Archived Writing

<< back to the search results

Battling lies

Thursday, April 26, 2007

No-one likes to be lied to. Not journalists, not politicians, not the ordinary voting public. And when the lies come from “our own”, so to speak, it seems all the worse. A provocatively well-honed question, if rhetorical, grabbed my attention in this week’s televised hearing of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, and it came from a Republican – Tom Davis from Virginia . He asked: “If the first casualty of war is the truth, what happens when the wound is self-inflicted?”

The committee was of course investigating the cynical and inexcusable lies by the US Army about both the death in Afghanistan of former NFL star Corporal Pat Tillman above left (painted as heroic sacrifice under enemy fire, when in fact it was fratricide) and the capture in Iraq and eventual release of Private Jessica Lynch above center (portrayed as heroic resistance from her and heroic daring from her Army “rescuers”, when in fact both were falsehoods). But what it revealed more broadly is how slovenly our country’s representatives have been allowed to become in handling that precious commodity in wartime, truth. 
 
We should hardly be surprised, since our men-and-women-in-uniform (as the Commander-in-Chief keeps calling them with a verbal automation that suggests he’s reading the words off some unseen flashcard) were first sent off to fight on the basis of an untruth. Or more precisely two untruths – that Saddam Hussein was developing weapons of mass destruction, and that he threatened the US with terrorism. Even with more than four years’ hindsight now, it’s still rare to see mainstream media outlets point out this simple bottom-line.
 
How, any objective and experienced observer must ask, does an institution like the military, at any level, believe it could get away with the lies it told about such cases as Tillman and Lynch – let alone the atrocities of Abu Ghraib, Haditha or Mahmudiya? I say “any level” knowing that the seeping, systemic perniciousness of such lying can only get established if conscientious leadership by example, from the top, is missing.

 

 

It is hardly credible (just to take one incidental example) that the “rescue” operation for Pfc Lynch, after her captors had disappeared, would have been organized only by some lowly or isolated loose cannon in the command structure, since its launching was carefully delayed until a dramatic  - or should that be dramatized? - video record could be made. Pfc Lynch's own scorn for her bosses' fiction was clear, dismissing it as the "story of the little girl Rambo".

 

How far up the chain does responsibility for the culture of lying rest? We are often told a fish rots from the head.  Cpl Tillman’s brother Kevin Tillman, who joined the Army on the same day as the renowned footballer, probably spoke for many of us when he told the Committee: “It’s a bit disingenuous to think that the Administration did not know about what was going on”. And their mother Mary Tillman certainly wanted to speak for us when she said “It’s not about what they did to Pat. It’s about what they did to a nation.” 



I NEVER KNEW THE SADLY-MISSED DAVID HALBERSTAM (above right), THOUGH I HAVE friends who worked with him. His determined, detail-oriented and passionate industriousness was fueled by being lied to. 

Imagine it’s the early 1960s and you’re a young reporter in the field – a Vietnamese field – listening to military briefings which systematically misrepresent what you’ve seen with your own eyes, and yet your editors back at home - and much of the opposition - are buying the official line. Halberstam, and his colleagues Malcolm Browne of the Associated Press and Neil Sheehan of United Press International reacted furiously by doing that essential, hard, but oh-so-rewarding job of finding the truth and exposing the lie. (Sheehan’s book on their efforts, called directly enough A Bright Shining Lie is among the best of the era’s journalistic memoirs.)

Three months into the present “surge” (with Vietnam, the word was “escalation”) how can we best describe the military briefings the press corps are given inside Baghdad’s Green Zone - now officially, for some unfathomable cosmetic reason, renamed the International Zone? I am sure that if he could be there Halberstam would be unafraid to use the word “lies”. As it was, the considered assessment of current war coverage, from a distance, by the man who authoritatively wrote The Making of a Quagmire was relatively gently-phrased. He described it as: “too much of an acceptance of our government's position”.