In an interview which aired on PBS' Now with Bill Moyers this week, Seymour Hersh relayed the story of how, following a 2001 battle near the Afghan town of Kunduz, the "cream of the crop of Al Qaeda" were allowed to escape into Pakistan with Donald Rumsfeld's authorization. Hersh first wrote about this in a January 2002 New Yorker article.
"America was never innocent. We popped our cherry on the boat over and looked back with no regrets. You can't ascribe our fall from grace to any single event or set of circumstances. You can't lose what you lacked at conception.
"Mass-market nostalgia gets you hopped up for a past that never existed. Hagiography sanctifies shuck-and-jive politicians and reinvents their expedient gestures as moments of great moral weight. Our continuing narrative line is blurred past truth and hindsight. Only a reckless verisimilitude can set that line straight."
--James Ellroy, American Tabloid
Ensure a Free and Fair Election (Ban Paperless Voting Machines
"The basic tool for the manipulation of reality is the manipulation of words. If you can control the meaning of words, you can control the people who must use the words."