As I have stated before, I wish to use this column to bring up discussion about the significance of international events. I still hold to my previous statements that generally we in the United States are completely ignorant of the world around us, especially when compared to countries in Europe and Asia that, unlike us, have to deal with foreigners regularly. While we are all personally accountable for our own interest in what goes on around us, we are by no means encouraged by anything in our society to give significant weight to events that happen outside of our own country.

A professor I had here at OU made the important and overlooked observation that not only do the media in our country deliver us information, but thatthey doas much or more to set the agenda for national discussions. The importance of an issue is judged by how much a specific story gets covered. So when the national news networks decide to cover Michael Jackson or Scott Peterson 24/7 and give a thirty second blip about the diplomatic outreaches by the Palestinian Leadership towards Iran and Russia, what are you and I supposed to think matters more? You have the New York Times, one of the most respected news sources in the country, publishing a small article about the U.S. Military abandoning its search for weapons of mass destruction in the last three quarters of its news section. Seeing as how this was the original justification for the war in Iraq, and the fact that WMDs were not found, I would think that the implications that this would have for our world reputation would be of more importance than page A17.

The news sources in this country are content to read press releases by foreign governments and accept them as fact. The lack of investigative reporting in this country is astounding to me, although I suppose that it could be traced to our education system. Our schools generally teach from the pulpit. By that I mean that it is a rare teacher that encourages open discussion and outright questioning of the material that is taught. We are required to accept what we learn as the only fact out there, and unfortunately too many people do. Either way it is a reciprocating cycle: the news sources do not care to investigate the legitimacy of these manufactured stories, and we believe that what they report is undeniably accurate.

Take for example the long held conspiracy that the depleted uranium used by the U.S. Military in its anti-tank rounds has caused harmful radioactive contamination of numerous locations throughout Iraq and the Balkans. And what did our mainstream media do with this: it described the story as produced by the conspirators, and then proclaimed our government's denial and assured us that the story was indeed a conspiracy theory. The Guerrilla News Network, an independent news source, did its own investigations in Iraq that seem to favor the view that the uranium has indeed created unsafe levels of radiation. Maybe or maybe not, but the fact is that Guerrilla News went to Iraq with a Geiger Counter of their own and did interviews with Iraqi doctors in Iraqi hospitals and viewed medical records. Whether or not their information is one-hundred percent correct or not, it shows a lot more of initiative that our glorified mainstream news sources. It just shows the lack effort put out by most major news networks, especially considering the implications for the United States if it is actually true that we are using radiation in conventional warfare.

This lack of initiative extends to our governments foreign services; the very people who are supposed to protect us from the dangers that the world holds. For the last decade and a half the CIAs clandestine operations (thats the one that recruits foreign agents) has been declining in terms of reliable and useful information output. In his book See No Evil, Robert Baer clearly depicts this from the point of view of a paid CIA case officer in the 1980s and mid-1990s. He suggests that the agency has given up on the recruitment of foreign assets in favor of instantaneous electronic reconnaissance such as satellite photography and imagery. No one gets hurt, no money has to be paid to human sources that can lie, but more importantly the case officers job becomes much easier. On a side note, it was not a lack of satellite imagery that kept the United States from making what could have been a series of successful missile attacks on Osama bin Laden during the 1990s, it was the lack of a source on the ground to verify the accuracy of the photographs. It also says something that as of 2000, we had no paid agents operating within the higher levels of the Al Qaeda network, leaving us out in the dark about their future plans. To reiterate, the CIA and other government agencies designed to protect us have favored making their job safer and easier rather than actually doing the work that agencies were intended to perform: risking lives in the acquisition of intelligence information that could be of vital importance to the national security of the United States.

What do I think? I think that the way we as Americans operate as a society has seriously undermined our ability and interest to pursue information collection, especially from places other than the United States. As a people we are educated to accept what we hear from authority figures as fact and move on, lesson learned, no questions asked. Unfortunately that same attitude has been adapted by the very organizations that are supposed to be informing us of what is important and how our international policy should be organized. Our mainstream media takes official press releases by our government, adds a few paragraphs of background to them, and then regurgitates them to us as if we are baby birds being fed. To me it is repulsive; you were hired to be journalists, and no offense to any journalism majors out there, but if all you do as a journalist is rewrite things that are already written and assign them importance as you see fit, then I dont understand why you have to go to school for that. We need journalists who will research a story on their own, go someplace and talk to the same people the government talked to, and cross reference facts. But that might be too much work for our culture. The fact that the CIA was often criticized by the Clinton Administration as being a slightly more up-to-date CNN is even more shocking. An agency that was designed to operate behind the enemys back to discover secrets is now content to spy from above and read embassy reports from foreign governments.

The sad fact of the matter is that at the current rate that our news gathering sources are degrading, I will be able to do their job from my computer at home before too long. What I cannot do is what they should be doing: going around the globe and actually visiting the places that they are reporting about, talk to the real people there and get to the bottom of things. As for the CIA, I only hope that the bleak picture painted by Robert Baer is an exaggeration, and if it is not, that the agency is seriously rethinking how it does business. Perhaps more disappointing to me, as someone who is neither a journalist nor a CIA employee, is the fact that we let it pass. Does our thirst for knowledge so abruptly end on Santa Monica Blvd.? I hope not, but if it does, then this system will never change. Like most things in a free society, until we decide that we are tired of being spoon fed, it will continue to be shoveled down our throats.

I know I dont want to take it anymore.Aaron Dyer is a mechanical engineering sophomore who loves to dream. He enjoys reading about current foreign events and intelligence collection.
hello there & you too