The Persecution of Truth-Tellers Ch. IV
America's most Prolific Truth-Teller
This is part 4 of an ongoing series, not sure how long I’ll carry it, maybe till ever, if I run out of persecution to talk about however, maybe the world is heading in the right direction, but as of now the number is not finite, more are being persecuted every day, as long as there are those that keep telling the truth. If you would like to read the other parts and catch up, they are here, here, and here. Thank you for your time.
“In times of deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act…” -George Orwell
Orwell’s time was absolutely, a time of deceit. We live today, in a time of deceit. This generation has been, entirely, a time of deceit, as was Orwell’s or today’s subject, Chris Hedges.
To say Chris Hedges is an Activist would hold activism to such a high standard, one that activism alone could never live up to. Or that he is an Author, Storyteller, Journalist, Truth-Teller, Professor, Chris Hedges changes people’s lives for a better. He taught U.S. History following the “People’s History of the United States” by Howard Zinn, to New Jersey Prisoners, and taught them the truth that had been suppressed in school. He reported on the war crimes and torture of innocents by Saddam Hussein in the 80’s, and he tried to warn us of the lying deceitful war drums beating before and post-9/11, on our way into Iraq, the War currently being waged in Ukraine, Gaza, and the proxy involvement America is currently waste deep in. To this day, He is speaking out for his friend Julian Assange, as we should all be for No one is free, when others are oppressed, Chris Hedges is not any of these things, he is ALL of these things. Chris Hedges is a Revolutionary and I believe history will tell him to be, if justice exists in any capacity, the Most Revolutionary Truth-Teller to ever live, we should only wish to be as great as him. Julian Assange, as we speak is awaiting his final judgement on extradition to these murderous America’s where 3 administrations in a row has been, not just seeking his prosecution, but planning his kidnapping and assassination for the embarrassment that he subjected them to for simply committing the Crime of Journalism and Chris is there, holding event after event, speaking out for his friend. Even after being censored out of existence, He continues to rise, and tell the truth, and be that bulwark against the oppressors anywhere oppression may be. Chris has dedicated his life to the Revolutionary Act of telling the Truth that Orwell speaks of.
Chris was born September 18, 1956, I am including that to say that he shares a Birthday with my father who passed away in 2011, from rough life living and not taking care of his health, but my father with his shortcomings was the Greatest man I ever met. Must’ve been the Birthday, it seems Chris Hedges is the Greatest man I never met.
Chris’ persecution started early, he was put on probation during his time at the boarding school Loomis-Chaffee for starting an underground newspaper which was banned, although I couldn’t find out the details of the ban, based on the rest of his career I can only imagine it was good. Damn I wish I could find that newspaper, lol.
Hedges graduated from Colgate University with a BA in English Literature and went on to receive a Master of Divinity (MDiv) from Harvard University. During his time at Harvard he lived in the depressed community of Roxbury in Boston where he ran a small church. And was a member of the YMCA Boxing Team where due the crime and economic hardship was the only place, he felt safe.
He’s written 15 books, each one revolutionary in its own, I am linking each one to the Amazon link in case you want to buy one or read about the book, you can’t pick up one of these books without learning something:
2005: Losing Moses on the Freeway: The 10 Commandments in America
2007: American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America
2008: Collateral Damage: America's War Against Iraqi Civilians, with Laila Al-Arian
2009: Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle
2010: The World As It Is: Dispatches on the Myth of Human Progress
2012: Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt, with Joe Sacco
2016: Unspeakable, with the Great David Talbot
2021: Our Class: Trauma and Transformation in an American Prison
2022: The Greatest Evil is War
All excellent and all hated by the, shall we say, rent-seeking elites.
