The routine of government lies

We, the public, cannot trust our government to tell us the truth about any major event affecting our lives.

Let me qualify that. Some government agencies, such as the Congressional Budget Office, that have thus far remained largely nonpartisan, routinely tell truth, even uncomfortable truth. The White House, Congress and its members and all the agencies controlled by the military, “intelligence” outfits and other self-serving bodies, such as “Homeland Security,” routinely lie to the public.

The greater the importance of an event to the public, the more certain it is that we will be fed lies.

Almost everyone knows that, though we seldom state it so bluntly, or even face it so openly in our own minds. It's one hell of a frightening fact: Our government lies to us, often outrageously, more often than it tells us the truth. The bigger the event, the more likely that government will offer us monstrous lies.

“America does not torture.” Yeah, right.

(Yes, we expect that of modern American politicians, but it's still hard to face when we're talking about The Government.)

We recognize that only the hopelessly naive believe the entire official stories of the murder of John F. Kennedy, the events that got us into Vietnam in a big way, the absurd Cheney/Bush story of our reasons for invading Iraq, and countless other events big and small.

I don't mean that the Kennedy assassination was engineered by the Pentagon, or that the FBI killed Martin Luther King. I don't mean that Dick Cheney and his evil cohort engineered the horrors of Sept. 11, 2001; I do defy you to find reason to believe the official stories are accurate and real. “Faith” doesn't count.

What I mean, simply, is that the lies and coverups are so numerous and in many cases so obvious that we who value truth simply must recognize that we don't know and probably never will know what happened in event after event.

Often the coverups obviously are created simply to save some bumbling fool's ass, or hide the gross incompetence of a group of politicians or crony appointees. (Heckuva job, Brownie.) Usually, we're denied certain knowledge of some stupid error, rather than knowledge of a deliberate crime, although it would be unrealistic to suggest that the lies never cover real crimes, even capital crimes.

All of which is by way of leading up to what seems to me very probably another government lie that the great majority of Americans have accepted without quibble.

I don't think we know, nor do I think we'll ever know, what really happened at Fort Hood on Nov. 5, 2009.

Quickly: No, I do not believe the shootings of military personnel and civilians was part of a terrorist attack plotted by some group in Iran or Pakistan. I do not believe that Major Nidal Hasan had accomplices. It seems quite clear that the man was desperately mentally ill, that he started the thing by himself, and probably with little planning beyond some wild imaginings within his fevered brain.

It's also obvious that the Army should have recognized the depth of Hasan's illness and done something about him, and it, long before he began shooting. The Army's feeble excuses – akin, as numerous people have noted, to the Catholic Church's weak excuses for not stopping child abusers within the ranks of its clergy – hardly are strong enough to be taken seriously as coverup.

However, there are big problems with the official story of Nov. 5.

Hasan, a psychiatrist, a doctor, is not a known marksman with a handgun or any other weapon. As a medical man, he probably spent very little time – as in almost none – on weapons ranges honing his shooting skills. Sketchy stories of his early life give no indication that he grew up with guns or used them regularly, if at all, during his youth.

Our “news” media, always ready to swallow the official take on any story, has never asked about that, so far as I can tell. I can find no evidence that they've sought Hasan's military weapons records – which by now could easily be falsified in any case, though questions immediately after the shooting might well have produced records we could trust. I've not heard nor seen a single reference to anyone checking to see if Hasan was known at private shooting ranges.

But, the official story is that this doctor, this unpracticed shooter, walked into a building on Fort Hood and within the space of approximately 10 minutes shot and killed 13 people and wounded another 30.
Reports said he carried two handguns, but later reports by several agencies quoting military sources suggested that he used only one of the two pistols.

As someone who did grow up with guns, who fired shotguns and rifles and sometimes handguns from the time I was 9 or 10 until my early 20s, my first reaction was “Ain't no way.”

My present take is exactly the same.

Even assuming the man was a cold, calm shooter and not the emotional and mental wreck all the reports show him to be, that is a very unlikely, though not quite impossible, outcome. Even if that cold, calm shooter was highly practiced, an absolute ace with handguns, 13 dead and 30 wounded in not quite 10 minutes is an unlikely result. Rambo movies are not reality, or anything close to it, people.

Say that the emotional and mental wreck we know Hasan to have been used just one gun and 43 dead and wounded becomes what I would say is a practical impossibility, though others certainly will disagree.

We can presume that the people who were shot, and those who avoided being shot, were not standing calmly, facing Hasan and awaiting their turns to be slaughtered. They were running, ducking, hiding, probably yelling and rolling and generally making a hell of a terrified fuss. And remember that he would have been distracted by at least a couple of attempts to take him down.

Immediately after the shootings there were some suggestions in television reports that some of the victims were or may have been shot by military people and/or police officers trying to get Hasan. Very quickly, however, those suggestions simply stopped. The curtain dropped with a thud. No one mentioned the possibility again after a surprisingly short time – a matter of hours.

So far as I've been able to find, no one has even hinted at the possibility of “friendly fire” deaths or injuries since then.

It seems very likely to me that some of the dead and/or wounded were shot accidentally by people other than Hasan. In fact, under the circumstances that have been presented to us, I can't believe anything else. Some military people or police or both – scared, confused, probably panicked – shot carelessly or stupidly and hit innocent people.

As coverups go, this is very far from being the worst. If what I think happened is correct, the official story has been doctored almost certainly to protect well-meaning people who were badly trained or emotionally and mentally ill-suited to handle such an emergency. They were not up to the task they took on, and the military cannot bring itself to admit that it's people were, at best, incompetent, unqualified to deal with the terrible mess they found themselves in.

We're being lied to again. And a government that lies to us to protect incompetents and to save reputations certainly has no qualms about lying to us to cover its deliberate crimes.

The New York Times reported on Dec. 9, 2009, that the FBI has named its former director, William H. Webster, to conduct an “independent” review of the bureau's handling of information about the Fort Hood shootings. Not of the incident itself, mind you, but the FBI's own handling of information – i.e. what it told us.

Anyone here believe Webster is going to say anything other than that the FBI was generally brilliant in its providing the government and the public with accurate information on a confusing situation?

I didn't think so.

Now we are confronted with another situation – and apparent attempt to blow up an airliner as it approached Detroit -- that is guaranteed to provide us with more official stories that we cannot trust.

But worse than that: We now have a "news media" that lacks competence and, anyway, has no interest in pursuing the big stories or getting at the truth.

We want truth. We are not likely to get it, on this or any other event that reflects badly, however correctly, on our government or its various cops, spooks, military or guns for hire. We are not likely to get it on any major event that would require a difficult and/or lengthy pursuit by well trained and dedicated reporters; those are so rare as to be effectively nonexistant.