Hey!, Wanna See Some Sin?

"Cry aloud, spare not, lift up your voice like a trumpet and show my people their transgressions and . . . their sins." Isa. 58:1

22. Lies

22.3a. Who lies to whom?

 

1. Media "Distortions":

"Our job is to give people not what they want, but what we decide they ought to have."
-- Richard Salent, Former President CBS News.
http://www.la.unm.edu/~ann/quotes.html

"We live in a dirty and dangerous world. There are some things the general public does not need to know, and shouldn't. I believe democracy flourishes when the government can take legitimate steps to keep its secrets and when the press can decide whether to print what it knows."-- Katharine Graham
Source: in a speech to CIA recruits in 1988
http://www.zmag.org/quotes/quotesResults.cfm?topic1=Media

"When you’re in this world [news media], you often have no idea what the truth is." -- Don Hewitt

Source: 60 Minutes Executive Producer Don Hewitt, after discovering that one of the show’s interview subjects—a man who claimed to be the “Czar of Iranian state-sponsored terrorism”—may have been an impostor. Brill’s Content, September, 2000, p. 33


"TV is not about to bite the hand that feeds it. Unless, of course, that hand is spoon-feeding miserly news leads, which explains why Al Gore is taking hits in the press: Reporters are incensed that he is keeping them at arm’s length. Remoteness from power not only hampers reporting; it also hurts a star reporter’s ego."-- Jeffrey Klein
Source: It’s the Ratings Stupid, Brill’s Content, September, 2000, p. 66. Jeffrey Klein is a former editor of Mother Jones.

"Those with the inclination can find everything they want and need in print, on NPR [National Public Radio], or on the Internet. But the networks, which still reach the largest audiences, are cutting back on stories they might once have felt an obligation to cover—especially foreign news. The most accessible media are devolving into the least useful and daring. The educationally and economically deprived in our society, who used to receive at least some exposure to information they might not have selected for themselves, but from which they might have received some benefit, are now reduced to watching only what we believe they want; and we have little confidence in their appetite and range." -- Ted Koppel
Source: Brill’s Content, October 2000, p. 87

"The FCC policy against deliberate distortion of the news is not a 'law, rule, or regulation.'"-- Fox News

Source: From a memorandum filed on behalf of a Fox-owned TV station in Florida, arguing it had committed no offense in dismissing journalists Steve Wilson and Jane Akre for refusing to remove what the reporters considered to be true information from their report on growth hormones and milk.

 

Lying by Biased Presentation of News:

"News media may only present sensational items which give an exaggerated impression of a certain sector of social, economic or political life, and which will tend to strengthen prejudices and antagonisms and maintain inequalities and injustices, or alternatively they may mask these and lead to ignorance and apathy. News items may be scandalous and tend to defame a person's reputation. They may also be titillating or gossipy or simply of a low standard.

Newsworthy items, or those that are felt to be so by the directors of the various news media, tend to be negative items or exaggerated items which are not necessarily related to context. The latter may be good or bad, depending on the political views of the controllers.

The closer you are to the facts of a situation, the more obvious are the errors in all news coverage of the situation. The further you are from the facts of a situation, the more you tend to believe news coverage of the situation."

[News media lying includes:]

Biased expertise
Distorted media presentations
Sensationalism
Gossip
Scandal
Titillation
Lack of perspective
Junk food journalism
Media smear campaigns
Scientific sensationalism
Propaganda
News censorship
Political feuding
Irrelevance of science and technology
Promotion of negative images of opponents
Alarmism
Inappropriate innuendo
Defamation of character
Proliferation of commercialism

http://www.uia.org/index.html, Mar. 2002
© Union of International Associations 1997 - 2000

2. Media "Propaganda":

"It is arguable that the success of business propaganda in persuading us, for so long, that we are free from propaganda is one of the most significant propaganda achievements of the twentieth century."
-- Alex Carey
Source: Managing Public Opinion: The Corporate Offensive, 1978, in Taking the Risk Out Of Democracy
http://www.zmag.org/quotes/quotesResults.cfm?topic1=Media

3. The news media lies:

-when it "editorializes" while pretending to be unbiased reporting.
-when television news anchor "personalities" over-emphasize, under-report, or neglect to mention stories according to their personal political opinions.

-when television news anchor "personalities" blatantly edit stories and add personal comments that show favoritism toward candidates and elected officials of one political party while disparaging their opponents.

-when its reports are censored, whitewashed, or in any way affected because of who the corporate owner is.

"Freedom of press is limited to those who own one." -- Unknown

4. Media "Distortions":

"One night, probably in 1880, John Swinton, then the preeminent New York journalist, was the guest of honor at a banquet given him by the leaders of his craft. Someone who knew neither the press nor Swinton offered a toast to the independent press. Swinton outraged his colleagues by replying:

"There is no such thing, at this date of the world's history, in America, as an independent press. You know it and I know it. There is not one of you who dares to write your honest opinions, and if you did, you know beforehand that it would never appear in print. I am paid weekly for keeping my honest opinion out of the paper I am connected with. Others of you are paid similar salaries for similar things, and any of you who would be so foolish as to write honest opinions would be out on the streets looking for another job. If I allowed my honest opinions to appear in one issue of my paper, before twenty-four hours my occupation would be gone. The business of the journalists is to destroy the truth, to lie outright, to pervert, to vilify, to fawn at the feet of mammon, and to sell his country and his race for his daily bread. You know it and I know it, and what folly is this toasting an independent press? We are the tools and vassals of rich men behind the scenes. We are the jumping jacks, they pull the strings and we dance. Our talents, our possibilities and our lives are all the property of other men. We are intellectual prostitutes."

(Source: Labor's Untold Story, by Richard O. Boyer and Herbert M. Morais,
published by United Electrical, Radio & Machine Workers of America, NY, 1955/1979.)

"One of themselves, even a prophet of their own, said, The Cretians are always liars, evil beasts, slow bellies. This witness is true." (Titus 1:12-13)

5. Distorted "Distortions":

Note: The John Swinton quote was found on more than one site. Dozens of other web sites contained variations of this quote, with the facts changed to make the quote more topical and more timely. Interesting, that those who attack the media to promote their own (right wing or left wing) agenda, conspiracy theories, historical revisionism, or "socialist" causes are not above using the same "intellectual prostitution" they so righteously condemn, or at the least, they are too careless or too lazy to get their facts correct.

For an explanation of the various Swinton legends see also:
http://www.snowcrest.net/zepp/History/swinton.htm

6. Reporters lie:

"In 1978 a 'Washington Post' reporter won a Pulitzer Prize with a story about an 8-year old heroin addict. Later she admitted making it up. Journalists are also accused of 'cobbling something together' when they can't get interviews by extracting quotes from earlier interviews, and embellishing them in scene-setting descriptions. One member of the UK Press Council, the bishop of Edmonton, said "What happens is that the media get a story, and when the truth interferes it is too untidy to fit the story. We had case after case. I still read the newspapers but I don't believe them - they are just comics." [GTF]

"Now begin to understand how much of the 'news' is really only opinion."

http://hammer.prohosting.com/~penz/encycl/m3encyc.htm

Note: This comes from a brief but excellent entry on how the "news" can be selected, edited, filtered, censored, massaged, and otherwise "managed" before it gets to us.

 

"A Reporter's Big Lies, Journalist Said She Had Cancer, Then AIDS, Then Nothing
Owensboro, Ky., May 14 — First, newspaper reporter Kim Stacy told her editors she’d fabricated five columns about her life-and-death struggle with cancer to hide the fact she really has AIDS.
Now she says she doesn’t have AIDS, either.
Over the past few weeks, Stacy wrote movingly about how she had brain cancer, had only a few months to live and was undergoing chemotherapy.
“I refuse to believe I’m going to die,” she wrote. “My life may be over in six months, but I’m not going out of this world without a fight.”
Earlier this week, in the Messenger-Inquirer’s first story about her deceit, Stacy was asked how readers would know that she was telling the truth about having AIDS.
“I don’t have an answer for you all,” she said."
http://more.abcnews.go.com/sections/living/dailynews/reportercancerscam_051499.html

 

7. Reporters suffer from "confusion" [lying about lying]:

"So far, though, the highlight of his Afghan adventure was an emotional report from the "hallowed ground" where three U.S. soldiers accidentally had been killed by an errant American bomb. Reported Geraldo: "It was just, the whole place, just fried really, and bits of uniforms and tattered clothing everywhere. I said the Lord's prayer and really choked up."
One tiny problem: Geraldo wasn't anywhere near the site of the fatal bombing. He transmitted his story from Tora Bora, hundreds of miles from Kandahar, where the friendly-fire tragedy occurred. This rather humongous factual error was pointed out in a critical article by David Folkenflik, the television writer for The Baltimore Sun.
In response, Geraldo blamed "the fog of war." He said he had "confused" two separate incidents and actually had been at the scene where two or three Afghan fighters -- not the American troops -- had been killed. Unfortunately, that version of the story hasn't held up well, either. The Pentagon told Folkenflik that the friendly-fire deaths at Tora Bora occurred three days after Geraldo filed his initial report.
Wrote Folkenflik: "Fox News did not have any explanation for how Rivera could have been confused by an event that had not yet occurred."

