Monday, July 28, 2008: a full week had flown by as O.U.T.R.A.G.E. officials poured over documents that revealed the United States' government's involvement in the horrendous tragedies of September 11, 2001. As mountains of papers, videos, and tape recordings were sifted through, it became evident that the Bush administration had been complicit in much more than most naive Americans would ever believe.
There were other stinging revelations: how the Bush administration 'silenced' a California attorney on Christmas Eve of 2006. Outspoken Bush critic and political activist Paul Sanford mysteriously fell to his death from the 12th floor of an Embassy Suites hotel. While police ruled his death a "probable suicide", friends and relatives believed it to be murder. At the time, www.arcticbeacon.com reported the incident, but the American 'mainstream' media ignored it.
Just days afterwards, on December 30, 2006, Germany arrested U.S. Treasury Secretary Paulson and subpoenaed Vice-President Dick Cheney by Tribunal charging Paulson and Cheney with money-laundering schemes that effectively prevented Germany and other countries from accessing international money sources. A scandal of unimaginable proportions involving over $4.5 TRILLION, the American "mainstream" media chose not to report what was, arguably, the most scandlous incident of financial skullduggery in world history. Again, an Internet website in Britain, www.worldreports.org/news/38-paulson-and-cheney-s 'scooped' the worldwide journalism industry as it reported the story to a relatively small audience.
One day later, on New Year's Eve, 2006, the Washington Post's online service revealed how the Bush administration failed to be honest with Americans about the number of American soldiers' deaths in Iraq. "Mainstream" media outlets were reporting that the 3,000th U.S. soldier had died in Iraq. What the Bush administration didn't want the media reporting was the truth: at the time, perhaps no place illustrated the actual toll in Iraq more vividly that Section 60 of the Arlington National Cemetery in Virginia. In the famed "garden of stone" rested "one-tenth" of the Iraq war's American dead. The Bush administration glossed over this startling fact: it never told the lazy, incompetent media that those 3,000 U.S. soldiers were only the ones actually killed while in Iraq. More than 27,000 additional U.S. soldiers had died after being wounded in Iraq and evacuated to military hospitals, where they ultimately died. Those numbers were not included in the Bush administration's information it spoon-fed to a lackadaisical press. Fox News, CNN, CBS, NBC, and ABC presented news only as "fill" between commercials. Newspapers and news magazines allocated more space for paid advertisements that they did space for comprehensive stories or reports about the events in Iraq (or elsewhere, for that matter). After all, real in-depth reporting and exhaustive journalism was expensive - and severely cut into profits. On September 15, 1982, USA TODAY introduced 'fast-food journalism' based on a premis that Americans raised on television, only wanted 'snippets' of news. Dubbed "McPaper" by its detractors and competitiors, it became one of America's leading newspapers, and resulted in most other newspapers following suit. Within the decade, most major American newspapers had dramatically chopped up their news departments and gave more space to advertising and "fluff" than to "hard news". Even Reader's Digest, which at one time accepted no advertising, was now fully 30% advertising - even a preponderance of its articles were nothing more than endorsements for consumer products, nothing more than thinly-disguised ads.
The media played right into the government's hands as it became fat and lazy, bloated and mismanaged. It had forgotten its role as "the fourth estate" which was supposed to be the watchdog over government malfeasance. The media was no longer a public trust; it was part of the government/corporate conspiracy to continue "dumbing-down' America. It was in the federal govenrment's best interests not to encourage students to learn to read. Just as the Catholic Church had thrived mostly in more illiterate countries, the U.S. government flouished when the public was misinformed, uninformed, and uninvolved.
If Americans could be distracted by "news" about Brad Pitt's love life, there was no need for the government to be honest about how many soldiers were dying in Iraq, how a badly-mangled economy was teetering on the verge of collapse, or how corrupt government leaders were destroying the world as we knew it. Evil prevailed. And a gullible American society sat in bars and barber shops complaining about it, yet not lifting a finger to try and change things.
O.U.T.R.A.G.E. had killed off President George W. Bush, Vice-President Dick Cheney, most members of Congress, most of America's wealthy elitists and squanderous celebrities. Now it was dealing with the aftermath of its 'Rebellion o '08' and the destruction caused by a massive earthquake and a horrendous hurricane. As it began trying to re-establish a fresh United States government, it was also discovering disturbing information about how the Bush administration had acted in cloaked secrecy to deny Americans the truth...about anything.
To be sure, it was not just the Bush administration; this kind of spurious behavior had been commonplace within the federal government for decades. All the Bush administration did was take such despicable conduct to a higher limit.