What is a representative republic? The United States claims to be one. We also claim to be a democracy according to George Bush who, by his own admission, wants to “export” democracy to other nations of the world. I would ask Mr. Bush this question, how can we export something to other nations that we don’t possess? If democracy were a commodity that we had a surplus of, we could export it. Unhappily that is not the case in this country. The sad truth is that the United States is woefully lacking that commodity. The underpinnings of a true democracy is the free flow of information and the transparency of government. We have no free flow of information and the government shrouds itself in secrecy.
Witness the media of this nation that refuses to tell the American people the truth about anything. The majority of news in this country is centered not on the world situation in which our government is waging wars of aggression against other nations, but on celebrity stories of failed marriages, drunken escapades, and bad parenting. The media refuses to cover anything of real importance.
There are so many examples of the media deliberately refusing to cover issues of the utmost importance to the American people. They refuse to cover the North American Union is which our government has fostered an agreement between Mexico, Canada and the United States that basically incorporates these three nations into one and effectively erases from the Earth the United States of America as a sovereign nation under The Constitution. Why has the media not covered this? Do they believe that it is of no importance to the American people that our nation and form of government is being negotiated away by an administration that hasn’t even reported what they are doing to our own Congress? How can this happen without coverage by the press and the rest of the media?
Our government is supposed to be “by the people and for the people”. The only access we have to our government’s decisions and policies is through the media. When it becomes clear that the media no longer reports on the truth of what our government is doing in the people’s name, we have no representative form of government. Unless the people have access to information on what is happening, the government has no limits on its power. This isn’t the only instance of the media failing to do its job in this country.
When Osama Bin Laden was taken to a hospital in Pakistan on September 10, 2001, the Army of Pakistan guarded his hospital to insure his safety while the next day four airliners were hijacked. The Pakistani secret service, the ISI provided the money to the ringleader of the hijackers Mohammed Atta. It is a documented fact that the head of the ISI in Pakistan, ISI director-general Lt-Gen Mahmud Ahmad, wired $100,000.00 to Atta. That week Ahmad was in Washington meeting with Secretary of State Rice and members of the CIA. This story was reported by The Times of India on October 9, 2001, yet American newspapers and television networks made only casual mention of it on NBC’s Dateline and the story was never followed up by anyone inside the mainstream media. According to the India Times: “Top sources confirmed here on Tuesday, that the general lost his job because of the "evidence" India produced to show his links to one of the suicide bombers that wrecked the World Trade Centre. The US authorities sought his removal after confirming the fact that $100,000 was wired to WTC hijacker Mohammed Atta from Pakistan by Ahmad Umar Sheikh at the instance of Gen Mahumd.”
Why hasn’t there been an independent investigation of this by the so-called “news” media? In other reports dealing with 9/11, Secretary of State Rice was asked if she knew that there were al Qaeda operatives working inside the United States with plans to hijack an airplane and fly it into buildings inside the U.S. She responded, along with the President and Vice-President, that they had no prior knowledge of that type of information. Yet, it was proven that the President in his daily briefing on September 8, 2001 was told exactly that. This briefing has been declassified and released, yet the media never investigated why all three had lied about ever having the information.
There are other things that the media will not cover. Where is the footage of the war in Iraq? The American people are shown snippets of film in and around Baghdad when a member of Congress or other dignitary visits, but where is the footage of the dead that line the streets every morning due to the carnage by rival militias the night before? Why did the story on Haifa Street reported by CBS reporter Lara Logan only appear on their website, and this was only after she begged that it be shown on websites on the internet?
Some other things that the media neglects; Senator Leahy (Chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee) declared that President Bush, Vice-President Cheney and Harriet Miers refused to hand over documents and testify in front of the Senate oversight committee about the NSA wiretapping after they had been subpoenaed by the Senate. To deliberately ignore a Senate subpoena is a crime, yet the media refuses to follow the story. If this had been seven years ago and William Jefferson Clinton had ignored a Senate subpoena, it would have made front page news. This is something that all Americans should be thinking about.
Our news media has not done its job for years. Most people that want real news must either turn to the internet or get news from foreign media or from progressive news sites. The majority of people in this country don’t bother and what they learn from the major news networks is criminally short on content, especially when it comes to the truth about what their government does. There was no reporting on the demonstrations in Washington in September against the war. Unless people had been there the majority of people would never know that there were a hundred thousand people demonstrating. The media doesn’t report on the “First Amendment Zones” that keep protestors away from events so that their protests go unnoticed.
How long will the American People continue to let the media trample on their right to know what is really happening in their country? When will the media finally report on the things that matter? Without a free and uncensored media, we have no democracy. Maybe it is time for the networks to stop their senseless babble and do what they are paid to do. Unless the situation changes, we will have no recourse but to behave in a way that they can’t help but cover. There are still enough Americans that value their freedom that they will fight to keep it. One of those freedoms is our right to know the truth.
