After 9/11, our government was obsessed with finding terrorists, both in other countries and our own. The biggest problem was with Vice President Dick Cheney and his cronies running the entire executive branch in secret. They had Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Deputy Secretary Paul Wolfowitz in charge of gathering intelligence that was considered a threat. Both of these men did everything they could to mislead the American people into war. They released false reports about weapons of mass distruction even though many of our intelligence agencies had said just the opposite. There was another problem besides the three of them though, the rush to gather intelligence and lack of experience from the government’s databasers made too much information available in their terrorist database. Now, instead of finding real terrorists and threats against America, you would find peaceful protests and anti-war activists flooding the pages. It was not uncommon to find college student’s names ending up on the No Fly List and being detained at airports.
In the meantime, the justice department would just have to take extreme measures to bottle-up whistle blowers like Sibel Edmonds with gag orders and reporters like Coleen Rowley of Time Magazine by banning her press pass. Even pictures of coffins containing dead soldiers shipped back from Iraq were off the table. By this time, 9/11 and Iraq had become so buried in censorship it was hard to get information about either one. The censorship made it possible to sell US Citizens a ridiculous story about the two large WTC towers collapsing from being hit with planes and one WTC building 7 collapsing from two tiny fires. In short, it sold the story for war. It’s not that real stories were not reported because they couldn’t stop them all, but what they could do is bury the stories beneath so much other news (that agreed with each other) that the one story that seemed the least bit different became (incredibly) discredited.
Ashcroft paved the way for agencies to keep more material secret on national security grounds by rolling back the Freedom of Information Act after 9/11, but it was the former District Attorney Alberto Gonzales that drew up new legal interpretations for President Bush so he could continue violating war crimes and treating our constitution with so much contempt. The entire justice department’s reputation has been brought into question because of the actions of Gonzales.
Because of breaking the rule of law, America has been torturing prisoners at Guantanamo Bay. Because of the censorship, America may never know the extent to which the White House participated in the events that led to 9/11. Because of the secrecy, seven US Attorneys were fired from their jobs and one CIA agent named Valerie Plume was given up in retaliation. Because of greed, hundreds of private contractors in Iraq have been killed and hundreds of others in Blackwater USA have been given a license to kill innocent Iraqis and American soldiers. Because our media has been silent, Rumsfeld’s announcement that 2.3 trillion dollars was missing on 9/10/2001 was ignored and never re-examined. Because the American people have been pre-occupied with Playstation games and reality shows, it is up to individuals to spread the truth. Individuals with any knowledge of the lies and deception that have occurred and claimed so many innocent people’s lives must come forward now before it is too late. We the people have to rebuff the crimes of Washington or we are all complacent in a war without end.