I just read the article in Rolling Stone on Gulliani and how he is basically bush the 2nd. Hired a lot of his people, has the same attitude (slamming Paul over his comment that comments without a clear understanding of why he said them).

Anyways, the author made the comment about some incident in Gulliani's history where at first glance it appeared he went above the call of duty to solve a situation, but at second glance, he really didn't do anything at all. The author's comment was all those who trumped Gulliani after that exhibited the American tendency to not bother to get the full story. Basing their opinion on partial analysis.

>Yeah, Katie Couric might miss it <s> and Michael Moore might not do an expose and it might not be in People ( People who need People are the yuckiest people in the world <g> )
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>Maybe not Don Imus, maybe not Howard Stern, and as to the Blogosphere - well, depends on the blogger i guess.
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>But Foreign Affairs, Jane's Intelligence Review etc, authors like Steven Emerson, Robert Kagan ... yeah, word would get out. <s> That is not to say every intelligence operation is matter of public knowledge ( unless it was something really important like the fact we could tap BinLaden's satellite phone which the NYT and others felt fell within the purview of the Public's Right to Know ) but the fact that a buddy of ours is a ruthless dictator generally gets around.
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>Remember the "Secret War" in Laos? We dropped more bombs on Laos than we did on Germany in WWII. Not a well kept 'secret' but a lot of the American public found out sometime around halfway through the OJ Simpson trial ...
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>Even when stuff comes out on TV (Iran Contra comes to mind) the desire of the public to know much about the backstory - or the abilty to put it in any context - is pretty limited ( fair enough, too, people have their own lives to live ) But it was interesting to see people like Secord, Singlaub, Felix Rodriguez etc testifying on TV without anyone really commenting much on exactly who they were <g>
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>I think the problem is context. Without much knowledge of history it is hard to interpret even information in the public domain in a way that has much meaning. Just too much info to process, even for people who want to.
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>>So then rather then being "covered up", it was a circumstnce of not getting covered on the nightly news. And incidents like that would stand to get covered far more in the blogsphere, if nothing else, today?
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>>>>I was not aware that dicatators in Indonesia and S. Korea committed atrocities against their own people under the watchful eye of the US govt and nothing was done because the dictator was considered such an important cog in the fight against communism.
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>>>But that is not because it was "covered up" Everyone who cared about it knew about it. Indifference is not the same as being the victim of a conspiracy to suppress knowledge.