Americans Have Embraced A Post-Truth Society

“What is truth?” Pontius Pilate once famously asked.

Truth once mattered in America. Our most beloved president, George Washington, was revered as a man who supposedly said, “I cannot tell a lie” when confronted with the childish misdeed of chopping down a cherry tree. Abraham Lincoln, who usually ranks just beneath Washington in the pantheon of great presidents, is remembered as “Honest Abe.” In the past few decades, however, both parties have strayed from the traditional ideal to one that lionizes political figures who have what can only be called a casual acquaintance with the truth.

It is hard to say exactly when our expectations for presidential behavior went off track. Richard Nixon, one of the most infamous failed presidents, is remembered for his proclamation that “I am not a crook.” Nixon’s protest turned out not to be true, but the president’s behavior was not quickly excused or forgiven. Nixon resigned to avoid impeachment in 1974.

President Reagan may have lied about his knowledge of the Iran-Contra affair or he may have purposely kept himself in the dark to maintain plausible deniability. Either way, the Gipper’s image suffered from his end-run around Congress. Bill Clinton certainly lied about his own scandals. He was impeached for perjury, lying under oath, about his affair with Monica Lewinsky, yet Democrats rallied around Clinton and, until recently, he remained a respected elder statesman of the party.

Barack Obama is fondly remembered by Democrats as well, but is closely associated with two lies. In the most well-known example, Obama received “Lie of the Year” honors for his claim that Americans could keep their doctor under Obamacare. The second, the claim that the terror attack on the Benghazi consulate was precipitated by an anti-Muslim video, was not actually spoken by the president, but the idea was widely pushed by members of his administration, apparently with his blessing.

Since Donald Trump burst onto the scene, the situation has only gotten worse. President Trump has kept fact-checkers busy and examples of his falsehoods and exaggerations are too numerous to list here. Suffice it to say that the man who established his political bona fides by questioning Barack Obama’s birth certificate may be on track for a lifetime achievement award in addition to the “Lie of the Year” he received for his denials of Russian attacks on the 2016 election.

The penchant for lying is trickling down to infect members other elected officials. In the past week, there have been two big lies in the news that didn’t even involve the president. Devin Nunes (R-Calif.) had egg on his face after claiming that the FBI did not reveal the political bias of its sources in FISA warrant applications against Carter Page, only to admit later that the information was included in a footnote. Later in the week, Ron Jonson (R-Wis.) twisted text messages between Peter Strzok and Lisa Page to claim that President Obama interfered in the investigation to Hillary’s emails. In reality, the text messages referred to Obama’s desire to be informed on the Russia investigation prior to a meeting with Vladimir Putin.

And don’t get me started on liberal lies that attempt to engineer their version of what society should be. While deriding the right as anti-science, the left makes unsupported and outlandish claims that an unborn baby is not a human or that gender is fluid and infinite. The leftist redefinition of common terms is a positively Orwellian lie.

The fact that these claims have been shown to be false won’t change the fact that many of the faithful will still believe them.  Partisans on both sides seem to have embraced the view of Obi Wan Kenobi that “many of the truths we cling to depend greatly on our own point of view.”

The problem with this approach is that Kenobi’s was defending an outright lie. When he told Luke that Vader killed Anakin, Kenobi knowingly and intentionally misled his protégé and covered up the truth. It is no different when Nunes reverts his claim that the FBI omitted the required disclosure to a claim that the footnote was too vague. Likewise, the liberal claim that a baby in the womb is not a living human is nonsensical, especially considering technological advances that show what life in the womb is like.

Politicians have always lied. What seems to have changed is that voters of both parties no longer seem to care or desire to hold them accountable. Democrats excused President Obama’s lie about keeping your doctor by arguing that Obamacare helped the uninsured. Republicans excuse President Trump’s baseless claim that Trump Tower was “wiretapped” by arguing that the FBI surveilled Trump campaign members… albeit after they had left the campaign.

Information has become disinformation. News has become fake news. Both sides are so guilty that their goal is to obscure the truth rather than to reveal it. The modern goal has become to reveal only enough of the truth to skewer one’s enemies while protecting the guilty on your own team.

