First of all, I’d just like to point out how annoyed I get when everything gets blamed on September 11th. It has become the stock excuse for just about anything you can imagine: “Marge and I don’t travel as much as we did before September 11th.” “Business hasn’t been the same since 9/11.” “The world changed on 9-1-1.”

Nevertheless, I can trace the origin of this page--or at least of my own political awakening--to that most infamous of days.

I was stationed at Kelly Air Force Base, San Antonio, Texas. On 11 September 2001, immediately following the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, our Wing Headquarters activated its Crisis Action Team (CAT). A CAT is activated during times of crisis, and it works around the clock to coordinate the emergency responses of a given military unit. In Texas, a CAT is usually set up to deal with weather-related crises--hurricanes, flash floods, stuff like that.

Like most Americans on September 11th, I was scared and angry. Scared that it could happen here, happen to me. And angry that it had happened at all. Like most Americans, my first thought was of finding those responsible and making them pay. We heard that this guy named Osama bin Laden was behind it, and that he was hiding out in Afghanistan. Fine, I thought. Let's go get his ass. I even slapped a US flag decal on my car to show I was a real American.

I cheered along with everyone else on the 20th of September, when George W. Bush gave his famous “Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists” speech. I believed that this man who had entered the White House under such a cloud of controversy, whose butchery of the English language had been such easy pickings for late-night comedians, had finally found his voice and had finally been transformed into a leader.

By the time military action had begun in Afghanistan, I had begun my own rotation on the CAT. I started on the night shift, 10 PM to 6 AM. Since all our people had deployed forward and the fighting had begun, there wasn’t much for the CAT to do. Nothing, that is, except watch the news. We had two big projection TVs in the conference room that was CAT central. One showed CNN, over which I had watched the first Gulf War. The other screen showed a station with which I was not familiar--Fox News.

As I watched these two news channels for eight hours at a time over the course of a month, I quickly became aware that I wasn’t really learning anything about what was going on in the world. CNN kept flashing bellicose banners touting “America’s New War,” while some angry loudmouth I’d never seen before over on Fox spewed hatred and xenophobia in a “No-Spin Zone” that seemed to be spinning hard astarboard. I was disturbed by the level of negative emotions that were bombarding me from the two most prominent 24-hour cable news channels. And the other news channels seemed to be pretty much the same. There were an awful lot of people screaming for vengeance for the 3000 killed in this terrorist attack, and very few trying to objectively analyze why this attack had taken place. It seemed to me (and still does) that the way to prevent future terrorist attacks is not to bomb the offenders back to the Stone Age, as this can only breed more terrorism. Rather, we need to address the root causes of terrorism and deal with them nonmilitarily. In other words, I was able to get over my initial, gut-level emotional response to the attack and begin to deal with the problem rationally.

It was obvious, however, that very few people on television were interested in pursuing this course. Those who did were immediately attacked as unpatriotic, un-American. I needed to find some other sources of news. I mentioned this to my friend Bill Pace, who was also working the CAT with me. He recommended a news website that he liked called NewsMax→. I checked it out and, sure enough, there was some more information available. But it seemed to me that NewsMax suffered from a lot of the same right-wing bias as Fox News. So I started digging on my own.

The next site I came across that I really liked was the World Socialist Web Site←. As the name suggests, this a pro-socialist news page, but it had a lot of good reports. Then I hit the jackpot, discovering a few of the sites that I continue to look at every day: Unknown News←, AlterNet←, BuzzFlash←, Antiwar↑, and Common Dreams←. By following various links from these sites, I began to amass a lengthy list of URLs for sites offering under-reported news and opinions that differ from the mainstream. I posted several of them on my old homepage. As the list grew, it became obvious that I needed to build a separate site for all my news links. So that’s what I did.

I built this site mainly for my own use. Since I travel a lot, this makes it easy for me to check all my favorite sites no matter where I am. Some of my friends also seem to find it useful. As the name “Liberty Links” suggests, most of my favorite sites have a libertarian slant to them, since I’ve discovered that’s pretty much how I lean (but that’s another story). But I’ve also included several right-wing sites in the interest of being “fair and balanced,” if I may be allowed that laughable cliché. To give you a general idea of what to expect with each link, I've devised an “arrow” rating system based on my own subjective interpretations of the websites’ content.

Staying informed in this age of unfair, unbalanced, corporate-owned mass media is a full-time job. It requires critical thinking, and the ability to ask important questions. But sifting through the lies to get at the truth is the responsibility of every adult citizen. It is critical to understand what is going on in the world and in our own country. I hope that this site helps you in your quest to stay informed. Enjoy!