A Nation of Abject Liars

The mind boggles at the truly astonishing, almost demonic (if I believed in such nonsense, I'd have to call it that; nothing else seems to fit) ability of the United States government to lie and get a way with it. I once said Bill Clinton could turn the White House into a house of ill repute (yeah, I suppose it has come to be that, but that's beside the point here), and the public would let him get away with it. The public's control of their government, after all, is next to nothing.

But the lie perpetrated to justify the war in Iraq defies any ever gotten away with in US History - or any other, for that matter. Let us go back to the time sixty years ago when the military industrial complex Eisenhower warned so urgently about created the Central Intelligence Agency, an agency empowered by law to spend as much as it wanted for anything it wanted. When it had immedately "orchestrated" (the favorite expression of one early CIA plenipotentiary) the Cold War, our government's new masters began boasting of their ability to do things like read a license plate from outer space. As early as 1953, planes called U-2s cruised at the edge of space, doing just that over the Soviet Union and anywhere else they found interesting. In 1960, a U-2 found as soon as they were delivered there medium range missiles and their launchers in Cuba. Photos taken from space were able to identify individual Soviet Technicians on the ground. That, you will recall, was 1960.

Swiftly, funded in a manner as equally unprecedented as the technology, the government became able to track a single human being all over the nation and planet, demonstrating the astonishing capability a number of times in full public view. Several times, the media reported that the government was mapping underground rivers - from outer space. Individuals, one a rapist-murderer who travelled nationwide and killed indiscriminately, another a hostage taken in the middle east, were located, found, and taken by means of satellite surveillance technology.

Fantastic? Nope, I know it for truth personally, I myself having been the subject and victim of federal high-tech surveillance and hounding during the years 1977-1998. Using state of the art technology including satellite observation, the government tracked me all over the US, Canada, and Mexico (Uh-uh - save it; I have incontrovertible proof including literally dozens of witnesses). Several times, federal panjandrums boasted that there was nowhere for me to hide. Time and time again, I was able to prove that was true, and being done. Once, I actually discovered the marking method providing the government the ability to track me by satellite.

Now the "Weapons of mass destruction" myth. Our government and the CIA that controls it insisted to the nation, the United Nations, and the world that Saddam Hussein had weapons like those found in Cuba decades before, and was developing the capability to make nuclear weaponry. The hubris, the gargantuan size, of the lie is rivalled only by its transparency.

For pity's sake, you really believe that UN inspection teams that roamed and ranged over the nation of Iraq for literally years couldn't find installations that would have to be as big as small cities? Satellites that can read a license plate, map an underground river, and identify a single human being from outer space couldn't find nuclear weapons facilities, ballistic missile factories and installation, chemical plants capable of making biochemical weapons?

My god, people - you don't build medium range ballistic missiles in your garage, or chemical munitions in your bathtub!

We didn't know Saddam had no weapons?! Search my mind and memory as I may, I can't come up with a more blatant, obvious, astonishing lie than that one. In the future - if our children and grandchildren manage one out of the hideous prospects we're leaving them - "Tell it to the Marines," "Yeah, and pigs fly," and the like will be replaced by another old canard. "Yeah," the doubter will say, "and Saddam had WMDs."

Anyone who believes a lie the size and in-your-face apparent as this one does so because he wants to. Only bias - or insanity - can explain his condition.

And, of course, one lie demands another. Now we have the "getting out of Iraq would result in more terrorism" canard. Let us be sure that we understand the reasoning behind that one. We will be safer against the guy who intends to sneak into the bedroom and attack the missus and the kids if the man of the house heads across town to pick a fight over there? The wagon train headed west will do better in hostile territory if the men leave the wagons uncircled to go raid the Indian village miles away - the village they are pretty sure (that's what they tell the folks, the women and kids, they leave behind) is hostile? The cavalry will be more successful against Crazy Horse, Sitting Bull, and the boys, if they split their forces several times?

Oops - gave myself away. And, yeah - NOBODY would do anything as stupid as what we're doing about the lastest edition of "hostiles." The householder and husband who left his family just when a maniac had been reported roaming the neighborhood would find mom and the kids gone - left home - when he got back. The wagonmaster would be out of a job, and the colonel - well, he'd have been demoted, had he not been killed.

Let's see - where was I? Oh, yeah. We're sure al Qa'ida is plotting more mischief, maybe even a "dirty bomb," biological or chemical - even nuclear - attack here in the US, but we're leaving the borders open to anyone who wants to walk - by the millions - across. It will cost billions (actually, less than one nuclear carrier or submarine) to build a fence along the borders, so we're spending it in Iraq and Afghanistan. We're far too short-handed to check shipping and ports, or train and prepare for prevention of an terroist attack, so we maintain seven hundred and fifty bases, one million, two hundred thousand military personnel, and who knows how many covert operations all over the world. Not exactly what a wagonmaster of old would call "circling the wagons."

Ridiculous? Yeah. Otherwise, you'd have to wonder about all that technology, huh? The kind that can track a gnat though a buffalo herd. 'Course, then you'd have to admit that you knew there were no WMDs or factories to build them in Iraq. You'd have to admit that Saddam was a sitting duck killable any time we chose. Ditto the other guy, Osama. You might even have to explain why "the dog didn't bark" at the guys getting ready to take down the World Trade Center.

Folks, this is the guy married and sleeping with two women who live only a block apart. If he gets away with it, there's only one explanation. The women are both blondes.