Uncovering the Truth

Yesterday an old friend and I were speaking about just how long it might take to find out what really happened during the last eight years. For the first few months of the Bush presidency, if you recall, nothing happened, except for Dick Cheney creating a secret cabal of energy producers to come up with a tactic that would question the science of global warming, start the "drill, baby, drill" mentality as an answer to dependence on foreign oil, and develop a strategy for grabbing Iraqi oil fields. Oh, and Bush vacationed at the movie set that he calls "the ranch in Crawford."

Then 911 happened. The litany of what we know occurred seems like a list of nightmares: rendition, torture, invasion with ill-equipped troops and no plan for an occupation, roadside bombs, eavesdropping, segregating decision making into the Office of the Vice President and out of the State Department, fear, more fear, color coded days, anthrax, Katrina, etc.

When there were newspapers in the business of investigative reporting, we might have gotten more while it was happening. Now who is going to finance the Freedom of Information Act cases needed to get to the meat of the Bush administration's incompetency? (News is that CNN is going in the wire service business. Yet I was watching the crawl the other morning and CNN reported that "Ivan Watkins" not "Ivan Watson," an NPR reporter had his car bombed in Baghdad.) That's trustworthy reporting!

When ABC puts out a whitewashed interview with Bush and then claims it revealed something worthy, we know we cannot rely on the corporate press.

We will have to rely on scholars from universities that are beset by the same financial meltdown conditions that everyone else is suffering from. That is worrisome. Because we can't prevent this kind of misshapen government from happening again unless we know how it failed us. I don't mean a witch hunt. I care about restoration.