WOULD YOU REPORT A MURDER IF YOU WITNESSED ONE?

THIS IS A VERY SERIOUS QUESTION...
IF YOU SAW SOMEONE COMMIT MURDER, WOULD YOU REPORT IT?

WHAT IF THE MURDERER WAS A CONGRESSMAN, A POLICE OFFICER, OR A CORPORATE EXECUTIVE?

WHAT IF IT WAS YOUR PRIEST, PASTOR, RABBI, IMAM?

WHAT IF IT WAS YOUR CHILD OR ANOTHER FAMILY MEMBER WHO KILLED ANOTHER 'IN COLD BLOOD'?

WOULD YOU REPORT A MURDER IF YOU HAD VIDEO PROOF OF THE CRIME AND THAT VIDEO CLEARLY SHOWED WHO COMMITTED THAT CRIME?

WHAT IF THE MURDERER WAS SOMEONE WHOM NO ONE WOULD EVER BELIEVE HAD "DONE SUCH A HEINOUS THING", BUT YOU SAW IT HAPPEN AND YOU HAVE A VIDEO?

WHAT IF REVEALING THIS MURDER(ER) MIGHT JEOPARDIZE YOUR OWN LIFE, YOUR OWN FREEDOM TO LIVE LIFE AS YOU HAD PRIOR TO REVEALING BOTH THE CRIME AND THE PERPETRATOR?

PLEASE ANSWER HONESTLY. 

SUBSTITUTE THE WORD 'MURDER' WITH THE NAME OF ANY OTHER CRIME, ANY OTHER ACTION THAT BREAKS THE LAW.... FROM PETTY THEFT TO CYBER-CRIMES, OR, TAKING IT A STEP FURTHER, SUBSTITUTE 'CRIME' WITH SOMETHING LIKE BULLYING, VERBAL ABUSE, NEGLECT, ANY 'MORAL ISSUE' WE'VE PROBABLY ALL DEBATED WITH OTHERS OR WITHIN OUR  OWN CONSCIOUS. 

WOULD YOU 'RAT-OUT' A COWORKER WHOM YOU KNEW HAD STOLEN ANOTHER COWORKER'S IDEA, TAKEN CREDIT FOR ANOTHER'S WORK? 

WHERE WOULD YOU DRAW THE LINE AT WHO OR WHAT YOU WOULD REPORT, ESPECIALLY IF YOU WERE THE ONLY PARTY WHO WAS AN EYEWITNESS?

IF IT WAS LEFT UP TO YOU ALONE, WHETHER OR NOT YOU CAME FORWARD TO EITHER EXONERATE AN INNOCENT PERSON OR PROVE THE GUILT OF SOMEONE WHO OTHERWISE WOULD GET OFF 'SCOT-FREE', WHAT WOULD YOU DO?

WHAT IF THE CRIME OR THE 'MORAL ISSUE' GOING UNREPORTED MEANT THAT EVEN MORE PEOPLE COULD DIE OR BE INJURED BY YOUR NOT REPORTING WHAT YOU SAW, WHAT YOU MAY HAVE RECORDED, WHAT YOU HAD PROOF OF?

OF COURSE I REALIZE THAT NONE OF US WHO HAVE NOT BEEN FACED WITH SUCH A DILEMMA WOULD TRULY KNOW WHAT WE'D DO UNTIL WE DID ACTUALLY FACE SUCH A THING, NOT REALLY, WOULD WE?
WE CAN'T BE 100% CERTAIN WHICH CHOICE WE'D MAKE, CAN WE? 
So, we may not truly know what we might do when faced with such a situation, but we can certainly look around and see what others have done.

THERE'S BEEN A MURDER, AND, FOR DECADES, SOME HAVE BEEN COMING FORWARD WITH INFORMATION, EVIDENCE, IF YOU WILL, ABOUT THE PERPETRATORS TO SHOW US SOMETHING IS TERRIBLY AMISS.

