SNIP
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>>But the reason that I wrote is that, starting about now, we'll all have to be careful about believing what we see, hear and read. Truth is about to become secondary to "spin".
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>>JimN
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>I'm reminded of the days preceeding WWII, when the Japanese were 'negotiating' with the US State Department in Washington. The attack on Pearl Harbor was in the planning stage for over a year, and was in progress when the Japanese ambassador delivered their final 'negotation' position. Their pilots jumped the gun by about 30 minutes and that resulted in a loss of "face" by the Ambassador, not the attack itself.
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>Some folks, political organizations and governments have an agenda that is not nice. Sometimes that agenda includes the deliberate attacking and killing of innocent (in our eyes, not theirs) civilians. You can tell how evil it is by how they treat their own children. It has never been in America's tradition to consider children as military assets or targets, or mine sweepers. Even in times of war we don't give our children weapons and start training them to be 'warriors'.

Jerry,

No argument with what you've stated here.
I just want to remind of the features of war in more modern times (since 1990). In the gulf war there was only militarily sanctioned information getting out, in that case mainly because they severely restricted the movement of reporters and the cross-over between military personnel and reporters. We learned, much later, that most of the 'facts' about scud launches, patriot missile effectiveness, target hits, etc. were bogus.
In the Yugoslavian "action" we saw exiting Kosovo refugees repeatedly being asked/interpreted about what horror they had seen and they obliged. It later turned out that, while indeed there was horror, it was not in the instances or numbers as we were led to believe. And the NATO spokesmen misspoke more than once in non-trivial ways.

We, the average citizen, are now being 'conditioned' and once action begins we will be told only that which suits the purposes of our side's effort. I'm sure you realize this and just wanted to remind those who may have forgotten.