If I continue to have the privilege of contributing to West Hawaii Today in 2017, I intend to persist in expressing factually supported opinion that I think most people might otherwise not be exposed to.
Many would say the daily blathering of television news is all the information ordinary folks need, but please consider, for example, the invasion, occupation and destruction of Afghanistan and Iraq and the subsequent disastrous consequences worldwide. Most Americans supported the invasion of Afghanistan because our corporate media beat the government’s war drum and gave virtually no air time to the many experts who said the invasion of Afghanistan would be both illegal and counterproductive.
Their voices might have caused many of us to think twice about where we were being led, and where we were leading the world.
With regard to Iraq, Middle East and arms control experts who maintained that there was no evidence that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction threatening the United States, and that Saddam Hussein was not involved in any way with 9/11 were excluded from the mainstream media, which instead provided an echo chamber for administration lies. The U.S. agenda had already been set and corporate media kept in step. A Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting study, which examined ABC, CBS, NBC and PBS’ evening newscasts during the week of Colin Powell’s infamous anthrax speech to the United Nations on Feb. 5, 2003, found only three out of 393 interviews done around the issue of Iraq and WMD’s were with peace advocates.
Unreported and never interviewed were the many experts who longed to testify that the Bush administration’s case for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq was full of holes. Fifteen years later, we remain embroiled in wars we were lied and misguided into; and despite the vast multitude of government and corporate prevarications, mainstream reporters today act ever more like stenographers, expressing even less skepticism of official statements than before.
In an equal if not more harmful failure of journalistic responsibility, the majority of corporate controlled media continues its bamboozling of the public by treating the human cause of global warming, extreme weather and the coming climate catastrophe as if it were an unsettled scientific question. Yet outside the centers of greed, the science was well established decades ago. In fact, as revealed by Inside Climate News, “Exxon’s Own Research Confirmed Fossil Fuels’ Role in Global Warming Decades Ago.”
The company, now ExxonMobil, has subsequently spent millions funding fake science and buying (oops, I mean “lobbying”) politicians to deny it. Environmental and economic justice activists are aghast at climate change denier Trump’s choice of Rex Tillerson, Exxon CEO as Secretary of State.
Call me unfair, but I see a conflict of interest when Exxon has a $500 billion deal with Russia that’s been blocked by U.S. imposed sanctions. Yet it’s likely that our bought-and-paid-for Senate will confirm him after a bit of obsequious questioning.
Speaking of Russia, now that we’ve established that our corporatocracy has no qualms about intentionally deceiving us, let’s consider the nefarious Russian “hacking” of our election reverberating in the blathersphear.
You’ve probably not heard of a group called “Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity” or VIPS. A search on Wikipedia reveals they are “a group of former officers of the United States Intelligence Community … formed in January 2003 … to protest the use of faulty intelligence upon which the US/UK invasion of Iraq was based. The group issued a letter before the 2003 invasion of Iraq stating that intelligence analysts were not being listened to by policymakers.”
That turned out to be about 110 percent accurate as is now well known. Last month VIPS issued a memorandum unambiguously titled, “Allegations of Hacking Election Are Baseless.” It’s not very long and I urge you to look it up online and note the impressive backgrounds of its signatories.
Jake Jacobs is a pilot who works for a worldwide cargo company and writes a monthly opinion column for West Hawaii Today.