AS WE REVIEW THOSE WHO HAVE DONE SO, THOSE KNOWN AS "WHISTLEBLOWERS", MAYBE WE CAN BEGIN TO SEE WHO THE VICTIM OF THE CRIME IS.
Each one who "blew the whistle" exposed corruption, exposed wrongs, exposed injustices, crimes, lies we may have believed because of who was telling the lies.
When we do look around, we just may notice a tendency here in America...those who "blow the whistle" are often not  praised for doing so.
The most recent, Dr. William Thompson , long-time employee of the CDC, telling Congress about the CDC hiding pertinent information from their study on autism, a study he was much involved in.

He turned over thousands of pages of absolute evidence, he actually testified against himself, but what came of it?

Almost nothing. HE became the "bad guy".
We can look at Snowden, who saw what illegal methods the NSA and others were using to spy on all of us, blew the whistle, and now people hate him!

Bradley (now called Chelsea) Manning...saw fellow military laughing and joking as they repeatedly shot unarmed journalists, kids, farmers, saw them mutilating their "kills", saw them shoot civilians for "sport", grabbed video proof, offered it up and now (s)he's doing prison time. 

Same thing when we all were made aware of Abu Ghraib, what was really going on in 'GITMO', or when Colin Powell was either 'snookered' into swearing Saddam had those 'WMDs" or lied knowingly, when he quit and apologized (sort of, not really) for his part in that, people still want to deride him, but...NOT BUSH? . 

When Ollie North took the fall for our 'god-like' President Reagan, when the Washington Post journalists blew open Watergate and Mark Felt and a few Nixon minions spilled the beans, it was, again, those who came forward, reluctantly or not, who became despised.

When dear old Ron Paul tried to show us the secretive way our congress passes bills, cuts deals with lobbyists, how most are "on the take" from Wall Street, when he tried to force the Federal Reserve to allow an audit, when he showed how the FED itself created inflation, bailed out Wall Street while we "average citizens" got no help (just stuck with the enormous bailout bill), Americans, for the most part, maligned him, the press absolutely crucified him and he was screwed-over time and time again.

Daniel Ellsberg, the former Defense Department official who released the Pentagon Papers showing us that Vietnam was a political war, that politicians and others were liars, crooks, also became a "bad guy".

Even people like Karen Silkwood, who showed us all the grave dangers related to plutonium,
Erin Brokavich showing us how giant corporations could care less if their pollution kills people, Frank Serpico exposing police corruption, Mark Whitaker blowing the whistle on price-fixing in the agriculture industry, Jeffrey Wigand turning on the tobacco industry and revealing their nasty little secrets, Coleen Rowley, who proved to us that the FBI simply refused to act on valid information about one of the 9/11 hijackers and so failed to stop him, Sherron Watkins, who exposed ENRON for their lies and fraud,  Allan McDonald and Roger Boisjoly, engineers at Morton Thiokol Inc., who testified before the Rogers Commission investigating the 1986 Challenger shuttle disaster that there had been ongoing problems with the rocket' s O-rings and that they had urged their supervisors and NASA officials to postpone the fatal launch.
Following their testimony, the engineers were demoted to menial jobs. Only the intervention of the Commission members got them reinstated.

Seems like, the bigger the "bust", or maybe the more embarrassing the truths revealed, the more whistleblowers are hated.

Why is that?
But then there are some who seem to get away with revealing "secrets" and nothing comes of it, and no one bashes them for letting a few cats out of the bag.

CIA Director Leon Panetta, for example, disclosed "secret" information about the (fairy tale) raid on Osama bin Laden’s compound.
Then he was promoted to Secretary of Defense.

Ditto for former CIA director David Petraeus who provided classified information to his mistress, who was his "biographer".

Panetta was never charged, and Petraeus was let off with a slap on the wrist, basically.

What's the big difference?

Why are companies still severely punishing whistleblowers while those who are supposed to protect corporate whistleblowers look the other way?

Seeing what happens to whistleblowers, I have to wonder why ANY would come forward, because seems to me that the majority of Americans truly do loathe them for their honesty.
The popular notion seems to persist that whistleblowers are crazy, vengeful troublemakers, even if they die trying to show us the truth.
Perhaps the MOST hated of all who have revealed deep dark secrets that show us what's really going on "behind the scenes", in secret, is Wikileaks founder, Julian Assange.

