By The TRUTH HOUND
‘STOP THE PRESSES’ News & Commentary
American Experience is, generally speaking, a high quality U.S. Public Television documentary series that for many years has aired interesting, inspiring and informative recollections of places like the Coney Island amusement park and profiled hero figures, pivotal events and various other matters.
But the Feb. 7, 2017 broadcast covered something I personally had never seen American Experience cover before: The April 1995 bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City (OKC).
This unexpected foray into a serious and controversial domestic bombing featured several journalists whose painfully one-sided observations helped convert the program into a rigid broadside against what the documentary’s narrative described as the “far right” still menacing the fruited plain of America.
And the man convicted and executed for reportedly having carried out the bombing, former soldier Timothy McVeigh, was made into the face of the U.S. “radical right.” Everything about McVeigh’s past, including his political views, was mocked and shunned, as if every thought in his head was without merit. Yet, in fact, he had valid concerns about the direction of the nation, even though his reaction to his worldview may have been highly misguided and overly impulsive, to be sure.
One of the totally predictable things in this broadcast came at the end when the radical-left Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) was quoted as saying there are some 500 “radical-right, anti-government militia” and “white supremacist” groups still operating in the U.S.—but the documentary’s commentators never mentioned the SPLC’s extremist views and the sordid background of SPLC founder Morris Dees.
The overriding thing was that this OKC documentary—like the one American Experience just produced on the 1993 Waco, Texas clash that saw men, women and children immolated in a fiery blaze prompted by federal tanks that were used to breach the compound’s main structure—did not interview a single defense witness from the McVeigh trial, nor was anyone who could articulate the documented historical and modern-day abuse of federal power interviewed at all in either the OKC or Waco documentaries.
Simply put, this was more propaganda from the America-can-do-no-wrong school of thought, which implies: No dissent. It also encourages massive distrust amongst the population.
And, not surprisingly, the same outfit that produced these documentaries produced another one on the Ruby Ridge, Idaho debacle where federal agents, including snipers, opened fire on Randy Weaver and family.
There’s little reason to believe that the Ruby Ridge production will be any different than the others. They all follow the typical, ultra-predictable script of using emotion and super-slanted testimony, littered with nonstop buzz phrases like “radical right” and “far right extremists,” to condition viewers to never seriously question government policy and to associate those who are skeptical of government policy with homegrown terrorists who commit violence.
From there, the carefully plied tactic is to take the obvious and totally understandable pain associated with the 168 killed in the OKC bombing and make it seem like you are dancing on their graves if you question major government policies—especially if you question the conventional story of the OKC bombing itself. The same goes for 9/11 and every other titanic event of violence on U.S. soil.
Several credible people, including retired Air Force weapons expert Ben Partin, long ago questioned whether a Ryder truck filled with fertilizer could have caused such serious damage to the Murrah Building in the OKC event. Partin went on record saying that it appeared to be a pretty sophisticated operation, which would’ve required additional bombs and additional people in the crime.
But whatever one may think of the details surrounding the OKC event, the mainstream press was never up to the task of fully discerning, checking or challenging the federal story. And once the federal “cement dries,” so to speak, in terms of the official narrative of what happened at OKC (just like with 9/11, JFK, Pearl Harbor, Gulf of Tonkin, RFK, MLK, etc.) the big media simply become repositories for the official story. From there, all the school textbooks everywhere absorb and tell everyone the same story, basically forever.
So, the 169th casualty at OKC is truth itself, thanks in large measure to a media that serves as a mouthpiece of the state—which is a betrayal of the public trust that makes lies into permanent structures.