Jeremy Scahill, who is the national security correspondent for The Nation magazine and author of Dirty Wars: The World Is A Battlefield will probably not remember but I met him once Minneapolis and we were able to speak for several minutes about his first book, Blackwater: The Rise of the World’s Most Powerful Mercenary Army [Revised and Updated]
. The book had taught me more about the lead up to the Iraq war and Rumsfeld’s version of adaptive war management than anything I read or saw in the mainstream news media and it helped me develop sources and tools for digging beneath the usual sound bytes. Scahill has once again exposed the mediocrity of what passes for mainstream journalism by piecing together public records and hundreds of interviews to provide a glimpse of a machine that is funded by the American taxpayer and expertly extracts money from the US Treasury and funnels it into the profit margins of government contractors and multinational corporations.

Without a real press we cannot have a healthy democracy or fully realize our individual right to the pursuit of life, liberty and happiness. The corporate national press has had some epic failures over the decades but I will mention one that, in particular, irks me because the public condones this failure by its own silence. While I know I am taking a gamble here and opening myself up for a whole new line of criticism I will freely admit that I am one of those that questions the official explanation of the 9/11 attacks. Not that I am willing to speculate about who orchestrated that event; I am not willing to suggest it was an inside job perpetrated by our own government, or the Isreali Mossad, or a get rich quick scheme by the owner Larry Silverstein, or aliens testing a new weapon or a combination of all the above. But as a scientist I do know that both towers and a few hours later, Building 7, each collapsed into its own footprint at free fall speed which means there was zero resistance from the floors below. I know that fires even jet fuel sparked fires are organic and do not burn evenly and could not have brought those buildings straight down and without resistance from the floors below. I know that there is documented evidence of military grade nano thermite explosives in the dust and the few remaining remnants of the towers that weren’t quickly whisked away to China. I know that many noted scientists, engineers and commercial demolition experts are convinced the World Trade Center was brought down by controlled demolition and have provided significant evidence contrary to the 9/11 Commission. Visit Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth for more information and watch this video about the collapse of Bldg 7. To me, the mother of a disabled Iraq combat veteran, the coverage of the 9/11 tragedy is an epic fail because the inaccuracies of the official report are so blatantly obvious and the cost to the America citizen and our military has been so exorbitantly high.

Thousands of everyday yet observant people find the official story that these three buildings are the first and only steel frame highrise structures to ever be brought down by fire to be so far fetched that it is hard to understand why the media will not dig deeper. Again I will not speculate, (publicly anyway), about who orchestrated that collapse of the World Trade Center buildings but I do know that the event was used, possibly as a false flag, to lead our nation to war with Iraq and to justify all the blood and treasure lost in the effort. The media never questioned the removal of forensic evidence from the biggest crime scene in America, the media simply repeated the official story despite acclaimed scientists, including members of the military and firemen and policemen on the scene whose eyewitness accounts differ from the sanctioned narrative. By trumpeting the press release as if it were news, the media, in my opinion, should very well be considered culpable and therefore liable for damages resulting from actions taken wherein the public have been misinformed or misled.

Without the work of independent journalists like Scahill and the grassroots efforts of organizations like A&E9/11 Truth and investigative sites like ProPublica.org many of the breaking stories we do learn about in the traditional media would never see the light of day. This is as true at the local level as it is at the national level and we have definitely seen it in Coos County where the local paper opts not to vet the press releases sent to it from the port, for example, and then chooses not to report on the falseness of the press release later.

Watch Scahill’s interviews with Democracy Now Part 1 and Part 2

Thankfully, across the country citizens who recognize how decisions made by a handful of well intentioned but not necessarily fully informed people can have devastating impacts on everyone’s lives and even, in the case of our military, whether they will live or die. Everyday I am grateful for the pieces of information collected and sent to me by concerned citizens who recognize the importance of government transparency and the danger of enabling secret cabals like those administering the local chamber.

As an interesting side note, Scahill utilized thousands of the cables released by Wikileaks and they are cited throughout his book as corroborating sources. What Scahill and his brethren do is heroic on a global scale but no more important than tackling public records roadblocks set by the Port and other municipal agencies at the local level. We need all the facts before we can make informed decisions that impact the lives of our neighbors and our children… for now, because we cannot rely on traditional media for the facts, we need a lot more independent journalists and bloggers to step up.