Yesterday I posted an entry citing a talk Chris Hedges recently gave concerning his new book, The Death of the Liberal Class. In said talk he mentioned a few bits of interest that have relevance to what I’m writing about today, illusion and war. Speaking of illusion and war, on Friday WikiLeaks “leaked” the largest classified military leak “that has ever been released into the historic record”, some 391,832 documents, otherwise known as “The Iraq War Logs”.
Putting aside the predictable reactions and infantile tactics we’re now witnessing from, both, the Obama Administration, and their lackey’s, the mainstream media, nothing I’ve read or watched since Friday is, at least in part, as powerful as what Josh Steiber wrote in an open letter to members of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, An Open Letter on the Needed Response to the Upcoming Wikileaks Report;
I write on behalf of those around the world who are ashamed to have to listen to the President, along with military and political officials, express their great angst over leaks while seeming to ignore the realities of what those leaks reveal about the very nature of these wars. When you fail to take account for what has been done in our names, funded by our taxes, and fought by those who believe that the U.S. should represent something noble, we will search for and tell the truth; if you are ashamed by citizens practicing the accountability that our country was designed to demand, then that says more about you than about us…
I’m urging people who are not so willing to drink the Kool-Aid to check out a the aforementioned letter by Josh Stieber, a couple video’s, featuring WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange (explaining the logs and defending the logs), and lastly Friday’s Democracy Now! appearance by America’s “most famous whistleblower, Daniel Ellsberg, who leaked the secret history of the Vietnam War in 1971”.
Please do yourself a few bits of important reading and watching today…