"Most network news operations would have been so humiliated by Geraldo's screw up that he would have been canned or exiled to some remote bureau where there was no hope of getting back on the air. Fox, however, is standing by its man. Calling the episode "an honest mistake," . . .
Meanwhile, Fox hasn't told its viewers about the big bungle. A spokesman said there is no plan to broadcast an apology or a correction."

"Geraldo-Gate"-- Carl Hiaasen, Miami Herald
Forwarded-by: newsletter@tvspy.com
Excerpted: ShopTalk - January 4, 2002, Nev Dull <nev@sleepycat.com>

8. Why does the Media lie?

"In the last 5 years, a small number of the country's largest industrial corporations has acquired more public communications power-including ownership of the news-than any private businesses have ever before possessed in world history.
Nothing in earlier history matches this corporate group's power to penetrate the social landscape. Using both old and new technology, by owning each other's shares, engaging in joint ventures as partners, and other forms of cooperation, this handful of giants has created what is, in effect, a new communications cartel within the United States.
At issue is not just a financial statistic, like production numbers or ordinary industrial products like refrigerators or clothing. At issue is the possession of power to surround almost every man, woman, and child in the country with controlled images and words, to socialize each new generation of Americans, to alter the political agenda of the country. And with that power comes the ability to exert influence that in many ways is greater than that of schools, religion, parents, and even government itself."

The New Communications Cartel from the Preface to the Fifth Edition (1997) of the book The Media Monopoly by Ben H. Bagdikian published by Beacon Press, 1997http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Media/CommunCartel_Bagdikian.html


"This inevitably raises suspicions of overt conspiracy. But there is none. Instead, there is something more insidious: a system of shared values within contemporary American corporate culture and corporations' power to extend that culture to the American people, inappropriate as it may be."

AFTERWORD from the book The Media Monopoly by Ben H. Bagdikian, published by Beacon Press, 1997
http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Media/Afterword_Bagdikian.html     (Emphasis ours.)

To understand the extent of monopolization of the media and the resulting conflicts of interests, see the extensive listings of "Who Owns What" at the Columbia Journalism Review site:
http://www.cjr.org/owners/index.asp

For a brief listing of the "family brands" owned by the six largest media conglomerates see charts at:
http://www.oneworld.org/ni/index4.html

Note: It is difficult to find this information apart from sites which promote wacko conspiracy theories or radical political agendas. With that firmly in mind, a clear yet detailed explanation of the conflict of interests among the media giants can be found at the following site:

"Media ownership and concentration"
http://www.wsws.org/articles/2000/dec2000/med5-d27.shtml

9. The media's partnership with politics and government:

"I. F. Stone warned that all governments are run by liars, and that nothing they say should be believed.

Now comes Paul Weaver to warn that the same is true of all newspapers and, with the possible exception of C-SPAN and a few openly partisan journals of opinion, pretty much all of the rest of the media as well.

But the main proposition put forth by this former Harvard professor, Washington bureau chief of Fortune magazine, and public relations official for the Ford Motor Company goes considerably further, arguing that the media and the government have joined together to institutionalize a culture of lying in our system of government.

Weaver's claim is that journalists and public officials combine to fabricate artificial crises of public policy that end up being "covered in the media, reacted to by the public, and dealt with by government" as if they were real. In short: officials tell lies by inflating the urgency of things, and journalists compound the fraud by passing them along in supposedly objective -- but inherently uncritical -- ways.

The result, he argues, is both bad government and a journalism that is "stupid and dysfunctional," practiced by reporters who are little more than "dependent, submissive, narcissistic courtiers" to the officials they cover.
The whole government-media symbiosis has been the subject of much discussion and hand-wringing over the years, and not just by people who believe the press behaves badly. Tom Wicker complained in his 1978 book On Press about the limitations of "objective" reporting and the problems of relying on official sources. Edwin Bayley's Joe McCarthy and the Press examined the difficulties reporters have in dealing with liars. Leon Sigal's 1973 study of twenty year's worth of New York Times and Washington Post coverage showed that 78 percent of the nearly 3,000 national and foreign stories sampled were based on official sources, suggesting the degree to which, even back then, government officials were shaping the news.

But Weaver takes this another step, picturing journalists not just as victims of hype and deception but as partners in it, allowing officials to create artificial crises in order to inflate the urgency of their programs and drum up public support for them. His term for this is "media-enabled fabrication," and he says it amounts to a lie.

. . . Joseph Pulitzer, who helped create the modern newspaper, and whom Weaver blames for many bad things. Before Pulitzer, most newspapers aimed themselves at fairly small and select audiences. They were partisan papers intended to serve specific constituencies. But what Pulitzer did was to create the first truly mass-circulation newspaper, pulling readers from all segments of society into his New York World by producing a news report that was less partisan than was usual for the day and by giving stories such display and impact that all segments of the community felt they were affected by them.

This attracted advertisers as well, and for the first time newspapers began getting more money from advertisers than they did from subscribers. As the need to get more customers for these advertisers increased, papers began turning toward marginal readers, including some who had little real interest in news and less interest in paying for it. And these, complains Weaver, were people who could be attracted only by a loud and sensational press, one that made every situation seem a crisis in order to make it seem important to all of its readers.

Weaver's point is that this new journalism gave press-savvy politicians like Woodrow Wilson the vehicle they needed to go over the heads of their constitutional colleagues in the Congress and appeal directly to the American people, creating what Weaver and others call a "rhetorical" presidency. They could do it because the supposedly "objective" journalism of the new mass-market newspaper gave them a free pass to say what they pleased without partisan rebuttal.

"Everything the Constitution had done to make democracy safe for individual rights and prudent statecraft, Pulitzer's journalism was undoing," Weaver says. "It took events out of their constitutional contexts. It focused on the near term. It stressed the emotional and the immediate rather than the rational and the considered."

The result, he says, is that today much government policy is crafted in an atmosphere of self-created crisis, by officials who know that the standards of objective journalism will let them get away with it, and by journalists who understand what's going on ("It's practically impossible to fool a reporter," Weaver says) but permit it. The journalists do this, he says, because playing the game by these rules gives them a sense of "mutual empowerment" with the officials, and because reporters are able to embrace lies when they are validated by the people whose approval they seek. Which is another way of saying that they like to suck up to sources."
. . .
"It's a given that most news stories are incomplete, that many lack proper context, and that much misinformation gets passed along to the public."

Columbia Journalism Review, November/December 1994
ABOUT BOOKS: NEWS AND THE CULTURE OF LYING, BY PAUL H. WEAVER, THE FREE PRESS. 243 PP.
A book review by Anthony Marro
Anthony Marro has been a reporter for The Rutland (Vermont) Herald, Newsday, Newsweek and The New York Times. He is now the editor of Newsday.
http://www.cjr.org/year/94/6/books-weaver.asp

10. Governments (political leaders) lie:

"There are still places where people think the function of the media is to provide information."-- Dan Rottenberg, Clinton White House spokesperson, 12.06.00
Source: Readers & Writers Magazine Looking at Language by Richard Lederer
http://www.zmag.org/quotes/quotesResults.cfm?topic1=Media

"Every politician -- Democrat, Republican, or Independent -- stares into the TV camera and lies. This isn't casual lying. They study how to do this. They hire people to help them do this. This is a profession, and lying is now a multidisciplinary science involving a complex understanding of the law, polls, psychology, acting, semantics and different communications media."
(source unavailable)

"Many great American leaders have lied. When former President George Bush broke his promise not to raise taxes, rendered with that portent rhetoric of Read My Lips: No New Taxes, Americans felt that they had been had. Bush was a man of great dignity and honor, always dripping with trust, but when economic circumstances forced him to make an about-face turn, he lost it and lost the American people and it cost him reelection. Then there was the Iran-Contra scandal, arms for hostages deal. Bush said he didn't know about it. It was such a big issue that Time magazine ran a poll which found that 63 percent of Americans thought he was lying. Americans also thought that the Teflon President, Ronald Reagan also lied in claiming he didn't arms were being traded for American hostages. Americans thought that Clinton lied about not dodging the draft. They also believed that Clinton fudged the truth when he said he smoked but did not inhale. Now, that's lying in America, and it goes as high as you want."

The Conscience of a Nation: Clinton, Sex and Politics Around the World
Chapter 3, The Morals of Americans
http://www.victorsbooks.com/CONchap3.html

"The public may now assume lying on the part of its representatives because it expects them to lie. Clinton himself reflected this cynical view recently, when he whimsically entertained reporters with his laws of politics, including this one: "Nearly everyone will lie to you, given the right circumstances."