After all, it was to Wikileaks that Bradley Manning turned.

But when Rolling stone, the BBC, other news services publicly posted the same, the identical material and worse that showed us all the sad facts of American troops killing for sport, killing the unarmed and kids, no one went after them to lock them away for a million years.

Why is that?

WAR IS HELL.. the stress of war makes men lose their minds sometimes, as we've seen since 1776 or so.

We EXPECT soldiers to crack, do terrible things, don't we?

After all, what might WE do in their place?

And don't we EXPECT our government to spy on us, on other nations, even on each other like the CIA spies on the FBI and the FBI CREATES "terrorists" to spy on? 

Don't we EXPECT another Iran-Contra, another Watergate, another ENRON scandal?
Below are two photos of a 15-year-old Afghan farm boy killed for sport by a group of military guys in Afghanistan who called themselves the "Kill Team". 

They killed for sport and removed body parts of their victims as "souvenirs".
Some of them freely admitted what they did.
They kept photos that SHOULD have hung themselves.

Maybe you remember their trials, called the Maywand District killings ?
Rolling Stone published several photos of the "Team".

These photos are hard to look at, even harder to comprehend, and it's harder still to admit that our own American sons are capable of this.

But it is, after all is said and done, in spite of what we'd like to believe, THE TRUTH.
These prove it's the truth, the real truth, period, the end, and THAT is what matters more than anything, isn't it?
TRUTH.


This 'soldier' played with the corpse, moving the kid's mouth and arms, pretending he was talking, like one might manipulate a puppet. He then cut off one of the boy's fingers as a souvenir and later used it as a bet in a poker game.

This is the one who actually threw the grenade and then shot the kid, after the group lured him over to them for a "friendly chat".

The "Kill Team" also discussed and wrote about tossing candy to kids and then either shooting or running over the ones who ran out to get the candy.
Mentally ill? Or just plain mean?
In either case, they did the acts and did admit to them, well, most did.

<Go HERE> to see the video that got Manning a lifetime in prison.
It was the one that the Pentagon hated being published the most, well, this one and the video of the "over-kill" of the father and son farmers in a bit of nighttime "fun" a helicopter gun crew seemed to be having. 

It shows the shooting of a Reuters News journalist, his driver, also a Reuters employee, and unarmed others, including two children and Iraqi civilians who tried to save the journalist who was trying to crawl to safety.

The gunner in the Apache chopper fired so many rounds so quickly that his weapon shut down.

The audio, with transcript, shows the pleading to open fire, the laughter, the jokes, the disdain those involved in the killings had for those they killed....even when it was confirmed they had shot two young kids,
The fate of the children was never proven.

11 adults were killed, all who were shown in the video.

Also in the video, you can see a Bradley tank roll over a body and hear the laughter that evoked.

Mainstream media around the world posted the videos, the audios, ALL the documents that Wikileaks posted, but the only one hunted down, the only one with a warrant for arrest of all who posted all the images, etc, was...Assange.

WHY?

The New York Times, the Washington Post, the Chicago Tribune, the Baltimore Sun have ALL actually PAID informants and 'whistleblowers' for such things for THEIR front pages.

Assange is the ONLY one taking refuge in a foreign embassy, Snowden is the only one hiding out in Russia, and Manning is the only one doing big, big time for revealing things that others have revealed ...and we called what we saw in Rolling Stone, the Times, etc, "news" and called Assange, et al, what?

TRAITORS?
ENEMIES OF THE STATE?
SCUM?

I just don't get it, America.

Shouldn't we WANT to know these things?
Shouldn't we be glad that some will come forward and show us these TRUTHS?

Or do we LIKE being uninformed, DUPED, LIED TO, manipulated, conned and used?

I don't!

