President Obama inherited not only the wars of George Bush, but also his lies. After elected, the new president was quick to affirm that the Iraq War had been fought to bring democracy to that nation, and that the war in Afghanistan was fought to capture and kill Osama bin Laden and the other Al Qaeda leaders, even thought our leaders knew early on that bin Laden was actually in Pakistan. I was stunned to hear my liberal friends who had marched against Bush, defend the same policies as soon as they came through the lips of our hero.
Once we realize that all governments propagandize, and that all major media outlets are owned by the powers that be, it is very understandable for people to lose hope of ever finding out what is really happening in our world. Fortunately, we are still free enough as a nation to be able to hear from people the world over. That allows us to listen to enough sources, each of them with their own bias, to get an idea of the bigger picture might be. What follows is a list of sources to information coming from foreign news sources and Freedom of Information requests to peak outside the silo of US media outlets
For access to foreign presses:
http://www.world-newspapers.com/
For Wikileaks and Openleaks, probably the two best known examples of sites designed to release classified materials:
“Public Intelligence” is a site that allows people from all over the world to release documents they claim to be classified. Obviously, such claims are difficult or impossible to test, but they open up truth claims to explore:
http://publicintelligence.net/
The CIA has its own site of declassified documents:
For “Government Attic” which has tons of declassified documents:
For “Open Secrets” which helps trace the influence of money in politics:
For the “National Security Archives” which are located at George Washington University, this site has thousands of government documents obtained by the Freedom of Information Act:
Regardless of where we are born, we have a duty to our human family not to fall asleep into the lies of our group. We more fully love our group when we love it within the context of all humankind.
It can be argued that liberals hated Bush because he said what they really thought, but do not want to hear spoken out loud. So when many of the same crude policies of Bush were carried over into the Obama administration, but wrapped in cellophane of self-serving poetry, liberals defended governmental secrecy as fully as any neo-con had defended it under Bush (“The President knows things we do not, etc.)
So Bradley Manning will spend this day in prison for the crime of showing Americans our true face. The rest of us must decide whether we will spend this day sleeping in the warm quilt of our national lies, or if we will find the courage to live this day with eyes wide open.