"Lies, Lies, Lies", By Paul Gray, All Politics, CNN TIME, October 5, 1992.
http://www.cnn.com/ALLPOLITICS/1997/10/06/back.time/

"That depends on what the definition of is, is." - President Bill Clinton, during his deposition in the Monica Lewinsky case
Lederer On Language, Richard Lederer
http://www.verbatimreporters.com/jcr/0011/0011_lederer.htm

11. Rules of political lying:

"There is an entirely new set of rules about lying for and by the politicians.I have not fathomed them entirely but the following are, I believe, accurate:

Always take all the credit for the good things that develop regardless of whether or not you had anything to do with it.
Always deny any involvement in anything that is unpleasant or damaging particularly if it applies to yourself.
Use surrogates to say the things you do not want to say.
Engage an unlimited number of surrogates so that they blanket the media in all its forms.
Surrogates of the minority groups are the most effective since they reflect your high level morality!
Obfuscate all the time.
Avoid all the tough issues and always deal with the issues that are decades away (Social Security) and that the people neither understand nor worry about!
Espouse righteousness and high level morality.
Hire the best legal minds you can find who are specialists in obfuscation, delay and denial.
Engage the pollsters to come up with preordained results.
Scare the country but guarantee you can fix it!
Flood the media with information that will further your cause and damage your enemies causes.
Never hesitate to descend to the personal level if it suits your cause.
Put no limits whatsoever on the name calling of the opposition.
Be paranoiac and claim conspiracy.
Never deal head on with an issue. Obfuscate the issue until it comes out to your advantage.
Fight dirty all the time. The Marquis of Queensberry rules are for losers!"

"From My Perspective: High Tech Lying", by Pierre A. Rinfret.
http://www.parida.com/lying.html

12. Governments lie to everyone in order to spy on other governments and cover up mistakes:

"Many of the original files documenting the CIA’s 1953 covert operation in Iran—the agency’s first successful overthrow of a government—were destroyed, a CIA historian revealed in 1997.
To guarantee the secrecy of its covert “MK ULTRA” program, which for twenty years ran behavior modification experiments on unwitting human subjects, the CIA destroyed most of these documents in 1973."

" A lawsuit filed in 1997 forced the CIA’s hand at last, revealing the total aggregate intelligence budget for that year at $26.6 billion. Director George Tenet disclosed the budget in the following year ($26.7 billion) and then reversed himself by withholding the figure for 1999.

In fact, much of what we know about the CIA today entered the public realm against the agency’s will. From the Bay of Pigs bloodbath to the Iran-contra debacle, excessive secrecy gave birth to and then covered up epic policy failures."

" The president’s own Information Security Oversight Office (ISOO) does not know precisely how many millions—or billions—of secret records are stored in agency vaults. The cost of keeping so many secrets—what with salaries, safes, locks, security training, record management, computer programs, and the like—is equally staggering. The ISOO figured that the government spent some $4.1 billion in 1997 alone on “security classification.” And that amount does not include the CIA’s share, which is ... secret."

U.S. Secrecy and Lies, Volume 5, Number 24, August 2000
http://www.foreignpolicy-infocus.org/briefs/vol5/v5n24secrets_body.html

13. Government leaders lie to their own citizens about other governments in order to justify national policies which benefit special interest groups, particularly the corporations who paid for their election.

"During the cold war, Presidents were allowed to lie when national security could plausibly be invoked. But now that the Soviet Union has collapsed, this exemption is gone.[1]

Presidents were also allowed to lie when they appealed to cherished national beliefs and mythologies. George Bush's orchestration of the 1991 Gulf War was an inspired and inspiring example of this dispensation. The central truth of Desert Storm was not the peril of freedom-loving Kuwaitis or the delusions of a tin-pot Middle Eastern despot. The Gulf War was fought over oil and the West's continued access to it. As reasons for waging war go, this was rather good: a national interest was threatened, and a military response met the immediate threat. But almost no one wanted to say or hear that young American lives were being put at risk for a commodity. Hence the successful collusion in mythmaking between the leaders and the led."

"Lies, Lies, Lies", By Paul Gray, All Politics, CNN TIME, October 5, 1992.
http://www.cnn.com/ALLPOLITICS/1997/10/06/back.time/

[1] Note: Now that terrorism is America's greatest threat, the exemption to lie in the interest of national security is back.

14. Governments lie to their own citizens using the justification that it is in their citizens' best interests to be lied to about a matter.

"National security has been a notorious refuge for scoundrels who confuse their interests with their country's and therefore lie to cover up both. Convinced that winning the Vietnam War was essential to U.S. interests, President Lyndon Johnson was exasperated to learn that not all Americans agreed with him. These ignorant, shortsighted people therefore had to be protected from themselves, an end that justified almost any means. The long trail of lies and deceptions that followed is a lamentable matter of record."

"Lies, Lies, Lies", By Paul Gray, All Politics, CNN TIME, October 5, 1992.
http://www.cnn.com/ALLPOLITICS/1997/10/06/back.time/

Of course, President Johnson also said that he did not want to be the first U.S. President to lose a war. His concern for how his term would be remembered in the history books was no small factor in prolonging and increasing U.S. troop involvement in southeast Asia, and the resulting body count.

"As with individuals, so with governments: the more deeply they get into trouble, the more apt they are to seek an escape through lying. Truth is the first casualty in every war. Governments consider it their patriotic duty to deceive the enemy and, incidentally, their own people. Thus, each government inflates the battlefield losses of the other and deflates its own. "National security" becomes the handy detergent with which a government washes the black out of every official lie. Things haven't changed very much in the four hundred years since Henry Wotton described an ambassador as "an honest man sent to lie abroad for the commonwealth."
http://www.christians.org/command/com09.html

15. Governments lie to cover up mistakes in judgment or policy:

"And then we learn that, once again, our own government has lied to us. Not about something far away, like Vietnam or propping up a Central American dictatorship. But something close to home. Our water supply, for instance.

The U.S. Department of Energy is finally admitting what a lot of folks suspected for a long time: that the radioactive waste from the Hanford Nuclear Reservation is moving inexorably toward the Columbia River.

For decades the energy department tried to convince us that Hanford didn't pose a threat to the world's water system. While the tanks containing some of the deadliest waste ever created by humans were leaking. But the brew seeping out wasn't dangerous, we were told over and over again that the brew seeping out wasn't dangerous.

Does anyone really believe our government didn't know 10, 15, 20 years ago?

It's another example of the classic lie to the public. When our government was filling the atmosphere during the 1950s with radioactive fallout, it kept telling us not to worry. There was no danger. Now, decades later, we learn that the tests have been making people sick for years. Our government claims it didn't know at the time.

Those people knew. They just lied to us, and waited until the original liars were long gone before their successors decided to tell us at least some of the truth.

Now it looks like the radioactive river forming under Hanford will flow right into one of the largest rivers in the world, which will take it right into one of our two oceans. Already, the oceans are so fouled we are told to limit the amount of seafood we eat. When the Hanford mess hits the big water, one can only imagine what the result may be.
. . .
But meanwhile, you have to ask yourself: What is our government lying to us about today? What will we learn in 20 or 30 years that we should know now?"

"Liars"
Copyright 1997 American City Business Journals Inc.
http://portland.bizjournals.com/portland/stories/1997/12/01/editorial1.html



16. Government leaders use "fear" of foreign nations or foreign ideologies to stabilize their own "popular" political support.

"Before Clinton, U.S. presidents were careful to cast U.S. military action as defensive in nature. Sometimes the protestations were shaky, as with the Tonkin Gulf Resolution that, on closer examination, turned out to be a pretext for expansion of U.S. effort in Vietnam, rather than a response to a clear-cut attack. But at least presidents made the effort to appear to be responding to aggression rather than initiating it.

President Clinton abandoned almost all pretense to a defensive posture; indeed, some of his foreign attacks could easily be interpreted as cynical "wag the dog" gestures designed to deflect attention from domestic or personal embarrassments.

The missile attacks on a pharmaceutical factory in Sudan and on targets in Afghanistan in August 1998 were said to be linked to Saudi terrorist Osama Bin laden, who was suspected of orchestrating bombings of U.S. embassies - although it turned out the pharmaceutical factory was not a chemical-weapons facility and it is almost certain that Clinton knew this and ordered the attack anyway. Monica testified before a grand jury that day.

All pretense of defensiveness was scuttled with the December 1998 missile attacks on Iraq.

As it became obvious that the House was going to go through with impeachment, the president seized on the fact that Saddam Hussein had kicked U.N. weapons inspectors out of Iraq two months earlier to launch "Operation Desert Fox," several days of airstrikes against Iraq. In November Clinton had U.N. support for such strikes, but by December he had none; he did it anyway.

The key factor is that although Saddam was undoubtedly intransigent with U.N. inspectors, there was no evidence - none - that he had attacked another country or had any near-term intention of doing so, as was at least the case after Saddam invaded Kuwait in 1990.

The airstrikes amounted to naked aggression against a country that, while undoubtedly led by a murderous tyrant, had not invaded or threatened its neighbors.

The 1999 air war against Kosovo and Serbia followed the same pattern.

Serbian leader Slobodan Milosevic is a villain, but when Clinton pushed NATO to launch an air war against him he had not invaded or threatened to invade any foreign country. He was putting down a rebellion in Kosovo rather brutally (though not as brutally as NATO insisted), but Kosovo was recognized by every member of the "international community" as a province of Yugoslavia. That made the NATO war against Serbia an undeclared (of course) war of aggression.

Clinton's interpretation of executive war making authority was positively Nixonian in its audacity. He also waged war without congressional approval in Haiti and Bosnia."

FOREIGN POLICY, By Alan W. Bock, January 14, 2001
http://www.ocregister.com/commentary/foreign14.shtml   (Emphasis ours.)


17. Governments use "fear" of foreign nations or foreign ideologies to justify excessive military spending which benefits their financial backers.