Maybe, thinking back, the first 'inconvenient' truth I learned was that local "civic leaders", charged with counting votes and collecting "poll taxes" were actually burning all but WHITE votes and were splitting those poll taxes among themselves,
I watched them do so.
I was about 10 years old.
I was in the room where they did this, with the daughter and older son of the mayor of the town, who was laughing the loudest and dumping those votes in a big metal bucket. 
I told my dad, who insisted I must be mistaken.
The mayor, after all, was a friend of his.
The next election, my dad made it a point to be in that vote-counting room himself.

He apologized to me.

When he tried to take the matter up with another friend, a county judge, his pal just laughed and told my dad it was common knowledge, necessary to keep "those uppity n___s in line".
From that point on, I watched, and I learned.

I learned that a gubernatorial candidate was blackmailed, actually threatened, into ending his campaign by members of the incumbent governor's staff.

I learned that Eisenhower had okayed raping and pillaging by his troops in Europe, mainly in France, one of our allies, as a sort of reward for their dedicated service.

I learned about Operation Keelhaul, far more than a shame to our government.

I learned that local police refused to arrest certain WHITE men in our small town, some who were deacons in local churches, some who were young college football players, when Black citizens called them to houses where rapes and beatings were taking place.

I learned that, of eight bodies of young Choctaw men found dead with bullets in their bodies along the Natchez trace during just one year, NOT ONE murder investigation was ever called for.

I learned from ripping yellow paper off a teletype machine for the newsmen ( one of my duties at a radio station where I landed a summer job starting my sophomore year of high school) that five bells meant a bulletin, but that sometimes that was almost immediately followed by another five bells and the word "URGENT", when the REAL news story was changed, "toned-down" or outright 'killed', cancelled.
 
Even in the late 1950s, Americans were not being told certain truths, whether because a political figure was involved or "it might cause panic", or it was"too sensitive" like some cancelled news during the 'Freedom Riders' and Civil Rights Movement times.

I learned that the America I loved was not what it seemed.
It had a dark side, and when I saw it, I was devastated.

But devastated as I was, that never stopped me from loving and seeking the truth, no matter how it hurt. 

Every truth uncovered just shined a light into the darkness, I told myself.
Eventually, I dreamed, we'd once again live in a nation of pure light. 
That hasn't happened yet, but I have hope.

Some day, I keep telling myself, when enough Assanges and Snowdens and Mannings and Ellsbergs and Silkwoods come forward, then the dirty, rotten scoundrels who are ruining and corrupting this nation will understand that they cannot get away with murder after all.

One day, allow me the dream, we will see a time when, even if it's BECAUSE of 'whistleblowers', those who have for so long pulled the strings in high places to suit themselves will no longer have a rock to hide behind as we "average citizens" will ALL become whistleblowers, we will ALL love the truth more than comfort and pride, more than 'feeling good about things', more than that old American tendency that somehow grew into a mantra here to "never rock the boat".   

Forbes, of all so-called "news" media, did an article in 2012 that sort of wondered aloud WHY Americans, in general, hate whistleblowers like Assange, et al.
That article listed possible reasons....

"It will doubtless be uncomfortable to consider, but there is ample reason to believe that whistleblowers are held in contempt as often as they are because their nobility makes people uncomfortable.

Folks who hate whistleblowers hate the cowardice they feel within themselves.

Seeing in others what irks you about YOU mitigates self-induced pain.

Your purpose in doing so (hating whistleblowers) is often to avoid examining what it is about the person that you feel is superior to your sense of self."

Can it be that simple, the reason why it seems that most Americans don't like those who shine lights into dark places, who reveal "inconvenient truths"?
Don't we see the reactions on "both sides" when a whistleblower shines a light on anything, wherein if whatever truth is revealed AGAINST those we disagree with or dislike is seen as a GOOD thing, but if the truth makes "our guys" look bad, or sends them to jail, whatever, we may scream, "FOUL! NOT SO!"?

MANY WILL ABSOLUTELY DENY THE EVIDENCE, THE FACTS, THE TRUTH IF "THEIR GUY" IS THE ONE THE WHISTLE WAS BLOWN ON.
Illogical and childish as that may seem at first glance, what if we look back at our own reactions to some of the above-mentioned whistleblowers?

When anything revealed by any of them was proven, beyond a doubt, to be factual, did that stop maybe half of America from damning the whistleblowers? 

