newsweek:
“What does it mean to tell the truth about a war? Is it a lie, technically speaking, for the Administration to say that it has faith in Hamid Karzai’s government and regards him as a legitimate leader—or is it just absurd? Is it a lie to say that we have a plan for Afghanistan that makes any sense at all? If you put it that way, each of the WikiLeaks documents—from an account of an armed showdown between the Afghan police and the Afghan Army, to a few lines about a local interdiction official taking seventy-five-dollar bribes, to a sad exchange about an aid scam involving orphans—is a pixel in a picture that does, indeed, contradict official accounts of the war, and rather drastically so.”
—
The New Yorker: Wikileaks and the War
(via southpol)
So, they are lying?
Like it even matters.
Who freaked out in 2000 when it was obvious to anyone paying attention that there was no clear winner in the election? Or that it’s Congress’ job to settle ties, not the Supreme Court’s?
What public rose up to demand impeachment when it became obvious the Bush Administration’s USG had violated international law several times over, least of all by invading countries unprovoked?
Every single one of us wander the streets of our cities and towns knowing full well that the cash in our pockets isn’t worth anything tangible, yet we just keep pretending that’s not true.
We, The People, are used to dealing with lies—all the time. Whether it’s God, Santa, our money, our government or the fact that Diet Coke is really no better for you than regular Coke. We lie to each other and ourselves all the time and this shock that the USG is lying to us about war is, you guessed it: a lie. This one, like many of them is to make us feel better.
No one in the USG should worry. Both endless wars can continue. We have no ability to stop them from doing so and even if we did we wouldn’t use that ability.
And that is no lie.
