Robert Parry: A great journalist who tried to alert the public

 

By Mary Beth Sullivan (Social worker, Brunswick, Maine) 

I just finished a book called American Dispatches: A Robert Parry Reader which I highly recommend. 

I think it was in 1987 when I first heard Noam Chomsky speak. I was working in Cambridge, Massachusetts at the time. A friend invited me to a foreign policy lecture Chomsky was giving at MIT, where he was a professor of linguistics. The lecture focused on US policy in El Salvador and Nicaragua. He shared information that turned upside down all that I had been reading and learning from the news I was consuming.

I was a huge fan of Ted Koppel and ABC's Nightline at the time, and I remember leaving the lecture thinking 'Damn! If I can't trust Ted Koppel, who can I trust? Now what do I do?' 

Chomsky had sown an internal discord that was discombobulating, and left me feeling unmoored for quite a long time. I was compelled to find alternative sources of information.

It wasn't until the US orchestrated a coup in Ukraine in 2014 that I discovered Robert Parry's on-line news source Consortium News, Although it is not my only news source, it is an important one as I strive to understand the chaos that has been unleashed in Ukraine. 

Parry's book brought me back into the history of our time, some of which I was wide awake for, some of which I only partially understood. It's an important chronicle. The time spent looking back informs the present day in sad and profound ways.  

I hope others will learn as much as I did! 

~ Here's a link to an article about the Parry book, which is excerpted below. 

A new compilation of Robert Parry’s writings, American Dispatches: A Robert Parry Reader, provides an illuminating history of the late 20th and early 21st centuries – a troubling recent past that Parry meticulously chronicles through in-depth research and compelling storytelling. The book, just published by iUniverse, documents how the deterioration of the U.S. media’s commitment to providing an honest accounting of current events has enabled corruption and wrongdoing at the highest levels of government.

Among the many hard-hitting stories that can be found in the reader:

•     Mafia influence in state and local governments
  
•     The full story of the Reagan administration’s illegal use of arms sales to Iran to fund the Nicaraguan Contras in the 1980s
  
•     How the U.S. government looked the other way as drug traffickers imported cocaine into the United States
  
•     The government’s development of sophisticated propaganda techniques to influence American public opinion
  
•     How the U.S. enabled and covered up war crimes, atrocities, and genocide in Central America
  
•     The development of crippling – and morally questionable – economic sanctions as a go-to policy option in achieving geopolitical objectives
  
•     The politicization of intelligence and abuses of power by the CIA
  
•     What’s known and not known about the Reagan campaign’s interference with President Carter’s efforts to free U.S. hostages held in Iran in 1980
  
•     How the U.S. supported an unconstitutional regime change in Ukraine in 2014, leading to eight years of civil war and today’s conflict with Russia
  
•     The use of official lies and distortions by the government and media to sell endless military interventions to the American people