Dying for the truth...

You might ask what it takes to remember
When you know that you’ve seen it before
Where a government lies to a people
And a country is drifting to war…
~ Jackson Browne, 1985

August 6, 2003
by Rob Lafferty

As individuals, our actions are the true measure of our values. What we say doesn’t really matter; what we believe is not that important, either. It’s what we actually do that counts – it’s our choices that reflect our philosophy and reveal the quality of our heart.

Governments are much like people in that way – politicians being humans, after all. The patterns of behavior by an administration tell us more about its agenda and priorities than all the public speeches and statements of every member combined.

A classic example is the difference between the statements and actions of the George W. Bush administration regarding Iraqi nuclear weapons and facilities. The public was repeatedly told that the lack of accountability within Iraq’s weapons programs and nuclear power plants posed a genuine, imminent threat to our national security. The deadly potential of nuclear materials in the wrong hands was used as the primary cause to wage war.

Oil was not a reason, they said. Access to the abundant, cheap oil under the desert sand was never a factor in the decision to invade a rogue nation and depose its evil dictator, we were told.

Yet before the invasion began, plans were in place to secure the oil fields as a first priority. After the invasion was underway, the Oil Ministry buildings and pipelines were secured by the U.S. military as quickly as possible.

During planning for the invasion, there were no specific orders issued to organize a search for nuclear, chemical or biological weapons. While the oil fields were being secured a nuclear reactor was left unguarded for six weeks, allowing unknown amounts of material and equipment to be stolen from the site. Even the metal drums used to store radioactive waste were taken from the facility, emptied, sold on the streets and used as water storage containers for thirsty families.

More than a month after bombs stopped falling on Baghdad, Time magazine reported on a meeting in Qatar in which neither the president, his top military commander, or the man in charge of rebuilding Iraq, had any idea who was leading the search for “weapons of mass destruction”. They had to be told by aides that a Defense Department official back in Washington D.C. had been handed the task.

At that same time, thanks to a well-executed, comprehensive plan, oil had once again begun to flow out of the desert through the pipelines.

That reality reveals the true priorities of those who initiated this war, and it gives credibility to what Paul Wolfowitz actually said two months ago – “For bureaucratic reasons, we settled on one issue, weapons of mass destruction, because it was the one reason everybody could agree on.”

The Internet has made it easier to track and compare statements made by public officials to their subsequent actions. Now more than ever, the difference between political rhetoric and political reality can be brought sharply into focus. With that information laid out on a page before you, it’s easy to see a pattern of evasion, denial, obsessive secrecy and outright lying by the President and members of his administration.

Reporting on a January 17 Presidential visit to Walter Reed Army Hospital, the Washington Post quoted Bush as saying, “We are, should and must provide the best care for anybody who is willing to put their life in harm’s way.” Two pages later in that same newspaper, there was an article announcing that the Bush administration was immediately cutting off access to the federal health care system for approximately 164,000 veterans.

In June of 2002, Bush went on a tour of a HUD housing project built under the HOPE VI program. Along with a lot of praise for the project, Bush said “Part of being a secure America is to encourage home ownership.” Eight months later his administration phased out the HOPE VI project, shutting it down entirely.

And on April 24, 2002, at a South Dakota ethanol plant, Bush stated “I said when I was running for President that I supported ethanol, and I meant it.” The Bush budget proposal for 2004 proposed eliminating all funds for the program that runs that very same facility.

Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld stood before a Senate committee recently and was asked if he knew of American involvement in providing Saddam Hussein with chemical and biological weapons materials in the 1980s. His reply to Sen. Robert Byrd’s question was “I have never heard of that, I don’t know where you heard of that, and I doubt it.”

Dozens of US-based corporations sold a wide variety of weapons to Iraq for many years. Many of those sales were approved by the administrations in office at the time. Some of the biological weapons recovered from Iraq after the first Gulf War were either made in America or made from American stock material.

Those are solid facts that have been documented in official records and reported openly in the media for the past ten years. Rumsfeld would have to be incompetent or a fool not to know those facts. He’s neither of those things – but he is a proven liar, as are his co-workers Condoleeza Rice, Colin Powell and Dick Cheney.

Although government in America wasn’t begun as a democracy, it was formed from a belief in honesty and open behavior. The Founding Fathers were mostly upper-class citizens who feared the instability of a democracy. They preferred a republic, so they designed one based on their personal ideas of honor and justice. It was an elitist system that was doomed to fail, but it worked fairly well at first and lasted for several decades.

A democratic system did evolve and operate for a short time in America, and it lived up to the best and worst of the democratic potential – much in the way that the Founding Fathers feared. That system was absorbed during the growth of Big Business; now the largest corporations control the process. They’ve replaced political campaigns with a marketing program to sell the new CEO of the country to the people.

In that sales campaign, truth is secondary to perception. All that matters is getting a message across to the consumer – if a lie serves that purpose better than the truth, then the lie gets promoted and the truth is denied, minimized or simply ignored. By the time the campaigning is over and one group assumes power, that attitude of deception will have grown from a habit into a working philosophy.

The Bush administration has a grand vision for this country, just as their predecessors did over 200 years ago. They are at the top of the human social pyramid - and they plan to stay there while they manifest their vision, just as those Founding Fathers intended.

But this administration was born out of lies and deception. Its members seem to have no moral restraint against using deceit as a tool to accomplish their goals. The truth is not in them, unless it happens to serve their purposes.

The long history of an American government deliberately lying its own citizens doesn’t make that behavior acceptable today, not when many of our people suffer and are in need – and not while soldiers are dying in battle during a questionable war in a distant land.

The behavior of the Bush administration is simply unacceptable.