The cold war and communism:

"In the 1950s there was tremendous pressure on Americans to conform to certain assumptions and values. During the height of the Cold War, any one who did not share these so-called "American values" could be and often was accused of being a communist. America represented freedom, democracy, individual rights, economic opportunity, equality, private property, and free enterprise. Looking back at the 1950s, [TV producer] Fred Freed said: "Back then there was general agreement in the United States about what was right and what was wrong about the country. Nobody really questioned the system....we had a common set of beliefs and common values." (Chafe, 101) In his essay, "The Ideology of the Liberal Consensus," Godfrey Hodgson argues that this common beliefs and values that Americans held in the 1950s were in fact a "liberal consensus" that described America as a perfect society that worked and did not suffer from any major conflicts or problems.

Young children, teenagers, and adults were bombarded with cultural and social messages reinforcing this liberal consensus in the 1950s. They were told that America was free and good and the Soviet communists were totalitarian and evil. Many young Americans even came to believe that if there were problems lurking in American society they must be the result of communist infiltration. One minister, Jack Impe, even charged that Rock-n-Roll music was part of a communist conspiracy to undermine the values of America's youth. Unlike the 1960s, many Americans in the 1950s unquestionably believed in the government, their society, and their culture.

Let's look at some of the core values and assumptions at the heart of this liberal consensus. Hodgson argues that there are six core assumptions at the heart of this American consensus on values and beliefs:

1. That American free enterprise is democratic and provides abundance and opportunities for all Americans.

2. That economic growth and increased production was ending class divisions in America and meeting the needs of all classes and peoples in America.

3. That because of economic growth, abundance, and increased opportunities all Americans were becoming middle class.

4. Government and society can solve social problems.

5. The main threat to American society comes from outside the United States, comes from the global communist conspiracy against the Free World and capitalism. The United States must therefore engage in a prolonged struggle against communism.

6. It is the duty and destiny of the United States to bring its economic and political institutions and free-enterprise system to the rest of the world.
(See Chafe, 104-105)

The problem created by the liberal consensus and 1950s optimism and conformity about America and its values was that it did not prepare young people and other Americans for some of the harsh realities of American society and culture. I will argue that it [is] the growing contradiction between the values of the liberal consensus and the increasing social problems that challenge Americans in the 1950s and 1960s that leads many young people to challenge their government and society. During the 1960s, they will continually ask why their government and society does not live up to its ideals and values. Are the values and beliefs of the liberal consensus just lies? Are Americans hypocrites? Or does America need to be reformed so that it can indeed live up the values and principles at the heart of this liberal consensus? These are the question American students and young people will try to answer in the social and political debates that created the tumultuous American society of the 1960s.

Let's look at some of the contradictions that America faced in the 1950s that were not addressed and explored by the liberal consensus. Because of McCarthyism, many Americans were afraid that if they spoke up or challenged their government and society they would be accused of being communists. In fact, school boards banned books such as Catcher in the Rye and Peyton Place because some people believed they were written by communists. Ministers and conservatives charged that Rock-n-Roll musicians were part of a communist plot. And because of their fear of McCarthyism, many high school teachers mindlessly led their students through "nuclear war" drills in which they talked about the possibility of the students being annihilated in a nuclear war. If the teachers challenged these drills, they could be called communists and lose their jobs. In addition, Black leaders and Blacks who challenged segregation and racial inequality were accused of being communists. As a result of McCarthyism, many young people began to wonder if America was really the free country that it claimed to be.

In addition to McCarthyism, Americans increasingly watched on TV in the 1950s the Civil Rights struggle in the South. They saw Blacks being denied service in whites-only facilities and saw Blacks brutally beaten for challenging this colorline. Americans saw white mobs attacking and beating up young Blacks students and their parents who were simply trying to get an equal education in the South. But Americans also listened to the arguments and demands of the leaders of the Civil Rights movement like Martin Luther King who declared that American cannot be free as long as Blacks aren't free. If Blacks weren't free, many young people asked, could America really be a free society? Didn't massive American racism and racial violence demonstrate the larger contradictions at the heart of a supposedly free American society?

Many Americans also feared the growth of the federal government and large corporations in the 1950s. Many workers believed that they were merely cogs in a giant machine that did not respect their existence or rights. Critics of corporate America referred to the army of "men in grey flannel suits" who were trapped in dead-end, anonymous jobs and lives. Even President Eisenhower by the early 1960s was beginning to express these fears about what he called the growing power and influence of the "military industrial complex." Eisenhower worried that the massive growth of federal government power, the American military, giant corporations dependent on making military hardware and weapons, and politicians and community's dependence on military spending threatened American democracy. He worried that because of this growing power of the military industrial complex public policy could "become the captive of a scientific-technological elite." Eisenhower concluded that it was the job of American leaders to protect and preserve our democracy and democratic institutions from the growing power of this military industrial complex.

Like Eisenhower, many Americans began to worry about the increasing power and influence of the "national security state" on American society. In order to fight and win the Cold War, the federal government created a vast, secretive intelligence and military establishment that few Americans understood and supported. In the 1950s, as a result of the Cold War, it seemed to many Americans that they, and even the Congress of the United States, were increasingly shut out of and prevented from making the major decisions that confronted America. By the early 1960s, it was increasingly clear that the President and the executive branch of government had increased its power at the expense of Congress and American democracy.

Let's look at some contradictions at the heart of America's Cold War struggle to preserve and protect freedom in the United States and throughout the world. According to Loewen, the American government in the 1950s and 1960s began to carry out many actions that were undemocratic and violated the basic principles that America stood for in the Cold War. In 1953, the United States and the CIA overthrew a democratically elected government in Iran and installed a brutal dictator the Shah of Iran, who ruled Iran with American support until he was overthrown in 1979. In 1954, the United States overthrew the democratically-elected government in Guatemala, and we have supported the brutal Guatemalan military rulers ever since. In 1958, the United States rigged an election in Lebanon that later led to a thirty years civil war. The United States had the democratic leader of Zaire, Patrice Lumumba, assassinated in 1961. Finally the United States tried to overthrow the communist leader of Cuba, Fidel Castro, and even tried on a number of occasions to assassinate him in the early 1960s. This gets even more bizarre when we take into account that the CIA hired the Mafia to kill Castro. By the early 1960s, it is increasingly clear to some Americans that the United States has become an arrogant power that threatens and denies the democratic rights of peoples throughout the world. Many young people in the 1960s wondered how America could be a democratic nation and yet deny basic democratic rights to other people. Can a democratic society overthrew the government of another democratic society? Can America really be free if it denies basic rights and freedoms to other peoples?

Finally, it was increasingly clear to many Americans by the early 1960s that not all Americans were becoming middle class. Despite the economic growth and abundance created by the booming American economy in the 1950s, many Americans were suffering from poverty, hunger, and despair. How could America be a free society if millions of Americans were denied the freedom and opportunity to become economically successful and pass this success on to their children? The recognition of poverty, racism, and economic inequality in the early 1960s caused many young people to question the values of the liberal consensus. They began to wonder whether Americans were being honest with themselves about the real social and political problems facing America.

Out of these increasing questions and social and political contradictions, many American young people and college students began to challenge Americans and politicians to face up to these problems and solve them. Instead of becoming cynical and disillusioned by the real contradictions that faced American society, many young people and Americans in the 1960s challenged Americans and the United States to live up to its values and ideals. The students and young people committed themselves to reforming America and helping the United States live up to the grand vision of America described by the liberal consensus. By the end of the 1960s, as a result of increasing social and political conflict, many young people and some Americans concluded that American society could not so easily be reformed. Maybe the United States was not the ideal society they had been taught that it was. The contradiction between the ideals and complacency of the 1950s liberal consensus and the larger reality of social and political conflict in American society helped create the tension, disillusionment, cynicism, and idealism of students and young people in the 1960s and 1970s.

"America in the 1950's"
http://www.colorado.edu/AmStudies/lewis/2010/liberal.htm

 

[Note: Some web sites present a lot of information without any source references or documentation. In some cases the material "sounds" valid because of the abundance of other sources which seem to agree with the information given. All we know for sure is it is "verrrry interesting" and "Caveat Emptor" ;-). With that caveat, we include the following site.]:

"The Government's Lies

"Every government is run by liars, and nothing they say should be believed," remarked journalist-gadfly I. F. Stone at the height of the Cold War. While some might quibble with the sweep of the statement, during the last half century national-security obsessions indeed often put the truth into cryonic suspension.

When the Reagan administration got caught scaremongering lies about Libya, secretary of State George Shultz felt obliged to quote Winston L. S. Churchill: "In time of war," he said, "the truth is so precious it must be attended by a bodyguard of lies." Of course, the United States wasn't actually at war with Libya, but it was, Shultz helpfully offered, "pretty darn close." In fact, Shultz had his sequence of events a bit confused. It was the bodyguard of lies that actually helped get us "pretty darn close" to war in the first place - not exactly what Churchill had in mind.

It's no secret that all governments sow scurrilous disinformation about their foes. Soviet commissars convinced their subjects that all of America was a war zone of rampaging, psychopathic criminals. During the 1980s, Soviet propagandists latched on to the theory that AIDS was a biological weapon perfected in U.S. military labs and persuaded much of the third world that such was the case.