Chris was a scholarship student; his parents couldn’t put him through college, so he had to work hard to stand out, and stand out, he did. After receiving a BA in English Literature from Colgate, and a Master of Divinity (MDiv) from Harvard University, Hedges became a Freelance Journalist. Chris talks about that time in the intro to his show The Chris Hedges Report, in an episode with Robert Cox, a fellow Journalist:
In the fall of 1980, I was a second-year student at Harvard divinity school. I intended, like my father, to become a Presbyterian Minister, but I was by nature a writer and a news junkie, who devoured at least two newspapers a day and had already published freelance articles in papers such as the Christian science Monitor. I could not, however, reconcile the Social Activism of my father who was involved in the Vietnam Anti-War Movement and the Civil Rights Movement with the supposed neutrality and objectivity demanded by American Journalism, it was then that I met Robert Cox, the former editor of the Buenos Aires Herald, who was a Neiman Fellow for the year at Harvard. Bob had reported on the crimes of the dirty war in Argentina which saw some thirty-thousand Argentines “disappeared” by military death squads in the late 1970s and early 1980s, the victims were held in secret prisons, savagely tortured, and murdered. Many families to this day do not know the fate of their sons, daughters, siblings, and spouses. Bob received frequent death threats, in a climate where some 60 Argentine Journalists were also kidnapped, by the military, and “disappeared”. He fatally accepted that he too would be killed, which he said, “gave him a strange kind of comfort”, and continued to doggedly persist in making public the names of those who had disappeared, and the anguish of their families. In his example, I saw that journalism did not have to be divorced from morality, that while the truth was always paramount, and should never be twisted to serve one side or another, we have an obligation as journalists to give a voice to the vulnerable. Especially, those who are being silenced, and persecuted by the powerful.
I took a leave from Divinity School to study Spanish at the language school, run by the Marinol Society in Bolivia, and report on the heinous dictatorships in Latin America. I covered the Falkland War from Buenos Aires for NPR, and then after returning to get my degree from Harvard left for El Salvador, where I would spend the next five-years reporting on the conflicts in Central America. The last piece of Sage advice Bob gave me before I left for Bolivia, was to take with me the four-volumes of “George Orwell's Collected Essays, Journalism and, Letters” which became my secular bible.
Later on in that episode they talk of an incident where a Tex Harris saved Chris’ career from destruction by the powerful, applying pressure on the editors of the Christian Science Monitor:
Reagan wanted to go on selling arms to Argentina, I just have to say that Tex Harris saved my career, you probably don't know that, well I didn't know he was a man of, of course great moral probity, and courage, and uh, there was a war in the Reagan Administration against reporters, who were covering and writing, about the atrocities committed by the military in El Salvador, and they framed me, accusing me of falsifying a story, and did a pretty good job of convincing. I was writing for the Christian Science Monitor at the time, the editors that, that story was falsified and suddenly, the foreign editor got a call from a guy named Tex Harris, and he explained, who he was and, “I want to”, he said, “I want to tell you, everything your reporter wrote is true, and there, this is a campaign to crush him and stop his reporting” and it absolutely saved my career. I was a young Freelance Journalist.
Hedges continued his career as a freelance journalist in Latin America. From 1983 to 1984, he covered the conflicts in El Salvador, Nicaragua and Guatemala for The Christian Science Monitor and NPR. He was hired as the Central America Bureau Chief for The Dallas Morning News in 1984 and held this position until 1988. Noam Chomsky wrote of Hedges at the time that he was one of the "few US journalists in Central America who merit the title."
In one of his early stories for the paper he tracked down Robert Manning in the settlement of Kiryat Arba in the Israeli-occupied West Bank. Manning, linked to the militant Jewish Defense League and allegedly behind several murders including the 1985 bombing death in California of Alex Odeh, was extradited to the United States in 1991 where he is serving a life sentence for a separate bombing incident.
In 1988, Chris took some time off to study Arabic, which from what I understand would be a difference in life and death for the coming decade for Chris. More on that soon.
Hedges was hired by The New York Times in 1990. He covered the first Gulf War for the paper, where he refused to participate in the military pool system, The Pool System is pretty crazy, the military picks what journalists are allowed in, they do the reporting, and the other Journalists report, what the selected reporters, reported, you can see how that might raise some eyebrows. Basically, the Military can pick people who will report their propaganda correctly so they can control the narrative, and anyone who disputes whether our Military would do that, need not look any farther than, Vietnam, Afghanistan, or practically every war we’ve been involved in. The officials back home think the effort is going great, based on what’s being reported back to them, when what’s really happening is the war is failing, as wars often do. He was arrested by the U.S. military and had his press credentials revoked but continued to defy the military restrictions to report outside the pool system.
Here Chris describes being kidnapped, and possibly his learning Arabic, saving his life:
In March of 1991, I was in Basra, Iraq during the Shiite uprising as a reporter for The New York Times. I had entered Kuwait with the Marine Corps and then left them behind to cover the fighting in Basra. I was taken prisoner by the Iraqi Republican Guard, who in the chaos – whole army units had defected to join the rebels – had ripped their distinguishing patches off their uniforms so as not to be identified with the regime of Saddam Hussein. I was studiously polite, because of Omar, with my interrogators. I swiftly struck up conversations with my guards. My facility in Arabic rendered me human. And when I ran out of things to say I told the long, shaggy dog jokes taught to me by Omar. Perhaps it was my accented Arabic, but my guards found these jokes unfailingly amusing.
