Press Pass – Fact not Fiction: I wrote this in response to an MSNBC story “Will Wikileaks Prompt Crackdown on Journalists.” link below.

One of the biggest culprits in the run up to the Iraq war against people, who were not involved in 911 and who did nothing to us, was the press. The press may be even guiltier than the ones who actually perpetrated wholesale slaughter for nothing because the press collectively did not do its Fourth Estate job, an imperative in a democratic state. How some at the Washington Post and the NYTimes (the big journalist guns) can sleep at night I will never know.

Those of us who have huge consciences when our nation becomes a perpetrator of war waged for no damn good reason have trouble sleeping. It makes me thrilled I never entered federal government service because I would have died of sleep deprivation. It bothered me when I inadvertently killed a bird that flew into my car window. Yes, I laud myself for that because the essence of who I am is that I could not hurt even a fly. This should not be an extraordinary human characteristic.

What is wrong with our humanity? Did we flush morality down the sewer? If I live to be 120 I will never understand the inhumanity of man against man. Nothing is worth unjustifiably taking a human life that is not yours to take. War should be the last option not the first and this country and any country should think long and hard before the first bomb is launched. Most importantly, pertinent to this article, is that the press should have examined scrupulously whether a violent action is justified and whether government is telling its people fact. The press should not hesitate a millisecond to uncover lies and speak truth to power. War is not worth the price paid by our brave troops who, ultimately, when they die, get lost in time and to other innocents who are taken way before their time if war is not fought for profound truths such as, in the case of Iraq, the existence or non existence of WMD.

Shame on much of the press for not asking the necessary penetrating questions to uncover the truth about the facts of the Iraq War, before not after the dastardly deed has been done. The press's Fourth Estate law should be, in fact, a preemptive war of the word so that we the people who do not have access to the truth can know it. It is better than a nation waging a preemptive war that kills thousands without close scrutiny of the rationale for doing so. The press could actually have saved these thousands of lives if it had doggedly pursued the rationale or lack of it for war. But the press, indeed, got a pass. They chose to cower in fear of power instead of confronting it. They are guilty of stupidity or collectively they are an immoral accomplice to wholesale murder or both!

Those who are in the echelons of power should be held accountable but they never will be because this nation’s new mantra of moving forward ignores looking backward to those who unnecessarily killed thousands, unleashed a civil war, destabilized an entire volatile region, handed our arch nemesis, Iran, hegemony and exiled over a million in our name. All of you in the press who ignored the truth that there were no WMD are as guilty as are our leaders of perpetrating an unjust, illegal, immoral war based on lies while our people slept. Next time, show some spine. Investigate and discriminate between what is fact and what is fiction. All of our lives may, indeed, one day depend upon it!

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/40729019/ns/politics