represent the kind of documentary evidence after which trial lawyers, intelligence analysts--and serious investigative journalists--lust.

Though the unauthorized disclosure did not come early enough to head off the war, which had started more than two years before the document surfaced, the unique disclosure could have thrown some harsh light on the war's origins--if the Fawning Corporate Media in the United States did its job.

However, having been acrobatic cheerleaders for war on Iraq, the FCM did its level best to suppress this documentary evidence of the war's fraudulent character.

McGovern recalls U.S. Representative John Conyers' "temporary fit of courage" in scheduling a June 16, 2005 "hearing" on the documents "in the only space the Republican majority would make available--a basement room under the Capitol." McGovern's description of the U.S. press response indicates as much about independent reporters' value as it does about corporate media perniciousness:

On the morning before the hearing, Amy Goodman invited Conyers and me to be interviewed on Democracy Now!. Just before the interview, I had a chance to look at the editorial page of Pravda, er, I mean the Washington Post, for that morning, and guess what? The Post saw fit to mention the Downing Street Minutes, though dismissively so as not to tarnish the newspaper’s glorious cheerleading for war.

Listen to the After Downing Street founder on FAIR's radio show CounterSpin: "David Swanson on Healthcare Reform" (7/24/09).

But for most people, the primary source of their information is the mainstream. It is mainly television. Even the Internet, for all its subversiveness, is still a very large component of the mainstream. And that means we're getting still this singular message about wars, about the economy, about all those things that touch our lives. All we are getting is what I would call a contrived silence, a censorship by omission. I think this is almost the principal issue of today, because without information, we cannot possibly begin to influence government. We cannot possibly begin to end the wars.

All of this, it seems to me, has come together in the presidency of Barack Obama, who is almost a creation of this media world. He promised some things, although most of them were more for us, and has delivered virtually the opposite. He started his own war in Pakistan. We see the events in Iran and Honduras as quite subtly, but very directly, influenced in the time-honored way by the Obama administration. And yet the Obama administration is still given this extraordinary benefit of the doubt by people, who in my view are influenced by the mainstream media.

Still, with all the non-corporate media available today, Pilger sees this as "a time when. I think, where either we are going to begin to understand how the media really works, or we're going to let that opportunity pass." For more views on what Pilger calls "almost a historic opportunity that we understand that the perception of our world is utterly distorted" by so-called "mainstream" news providers, listen to the latest FAIR radio show CounterSpin: "Jim Naureckas on the Future of Journalism" (7/10/09).

In Goodman's program, as well as in her column and the three bestselling books she has co-authored with her brother, David Goodman, she also accuses the mainstream media of dangerous laziness in its reliance on so-called "pundits."

"We need to bring out the voices of people who think outside the box, [and include] creative thinkers, [and] people at the grassroots, who know exactly what they're talking about, because they've experienced policy in a very real way," she says. "These are the stories we have to tell until they can tell their own."

The great disparity between complicit corporate reportage and Democracy Now!'s invaluable muckraking is boiled down to one crucial observation: "The media's job is 'to serve democratic society,' she adds 'not to win a popularity contest.'" Listen to the FAIR radio show CounterSpin: "Amy Goodman on The Exception to the Rulers" (5/21/04).

In February of this year, about a month after Obama was inaugurated, there were 16 prisoners on a hunger strike at Guantánamo. The ...Immediate Reaction Force was used to go in and violently shove massive tubes down their noses into their stomachs.... They would use no anesthetics or any painkillers, shove this massive tube by force down their nose into their stomach and then yank it out. Some prisoners have described this as torture, torture, torture. And many have passed out from the sheer pain of this operation.

When Scahill mentions that "this force has received almost no scrutiny in the U.S. Congress or the U.S. media and operates at this moment," Goodman wonders, "How do you know about this?" It turns out Scahill used a little-known tactic called "reporting": "I discovered these teams, because I've been covering the investigation being done by Judge Baltasar Garzón in Spain into the Bush torture system":

And yet, the only time when it's really made any kind of a flash in the corporate media was when a U.S. soldier, a young guy named Sean Baker... was ordered, he says, by his superiors to dress up in an orange jumpsuit and play the part of a restive or combative detainee at Guantánamo. He was told that the team that was going to come in to handle him knew that he was a U.S. soldier, knew that it was a training drill, and he was given a word, a codeword, "red," that when he said it, the beating was supposed to stop.... He describes them just mercilessly beating him, and he's yelling out "Red!" and they continue to beat him, even after he then said, "I'm a U.S. soldier! I'm a U.S. soldier!"

And the fate of not-even-real-prisoner Baker?--he "has permanent brain damage, suffers from multiple seizures, and had actually sued Rumsfeld and other officials because of his treatment."