The truth is good, bad and sometimes ugly. While it is tempting to cover up the sins of one’s allies, the American people need to see the truth about problems and misdeeds on both sides. Neither side is pure and blameless.

“Sunlight is said to be the best of disinfectants,” Justice Louis Brandeis once said. People in power who operate in darkness behind closed doors tend to become corrupt. Shining the light of truth on government is the only way to protect our Republic.

It is up to American voters to insist on truth from their elected officials and stop excusing their lies and accepting a society that is, for all intents and purposes, post-truth. The post-truth age we live in is an era where what matters is twisting the facts to fit one’s preconceived beliefs and biases.

“The truth will set you free.”

Originally published on The Resurgent

Becoming a discerning internet user

Anyone who has spent any time on the internet knows that there are an abundance of fraudulent claims, hoaxes, and conspiracies. Cartersville, Ga. was the centerpiece of a 2008 hoax about rigged gas pumps and countless Georgians have received variations of the Nigerian email scam. The proliferation of such lies means that internet users need to learn how to separate fact from fantasy.

There are steps that that internet users can take to become more discerning about the information available on the internet. The first and most obvious step is to distinguish between trustworthy and unreliable websites. When looking for factual information, be leery of blogs and other websites that do not meet journalistic standards.

Wikipedia is a popular online encyclopedia site, but its articles can be edited by users. There have been several cases of false or unreliable information on Wikipedia. Wikipedia can be useful for an overview of a topic, but information found there should be verified elsewhere. Fortunately, Wikipedia entries are often footnoted with links to the source information.

Other websites have no such saving graces. World Net Daily is a news website that is less than credible. It is associated with a wide range of conspiracy theories including questioning Barack Obama’s birth certificate. The websites of Alex Jones, Infowars and Prison Planet, are notorious for propagating outlandish conspiracies on topics from 9/11 to UFOs. Documentaries posted on Youtube or other internet sites should also be treated with skepticism unless the creator of the piece can be determined to be credible. Articles by mainstream political groups and politicians may be so slanted that the truth is barely recognizable.

As a general rule, information should not be believed unless it can be independently verified by more than one source. In many cases, this can take a little searching. Sometimes this can be accomplished by following links in the article to the source. In other cases, it will involve using an online search engine such as Google or Bing.

Internet users should hone their innate BS detectors. If something sounds either too good or too outlandish to be true, it probably is. Atlanta consumer talk show host Clark Howard offers a list of resources for use in cases of suspected financial fraud. For internet rumors and conspiracies, there are several resources as well. The most famous of these is Snopes.com, but the Urban Legends page on About.com and Hoaxbusters.org are recommended as well. Politifact and Factcheck are good resources for political claims, but both of these sites sometimes lean left.

Even on reliable sites, it is important to distinguish between commentary and factual reporting. For example, the Atlanta Journal is usually considered to be a fairly reliable source, but its columnists and bloggers merely state their opinions. Therefore, news items from AJC.com can generally be trusted. On the contrary, statements by its famously left wing editorial writer Cynthia Tucker (who recently left to teach journalism at UGA) should be taken with a grain of salt.

Another clue that a website is unreliable is a fixation on how one group is conspiring for nefarious purposes. This could include racial groups, religious believers, corporations, or the government. Jews, Catholics, and Freemasons are favorite targets of conpiricists. The Illuminati, the Bilderbergers, UFOs, the United Nations, and a shadow U.S. and world government are also frequent topics on conspiracy sites.

In one recent example, the Atlanta Conservative Examiner was sent a link that purported to show recently unclassified National Security Agency documents detailing how extraterrestrial messages were decoded by government cryptologists. These documents immediately set off the BS detector because of the incredible claim that aliens had contacted Earth and that the government had decoded their message, published it on the internet, and all this had somehow been missed by the major news outlets. Googling the author of the report and the report’s title yielded only links that referred back to the original source document as proof of alien contact. Snopes and the debunker sites had no information.

Finally, an article on Open Minds (admittedly not a first tier site when it comes to credibility) was found several pages into the search results. It detailed how the messages were part of an NSA cryptology exercise from the 1960’s. As Sherlock Holmes said, “When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.”

Don’t believe everything you read. Use common sense and look for verification from objective, reliable sources.