Doesn't THAT mean that we just can't depend on those who DENY the truth to ever be honest?

Doesn't it reveal a trend in America to put MORE value on what we LIKE, WHOM we hero-worship, which political party or politician or celebrity or friend, than we value TRUTH?

Won't such a thing undermine everything America once stood for, including her CONSTITUTION, including JUSTICE?
A recent paper from Columbia professor Ernesto Reuben titled "Nobody likes a rat: On the willingness to report lies and the consequences thereof," summarized at Columbia Business School's "Ideas @ Work,"  tests the situations in which people lie, and the ones in which they report lies. 
Particularly, Reuben wanted to know how people would react when they know their actions will be public, and may be held against them.

He hypothesizes that whistleblowers were thought of as self-righteous, or that people think that they too would lie under the right circumstances.  

WHICH IS IT?
Do whistleblowers simply have a dedicated set of moral standards and so won't just amicably go along with the crowd?
Or, are they, for the most part, vindictive "rats"?
If people are furnished with the facts, they will be clearer thinkers and better citizens, RIGHT?

If they are ignorant, facts will enlighten them. If they are mistaken, facts will set them straight, YES OR NO?

In the end, truth WILL win out. 
Won’t it?
GOOD FOLKS WILL DO THE RIGHT THING NO MATTER WHAT, RIGHT?

Maybe not.
Political scientists have begun to discover a human tendency deeply discouraging to anyone with faith in the power of information.

It’s this: Facts don’t necessarily have the power to change our minds.

[NOT ANYMORE, AT LEAST, NOT AS IN DAYS GONE BY.]

In fact, quite the opposite seems to be true {these days}. 

In a series of studies in 2005 and 2006, researchers at the University of Michigan found that when misinformed people, particularly political partisans, were exposed to corrected facts in news stories, they rarely changed their minds.

In fact, they often became even more strongly set in their beliefs.

Facts, the researchers found, were not curing misinformation.

Like an underpowered antibiotic, facts could actually make misinformation even stronger.

SO WE ELECT LIARS...

This bodes ill for a democracy, because most voters — the people making decisions about how the country runs — aren’t blank slates.
They already have beliefs, and a set of facts lodged in their minds.

The problem is that sometimes the things they think they know are objectively, provably false.
And in the presence of the correct information, such people react very, very differently than the merely uninformed.

Instead of changing their minds to reflect the correct information, they can entrench themselves even deeper.

“The general idea is that it’s absolutely threatening to admit you’re wrong,” says political scientist Brendan Nyhan, the lead researcher on the Michigan study. The phenomenon — known as “backfire” — is “a natural defense mechanism to avoid that cognitive dissonance.”
Most of us like to believe that our opinions have been formed over time by careful, rational consideration of facts and ideas, and that the decisions based on those opinions, therefore, have the ring of soundness and intelligence.

In reality, we often base our opinions on our beliefs [AND EMOTIONS], which can have an uneasy relationship with facts.

And rather than facts driving beliefs, our beliefs can dictate the facts we chose to accept.

They can cause us to twist facts so they fit better with our preconceived notions.
Worst of all, they can lead us to uncritically accept bad information just because it reinforces our beliefs.
This reinforcement makes us more confident we’re right, and even less likely to listen to any new information.

And then we vote."

LIKE I SAID, WE ELECT LIARS.

WE SEE THE ABSOLUTE "MURDER" OF THE TRUTH, THE DEATH OF FACTS, AND WE DON'T DO ANYTHING ABOUT IT....WE LET IT GO...WE KEEP QUIET...WE BECOME ACCOMPLICES TO THE CRIME.
We REFUSE to acknowledge what we see.
We continue to deny we saw anything but what we WANTED to see.

'PARTY' REPLACED PATRIOTISM.

The last five decades of political science have definitively established that most modern-day Americans lack even a basic understanding of how their country works.