Hedges was appointed the paper’s Middle East Bureau Chief in 1991. His reporting on the atrocities committed by Saddam Hussein in the Kurdish-held parts of northern Iraq saw the Iraqi leader offer a bounty for anyone who killed him, along with other western journalists and aid workers in the region. Several aid workers and journalists, including the German reporter Lissy Schmidt, were assassinated, and others were severely wounded.
In 1995, Hedges became the Balkan Bureau Chief for The New York Times reporting from the besieged city of Sarajevo. In his first book, War is a Force that Gives Us Meaning, the book opens with a description of Sarajevo, in which Chris says:
SARAJEVO IN THE SUMMER OF 1995 CAME CLOSE TO Dante’s inner circle of hell. The city, surrounded by Serb gunners on the heights above, was subjected to hundreds of shells a day, all crashing into an area twice the size of Central Park. Ninety-millimeter tank rounds and blasts fired from huge 155-millimeter howitzers set up a deadly rhythm of detonations. Multiple Katyusha rockets—whooshing overhead—burst in rapid succession; they could take down a four- or five-story apartment building in seconds, killing or wounding everyone inside. There was no running water or electricity and little to eat; most people were subsisting on a bowl of soup a day. It was possible to enter the besieged city only by driving down a dirt track on Mount Igman, one stretch directly in the line of Serb fire. The vehicles that had failed to make it lay twisted and upended in the ravine below, at times with the charred remains of their human cargo inside.
Families lived huddled in basements, and mothers, who had to make a mad dash to the common water taps set up by the United Nations, faced an excruciating choice—whether to run through the streets with their children or leave them in a building that might be rubble when they returned.
A couple paragraphs later he describes his trajectory:
War and conflict have marked most of my adult life. I began covering insurgencies in El Salvador, where I spent five years, then went on to Guatemala and Nicaragua and Colombia, through the first intifada in the West Bank and Gaza, the civil war in the Sudan and Yemen, the uprisings in Algeria and the Punjab, the fall of the Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceauşescu, the Gulf War, the Kurdish rebellion in southeast Turkey and northern Iraq, the war in Bosnia, and finally to Kosovo. I have been in ambushes on desolate stretches of Central American roads, shot at in the marshes of southern Iraq, imprisoned in the Sudan, beaten by Saudi military police, deported from Libya and Iran, captured and held for a week by Iraqi Republican Guard during the Shiite rebellion following the Gulf War, strafed by Russian Mig–21s in Bosnia, fired upon by Serb snipers, and shelled for days in Sarajevo with deafening rounds of heavy artillery that threw out thousands of deadly bits of iron fragments. I have seen too much of violent death. I have tasted too much of my own fear. I have painful memories that lie buried and untouched most of the time. It is never easy when they surface.
That explained better in a paragraph than what i said above it, in 1,000 words.
Censorship in the U..S..A..U..S..A..U..S..A…
If you take the time to watch this, it is unbelievable and a perfect model of the world after 9/11. Chris, who by this time has been reporting on terrorism committed by Al Qaeda while stationed in Paris. Being Arabic speaking, and spending most of the 90s in the Middle East, 9/11 was no surprise, Alex Jones seen it coming from Texas, so there’s no doubt Chris could hear the war-drums beating. He spoke about it at every opportunity. Here he again, in Unspeakable:
But before all that, you’re part of the team that covers 9/11?
Yeah, I reported from cities such as Paterson, New Jersey where six of the hijackers had been living. Then I was sent to Paris to cover Al Qaeda in Europe and the Middle East.
And you’re finding out that the facts on the ground don’t go along with the emerging Bush-Cheney story line, that Saddam Hussein was behind 9/11.
The French government was apoplectic about the Bush administration’s decision to invade Iraq. It made no sense to them. They knew Iraq had nothing to do with the attacks, that its army and military was severely degraded. Iraq was not a threat to its neighbors, much less to Europe and the United States. It did not have weapons of mass destruction!