 

Read this article on Examiner.com:  http://www.examiner.com/conservative-in-atlanta/becoming-a-discerining-internet-user

Photo credit:  Stuart Miles/ http://www.freedigitalphotos.net

Whatever happened to Saddam's WMD?

Kurdish victims at Halabja

It has been almost eight years since The US-led Coalition invaded Saddam Hussein’s Iraq.  There were several reasons presented to the American public to justify the war.  There was the Iraqi regime’s support for terrorism, its violations of human rights against Iraqi citizens, and, last but not least, Saddam Hussein’s efforts to amass an arsenal of Weapons of Mass Destruction which, it was argued, might one day be turned over to terrorist groups. 

Since the antebellum political discussions much has happened.  Saddam’s terror ties are confirmed and were thoroughly documented in a 2008 report, Saddam and Terrorism:  Emerging Insights from Captured Iraqi Documents.  Likewise, Saddam’s record of torture and mass murder is now a matter of historical record.  These facts have been overshadowed by the failure of Coalition forces to find the expected stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons, as well as indications of Saddam’s nuclear weapons program.  This, in turn, has led to charges that the Bush Administration lied about the WMD in order to sell the war to Congress and public.

Halabja (Sayeed Janbozorgi)

It is important to note that Saddam’s WMD programs were established as fact long before President Bush was elected.  During the latter half of the Iran-Iraq War, Saddam’s regime had used chemical weapons against Iranian troop concentrations.  In 1987-1988, Saddam ordered chemical attacks against Kurds living in northern Iraq.  On March 16, 1988, an attack on Halabja killed an estimated 5,000 people by Iraqi forces using some combination of mustard gas, sarin, tabun, and VX. Whole families and villages were murdered.  You can view actual video of the attack and its aftermath here (Warning:  This is not recommended for children or sensitive viewers).  Many thousands more were injured and suffered permanent injuries from the poison gas.  In all, an estimated 100,000 people were killed by Saddam’s government during the Anfal campaign, many of them by chemical weapons.  Saddam also had an active biological weapons program, although these may not have been used in combat.

Saddam never obtained nuclear weapons, but he had long sought them.  In 2004, Mahdi Obeidi, one of Saddam’s chief nuclear scientists, detailed in the book The Bomb in My Garden how Saddam’s nuclear quest began shortly after he assumed the presidency in 1979.  The program was set back by the Israeli raid on the Iraqi nuclear reactor at Osirak in 1981.  By 1991, Saddam was very close to a nuclear weapon, but the program was set back again by Operation Desert Storm.  After 1991, the Iraqis concentrated on hiding or destroying nuclear materials to keep them out of the hands of UN inspectors.  Obeidi hid plans and key equipment for nuclear material in his garden until Saddam’s government was finally toppled and he felt confident enough to bring the cache to US forces.

Saddam in happier days

After the fall of Saddam, the Iraq Survey Group scoured the country for traces of the nuclear program, as well as Saddam’s chemical and biological stockpiles.  The Duelfer Report, released in 2004, concluded that after the Persian Gulf War Saddam’s goal was to have the sanctions on Iraq lifted.  To that end, he hid or destroyed much of his WMD capability.  With the introduction of the Oil for Food program in 1996, was used to enrich the regime and undermine the UN sanctions.  Saddam’s stated intent was to revive the WMD programs after he evaded the sanctions.

Nevertheless, the belief that Saddam possessed no WMD or banned weapons by the time of the 2003 invasion is not true.  For example, prior to the invasion UN inspectors found that Iraq’s al-Samoud 2 and  al-Fatah ballistic missiles had ranges that exceeded the UN’s 150 kilometer limit.  Both missiles also exceeded the size limit of 600 mm in diameter imposed by the UN on Iraq.  Iraq also illegally imported banned missile engines and fuel. 

In 2004, insurgents used several artillery shells containing the nerve agent sarin as IEDs to attack US troops.  The shells were likely from small stockpiles that were not destroyed by Coalition aircraft or Saddam’s soldiers attempting to deceive UN inspectors.  The stockpiles were probably raided by insurgents before they were discovered by Coalition forces in the aftermath of the regime’s fall.

