Rewriting History

There are so many horror stories that arise out of the current US Administration that it's hard to be shocked anymore. And yet I am once again. It's readily apparent that history is being rewritten, especially with respect to Iraq. A recent Time article highlights a recent example of this.

On the morning of Nov. 19, 2005, a roadside bomb struck a humvee carrying Marines from Kilo Company, 3rd Battalion, 1st Marines, on a road near Haditha, a restive town in western Iraq. The bomb killed Lance Corporal Miguel (T.J.) Terrazas, 20, from El Paso, Texas. The next day a Marine communique from Camp Blue Diamond in Ramadi reported that Terrazas and 15 Iraqi civilians were killed by the blast and that "gunmen attacked the convoy with small-arms fire," prompting the Marines to return fire, killing eight insurgents and wounding one other.

[...]

In January, after Time presented military officials in Baghdad with the Iraqis' accounts of the Marines' actions, the U.S. opened its own investigation [and] acknowledged that, contrary to the military's initial report, the 15 civilians killed on Nov. 19 died at the hands of the Marines, not the insurgents.

[...]

According to Eman [Waleed, 9], the Marines then entered the living room. "I couldn't see their faces very well -—- only their guns sticking into the doorway. I watched them shoot my grandfather, first in the chest and then in the head. Then they killed my granny."

[...]

[Eman] still does not comprehend how, when her father went in to pray with the Koran for the family's safety, his prayers were not answered, as they had been so many times in the past. "He always prayed before, and the Americans left us alone," she says. Leaving, she grabs a handful of candy. "It's for my little brother," she says. "I have to take care of my brother. Nobody else is left."

[emphasis added]

That's the past. The present. What about tomorrow?

Hansen is arguably the world's leading researcher on global warming. He's the head of NASA's top institute studying the climate. But this imminent scientist tells correspondent Scott Pelley that the Bush administration is restricting who he can talk to and editing what he can say. Politicians, he says, are rewriting the science.

[...]

"In my more than three decades in the government I've never witnessed such restrictions on the ability of scientists to communicate with the public," says Hansen.

[...]

"If [a declining rate of growth of CO₂ emissions] doesn't happen in 10 years, then I don'’t think we can keep global warming under one degree Celsius and that means we'’re going to, that there's a great danger of passing some of these tipping points. If the ice sheets begin to disintegrate, what can you do about it? You can'’t tie a rope around the ice sheet. You can'’t build a wall around the ice sheets. It will be a situation that is out of our control."

But that's not a situation you'll find in one federal report submitted for review. Government scientists wanted to tell you about the ice sheets, but before a draft of the report left the White House, the paragraph on glacial melt and flooding was crossed out and this was added: "straying from research strategy into speculative findings and musings here."

It's one thing to rewrite history; an independent media would have to expose the lies for it to become public knowledge.

But to rewrite the future?

Now that's a new level of arrogance.