Barstow

I remember when this story broke and I thought "Finally! No one will stand for this, it's the Watergate of our time." I held on to the paper, keeping it with a collection of newspaper and magazine clippings that, over the years, I've believed were worth hanging on to for posterity's sake. But as the weeks went by, I waited for fallout, for an uproar from citizens, editorials and op-eds, and huge exposes in Time or Newsweek...but instead...nothing. Nothing?!? Where are we living that people barely respond to the knowledge that everything we heard about the war was scripted and conscripted? I remain as disgusted with US citizens and media as I do with the generals and the Pentagon, because the apathy that followed this news was despicable. We should all be ashamed that, 1) we didn't (necessarily) see it coming, and 2) we didn't react to being lied to and coerced through such sinister propaganda. At the time, I was a Teaching Assistant for Media and Politics, and in my section I jumped on the story, I tried to get every one of my students to read it, to react to it, and to discuss the consequences and what it said about the state of collusion between the media, the military, and the government. I managed to facilitate a discussion for maybe 15 minutes before they moved on to sports. Even in the larger section, there was barely a ripple in response to what I saw as a boulder being hurled at us. I realized that these reactions were the reason why such tactics were successful in the first place, why we were at war, even, with a country that had nothing to do with the terrorist attacks of 9/11/01. It all was connected with that one word: apathy. People in this country don't care enough, aren't informed enough, and rarely make the effort (claiming lack of time, access, etc - sometimes valid, often not) to inform themselves of the state of our union.

So what are the consequences of this story? Was there any follow-up to this story? Did I somehow miss it?

To think that there were people who, from the beginning, were suspicious of the war in Iraq and still were willing to go on television and look into the camera and argue that WMDs were present, that the war was justifiable...I am appalled. One even said that in the beginning, when he was told the government had "no hard evidence," he looked around at the other analysts thinking,"What are we doing?." WHAT WERE THEY DOING? How could they sleep at night knowing they were spreading lies to promote a violent occupation that not only put US troops at risk, but also the role of the US in the world, its reputation, and, most importantly, the lives of the innocent Iraqis? Perhaps in part it was the threat of the Pentagon's rebuke that fueled them,Mr.Cowan's firing is an example, but I don't accept that as a permissible excuse.

There was a concerted effort to destroy the anti-war sentiments across the nation, and it is insane to think that "Analysts argued that opposition to the war was rooted in perceptions fed by the news media, not reality." THE NEWS MEDIA WAS FEEDING US THE ANALYSTS!!!!! It's all so maddening, so nauseating, to think that we were being spoon fed lies from just about every mainstream media source out there. And our anti-war sentiments came from that? Is it so hard to believe that there might be US citizens who are just opposed to war in general? Is it so hard to believe that we might not like occupying another people in another country to expand the US sphere of influence? There are people in this country who lived through WWII, Korea, Vietnam, the Cold War, the first Gulf War...isn't it possible that the country was tired of fighting wars that weren't fully explained, that didn't have a cause that moved people to believe war was the only option? Colin Powell himself tried to argue for sanctions instead of war, and he was silenced. I don't even know how to express my disgust and contempt for the propaganda and scare tactics, for the initial push for war, or for the actions and motivations of those at the top. The media's cooperation, the collusion, the expansiveness of this entire operation - how are we supposed to deal with that knowledge? How are we supposed to react, to respond? How do we prevent this sort of thing in the future, or is it becoming inevitable? I'm at a loss.