Soviet disinformationists also spread the rumor in Latin America that minions of the United States were abducting children in an evil scheme to steal human organs. This black pearl of calumny is still reverberating: In the past several years, several unfortunate (and innocent) American tourists visiting Guatemala have been killed or seriously injured by mobs of angry locals convinced that they were meting out justice to evil child abductors.

An oft-used CIA technique for "disinforming" Americans without breaking the letter of the law involved planting unattributed, or "black," propaganda in the foreign press in hopes that the American media would pick up the bogus story. According to a 1977 New York Times report, former CIA officers "spoke of unmistakable attempts to propagandize the American public indirectly through 'replay' from the foreign press," particularly during the Vietnam War. A 1970 CIA assessment spoke of "continued replay of Chile theme materials" in the American press, including the New York Times and Washington Post . "Propaganda activities," the report went on, "continue to generate good coverage of Chile developments along our theme guidance."

John Stockwell, head of the CIA's Angola Task Force during the 1970s, has described planting a phony story in the African press about Cuban soldiers raping Angolan women. Days later, the story made headlines in the American press, as expected.

In wartime (or pretty darn close to it) that celebrated bodyguard of lies has often been mustered, usually to stir up popular support for military adventures. President Johnson used the infamous Gulf of Tonkin incident, in which American destroyers were supposedly attacked off the coast of North Vietnam but really weren't, as a pretext to escalate the war. In the months leading up to Operation Desert Storm, the Bush administration endorsed, but didn't concoct, the like that Iraqi soldiers ripped babies from incubator in a Kuwaiti hospital. Later, the Pentagon's claims about the celebrated Patriot missile were exposed as being, shall we say, somewhat phantasmal. In fact, according to several independent analysts, the defense missile missed most of its targets - incoming Iraqi Scud missiles - and exacted a not inconsiderable amount of damage on the cities they were supposed to be defending.

West European intelligence officers were convinced that the Soviets were also adept at transforming the worldwide popularity of UFO speculation into their own crafty intelligence tool. The UMMO UFO cult of Spain - its adherents are convinced that they are in contact with extraterrestrial aliens from a cosmic government called UMMO - may have begun as a mischievous hoax. However, according to UFO researcher Jacques Vallee, the French government came to suspect that the Soviet Union had infiltrated the cult for obscure purposes that might have involved manipulation of religious belief systems. Vallee points out that many of the pseudoscientific "revelations" channeled to earthlings from the UMMO entities contained "very advanced" theories about cosmology. "Very advanced cosmology about twin universes," Vallee explains, "involving some data that had to have come straight out of the unpublished notes of Andre Sakharov." Only the KGB would have had access to those notes, French intelligence officials decided.

But why would the Soviets go to the trouble to manipulate an obscure New Age cult? Per Vallee, there are at least a couple of reasons: Cults are an ideal way to incubate ideas - and irrational belief systems - that might later prove destabilizing to enemy governments. Moreover, a cult might provide cover for foreign spies doing technical assessment; after all, the UMMO "channelings" were distributed to noted Western scientists, who were encouraged to correspond with UMMOs representatives on earth.

When it comes to the black art of espionage, we've come to expect the most devious means and the worst intentions. But there's something especially rankling when the U.S. government purposely deceives the American public.

Not surprisingly, the CIA ever on the sociotechnological cutting edge, pioneered propaganda as a form of "mind control" to help mold public opinion during the heyday of the cold war. Once-secret CIA documents from the early 1950s describe "broad" mind-control operations both overseas and domestically (in violation of the Agency's charter) and high-level meeting convened to discuss "the broader aspects of psychology as it pertains to the control of groups or masses . . . ." Drawing on the lingo of Madison Avenue, agency officials pondered "means for combating communism and 'selling' democracy."

Consumers of this psychological bill of goods were often American citizens. Ironically, part of the propaganda operation was an effort to convince the public that it was the Soviets (and certainly not the CIA) who had unilaterally launched a "sinister . . . battle for men's minds" involving "brain perversion techniques . . . so subtle and so abhorrent to our way of life that we have recoiled from facing up to them," as agency director Allen Dulles intoned in a foreboding speech. Edward Hunter, a CIA propagandist turned "journalist," coined the lurid term "brain-washing," and the official government line charged the Chinese and Soviets with bleaching the patriotic brain cells of American soldiers, transforming them into robotic "Manchurian Candidates."

In reality, though, then-secret CIA memos maintained that there was "no indication of Red use of chemicals" and that the Soviets had no interest in controlling minds via "narcotics, hypnosis, or special mechanical devices." The CIA, on the other hand, did take great interest in brainwashing foreigners and Americans through its notorious MK-ULTRA program launched three days after Dulles's scarifying speech. As authors Martin Lee and Norman Solomon wrote in their book Unreliable Sources , "It appears that the communist brainwashing scare was a propaganda ploy, a kind of 'brainwashing' or mind control in its own right designed to dupe the American people."

But when it comes to disinformation in a wide-screen, Cinemascope format, the former thespian Ronald Reagan deserves top billing. Assisted by a gullible press corps, the Reagan administration fobbed off sundry falsehoods on an unsuspecting public.

Early in the Reagan epoch, the State Department reawakened cold-war angst when it released a white paper purporting to have exposed a global Communist conspiracy to arm El Salvador's leftist rebels. The Commie brouhaha was later debunked as a hoax.

Soon after the El Salvador scare, Secretary of State Alexander Haig warned the world that the Soviets were spraying innocents in Laos, Cambodia, and Afghanistan with a deadly chemical weapon. The poison, dubbed "Yellow Rain," supposedly fell from the sky with devastating results. The hideous weapon turned out to be the natural drizzle of bee feces. State Department documents eventually emerged indicating that U.S. cold warriors pushed the false story despite warning by various government analysts that there was no evidence to back it up.

Then there was the aforementioned disinformation campaign against Libyan leader Mu'ammar al-Qaddafi, who was fingered as the hub of an international terrorist network, the mastermind behind a plot to assassinate Reagan. The goofiest result of this campaign of canards was a New York Post headline that read: "MADMAN MOAMAR NOW A DRUGGIE DRAG QUEEN"! Alas, it was too good to be true. A memo from Iran-Contra fall-guy John Poindexter to Reagan later surfaced, describing a disinformation program to destabilize the Libyan government.

The Reagan administration took its propaganda efforts seriously enough to establish a de facto bureau of domestic disinformation, dubbed euphemistically the Office of Public Diplomacy (OPD). Described by a high-ranking U.S. official as a "cast psychological warfare operation" aimed at the American public, the OPD was run by a CIA propagandist whom Director William Casey had transferred to the National Security Council in an effort to side-step the ban on CIA meddling in domestic affairs. The OPD enlisted army psywar experts in the campaign to win American hearts and minds over to Reagan's foreign policy.

The OPD focused on Reagan's Nicaragua obsession, especially "gluing black hats" on the leftist Sandinista government and "white hats" on the Contras, as a 1986 memo put it. In addition to producing slick flyers and lobbying Congress, the OPD slipped "scoops" to credulous reporters, including the canard that the Soviets planned to ship MIG fighter planes to Nicaragua.

In 1987 a General Accounting Office probe of the OPD concluded that the Reaganites had operated "prohibited, covert propaganda activities" at the expense of the American public. Jack Brooks, the congressman from Texas, called the OPD's work an "illegal operation" intended "to manipulate public opinion and congressional action." The OPD officially shut down soon after the Iran-Contra scandal began to make headlines.

And last, but hardly least, are more recent revelations that during the Reagan era the Pentagon doctored the results of "Star Wars" weapons testing. When criticized for concealing the less-than-stellar performance of the high-tech, multibillion-dollar boondoggle, military brass invoked that old Cold War rationale: We couldn't afford to let the Russkies know we had a space-age lemon on our hands. Of course, fooling the Soviets necessarily meant pulling the wool over Congress and the American public, too. Which certainly didn't hurt when it came time to ask for more astronomical funding."

Copyright © 2001 CarpeNoctem. All rights reserved.
Revised: October 2001.
http://www.carpenoctem.tv/cons/lies.html



18. Government leaders lie to protect their "reputation".

Lyndon Johnson:

"In 1997, an Army major published a book about Vietnam that caught the attention of virtually every American military leader. The writer was H.R. McMaster and the book is titled Dereliction of Duty: Lyndon Johnson, Robert McNamara, The Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the Lies that Led to Vietnam."

"Far from an inevitable result of the imperative to contain communism, the [Vietnam] war was only made possible through lies and deceptions aimed at the American public, Congress, and members of Lyndon Johnson's own administration. Contrary to Robert McNamara's claims of ignorance and overconfidence during the period 1963-1965, the record proves that he and others were men who not only should have known better, but who did know better. These men and the decisions they made during those crucial months mired the United States in a costly war that could not be won at a cost acceptable to the American public.
. . .
Lyndon Johnson was a profoundly insecure man who feared dissent and craved reassurance. In 1964 and 1965, Johnson's principal goals were to win the presidency in his own right and to pass his Great Society legislation through Congress. The Secretary of Defense, Robert McNamara, was particularly adept at sensing the president's needs and giving him the advice he wanted. Lyndon Johnson knew that he faced a difficult choice between war and disengagement in Vietnam. However, because such a decision would alienate key constituencies on which his domestic goals depended, he sought a middle course aimed at placating those on both sides of the issue.
. . . Lyndon Johnson pursued consensus, which is the absence of leadership. He so feared dissent that he excluded everyone but his most trusted advisers from discussions on Vietnam when the situation there demanded a full examination and debate. LBJ so feared a debate over Vietnam that he often refused to discuss the subject within his own circle. On one occasion he threatened to feign illness and leave town for his Texas ranch if his advisers pressed him further to confront the issue.
. . . Lyndon Johnson ultimately got the military advice he wanted. He and McNamara were arrogant in their belief that they did not require advice based on JCS [Joint Chiefs of Staff] military experience and education. What they wanted instead was silent acquiescence for decisions already made and the legitimacy lent their policies by the chiefs' uniforms.
. . .
[Regarding the question of ] whether and how to use military force in pursuit of limited foreign policy objectives?