One of the claims that Bush had lied about Iraq’s WMD centers on the claim made by Joe Wilson and Valerie Plame.  The story begins with Italian intelligence passing documents (that turned out to be forgeries) to the US.  The documents reportedly showed that Iraq was attempting to buy yellowcake uranium from Niger.  The Italians gave the same reports to the British.  In response to debate over the Italian reports, Plame suggested that the CIA send her husband, Joe Wilson, to Niger to investigate the claims.  Wilson visits Niger and is convinced that the Italian reports are false.  Nevertheless, there is doubt about Wilson’s conclusions.

In the end, there was much other evidence pointing to a reconstitution of Iraq’s nuclear weapons program.  Saddam’s regime was reported to be in the market for aluminum tubes, magnets, and other equipment needed for such a program.  Additionally, there are numerous reports from other foreign intelligence services that Iraq is trying to obtain uranium from Africa.

American soldiers on patrol in Iraq

After the fall of Saddam, the US captured more than 500 tons of uranium in Iraq.  Ironically, this may be the final proof that the Italian reports of uranium purchases from Niger were wrong.  After all, why would Saddam be frantically trying to obtain uranium abroad when he already had a stockpile in Baghdad?  (The answer may be that this material was already known to UN inspectors.  Saddam may have indeed wanted uranium that the UN inspectors would not miss when they returned.)

Further, it was CIA Director George Tenet who asserted that the case for Iraqi WMD was a “slam dunk.”  Tenet later claimed that his comment was taken out of context, but before the war he publicly supported the Bush Administration’s claims.  If he believed that the president was distorting his position, then Tenet had a duty to confront him.  Tenet was a Clinton appointee.

In 2006, former Iraqi Air Force General Georges Sada published Saddam’s Secrets.  Sada claimed that Saddam had ordered moved much of his WMD material to Syria under the cover of relief flights prior to the 2003 invasion.  This is a plausible claim because both Iraq and Syria were Baathist regimes at the time.  The Duelfer Report could not corroborate Sada’s claim, but neither could it disprove it.  It is known that the two countries engaged in legal and illegal trade during the years leading up to the war. 

In 2004, the Senate Committee on Intelligence issued its report on prewar intelligence.  The report found flaws in the intelligence and analysis, but failed to note any pattern of deception pressure (except in partisan additional views).  Georgia Senator Saxby Chambliss was party to an additional view that decried the lack of human intelligence inside Iraq and the US reliance on foreign liaisons.  Chambliss also rebutted allegations of administration pressure on intelligence analysts. 

George W. Bush

The claim that Bush knowingly lied about Saddam’s WMD does not pass the logic test.  If President Bush fabricated claims about WMD, then he would have known in advance that the WMD stockpiles would not be found.  If Bush was so unethical and unscrupulous as to lie to start the war in the first place, the logical course of action would be to import WMD along with Coalition military supplies being shipped to Iraq.  Bush could have planted fake WMD and arranged to have the UN inspectors and the ISG find them.  He would have been vindicated in the eyes of the world.  Instead, Bush was as surprised as the rest of the world when Saddam’s stockpiles were not found.  The egg on Bush’s face is the strongest argument in favor of his honesty.  Being wrong is not lying.  Lying requires an intent to deceive that is absent from Bush’s Iraq claims.

So what did happen to Saddam’s WMD?  The evidence suggests that some was destroyed.  Some of this was by Coalition warplanes in 1991.  Some was by Saddam’s men in an attempt to deceive UN inspectors.  It is likely that some was sent to Syria and other friendly nations.  Some was also likely hidden inside of Iraq.  For someone as callous as Saddam, with the blood of hundreds of thousands on his hands, it would be simple to have laborers build underground storage facilities, move in the materials, and then have everyone involved killed.  Dead men tell no tales.  Some of these caches may yet be discovered underneath the shifting sands of the Iraqi desert.

What is certain is that had the US and its Coalition allies not toppled Saddam’s government, the Iraqi dictator would have soon escaped sanctions and restarted his programs for nuclear, as well as chemical and biological weapons.  The failure to find WMD stockpiles in Iraq was unexpected, but other US claims about Saddam and Iraq were substantially correct. 

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