Big difference between opinion and reality

There’s a spectrum of common opinions driving current events that greatly offend me. Consider them to see if they offend you.

Opinion: It’s the president’s primary duty, as supported by Congress, to protect the American people.

What?: Protection, by definition, must censor or suppress true freedoms to work. Furthermore, protection of the people is the basic principle used to justify enlightened aristocracies, monarchies and dictatorships. This also contradicts the federal government’s primary duties plainly defined in our Constitution. So, every time our president and Congress spout this, they are blatantly being sanctimonious hypocrites.

Opinion: Our government uses the best resources and capabilities to gain proper intelligence for accurate decision-making.

What?: Our leaders use manipulation-prone reliable-source intelligence instead of cross-checked multi-source intelligence to make decisions. This makes them vulnerable to well-executed espionage, propaganda and pseudo-science. Witness just the last 20 years of anti-American espionage convictions, bad results from expert advice used and consequences from serving the interests of our so-called allies before our own.

Opinion: Americans are among the world’s most highly educated populations.

What?: Too many Americans repudiate the scientific method, learning and their personal education by unquestioned acceptance of expert- or authority-dictated explanations for many recent events. Examples are global warming, the steel-framed WTC Tower 7 collapsing on Sept. 11, 2001, without even aircraft fuel fires, the Iraq/Afghanistan wars lasting longer than World War II, America’s poor international reputation, America becoming the world’s leading consumer and debtor nation and America going bankrupt funding the military-industrial complex.

Opinion: Just a handful of guerilla fanatics called al-Qaida, supported by truly insignificant numbers of Muslim sympathizers, are more effective, dedicated and clever than a nation full of predominately Christian Americans.

What?: This hysterical reaction to terrorism denies the power of the Christian religion to help develop competent people by promoting the religious supremacy of Islamic fanaticism. Furthermore, civilization’s 1,000-year history of successfully handling Islamic extremists like al-Qaida is being rejected by American political and religious leaders. They are recreating the mindless hysteria and losing policies of the Crusades.

Opinion: Unquestioned funding for defense budgets gives necessary support to our troops at war.

What?: The Congressional General Accounting Office reports that $1.5 trillion in defense budget allocations this last decade can’t be sensibly accounted for, and another one-third of the total has been spent on programs unconnected with current wars. Moreover, a big chunk of money allocated to prosecuting war gets paid to contractors and security forces that earn three to five times what comparable military personnel get. This is despite our military people doing three times the real work while enduring incompetent leadership and (bad) military planning. Worse, there are more civilian contractors and mercenaries in the war zones than U.S. military personnel. Horribly, these civilians aren’t under the operational control of our military command. This naturally breeds obscene levels of war profiteering and war crimes that have to be hushed up or explained away by our hamstrung military.

Opinion: Extreme physical interrogation methods like water boarding are justified to force apprehended terrorists to reveal plots that threaten extensive American casualties.

What?: Authorities need sufficiently detailed information even to identify who to arrest as terrorists, as well as specifically who then might be tortured for accurate information. If authorities can successfully obtain all of this before torturing anyone, ordinary police methodology is capable of getting the rest. Remember, the eternal whore for injustice has always been judging guilt by unverified official accusation. Furthermore, the unreliability of torture at obtaining necessary truth is the lesson of government enshrined in our Constitution’s Fifth Amendment’s prohibition against forcing people to testify against themselves. Without it, our police would inevitably be torturing likely Americans to solve crime; government behavior historically resulting in national suicide.

Am I implying conspiracies? No. The common opinions above are a self-evident indictment that too many Americans have abandoned faith in the devices and methods of our constitutional republic. So now really is the time for all good citizens to come to the aid of their country.

Stuart Thompson is a Wasilla resident.