There is a danger that one can learn the wrong lessons. All warfare is limited to some degree. There is nothing inherently wrong in limiting the use of force as long as the means employed are connected with strategic goals and objectives. The process of determining the means to employ must begin with a clearly stated policy goal or objective. Senior military advisers and commanders should then develop a military strategy that contributes to or achieves that goal or objective. Then, military commanders determine the level of force necessary to carry out that strategy.

During the Vietnam War, Lyndon Johnson and his advisers did precisely the opposite. LBJ determined what level of military force was politically palatable in the short term, made it available to the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and told them to do the best they could with what they got. That is why we had lots of military activity in Vietnam (bombing North Vietnam and killing the enemy in South Vietnam)without a clear idea of how that activity represented progress. That is also why many brave, patriotic men took risks and made sacrifices without knowing how those risks and sacrifices were contributing toward an end of the war. That is why, along with the recognition that they had been lied to for years, many Americans lost faith in the effort."

"Major H.R. McMaster graduated from West Point in 1984, and, during the Gulf War, commanded Eagle Troop, 2nd Armored Cavalry Regiment's successful ground campaign against Iraq's Republican Guard in the Battle of 73 Easting. He has taught at West Point and received his Ph.D. in military history from the University of North Carolina in 1996. Currently, he is serving as regimental operations officer of the 11th Armored Cavalry Regiment at the National Training Center."


"Lessons of Vietnam: A Conversation with Major H.R. McMaster" by Rick Young
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/military/etc/lessons.html     (Emphasis ours.)

Richard Nixon:

"On June 17, 1972, five men, including former CIA agent James McCord, were arrested in the burglary of the Democratic party headquarters in the Watergate apartment complex in Washington, D.C. McCord was working for the Republican party.

Later in the same year, President Nixon announced that an internal White House investigation by counsel John Dean revealed no involvement by White House officials."
http://www.journale.com/watergate/watergate1.html

"On June, 23, 1972, Richard Nixon ordered a cover-up of the Watergate break-in, telling John Mitchell, the attorney general of the United States: "I don't give a sh_t what happens, I want you to stonewall it...save the plan."

"Watergate" is now an all-encompassing term used to refer to:

1. political burglary
2. bribery
3. extortion
4. wiretapping (phone tapping)
5. conspiracy
6. obstruction of justice
7. destruction of evidence
8. tax fraud
9. illegal use of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA.)
10. illegal use of the Federal Bureau of Investigations
(FBI.)
11. illegal campaign contributions
12. use of public (taxpayers') money for private purposes"

[For the rest of the story, go to the following web site.]
http://www.colorado.edu/AmStudies/lewis/2010/water.htm#Watergate


Ronald Reagan and Vice President George H. Bush:

Iran-Contra Criminal Conspiracy

1. Illegally selling military arms to the terrorist-state Iran, which was supporting Islamic militants who captured and held Americans hostage in Lebanon, from 1981 to 1986.

2. Selling Hawk missiles and military spare parts to Iran in exchange for the release of American hostages by Iranian-supported Islamic militants.

3. Lying to Congress and the American people about "trading arms for hostages" with Iran.

4. Selling missiles and military equipment through a private company to Iran and using the profits from these missiles sales to illegally fund a guerrilla war in Central America.

5. Illegally using the CIA and Defense Department to support the Nicaraguan Contras, which Congress had banned from giving such support.

6. Lying to Congress and the American people about illegally providing military aid and support to the Nicaraguan Contras.

7. Working with Columbian Drug cartels to illegally ship drugs into the United States and using the profits to help fund the Contras' military operations in Nicaragua.

8. A cover-up of the illegal activities of President Reagan and his administration led by Reagan and his National Security Council Staff.

9. Destroying government documents and e-mail that would implicate Reagan and his top advisers.

10. Lying to Congress and the American People about President Reagan and his advisers' role in the larger Iran-Contra criminal conspiracy.

11. Reagan and his advisers committed perjury about their knowledge of and involvement in the larger criminal conspiracy during the Iran-Contra criminal trials.

12. President Bush's December 1992 pardon of Caspar Weinberger and other top Reagan advisers in order to avoid the possible criminal prosecution of Bush and Reagan for their Iran-Contra crimes.
http://www.colorado.edu/AmStudies/lewis/2010/irancon.htm
----------------------------

"Let's start with President Truman. He deceived the nation and the world when he described Hiroshima -- just devastated by a U.S.-dropped atomic bomb -- as "an important Japanese Army base." More than 100,000 civilians -- men, women and children -- in a city of 350,000 died there. Truman lied about our war in Korea. He said that we were fighting for democracy, but we were protecting South Korea -- a military dictatorship. More than 50,000 Americans died. And perhaps 2 million Koreans.

[The truth: Though Hiroshima was the headquarters of a number of military units, it was mostly a civilian city. In fact, Hiroshima was rated a low military priority by the U.S. Army; that's why it hadn't been bombed yet. 140,000 people, almost all civilians, died as a result of the bombing.
The excuse: None. He never changed his story
The consequences: None for President Truman.] (1)

President Eisenhower lied about our spy flights over the Soviet Union, even after one flier on such a mission was shot down. He deceived the nation and the world about the U.S. involvement in the 1954 coup that overthrew a democratic government in Guatemala. That coup installed a succession of military juntas that took tens of thousands of lives. He deceived the nation about the U.S. role in the 1953 toppling of a government in Iran because it was offending multinational oil corporations. The Shah of Iran was put back on the throne, and his secret police tortured and executed thousands of his opponents.

President Kennedy lied to the nation about U.S. involvement in the failed 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba, telling a press conference: "I can assure you that the United States has no intention of using force to overthrow the Castro regime."

[ President John F. Kennedy, April 18, 1961
The lie: "I have previously stated and I repeat now that the United States intends no military intervention in Cuba."
The truth: Not only was the Bay of Pigs invasion organized and funded by the CIA, but Americans flew combat missions as well. One day after Kennedy made the above statement, an American pilot was shot down on a bombing mission over Cuba. Castro recovered the pilot's body and kept it -- frozen -- for the next 18 years as proof. (He returned the body when he heard that the pilot's daughter was looking for her father who, she had been told, disappeared on a training flight.) Over 100 Cuban exiles, 14 Americans, and an unreported number of Cubans died in the invasion.
The excuse: None, he never got busted.
The consequences: None (though some folks believe that Cuban exiles played a part in Kennedy's assassination).] (1)

Presidents Kennedy, Johnson and Nixon all lied to the nation about what was happening in Vietnam. Kennedy, while denying repeatedly that American fliers were involved in the bombing of Vietnam, sent two helicopter companies there as early as 1962, along with napalm. Johnson and Nixon both lied when they claimed only military targets were bombed in the war. And Nixon kept the bombing of Cambodia secret from the nation.

[President Lyndon Johnson, August 5, 1964
The lie: "As President and Commander in Chief it is my duty to the American people to report that renewed hostile actions against United States ships on the high seas in the Gulf of Tonkin have today required me to order the military forces of the United States to take action in reply."
The truth: There was no unprovoked Vietnamese attack on a U.S. warship. President Johnson ran with the untrue story to gain support for American involvement in Vietnam.
The excuse: None needed. The press didn't follow up until after Johnson left office.
The consequences: None for President Johnson. The lie resulted in the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, which authorized the president to use "all necessary measures" to defend U.S. forces. Johnson later compared the resolution to "grandma's nightskirt -- it covered everything." 58,214 Americans died in the Vietnam War.] (1)

President Reagan lied to the nation about his covert and illegal support of the contras in Nicaragua during the 1980s. He lied about the importance of Grenada in order to justify the 1983 American invasion of that little island.

[President Ronald Reagan, November 13, 1986
The lie: "We did not -- repeat -- did not trade weapons or anything else for hostages -- nor will we."
The truth: Reagan approved the sale of over 2,000 anti-tank weapons to Iran in return for promises to release the American hostages there. Money from the sale of those weapons went to support the Contras' war in Nicaragua. (The White House needed this backdoor method to fund the Contras because Congress had banned military aid to them.)
The excuse: "I'm afraid that I let myself be influenced by other's recollections, not my own."
The consequences: Reagan was a lame-duck president his last two years in office, but no administration official ever served prison time for the scandal. (The only person to serve time as a result of the scandal was Bill Breeden, who stole a "John Poindexter Street" sign in his town and held it for $30 million ransom, the amount of money made from weapons sales to Iran. He spent a few days in jail.) Over 70,000 Nicaraguans died in the war between the Contras and Sandinistas.] (1)

President Bush lied about the reasons for invading Panama in 1989, saying it was to stop the drug trade; in fact, the drug trade has flourished. And he deceived the nation about his real interest in the Persian Gulf, pretending to anguish about the fate of Kuwait while actually being more concerned about enhancing American power in Saudi Arabia and controlling the region's oil deposits.

