Silicon Investor (SI) -- The First Internet Community

STOCKTALK

We've detected that you're using an ad content blocking browser plug-in or feature. Ads provide a critical source of revenue to the continued operation of Silicon Investor. We ask that you disable ad blocking while on Silicon Investor in the best interests of our community. If you are not using an ad blocker but are still receiving this message, make sure your browser's tracking protection is set to the 'standard' level.

Politics : Stockman Scott's Political Debate Porch -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: abuelita who wrote (51727)	7/22/2004 12:19:47 PM
From: stockman_scott	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 89467

<<...Frankly, President George W. Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair can twist, weasel, equivocate, obfuscate, deny, dissimulate and strew the political landscape with as many red herrings as they like. It won't change the fact that they beat the drums for a war that has caused the deaths of thousands of soldiers and tens of thousands of innocent civilians based upon information that even a smidgin of prudence would have warned them was unreliable. So where were the vaunted U.S. media when the governments they claim to hold accountable began marching toward the moral abyss? The so-called liberation of Iraq is now a nightmare of civil violence in which senior officials of the new regime are routinely assassinated, a clandestine resistance seems to be growing rather than shrinking and the moral capital accumulated by Britain and the U.S. over many decades has been squandered in a matter of months. Yet few media moguls seem to be asking about the global consequences of the foreign affairs catastrophe visited upon us all by the hubris of these two governments. What Hersh was really pointing to at the ACLU conference was that dreadful, disheartening moment at which citizens discover that the only cop in town has gone bad. Much is now being made by politicians and pundits of the "failure of intelligence" in presenting an accurate assessment of reality. But the intelligence that failed was not that of the spooks, it was among the elected representatives and the media who abandoned their simple common- sense mandate to challenge, challenge and challenge again any evidence presented to justify killing people. Instead, those who produced contrary views were ridiculed, reviled and bullied in a fashion that is unfathomable for nations wedded to the notion of free speech. Weapons inspectors Scott Ritter and Hans Blix, Prime Minister Jean Chretien, U.S. anti-terrorism expert Richard Clarke and the leaders of France and Germany all expressed doubts about the rationale for war and the existence of weapons of mass destruction. They found themselves dismissed as fools and dupes. Well, somebody was duped all right -- it was the U.S. Congress, the British House of Commons and the people of both countries. When institutions become so desensitized that allegations about the rape of children being videotaped for the amusement of the captors results only in a deafening silence, when the conversation about it must take place outside the mainstream media, every American and every Briton should be asking how their country came to find itself in the service of such values...>> Message 20335525 r1: thanks for posting that editorial...the author was quoting Sy Hersh -- a Pulitzer Prize winning investigative journalist who writes for The New Yorker...IMO, it takes real heroes like Hersh to uncover crimes that the rest of the world should know about...The same thing happened with WaterGate in Washington...Without The Washington Post's Woodward and Bernstein and their willingness to break open a tough story about high level corruption where would we be today...? Hope things are going well up in British Columbia. -s2