05/02/03 

Liar Liar

USA The US's justification for the first Gulf war does not bear scrutiny. i.e. there was obfuscation and deceit - Maggie O'Kane - 3 min - worth reading!

The claims of major deceit by powerful interest groups made in the above article have now been pretty much established beyond reasonable doubt. And, as I have been saying for some months now, it is those in power who lie and deceive who are the very Devil on Earth.

In this case, they used lies to convince people that the Gulf War of 1991 was necessary. 

And it is surprising that wherever one travels throughout the internet reading articles from all those well-known writers whose views spread right throughout the political spectrum there appears to be no recognition that the spread of valid information - i.e. of the truth - is the most important mechanism by which the very problems that they claim to be so concerned about could be resolved.

They will delve into the history of it all. They will quote the Founding Fathers. They will create their theories. They will offer their solutions. But there appears to be no overt recognition of the supreme importance of allowing people to have access to valid information. And there appears to be no overt clamour for the prosecution of those people in positions of power who have lied and deceived.

As just one example,  ...

USA More than 5,000 veterans are plaintiffs in a lawsuit that accuses companies of helping Iraqi President Saddam Hussein build his chemical warfare arsenal. The plaintiffs are among the tens of thousands who came down with Gulf War Syndrome, a debilitating series of ailments that can include chronic fatigue, skin rashes, muscle joint pain, memory loss and brain damage. 

But what about suing those who lied and deceived and who tricked them - at least partially so - into going into war in the first place?

For example, what about these guys ...

Hill & Knowlton's coup de grace was their fabricated "incubator baby" story. A story of how Iraqi soldiers had thrown premature babies out of incubators in the Al Adnan hospital in Kuwait city and "left them on the cold floor to die".

If this is true, then those employees of Hill & Knowlton who knowingly helped to perpetrate the hoax about the murder of babies should be prosecuted.

And, quite frankly, if I had lost my own son or daughter in the Gulf War and I had discovered that the war was largely inspired on the basis of fraudulent propaganda perpetrated by workers in a public relations business, I would find it very difficult not to confront them and, possibly, blow their brains out. "How dare these bastards fill their bank accounts by creating false pretences and putting my child into a grave!"

But, of course, I never advocate violence.

And if we had to go to war, then we had to go to war. But for people to be bamboozled into giving their support for a war through deceits perpetrated by overpaid tossers in the public relations business must be seen as a serious criminal offence and the people involved must be prosecuted. 

And I hope that if any Gulf War veterans are reading this then they will alert their associations to the possibility of extracting a good deal of compensation from the likes of Hill and Knowlton. 

If it is seen as legitimate for powerful people to lie - and this includes those who work for public relations companies - then we have no hope for the future.

NONE. AT. ALL.

And by failing to address this issue - the supreme importance of valid information - activists of whatever shade or colour are, as we say in the UK, pissing in the wind. 

They might as well not bother!

They have absolutely no hope of achieving very much with their activism if those with the power can simply override their concerns and hoodwink the public with impunity knowing that they will never be prosecuted.

And what activists of all persuasions should be doing is raising as much public anger and hysteria over the issue of lying as is currently done at the moment over issues such as, say, child abuse or domestic violence.

But no. Despite the fact that I trawl the internet from dusk till dawn there is no fuss being made over the issue of lying on any of the major websites or in the mainstream media. 

There is no commotion about it.

And so, for example, the Gulf War veterans are suing American companies that provided Iraq with chemical weaponry. But they are not suing the alleged liars at Hill & Knowlton who profited so much from the war and who were clearly so keen to have one.

And they are missing this opportunity because lying does not seem to be an issue worthy of much attention - thanks mostly to the failures of political activists to turn it into one.

In my masterpiece of a month ago entitled Overwhelming Forces  I suggested that the Men's Movement is going to be made up of "the collection of ideas, thoughts, notions, desires and needs of men statistically summated and loosely coordinated both within and outside of cyberspace." And, indeed, if you look at the major and most successful of the political websites in cyberspace - Lew Rockwell, Strike-The-Root, FrontPage etc - and at the most popular individual columnists, then it is quite clear that men far outnumber women both as political activists and as writers.