And what of Clinton’s deceptions -- not about sexual activities -- but about matters of life and death? Politicians and journalists who are indignant that he lied about sex with "that woman" were silent when he deceived the nation about the need to bomb a "nerve gas plant" in the Sudan. His administration cannot produce convincing evidence that the plant was anything but what the Sudanese government said it was -- a plant that produced medicines for the Sudanese people."

[President Bill Clinton, January 26, 1998
The lie: Speaking after a White House presentation on child care, he told the nation, "I want you to listen to me. I'm going to say this again: I did not have sexual relations with that woman, Miss Lewinsky." (He also, of course, may have told the same lie under oath.)
The truth: Oh, he did it, alright.
The excuse: He didn't have sexual relations with her. She did with him.] (1)

"A historical perspective on Clinton’s lies", by Howard Zinn, October 1998
http://www.progressive.org/mpzinn1098.htm

(1)"Presidential Lies and Consequences", by Suzie Larsen, October 6, 1998
http://www.motherjones.com/sideshow/prezlies.html

"Jimmy Carter: "I will never lie to you."

"Yet Carter sometimes described himself during his campaign as a nuclear physicist when he was, in fact, educated at the Naval Academy as a nuclear engineer.

And Georgetown political science professor Stephen Wayne observes, "However much Carter made of never telling lies, he ended up in secret negotiations which Hamilton Jordan conducted for him with the Ayatollah Khomeini's representatives in Paris, and certainly not telling the whole truth about it.""

"A history of presidential lies"
Copyright © 1998 Nando.net
Copyright © 1998 Scripps Howard
http://archive.nandotimes.com/nt/special/lang0216.html



19. Government leaders "creatively manage" statistics or investigative reports to defend policies and decisions.

"How to Lie with Statistics"

"Some readers may have heard of How To Lie With Statistics by Darrell Huff. The book was written in 1954 but everything it says still holds just as true as it did then, which explains why the book is still available in all good bookshops. Darrell Huff explains many ways in which newspapers and politicians mislead the public by presenting data in carefully chosen ways and by drawing scientifically invalid conclusions, or leading the reader into drawing invalid conclusions of his or her own. He ends up asking, is lying with statistics simple incompetence or is it dishonesty? His conclusion is that it is mostly dishonesty.

Some good examples of misleading use of statistics have come up recently. The Government says that, over the last few years while they have been in office, taxes have fallen. The Opposition claims the opposite, that the tax burden has increased. Both sides are using the same data, yet they reach different conclusions: each side is simply presenting the data in its own confusing way, designed to make its arguments more convincing. It takes somebody who understands statistics (and economics to some extent) to work out who is right and who is wrong. Another example arose with the recent 'flu outbreak': medical experts said that it was not an epidemic, because the number of cases reported to GPs had not reached 400 per 10,000 people, which is the accepted definition of an epidemic. The Government stated publicly, however, that this was an epidemic, simply because (to paraphrase) lots of people had it and many of them probably weren't telling their GPs. We wonder what the point of having a definition of an epidemic is if we can just ignore the definition if we feel like it?

Should schoolchildren be taught how to interpret statistics? There are many aspects to teach about, such as graphs with misleading scales or axes, and opinion polls reported without the all-important sampling errors. To be able to grasp all the data which the media flings at the public and interpret it correctly: there seems no doubt that this is an important skill."

http://plus.maths.org/issue10/editorial/      (Emphasis ours.)

20. Politicians "buy" misleading or false opinion polls to support their actions and decisions.

"And as University of Virginia's nationally renowned political scientist, Larry J. Sabato, writes in his book "Dirty Little Secrets: The Persistence of Corruption in American Politics," telephone polls are growing sleazier.
The telephone polls, called "push polling" in political campaigns, often say things like, "Would you still vote for [Candidate B] if you knew he was gay?" although, in fact, the candidate is not gay, Sabato points out. Under the guise of legitimate polling, those engaged in push polling don't record data but, instead, use the conversation to plant rumors or spread false information in the hopes of influencing election outcomes."
". . . expert opinion on good and bad polling practices, push polling, survey methods and why different polls show substantial statistical differences from each other".

http://www.virginia.edu/topnews/textonlyarchive/October_1996/campaign.txt

On almost every occasion when we release a new survey, someone in the media will ask, "What is the margin of error for this survey?" There is only one honest and accurate answer to this question -- which I sometimes use to the great confusion of my audience -- and that is, "The possible margin of error is infinite."

"When the media print sentences such as "the margin of error is plus or minus three percentage points," they strongly suggest that the results are accurate to within the percentage stated. That is completely untrue and grossly misleading.   . . .
But they might be better off assuming -- as most of the readers surely do -- that all surveys, all opinion polls (and, indeed, all censuses) are estimates, which may be wrong."

"Polls are the worst way of measuring public opinion and public behavior, or of predicting elections--except for all the others."

Myth and Reality in Reporting Sampling Error
How the Media Confuse and Mislead Readers and Viewers by Humphrey Taylor

http://www.pollingreport.com/sampling.htm      (Emphasis ours.)



21. Politicians lie when they claim to represent "the people" while their actions are based on benefiting their financial backers. They claim to be "statesmen" when they are only political "pimps and prostitutes":

Political contributions to both parties by industries, PACs, and special interests during 1999-2000, and percentage of increase in contributions since 1990.

Abortion/Pro-life .............................$1,024,889      523 %   increase 1990 - 2000      
Abortion/Pro-choice ........................$3,071,665      463 %          
Casinos/Gambling ..........................$10,865,372    3,010 %           
Commercial Banks ....................... $25,235,097       308 %            
Computers/Internet ........................$39,625,739     3,302 %               
Gun Rights ...................................... $4,319,995       562 %               
Gun Control .......................................$484,799        323 %          
Education ......................................$16,231,430     1,082 %  
Health Professionals .......................$45,254,219        319 %     
Insurance .......................................$40,557,803        359 %       
Lawyers and Law Firms ...............$108,455,614        526 %     
Lobbyists .......................................$16,238,589        625 %             
Oil and Gas ....................................$33,486,154        372 %         
Pharmaceuticals/Health Products: ....$26,615,403        951 %       
Telephone Utilities ...........................$17,758,846        335 %         
Tobacco ...........................................$8,410,514        401 %         
TV/Movies/Music: ..........................$37,579,249        800 %     

Total ..............................................$435,215,377
http://www.opensecrets.org/

Note: These amounts are for two-year periods. From 1990-2000, the contributions have always increased, sometimes by 200-300% per period. The money contributed through lawyers and law firms can be from politically embarrassing sources such as foreign nations or foreign corporations.

--------------

Communist Chinese Money and the Democrats:

"On the Bright Side: Fox News Channel Shows the Flow, April 19, 1999"

Four days after the Los Angeles Times revealed Johnny Chung told a grand jury how the head of China’s military intelligence unit gave him $300,000 to donate to the DNC, the Fox News Channel’s Carl Cameron was the first and only television reporter to outline the money flow to show how cash traveled from communist front companies to the Democrats. He also uncovered how Al Gore met with the head of one of the front companies.

In a piece run on the April 8 Fox Report and Special Report with Brit Hume, Cameron revealed: "China’s military intelligence official most likely to be interested in stealing U.S. secrets, sources say, also turns out to be the mastermind behind China’s alleged plot to get the Clinton-Gore team re-elected in 1996 with illegal contributions."
Cameron then explained the money path: "At the beginning of a complicated money trail is the head of Chinese military intelligence, General Ji. He pulls the strings at a massive Chinese conglomerate called China Resources Company. U.S. intelligence say some China Resources divisions in Hong Kong and worldwide are known fronts for China’s Peoples Liberation Army and espionage. China Resources has joint ventures with an Indonesian-based firm called the Lippo Group. Lippo is run by the ethnic Chinese Riady family. James Riady has visited the White House. His family has long supported the Clintons. The Riady family’s chief adviser on U.S. political donations: John Huang. Huang left Lippo for a Commerce Department job, then became a fundraiser, where mostly through connections to the Riady’s, he collected nearly $2 million in illegal foreign contributions for the Democratic Party. Thus completes what investigators say was the Chinese military’s circuitous route to funnel money to the President’s re-election effort."

During Cameron’s exposition of how the money flowed, FNC offered an on-screen graphic showing the stream of money with arrows between each name going down the screen: General Ji => China Resources => Lippo Group => Riady Family => John Huang => Democratic Party.

Cameron noted Al Gore "has been connected too...On September 23rd, 1993, Huang and Riady came to the White House to meet Gore and introduce...[the] head of Beijing’s alleged espionage front, China Resources Company.""

http://www.mediaresearch.org/news/mediawatch/1999/mw19990419otbs.html

23. Deception by government:

"The use or alteration of intelligence reports, the creation of misinformation, and the use of unconfirmed information for the purposed of beginning or continuing an unpopular or potentially unpopular policy, of maintaining power in government or of insuring a public image, such as being a great statesman.