In 1996, Princeton University’s Larry M. Bartels argued, “the political ignorance of the American voter is one of the best documented data in political science.”
A study was done in the year 2000, led by James Kuklinski of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, in which more than 1,000 Illinois residents were asked questions about welfare — the percentage of the federal budget spent on welfare, the number of people enrolled in the program, the percentage of enrollees who are black, and the average payout.

More than half indicated that they were confident that their answers were correct — but in fact only 3 percent of the people got more than half of the questions right. Perhaps more disturbingly, the ones who were the most confident they were right were by and large the ones who knew the least about the topic.

(Most of these participants expressed views that suggested a strong anti-welfare bias.)

WHEN SHOWN THE GOVERNMENT STATISTICS, THE FACTS, THEY CONTINUED TO DENY THEY HAD BEEN MISTAKEN!
Kuklinski calls this sort of response the “I know I’m right” syndrome, and considers it a “potentially formidable problem” in a democratic system.

“It implies not only that most people will resist correcting their factual beliefs,” he wrote, “but also that the very people who most need to correct them will be least likely to do so.”It’s unclear what is driving the behavior — it could range from simple defensiveness, to people working harder to defend their initial beliefs — but as Brendan Nyhan, the lead researcher on the Michigan study, dryly put it, “It’s hard to be optimistic about the effectiveness of fact-checking.”
What it may boil down to is, if you feel good about yourself, you’ll listen and LEARN — and if you feel insecure or threatened, you won’t.

This would also explain why demagogues benefit from keeping people agitated.

The more threatened people feel, the less likely they are to listen to dissenting opinions, and the more easily controlled they are.

In 2007 John Sides of George Washington University and Jack Citrin of the University of California at Berkeley studied whether providing misled people with correct information about the proportion of immigrants in the US population would affect their views on immigration.

It did not.
In an ideal world, citizens would be able to maintain constant vigilance, monitoring both the information they receive and the way their brains are processing it.

But keeping atop the news takes time and effort.
And relentless self-questioning, as centuries of philosophers have shown, can be exhausting.

Nyhan ultimately recommends instead of focusing on citizens and consumers of misinformation, looking at the sources.

If you increase the “reputational costs” of peddling bad info, he suggests, you might discourage people from doing it so often.

“So if you go on ‘Meet the Press’ and you get hammered for saying something misleading,” he says, “you’d think twice before you go and do it again.”

Unfortunately, this shame-based solution may be as implausible as it is sensible.

Fast-talking political pundits have ascended to the realm of highly lucrative popular entertainment, while professional fact-checking operations languish in the dungeons of wonkery."

WHAT DOES IT ALL MEAN?

IT MEANS THAT WHILE YOU MAY TELL YOURSELF YOU WOULD REPORT A MURDER THAT YOU ALONE WERE WITNESS TO, YOU PROBABLY WOULD NOT IF THE MURDERER WAS SOMEONE YOU WERE CLOSELY ASSOCIATED WITH, CARED FOR, LOVED, SOMEONE YOU GREATLY ADMIRED, SOMEONE YOU WOULDN'T WANT TO SEE GO TO PRISON. 

IT MEANS EMOTIONS (OFTEN POLITICALLY CHARGED EMOTIONS) HAVE REPLACED HONOR AND INTEGRITY...AND TRUTH IS DYING IN AMERICA.

AND WHAT DOES THAT MEAN?

IT MEANS MANY WILL GO TO THE POLLS AND VOTE FOR CROOKS, YET AGAIN....
AND DENY THAT THAT'S WHAT THEY ARE.

THE GOOD OLD "TWO-PARTY SYSTEM"... IT'S CREATED FAR TOO MANY ACCOMPLICES TO MURDER OF THE TRUTH, OF OUR CONSTITUTION, OF OUR NATION, OF OUR HONOR.

WELL, I'D LIKE TO REPORT A MURDER.... AS I WROTE IN MY EULOGY OF A FEW DAYS BACK, AMERICA HAS BEEN MURDERED....BY APATHY AND BY THOSE WHO AGREE TO LIES.

TROUBLE IS....NO ONE MUCH SEEMS TO CARE.

PEOPLE SEEM MORE CONCERNED WITH 'PARTY' THAN WITH NATION.