And while a large proportion of these men do aggressively expose the disinformation and lies that are put out by those with power, very rarely indeed do they suggest that any action should be taken against them.

If a politician was found to have been molesting a young boy then he would be hauled off to a courtroom before you could blink. And there would be articles all over the place demanding this.

But if he lies and lies and lies, nothing! - even though thousands may actually die as a result.

It seems simply to be accepted by male activists and male writers that people lie, and that, presumably, nothing can be done about it.

Lying in and of itself is not an issue worth pursuing, nor is it worth making a fuss about.

It is simply par for the course, and it is something to be expected.

But this situation just cannot be allowed to continue.

There is no hope for the future if those people with power and influence are permitted to get away with lying. And the ordinary people will always be at the mercy of their whims, their predilections and their greed unless there is a sea change in attitude toward those with power who deceive.

And those writers and activists whose medium is the internet, and who are pretty much free to express their own views, have no excuse for not demanding continually that the heads of liars should roll. Only in this way can we eventually persuade people that lying is just not acceptable.

Of course it is going to take a good deal of time and activism to change the current climate of complacency with regard to this issue. But the internet is an extremely powerful tool for helping people to expose lies. And those with power are going to have to watch their backs even more closely now because any misbehaviour on their part can far more readily be exposed thanks to the internet - and this will be true even more so in the future.

And yet, while I have not come across one sincere internet activist who is not screaming out for more information and for better access to the truth concerning the issues that trouble him, there is no energetic activism being directed toward turning the act of lying into something that is completely unacceptable - particular when engaged in by those people with power. 

This is crazy! Because if activists do not tackle the issue of lying, then those with power will simply carry on doing it - which, in practice, means that activists will make very slow progress indeed.

Putting this another way: If every sincere activist - whatever their concerns may be, whatever their politics - was to create a real fuss over those in power who were found to be lying or deceiving, and, for example, they demanded that they were prosecuted or booted out of their jobs, the clamour on this issue right across the internet would be so huge, that most people really would begin to take notice. And, eventually - with the help of the internet - only those who remained truthful would ever manage to get to the top of any significant tree.

At the moment, the very opposite is true. Those with integrity and who see their loyalty to the people as being far more important than their loyalty to their party have no hope of achieving very high political office.

The system of democracy that we currently operate in the west is completely stacked against such people.

Somehow, we seem to have ended up with a system wherein those who achieve the most in the way of power are the very ones whom we should trust the least.

This is a ludicrous and highly destructive situation to find ourselves in - even though, perhaps, it has always been this way.

But one of the main reasons that this has been allowed to occur in modern times is partly due to the fact that when it is discovered that people in power have lied or deceived, nothing of significance - if anything - is actually done about it.

And the main reason for this is because the corruption usually goes so deep that the guilty party has to be protected by his associates lest he spill the beans about them!

Finally, I do not want to make myself out to be a saint of some sort. And this piece is not surreptitiously about me trying to suggest that I am Holier Than Thou.

Who knows? For $2 million I might well have been tempted into putting out some influential lies about babies in incubators being killed.

But had I finally been caught out, I would have genuinely hung my head in shame, and I certainly would not have been surprised to be prosecuted for doing such a thing because this is exactly what I would have deserved.

USA Hill and Knowlton is one of the world's largest and most influential corporations. As such, its virtually unregulated status, its longstanding connections to intelligence agencies, its role in shaping policy, and its close relationship to the Clinton administration deserve careful scrutiny. Johan Carlisle - 10 min

(Not long after this piece was written there was a virtual explosion in the number of articles appearing both on the internet and in the mainstream media concerning deception by government officials - most notably revolving around the issue of whether or not the Bush and Blair governments had misled their countries over the grounds for war against Iraq.)