Let My People Know

     This week in my American Studies class we discussed papers we wrote on restricting civil liberties during perilous times such as, times of war. One of the wars I talked about in my paper was the War on Terror. Even though I use it as an example in my paper and I am currently living during it, I still don't know a lot about this war (maybe that it why I have a lot of revising to do). Then, when I was searching through my classmates' blogs to post a comment, I came across a blog by Sarah H called "Faces of the Fallen". In Sarah's blog she also found that there was a lack of information about the War on Terror.
     In "Faces of the Fallen" Sarah discussed a Washington Post article that was about all the service members who have died this past year in the war and how the article was very vague about the causes of death. Sarah's blog inspired me to start thinking about who gets to decide how much information we as American citizens get to know? I now think that the government might restrict our knowledge of the war in order to decrease the number of people against the war. Maybe if we don't hear about the painful deaths some of these soldiers went through, then maybe the War on Terror will seem less harmless. If the government is really in charge of withholding information about the War on Terror, then this very much connects to my paper that I wrote about in the beginning. The government has a lot of power over the American citizens and I think they abuse it sometimes.
     Would you like to have more information about the war, even if some of the details were about gruesome deaths of American soldiers? How much information do you think the government should be allowed to withhold for the citizens?