After the incident in the video above, if you didn’t watch it, Chris spoke for 22-minutes, in which he gives a scathing take down of the current invasion that was taking place, and if you listen to his words you realize, he knows what the fuck he’s talking about. Even looking back on this moment historically, he gets it. It’s infuriating to watch, that these fucking brats should be so lucky, and what do they do? They shout him down. They chant “U S A U S A….” They were propagandized, he tried to warn them, they got him off campus so fast he didn’t have time to get his jacket. What followed was persecution, all the Right-wing outlets, and not just them, just about every media outlet at this time was war crazy, ready to kill, kill, kill. Even his own the NYT, with Judith Miller they led the invasion, with false reporting on Saddam and his underlings, “purchasing random parts to make nukes” and “Yellow Cake” which is a Uranium deposit that looks like the name and is a must in making the bombs.
After just a year before, receiving the Pulitzer Prize for Exploratory Reporting on the terrorist attacks committed post-9/11, they are now telling him he can no longer report on the war, they issued him a formal reprimand for "public remarks that could undermine public trust in the paper's impartiality". Hedges cited this reprimand as a motivation for resigning from the Times in 2005. People who tell the truth are not meant for the “Times” anyways, the pushing out of Chris Hedges was another notch in the bedpost of corporatism. They are corporate media, a state apparatus for, as Chomsky called it “Manufacturing Consent”. If you read about Hersh’s time there, they were afraid EVERY TIME he released a story, and were TERRIFIED to talk about Watergate until it was almost at its end. Not to mention, Michael Malice talks about this in his book “The White Pill”, when there was starvation and famine in the Soviet Union the New York Times was saying things like, RUSSIANS HUNGRY, BUT NOT STARVING;……Russians and Foreign Observers In Country See No Ground for Predictions of Disaster. This was during the Holodomor, when Ukrainian children were in the streets, dying of starvation. He was quite literally, too good for them anyways. Chris says of the NYT in his book, Unspeakable:
like me now. The New York Times is primarily populated by careerists. They do journalism on the side. The careerists always get you in the end
Post-New York Times
After NYT Chris didn’t lay down, or retire. I’m sure he could have, but he was just getting started and so were they. It seems he used his perspective and wisdom, gained over the decades, Chris Hedges did what he had been doing for the last three decades. Searching for truth in a decaying world, advocating for peace and human rights, challenging the war happy ruling class. And they were not done with him yet.
Hedges has worked for a decade teaching writing classes in prisons in New Jersey through a program offered by Princeton University and later Rutgers University. A class that Hedges taught at East Jersey State Prison in 2013 went on to collaborate in the creation of a play titled Caged. Hedges has become a fierce critic of mass incarceration in the United States, and his experience as an educator in New Jersey prisons served as inspiration for his 2021 book, Our Class: Trauma and Transformation in an American Prison.
Hedges was active in 2011 Occupy Wall Street. He and Cornel West held a People's Hearing of Goldman Sachs that culminated with a march on Goldman Sachs where Hedges and other activists were arrested.
In 2012, after the Obama Administration signed the National Defense Authorization Act, or NDAA, Hedges sued members of the U.S. government, asserting that section 2021 of the law unconstitutionally allowed presidential authority for indefinite detention without habeas corpus. He was later joined in the suit, Hedges v. Obama, by activists including Noam Chomsky and Daniel Ellsberg. In May 2012 Judge Katherine B. Forrest of the Southern District of New York ruled that the counter-terrorism provision of the NDAA is unconstitutional. The Obama administration appealed the decision, and it was overturned. Hedges petitioned the U.S. Supreme Court to hear the case, but the Supreme Court denied certiorari in April 2014.
Hedges became a senior fellow at the Type Media Center and a columnist for Truthdig, where he remained until 2020.
On March 11, 2020, nine employees of Truthdig signed a statement announcing a work stoppage to protest what they described as "unfair labor conditions and the effort by the publisher, Zuade Kaufman, to remove the site's founding Editor-in-Chief and co-owner Robert Scheer". On March 27, 2020 Kaufman responded in an open letter that attributed the matter to "negotiations to end the business partnership" between her and Scheer. On March 25, 2020 Truthdig employees received emails they characterized as "Truthdig LLC was being dissolved and that our positions at the publication had been terminated". According to the full statement, 15 employees would be affected. The "Truthdig" website concomitantly posted an announcement that "Truthdig" was "going on a hiatus”.
Hedges produced a weekly column in Truthdig for 14 years. He was fired along with all of the editorial staff in March 2020. Hedges and the staff had gone on strike earlier in the month to protest the publisher's attempt to fire the Editor-in-Chief Robert Scheer, demand an end to a series of unfair labor practices and the right to form a union. Hedges resumed work with Scheer after the launch of Scheerpost.
