The BEAST: Buffalo's Best Fiend

Disinformation Age

America Loves a Good Liar

by Allan Uthman

Donald Rumsfeld is having a bad holiday season. He’s getting hit from all sides now, without even hillbilly armor to protect him. It would seem George Bush himself is Rumsfeld’s last remaining fan. In reality, Rumsfeld has always had, and still does, a cult following of dupes who just like the guy—I don’t know, maybe their dads were easily exasperated assholes, too. But when CIA and Pentagon bigwigs think the guy is going too far, you’d think that people would take note. It’s not like the CIA is an icon of prudence in the area of human rights.

I’m not going to go after Rummy for stamping those condolence letters rather than signing them. All that shows us is that he’s not all that bright when it comes to public relations. Signing a letter signifies nothing. But the armor thing is hurting him, bad. What’s hard to fathom is that we’ve all known about the lack of armor for a long time now, but nobody gave a damn until they were presented with a human-interest story about it. Now, because the mainstream media has chosen this moment to hammer Rumsfeld, it is everywhere. It’s good entertainment, because a “real” person asked the question.

Sort of. It turns out the soldier in question was fed his question ahead of time by an embedded Chattanooga Times reporter. Many have seized on this fact, as if it invalidates the question, but it only illustrates the point: why does this guy have to go to such lengths to pose a question that should have been asked of Rumsfeld 1,000 times by now? Why would a reporter have to go through a soldier for that? Because reporters don’t get real access anymore. Their questions are screened. They don’t get to ask follow-ups. They can’t do their jobs, but they keep right on pretending with nary a complaint, much like the Democratic Party. Actually, it seems the only group mounting a serious challenge against the White House’s current national stranglehold is the old school military-industrial complex.

The Pentagon has been waging a campaign of death by a thousand leaks right since our tragic, flawed election, as Rumsfeld moves to take more control, and the intelligence reform bill, more scary in it’s expansion of the secret FISA court than the infamous Patriot Act, has passed. Every day, papers come up with a new classified document or high-level leak detailing some wretched aspect of the current administration’s war on civil liberties, be it executive approval of torture, plans to spread false stories, or a plan to convert Iraqi civilian biomass into energy stored in hydrogen fuel cells.

I made that last one up; could you tell? It was the fuel cells, wasn’t it?

It’s kind of hilarious to watch. Every time another classified document surfaces, further detailing that torture is a matter of policy in Iraq as well as Guantanamo, liberals brace themselves for victory. “They’ll see it now,” they think.

But they won’t see it, because they refuse to look. The problem with the left is that our whole model of changing opinions—that contrary facts will alter people’s views—is inherently flawed. Mundane, oafish Americans, in a national competition to see how many $3.99 “support our troops” ribbon magnets they can fit onto the backs of their Suburbans, simply aren’t interested in reality. These people won’t be convinced of any upsetting facts that they can avoid thinking about, or can stave off with the crude set of official denials and made-up stories the White House provides for them and the press dutifully parrots. Let’s face it; there is a sizable chunk of the population who deny the validity of evolution—evolution. Who are we kidding, thinking we can make them see the errors in Social Security privatization?

People don’t think much; they’re far more interested in feeling. God and country feel good; corruption and war crimes don’t. So when we see pictures of our soldiers engaged in less-than-admirable conduct, “values voters” cry out—against the reporters who brought it to our attention, who had the audacity to burst our imperial bubble. How dare these liberal media elites violate our right to not know?

This obsessive ignorance is a hallmark of the religious. It is a necessary reaction to encroaching reality. If you want to go on believing things that are simply and demonstrably untrue, you need to develop a selective blindness. The fact is, everybody already knows that we’re engaged in medieval interrogation techniques, and that the orders have come from on high. There is just too much evidence, too many stories from too many places. The “few bad apples” excuse was never really believed so much as it was embraced, in the same way a coddled teen’s parents will happily buy the most outrageous lie rather than believe their kid might actually be a shithead. It wasn’t my drugs, ma, I was just holding it for a friend, honest! America might as well believe in Santa Claus if they can continue believing that the torture of prisoners is the product of a few insane yahoos at the lowest levels of the command structure.

But, for Don Rumsfeld, lying as a matter of personal policy isn’t enough—he wants to make is military policy. Three years ago, Rumsfeld opened the Office of Strategic Influence—a propaganda division—and had to close it almost immediately due to the righteous outrage it provoked. Now he’s back at it, and even the military doesn’t want it. The plan calls for phony stories, translated into different languages, and disseminated through the foreign media. Now, we’ve been doing this for a long time in countries we are fighting, but the new plans are to strategically disinform neutral and even allied countries. The natural effect, of course, aside from flushing any vestigial US credibility down the toilet, will be that these propaganda stories will seep almost immediately into the press here—internet and all that, you know.

The New York Times article that broke the story, by Thom Shanker and Eric Schmitt, says that “Critics of the proposals say such deceptive missions could shatter the Pentagon's credibility, leaving the American public and a world audience skeptical of anything the Defense Department and military say - a repeat of the credibility gap that roiled America during the Vietnam War.” As if there were no such credibility gap in existence today. In truth, while there is debate as to whether to engage in lying campaigns in other nations, there is no doubt that they have been practicing on home turf for years, and a necessary consequence of that is diminished credibility. Who the hell believes these guys anyway? After all the lies, from Tonkin to Grenada to Libya to Kuwait, from WMD to Pat Tillman, who is left out there that doesn’t know the media crap-cannon kicks into overdrive during war? Who doesn’t know that?

Unfortunately, a lot of you. People notice and remember the lie, which hits front pages with explosive headlines and incessant repetition on cable news, but the eventual retraction is drawn out, quiet, and receives little attention. The recent revelations about Tillman’s death by friendly fire and the subsequent market-friendly cover story made the papers, but not the TV. The sinister 1991 story from the Gulf War about Iraqis ripping babies from incubators, made up by an American PR firm, penetrated our national consciousness so deeply that it is repeated whole and uncorrected in a 2002 HBO movie “Live From Baghdad.” You probably still believe it.

No one ever get charged for these lies. Nobody is held accountable. And you’re probably comfortable with that. If there’s one thing we’ve learned from this grand failed experiment, it’s that, given the choice between the cold truth and a friendlier lie, the majority will always choose the lie. We are benevolent; the enemy is evil. Freedom is on the march. You know the drill.

WMD. Jessica Lynch. Mission Accomplished. Pat Tillman. Liberation. All lies. Not mistakes, lies. Americans choose the lie every day. And why shouldn’t they? The truth is a stark void of insecurity, relativity, and struggle—who the hell wants that? Why on earth would anyone eschew the joys of patriotism and laser-white teeth to stare, horrified, at the dreadful depravity our denial enables, with full knowledge that to fight it is utterly futile? Maybe there’s something wrong with me. After all, it’s a hollow victory to be able to say to the guy next to you, as you’re being led into a concentration camp, “I knew this was going to happen.” I think I’d really rather be the guy saying, “Oh really? I was too busy watching DVDs in my Escalade and licking champagne off of my girlfriends.”

I really do hope that the government moves further toward a stated public policy of lying. It can only propel us toward a better understanding of the most important truth, that we don’t know shit, and can’t trust the media to let us know when we should be really pissed about something (other than particularly brutal individual crimes involving pregnant white women). The best effect of a psy-ops media will be that, eventually, no one will believe anything, except the very worst baboons of us all. For example, from the same Times article I mentioned previously: “Mr. Di Rita, the Pentagon spokesman, says that even though the government is wrestling with these issues, the standard is still to tell to the truth.”

But that’s exactly what he would say if he were lying.