Tell Me No Lies

Pilger compiles 600 pages of the best investigative journalism since 1945, including his own riveting reports from Cambodia in the wake of the Khmer Rouge. It's a feast of great writing. But the selection is heavy on horror -- Hiroshima, My Lai, apartheid South Africa, Palestine, Chechnya, Iraq. Or else it deals with awkward realities, like "The American Way of Death" or "Fast Food Nation." This is not the more usual feel-good, patriotic, ego-boosting sort of journalism. Pilger honors journalists who uncover things most of us would rather not know, and that many power holders wish to keep secret. As we know, contributor Anna Politkovskaya was only one of many journalists recently eliminated for exposing such things.

While everyone is talking about integrity in our government, someone needs to look at the so-called "watch dogs" of government and how they became the fourth arm of government. Yes, the press. Tell Me No Lies, talks about a few rare journalists who told their stories and sometimes sacrificed a great deal as a result. The stories they tell are not pretty and shouldn't be read unless you are willing to believe them. Most of them have been told over and over, but people tend to forget them. They need to be read again so people are reminded. We already know the federal government is trying to take all the power from the legislative branch of the government and the legislative branch appears to be willing to hand it over to the executive branch irregardless of the long-range consequences. And in turn our Judicial Branch appears to be willing to politicize itself to the point it wants to allow the Executive Branch to have more power than it was ever intended to have. In other words, we are walking into a dictatorship. This book is a warning of what a democracy really is. It's a fragile balance between the three branches of government with a FREE PRESS that is not afraid to criticize, confront or tell the people of this country what in fact, the country is doing in the name of freedom when it kills people overseas in order to maintain its influence and keep "communism" out of areas when the threat was less real except in the minds of the politicians back here. Even the military that have to fight the wars speak up because they are there and are training thugs to do the dirty work to uphold dictators. This book tells it all. The relationship between Reagan and Thatcher, for instance, when Iran/Contra got hot and Reagan asked Thatcher to take over in Cambodia and the British soldiers did the bulk of the training of Pol Pot types while the United States was busy in Iran/Contra and then trying to get out of trouble for getting caught. It makes the reader really question whether or not this country really believes in democracy the way it really proclaims it does. Without a free press, there is no democracy. The press is as important to a democracy as is the right to vote or to assemble or to lobby our congresspeople or Senators, etc. Do not hand it over to corporations like we do everything else as in health care. It needs to be read by everyone, particularly in this country. But also in the United Kingdom, our "cousins" who share in our foreign policy dirty work.