While doing research on this piece, I received this from Bing:
Content Shift?:
Some users have noticed a shift in content on Scheerpost, including pro-China content and a focus on blaming NATO for the war in Ukraine.
Chris Hedges, another prominent journalist, resumed work with Scheerpost after leaving Truthdig3
It was quite hilarious how blatant that is:
a focus on blaming NATO for the war in Ukraine.
Anyway, they tried to get rid of Robert Scheer, who I will have to do some research on, and maybe one of these pieces on. Chris wasn’t having that shit, they moved to protest, and instead of the Truthdig guy working shit out, he shut it down. Really shows what kind of “stand-up guy” we were dealing with there. And go figure, BING, owned by MICROSOFT, is criticizing the ‘Scheerpost’ for criticizing NATO, a military alliance that takes all of our tax money, Wages war around the world, with OUR children flipping the bill, and the blood of OUR people at risk of war, It’s NOT Putin that’s trying to conquer Europe, it’s NATO. Lusting for Empire, long since gone. They don’t want to conquer Europe, they want the whole world in the palm of their little hands. If you don’t believe that, just watch the way they move, look at how many of there minions and mouthpieces come out of the wood work, outraged, when someone tries to expose the truth. When someone tries to talk to Putin, why is intelligence so worried about what he’s gonna say? Or Donald Trump, why do I have to point out first that I don’t like the guy because I can’t get over the ‘Central Park Five’ debacle before I say, Why are they so terrified of what this guy will say? It’s fine when he lies, but telling the truth????
One of Chris’ many accolades is, or was his show ‘ON Contact’, which was an Emmy Nominated show on the channel Russia Today, or RT. When I first learned of his show being deleted into oblivion, post-invasion of Ukraine by Russia, I thought, What the Fuck is RT? And being very familiar with Chris’ material, I thought, Why the fuck is Chris Hedges on Russia Today? I know for a fact that Chris opposes the illegal invasion by Putin, so what gives. Then I realized Abby Martin, Jesse Ventura, and many other voices in the Anti-War movement were also there, Matt Taibbi explained it very well in his series, Meet the Censored, with Chris as the feature:
By the 2010s, one of the last places where media figures pushed off the traditional career track could pick up a paycheck was Russia Today. In an arrangement Hedges plainly describes as a cynical marriage of convenience, the Russian state was happy to give voice to figures covering structural problems in American society, and those quasi-banned voices were glad for the opportunity to broadcast what they felt is the truth, even understanding the editorial motivation. Hedges ended up working at RT for six years hosting On Contact, where he interviewed authors and thinkers resting outside the cultural mainstream, from Nathaniel Philbrick to Cornel West to Nils Melzer to Noam Chomsky to many others (disclosure: I’ve also been a guest).
Chris, although critical of practically every war since Vietnam, after six years of work, an Emmy nomination, and thousands of hours of knowledge, packed into this show, they simply clicked delete. Thats what they would like to do with us all, thats what they would like to do with Chris, and anyone else looking for the truth. They want to click DELETE, In conversation with Matt, Chris said this is what is expected:
MT: What happened with YouTube?
Chris Hedges: My entire archive of shows from On Contact was taken down. I was in London last week for Julian Assange — I was supposed to be a guest at the wedding, but then, the prison didn’t let me in of course. When I came back, I got a text from a friend of mine, with whom I’d done a half hour show, about a girlfriend who’d overdosed on fentanyl. And because I knew him, my interview with him is quite a powerful segment. And he said, the show doesn’t exist anymore. Then I checked, and nothing exists.
The RT On Contact website is still up, but everything on YouTube is gone, and people watched it on YouTube. Some of that stuff had hundreds of thousands of views.MT: This two-step process feels like a backdoor way of getting rid of unorthodox voices. In other words, weren’t you on RT in the first place because you’d been bounced out for opposing the war in Iraq? Now, because of your association with RT, you’re off YouTube. Is this a way to get at, not just people connected with Russians, but people with unpopular views generally?
Chris Hedges: Yeah. That’s how it works. They push you to the margins and then, they demonize those spaces on the margins. This has long been the habit of the dominant ruling elites. So for instance, Robert Scheer, whose website I write for, Scheerpost — and of course, we were all fired from Truthdig, this is just a never ending saga — but he ran Ramparts. I think it was Spiro Agnew said, “It’s a magazine with a bomb in every issue.” We could never get advertisers.