Governmental lying is a continuous phenomena. Almost every month there is an exposure. It may be in South America (Chile, Argentina), Southeast Asia (Vietnam, the Philippines), South Africa, India, or anywhere that governments are under pressure. Some instances of governmental deception have achieved great notoriety. Hitler's dictum that "a lie thrice repeated becomes a truth" was put into practice during the regime of the Third Reich. The intelligence apparatus of the former USSR had a bureau of disinformation, and counterparts exists for domestic purposes. The Non-aggression Pact of Stalin and Hitler was one of many misrepresentations of the two leaders. In the USA there have been Watergate (concerning President Nixon's falsehoods), and earlier misrepresentations concerning the conflict in Vietnam. In the UK, the Belgrano affair and the 1985 national coal strike have occasioned allegations of misrepresentation or lying.

A striking example is provided by a Chinese satellite which crashed into the sea off Peru in October 1993. A few days previously, monitors in the USA and elsewhere detected its descent from orbit, although the Chinese denied that they had lost control of it, even hours before it crashed. They affirmed that any satellite which crashed at that time could not be theirs. Another example is the discovery in 1994 that the South African government had lied concerning its collaboration with Israel on nuclear development, notably with regard to the exchange of 600 tons of uranium in exchange for 30 grams of tritium.

In the UK in 1993 it was acknowledged that the government had deliberately misled critics of human rights violations in East Timor to believe that it was endeavouring to negotiate access by the International Red Cross to the territory although it had already decided that this would be counter-productive to its relationships with Indonesia and had no intention of doing so. The government was also obliged to acknowledge that it had falsely denied the existence of any contacts with the IRA regarding the future of Northern Ireland. This deception was then compounded by falsification of reports on the actual contacts.

In both the USA and the UK the consequences of covertly arming Iraq prior to the Gulf War have led to major investigations of deception within government and the manner in which efforts were subsequently made to deny any such deception.

If before Watergate and the Vietnam war, political manipulation was an occasionally recognized, by the 1990s it was widely accepted that politicians do not merely lie on occasion, they are proverbial liars."

Government deception includes:

Government duplicity
Deliberate lying by government officials
Misrepresentation of facts by national leaders
Deliberate distortion of official news and information
Official over-reporting and under-reporting
Diplomatic lying
Perjury by government agents
Susceptibility of electorate to government repetition of untruths
Intellectual dishonesty in government
Government insincerity
Contradictions in official statements
Electoral fraud
Beneficial lying
Official self-deception
Deceptive misuse of research
Biased government information
Concealed government subsidies
Unreported government spending
Misreporting of military action
Military-industrial malpractice
Defense information uncertainty
Sanitizing of governmental information
Government manipulation of public information
Government misrepresentation of human rights abuses
Misleading of elected representatives by government officials

http://www.uia.org/index.html, Mar. 2002
© Union of International Associations 1997 - 2000

24. Government officials lie about where the tax money goes.

See: "Congress receives annual "Oinker" awards" at:
http://www.acssonline.org/news/20010314-oinker.asp

"The taxpayers' trough" at:
http://www.worldmag.com/world/issue/04-06-96/national_3.asp

25. Political and Diplomatic deception:

"White lies are as common to political and diplomatic affairs as they are to the private lives of most people. Feigning enjoyment of an embassy gathering or toasting the longevity of an unimpressive candidate for office are forms of politeness that mislead few. But as with all white lies, the problem is that they spread so easily and that lines are very hard to draw. Is it still a white lie for a secretary of state to announce that he is going to one country when in reality he travels to another? Or to issue a letter of praise for a diplomat one has just fired? Is a politician's lying about one's family affairs to preserve privacy different from withholding information for the same purpose?

One of the more infamous political lies of recent times is "I first learned from newspaper reports of the Watergate break-in. I was appalled at this senseless, illegal action, and I was shocked to learn that employees of the re-election committee were apparently among those guilty". Richard Nixon, 1973 . Following Watergate, 69% of Americans agreed that "over the last ten years, this country's leaders have consistently lied to the people".

Political lies, so often assumed to be trivial by those who tell them, rarely are. They cannot be trivial when they affect so many people and when they are so peculiarly likely to be imitated, used to retaliate, and spread from a few to many. When political representative or entire governments arrogate to themselves the right to lie, they take power from the public that would not have been given up voluntarily."

http://www.uia.org/index.html, Mar. 2002
© Union of International Associations 1997 - 2000

26. Politicians (who are mostly lawyers) lie in order to be politicians:

"To the rulers of the state then, if to any, it belongs of right to use falsehood, to deceive either enemies or their own citizens, for the good of the state: and no one else may meddle with this privilege." Plato (c. 427-347 B.C.), Greek philosopher. The Republic, bk. 3, sct. 389.

http://www.parida.com/polls.html

"Politicians know they are widely perceived as liars. They also remember what happened to presidential nominee Walter Mondale after he told the 1984 Democratic National Convention that he would, if elected, raise taxes. Voters say they want the truth, and then they get angry when they hear it."

"Lies, Lies, Lies", By Paul Gray, All Politics, CNN TIME, October 5, 1992.
http://www.cnn.com/ALLPOLITICS/1997/10/06/back.time/


"A person who almost always told the truth would be a failure in politics. Consequently, virtually all politicians are skilled at either lying or avoiding the truth in some manner or other, or both. A skilled politician knows many ways to avoid a direct answer to a question. However, there is an old saying that "A half truth is a whole lie.""

http://www.mcn.org/c/irapilgrim/POL17.html       January 29, 1999 (Ira Pilgrim)

"Senator Orrin Hatch has charged that the Bill Clinton-Al Gore administration "may be remembered as the most deceitful and corrupt in our nation's history." He also said that the "cultural legacy of this administration" is the "institutionalization of the cynical deceit that you've not done anything wrong if you can talk your way out of it.""

"Strong words. However, the dire indictment upon us as a nation is that we have tolerated such "cynical deceit" and become apathetic to that disreputable kind of politics which Mr. Clinton and Mr. Gore represent, which does or says virtually anything, true or not, to get elected. We've been indifferent to the lies to the place that we have elected Mr. Clinton and Mr. Gore not once but twice, the second time in full knowledge of their character. They reflect us; we mirror them."
http://www.pastors.org/alertarchives/alert020800.html

27. "Top Ten Lies of Political Advertising"

10. Politicians are your friends and they care about you and your family.

9. There are fundamental differences between the Republicans and the Democrats.

8. The government benefits the working man and woman, protects the general welfare, and enhances the common good.

7. There is a political solution to every problem.

6. Psychological manipulation is honesty and openness.

5. US elections are free, fair, and open. There are no wizards behind the curtain.

4. The US is the most important nation on earth.

3. Politicians speak the truth; their campaigns frankly and openly discuss the important issues.

2. A great leader can solve our problems.

And the Number One Lie is: War is peace and slavery is freedom."

(S) shareright 2000 by Robert Waldrop, http://www.justpeace.org .This document may be freely reprinted or forwarded via the internet or any other communications medium as long as this notice is included with the forwarded or reprinted copy.  http://www.cin.org/archives/cet/200008/0083.html

28. Public Relations People lie:

PR firms and personnel are not the same as the media, but they are so closely associated with both the media and with politicians that we have included them here, on the same page.

"Survey Shows Most PR People Still Won't Admit Lying

"The cardinal rule in public relations, as enunciated by the Public Relations Society of America and followed by every self-respecting public relations practitioner is 'never lie,' " says Fraser P. Seitel, editor of the PRSA's monthly magazine, the Public Relations Strategist.Outside the public relations industry itself, however, many people regard PR as a synonym for spin, insincerity and deception. Now a survey by the trade publication PR Week shows that a substantial number of PR people themselves agree with that assessment.

Published in PR Week's May 1 edition, the survey asked 1,700 PR executives about the ethics in their industry. The result: 25 percent admitted they lied on the job, 39 percent said they had exaggerated the truth, 44 percent said they felt uncertain of the ethics of a task they were asked to perform, and 62 percent said they had felt compromised in their work, either by being told a lie by their client or by not having access to the full story.

PR Week Editor Adam Leyland tried to put the best spin possible on these numbers. "I would really like to survey the world of business people, or the world of journalists, and find out how many of them have lied," he told the New York Times. He noted that the survey has prompted hundreds of reactions from people who work in PR. "Some of them have said they just want to resign from the industry and lie on a beach, examining their navel," Leyland said. "I say, look at the bright side. If 25 percent told a lie, that means 75 percent did not."

PRSA's Fraser Seitel also tried to brush off the result of the survey. "In a society where the President of the United States acknowledges he lied to the American public, the failings of a minority of public relations people is more understandable," Seitel said.

We're tempted to ask how many PR people earn their living helping the President to lie, but let's not quibble. What we'd like to know is why we should believe the 75 percent who say they don't lie. When it comes to truth and lies, our experience is that many PR people don't know the difference."

© Center for Media & Democracy, 520 University Ave., Suite 310, Madison, WI 53703
http://www.prwatch.org/prwissues/2000Q2/liars.html     (emphasis ours)

 

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