"I didn't realize how high a price we were going to pay for that lie." -President Dwight D. Eisenhower, 1960.
"Think of the use of drone air strikes as summary executions, extra-judicial killings justified by faceless bureaucrats using who-knows-what "intelligence," with no oversight...a world where joystick gods manipulating robots deal death from the skies and then go home and hug their children." -U.S. Congressman Dennis Kucinich, 2011(1).
It was banal, when United States political and military leaders immediately dismissed the London-based Bureau for Investigative Journalism's report documenting that since 2004 almost 2,300 Pakistanis had been killed by CIA covert drones, 160 of them children. Predictable too was the Pentagon's frail attempt at denying the fatal report by blaming it on faulty intelligence, and then employing a propaganda surge by claiming those killed in drone strikes were "terrorists."
Architects of empires and nation-builders, including their consumerist populaces, have no need for truths or reality, especially since they believe their new world order justifies lying. Hannah Arendt warned of this, of how darkness comes when this light-the public realm throwing light on the affairs of men-is extinguished by a "credibility gap" and "invisible government," and how they "sweep under the carpet and, by moral exhortations and under the pretext of upholding old truths, degrade all truth to meaningless triviality."(2)
Similarity, when U.S. pilot Gary Powers was sentenced this very same week on August 19, 1960, another denial, another lie leading to credibility gaps and invisible governments, was exposed. What led to Powers arrest and imprisonment (symbolic of ours?) was when his Lockheed U-2 Spy Plane, illegally flown over Soviet airspace and collecting data, was shot down. For days, President Dwight D. Eisenhower intentionally lied and deceived the world, claiming the spy plane was merely a weather plane that had strayed off course.
But President Eisenhower and state department officials were also lying to the American people about a "missile gap," claiming the U.S. lagged far behind the Soviets in nuclear weapons technologies and arsenals. Even though photos from previous U-2 flights over Soviet installations had proved otherwise, they still lied and deceived Americans. When John F. Kennedy, before taking office, discovered how inaccurate the missile gap assertion was, he perpetually lied about it too, using it for political gain.
Meanwhile, President Eisenhower was unaware that the U-2 Spy Plane's wreckage was intact enough for the Russians to have recovered the camera, complete with the film of Soviet missile bases. Even more shocking and embarrassing for U.S. officials was that Powers, the pilot of the plane, had been taken captive and was still alive. They had either thought or hoped Powers, the pilot of the plane, had either been killed beyond recognition in the crash, or that he had taken his suicide pills.
Although President Eisenhower was forced to admit he had lied, he refused to apologize. As the Soviets cancelled the next USA-USSR disarmament summit, the U.S. lost some of its moral high ground. Out of fear, the Soviets started constructing the Berlin Wall and then attempted to station nuclear missiles in Cuba. In America, lying became routine: the Gulf of Tonkin Incident and U.S.-Vietnam War, Watergate, Iran-Contra Affair, and Iraqgate I and II. It also became deadly and costly as millions of people were killed.
Since America's U-2 Spy Plane, the one shot down over Russia, took off from a U.S. military base in Peshawar in Pakistan, maybe this new report recording and detailing how 2,300 Pakistanis were killed, including 160 children, is another warning and indictment against America's credibility gap and invisible government-ruled by American political and military leaders obsessed with intentionally lying to themselves, each other, the American people, and the rest of the world.
Perhaps it serves as a condemnation too, not of America's technological achievements but of its technological inhumanness. Since 1960, the human image, either of the warrior or the enemy or of civilian casualties, appears less and less frequently in modern portrayals of war.(3) The weapons themselves, like the deadly flying drones, are the new surgical and sanitized icons. What happens to an ideological paranoid nation when their own weapons, fashioned by their own hands and in their own images, become the new face of war?
In this new technologically, aggressive and delusional environment, there is no moral ground. Lies are no longer troubling or discomforting. Neither are they and humanness detected. Instead, national- and technological-serving motives are what really counts. Protecting liars and enhancing their industrial investments becomes paramount. But in this culture of habitual lies and technological violence-a deliberate assault on human character has occurred, one that can coerce even the good and just to act against their will.
Therefore, it is crucial for a nation's leaders and its citizens to tell and live the truth, especially since "truth" is similar to reality. Lying distorts thinking and judgment. It alters reality and perception. When confronted with the 168 children that have been killed by U.S. drone strikes, or the documentation showing for every 10 to 15 Pakistanis killed by drones only one is a suspected militant, Pentagon officials and political leaders still claimed the strikes defended the U.S. and protected its national security and freedoms.
It is impossible for a nation to function properly and to have a vibrant democracy while its domestic and foreign polices are perverted and delusional. Only more destruction and death awaits a lying and deceitful nation. As Pakistan considers vetoing deadly U.S. drone strikes, will Americans find the courage to veto its leaders' lies which continue to kill? Alas, we should have told the truth then...and now, not only for our national well-being but for the sake of innocent children who have been murdered with our adversarial lies.
Dallas Darling (darling@wn.com)
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