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“THE PROJECT ON GOVERNMENT OVERSIGHT”
“The public must become more skeptical of government claims about the use of military force, Congress must reassert its authority over war making, liars must be held accountable, and whistle blowers must be celebrated as patriotic truth tellers. These changes are key to ending the cycle of war lies and death.“
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“The government lies. Anyone who paid attention to the last 20 years of war knows something about that. Deadly lies aren’t new, of course. “Remember the Maine!” — the rallying cry that led to the Spanish-American War — was based on a military claim that a Spanish mine had sunk the U.S.S. Maine, when a coal bunker fire was later shown to be the most likely cause.
Then there was President Lyndon Baines Johnson, who sounded sincere when he claimed the North Vietnamese launched unprovoked attacks on the U.S.S. Maddox and other U.S. Navy ships. Congress raced to pass the Tonkin Gulf Resolution in response, giving the president nearly unfettered discretion to wage war in Vietnam. LBJ loved that resolution, reportedly saying that, “like Grandma’s nightshirt, it covered everything.”
But LBJ deceived us about the attacks. The Navy provoked the first one by conducting surveillance near the coastline as South Vietnamese troops carried out sabotage missions. Then, LBJ positioned the Navy’s ships near land in a deliberate attempt to provoke a second attack. Conflicting information from the Navy’s ships left doubt about whether a second attack occurred, but the White House doubled down on the claim that it had. The war escalated after that, leaving nearly 60,000 Americans dead and hundreds of thousands wounded.
POGO tackles the lies that kill in the second episode of its new podcast, The Continuous Action, which Virginia Heffernan and I host. If you haven’t yet, I’d encourage you to take a listen. We discuss how the government manipulated intelligence information to justify the war in Iraq, and how the government misled the nation about the success (or lack thereof) of the war in Afghanistan.
In the podcast, we hear a recording of Ron Ridenhour, the whistleblower who exposed the My Lai massacre. Ridenhour talked about how mass killings in Vietnam were a result of policy choices the government hid from the public. He also discussed how this attitude extended beyond Vietnam. While speaking on the U.S. involvement in Latin America in the 1980s, Ridenhour said that the only thing “that was not American provided, planned for, were the bodies of the people who were pulling the triggers — everything else was ours; it was our strategy; it was our money; it was our training; it was our supplies; it was our guns, our bullets.” The use of proxies (other military forces) provided cover for the United States.
Our government trained some of those proxies in Georgia at the secretive School of the Americas, also known as “School of the Dictators” — more recently renamed the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation. The school notoriously taught dictators and military personnel how to wage counter-insurgency efforts that included torture and other brutal tactics. (The renamed school continues to operate and has added U.S. Border Patrol personnel to its roster of students.) The school claims it has cleaned up its act, and that’s the story the government is sticking to.
The government hasn’t lifted its veil of secrecy or stopped lying in the two decades since Ridenhour passed away. As recently as this past December, the New York Times published a shocking report on a secret U.S. strike force that, in its zeal to kill ISIS fighters, stopped caring how many civilians it killed. The victims included “people who had no role in the conflict: farmers trying to harvest, children in the street, families fleeing fighting, and villagers sheltering in buildings.” And the military concealed these dire consequences from the public.
Much the same can be said about the U.S. support for Saudi atrocities in Yemen. Our government quietly facilitated the Saudi effort by selling weapons and planes, refueling planes, and delivering logistical and intelligence support.
Something must be done to stop the deadly lies. For one thing, POGO had been pushing lawmakers to strengthen the laws that protect federal whistleblowers. More broadly, change is possible if the public becomes more skeptical of government claims about the use of military force, Congress reasserts its authority over war making, liars are held accountable, and whistleblowers are celebrated as patriotic truth tellers. These changes are key to ending the cycle of lies and death.”
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