So they push you into a space that they then demonize, and then use it as an excuse to shut you down. But they’ve already in essence created the space in which you exist.
I have a couple strikes against me. One, I was pushed out of the New York Times, because I spent so many years in the Middle East, and many years in Gaza. And of course, I was the Middle East Bureau Chief for the New York Times. I’m very outspoken about Israel, and I’m a very strong supporter of the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement. Which alone is enough — I just saw my friend, Cornel West, denied tenure at Harvard over this. And I’m also a fierce critic, as you are, of the Democratic party. Those are all flags that will get you locked out of even the quote- unquote “liberal media” like MSNBC.MT: This freeze-out led to your tenure at RT?
Chris Hedges: I’d been marginalized for a long time because of those issues. RT gave me space, and I took it. But it wasn’t a show about Russia. We never did a show on Russia. The irony is that, in fact, the very few times Putin was mentioned, he was not described in flattering terms — it was as an autocrat. There was one show where Syria came up, and Russian war crimes. So there was nothing on the show, ever, that was in any way flattering to the Putin regime.
But the point of the show was, of course, critiquing and looking at our own society, and that was the problem.
It was a very wonky show. It was mostly about books. I was very conscientious about reading the books, because as a writer, I don’t like it when people interview me, and never read my books. The last few shows, it was Nathaniel Philbrick, on his book on Washington, Kai Bird, on his biography of Jimmy Carter, and then also, his brilliant biography of J. Robert Oppenheimer.
I did a show on the 100th anniversary of the publication of James Joyce’s Ulysses, with a Joyce scholar from Trinity College, Dublin. A biography of Susan Sontag, by Benjamin Moser. And then, very high powered, thoughtful, social critics Cornel West, Tariq Ali, Noam Chomsky, Wendy Brown from UCLA, Naomi Wolf, Slavoj Žižek. It was the kind of show that should have been on public broadcasting, if we had a functioning public broadcasting system. Probably run at like one in the morning, or something.
I used to work for NPR — covered the Falklands War for NPR, Buenos Aires. But of course, public broadcasting has been destroyed.
Currently Chris writes here on Substack, at The Chris Hedges Report, the last place left for Truth-Telling, until they sink their tentacles into us here too. And you can find him on Scheerpost Chris is currently as always speaking out against the genocide currently happening in Gaza, and the public torture being committed against his friend, and our hero, Julian Assange. They are the two biggest issues currently in the world, and he is the greatest advocate, I’ve already made this waaaaaaaay too long, so I shall end it here. If you don’t know about Gaza, turn on the news and assume it’s ALL a lie, they were lying three ago, as much if not more, than they do today:
You talked earlier about how you didn’t follow the pattern of Middle East bureau chiefs at the Times in how you covered Israel—can you explain that a bit more?
When I visited Israel [from the Times’ Cairo office], I lived in Gaza. In those days Gaza did not have a hotel. I lived in a run-down boarding house. Most reporters, especially Times reporters, didn’t want to go to Gaza. It was physically uncomfortable—I don’t know if it was that dangerous, but it wasn’t pleasant. The Times ran my stories almost always on the front page. They did not bury them. Most reporters drove down from Jerusalem, went through the Israeli checkpoint, stayed for a few hours to get the dateline and were home for dinner. They wrote canned stories, stories that had already been written in your head on the drive down from Jerusalem. This meant that the real stories rarely got out.
If the Israelis bombed Gaza, I’d go into the streets and count the bodies. The Israelis were furious. But what could they do? I was there. It blew a hole in the fiction they put out about surgical strikes.
So Israel’s official reports would minimize the casualties?
They lied. Constantly. They claimed not to target civilians while using their air force, tanks, naval gunships and heavy artillery to obliterate civilian neighborhoods. Their dishonesty is quite breathtaking.
Or get online and read The Chris Hedges Report, because no matter how many times he’s dragged through the mud, he has proven that he will keep getting up, and if you don’t know about Julian Assange, you should be ashamed! Not really, the news won’t mention him, but read Chris Hedges, or his wife Stella Assange, or check out Part II of the Persecution of Truth-Tellers, thank you for your time, and remember, you can lie forever, they love liars, no one who lies ever feels persecution, only the ones who tell the truth.
-Declaration of War Liberty.
Thank you. Any criticism?