the bill for this monstrous policy.
More recently, months after the 9/11/2001 attacks, I became aware of disturbing facts around 9/11, including the "insider stock" trading against United and American airlines the day before 9/11, that led to a CIA connected investment house that had once been headed by the Executive Directory of the CIA, Buzzy Krongard. The current director of this institution quietly resigned the day after 9/11, with no media scrutiny at all. $5 million were made there on insider knowledge of the coming attacks the next day, and even more bizarre is that half of those "winnings" are still uncollected. These and other facts were sent out to media worldwide.
One day I received a massive number of emails from people asking for more information regarding 9/11, and the possibility it was an inside job. Stunned, I contacted one of these people to find out how they'd gotten my email address, and found that my email address had been published in a major North American newspaper. The article had begun as a "grassy knoll" "tin foil hats" hit piece on 9/11 truth seekers, but oddly it listed point by point the disturbing facts around 9/11 I had collected and sent out. Then it said if you want more information on 9/11, contact ... and they gave my email address.
I called the reporter, who immediately apologized for the "hit piece" quality of the article. He said that in order to get the facts out about the disturbing questions around 9/11, he had to write it in the form of a hit piece in order to get it past his editor. He spoke of other reporters at major papers who'd already lost their jobs for critically analyzing the events of 9/11, and this was only a few months after 9/11/2001.
So, we know that media has been manipulating our thinking for decades to justify illegal wars of aggression all over the world causing untold misery and suffering. The latest war showed Bush and the US corporate media touting the testimony of Saddam Hussein's son-in-law, who'd defected from Iraq. They waved his testimony to justify our illegal attack on Iraq and mass murder of Iraqi civilians. The testimony they waved was about the Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD) Hussein's Iraq had developed. However, in that same document in the same testimony he revealed that ALL of those WMD had been destroyed before the first arms inspections years ago. He said that not only weapons were destroyed by also documents.
This is a huge revelation! Remember that Bush, et al, said that Hussein was hiding WMD because he would not produce the "paperwork." Hussein's son-in-law had testified that documents had been destroyed years before. He also testified, again, that the WMD had been destroyed. This administration, with the cooperation of the US media LIED US INTO AN ILLEGAL WAR. This is a war crime, committed by our media. There is no way they could have collectively gone blind half way down that document, to only see the WMD possession, and be completely blind to testimony in the SAME DOCUMENT that the WMD and documents had been destroyed.
Our corporate media was complicit in a crime of vast proportions. Their cover up of this information has led to the mass murder of tens of thousands of Iraqi civilians, thousands of US and coalition forces, and the loss of arms, legs, faces of young troops.
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