Blind in to War on Terror

Through the two pieces on buying and framing the War on Terror, I guess it is clear that American politicians, so a significant extent, authored an agenda separate from that of the American people then employed sly tactics to trick their constituency into supporting a new violent conquest. Buying the War explains clearly how our most elite ring of leaders, the presidential cabinet under GW (Bush, Cheney, Rice, and Rumsfeld), coordinated a very thorough effort to push a lie on America. But in framing the war, it also becomes clear that there was no totalitarian censorship, that this overthrow of democratic autonomy in the United States was not conducted via the means of forcibly silencing any dissenting voices. Rather, the American press (and most of the American population), tidily fell in line with the executive and the military's narrative of what was going on and of what had to be done. The American people, generally good and peaceful, compassionate and intelligent, threw their support behind a monstrous reign of conquest of missiles, bombs, bullets, and tanks, that still continues today. And, it seems, they did it willingly with full access to the truth. The press, those charged with the responsibility of presenting us with a thorough image of the current reality, fell into the nationalist narrative that Bob Jensen describes. It was another chapter in our manifest destiny. For half a century before, the war machine of the United States dropped so many tens of thousands of bombs and chemical agents, concocted to kill, across the world. Our people carried weapons into remote reaches of the third world and fired them on the people of that land. We orchestrated coups, invasions, and ideological cleansing of turbulent foreign populations. But, when two of those thousands and thousands of bomb made it back home and hit us, we were shocked. We never knew the feeling of bombs in our own cities. We had always, always been on the other side of this deadly transaction. Warfare was not legitimate, not acceptable, not a natural, necessary part of the world when it was directed against us. And, our response was so blood-thirsty, so viscous that we, and our press, lost clear sight. Our leaders led an army of blind civilians, and the manipulation employed was crude. Seeing video footage of George W. Bush's speeches and Iraqi dissidents show diagrams of terrorist training camps drawn in magic marker shocked me. It all seemed so dumb. Is that really what we feel for? What about democracy? Isn't anyone bothered by that?