Take Off the Blindfold; Don't Fear the Truth

Coleen Rowley knows from terrorism, government secrets and the struggle to reveal the truth.

Read what she writes about Wikileaks:

Unfortunately, the US corporate PR machine is again triumphing. The naked emperor has shot the little boy trying to yell the truth. About 70% of Americans, misled by the likes of Amy Klobuchar, now declare that ignorance is bliss and they want to see Assange assassinated and WikiLeaks taken out. Only a tiny fraction of critical thinker Americans recognize that what they don't know CAN hurt them.

The last time an Administration got 70% of the country to believe a false proposition (that Iraq was behind 9-11), we launched an unending war that has already killed over a million and, in so doing, we shot ourselves in the foot. So unless Americans are willing to take their heads out of the sand, that's about to happen again. We find ourselves in such an Orwellian tragedy, that if we don't laugh, we'll cry.

Note: I agree with the realists that neither those in the White House nor in the Congress are listening. The elected in Washington DC operate in a kind of lead SKIF that encloses those inside the DC Beltway like Maxwell Smart's old "cone of silence". (So the politicians are truly unable to hear anyone outside that bubble and they are deaf to all except the ir own corporate and special interest funders, which include the powerful Military Industrial Complex war profiteers and also includes the neo-con aligned Likud branch of Israeli warhawks.)

SNIP

If the people recognized that their leaders' decisions to continue to fund war was bankrupting the U.S. and making it impossible to fund their "entitlements" and services, then there might arise more pressure on Congress to vote to end the war funding, but right now there doesn't seem to be a way to make people understand the horrible situation they are in. The main stream media merely transcribes the Pentagon and Obama press releases and fails to investigate as old Woodward and Bernstein once did and tell the harsh truth to the American public.

For the most part, the media seems to view a WikiLeaks truth-telling mechanism and government whistleblowers as trying to upset their easy job of transcribing leaders' press releases. Not surprisingly, much of the press says, "quick shoot the little boy calling the emperor naked." The corporate media is funded by the corporations and wealthy Americans who don't want to pay higher taxes or even pay any taxes and who are largely profiting off the continuing wars.

No one remembers that in the summer of 2001, Richard Clarke was unable to get anyone to pay attention to his plan to stem Al Qaeda terrorism. It seems incomprehensible as we bankrupt ourselves (which, by the way, is and always was Osama Bin Laden's stated goal, to bankrupt the U.S.) that Richard Clarke and others were repeatedly put off during that summer of 2001 when "all their hair was on fire", being told that there was "not one dollar available" for anti-terrorism efforts.

So that's the current horrible situation we find ourselves in at the present moment. The current quagmire devoid of truth on every level is a vortex sucking us all down. A truly independent media mechanism like WikiLeaks and more government whistleblowers would be a huge part of a root solution and that is why those in power are in the process of somehow (whether thru assassination or prosecution), taking them out. WikiLeaks had given me a flicker of hope of perhaps getting a sufficient number of Americans to take their heads out of the sand at least long enough to see the danger all around them, their children and grand children but sadly the Propaganda Machine already has 70% of Americans in agreement that they would prefer not to know the Sorrows of Empire that will befall them (as Chalmers Johnson termed it).

Americans continue like the lemmings in that Apple ad that flopped during the Superbowl a couple decades ago. They are being led blindfolded up to the edge of an abyss and then are, one by one, falling off.

Read the whole thing.