When Did Truth Become A Crime?

What a crazy world. "Deep Throat" comes out in public and instead of being greeted as a hero, he has to fend off allegations that he is a traitor, or that he is only going public to grab a lucrative book contract. Even Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, the guys who broke the story, are forced to fend off tough questions (in what turns out to be a great interview nonetheless).

Bush says it's not appropriate for the President to get drawn into the debate. Debate, George? There shouldn't even be a debate - the President should be awarding that man the nation's highest honour!

Former Nixon aides like Gordon Liddy and Chuck Colson are publicly calling Mark Felt a traitor. Please! These are the very people who went to jail for helping Nixon break the law! And that's what Nixon did, love him or hate him - he broke the law. And when the President of the USA breaks the very laws that he is supposed to be upholding, and when people find out about it, he either gets impeached or (as we can see today) makes a total mockery of the entire system.

Leave it to Henry Kissinger, Nixon's National Security adviser and later Secretary of State, to make the ultimate Orwellian statement of the day:

Mr Kissinger said Nixon's tragedy was that he was misunderstood by his closest aides, who thought Nixon was ordering them to do things when all he was really doing was "blowing off steam".

"When he said 'we should do this or we should do that', he wasn't giving orders. He was just trying to show how macho he was. They went out and did things that he wasn't asking them to do."

So Kissinger is suggesting people should have ignored Nixon's orders because he was over-emotional and mentally unstable?

Let's look at what's really going on in the subtext here. When Nixon gets resurrected as a hero and Deep Throat becomes a villian, people are really saying that they think it's OK for US Presidents to break the law. I mean, surely all Presidents have to do it, right? How else are you going to make things happen? That's what Kissenger, Rumsfeld & Co are really saying: Presidents (and presumably therefore people like Rumsfeld too, by extension) should be outside the law.

Is that OK with you? If you voted Bush last election, I assume it is. And if it isn't, you should be supporting efforts to impeach him!

I shouldn't be so surprised. I mean, look at Kevin Sites, the cameraman who filmed a US soldier killing an Iraqi in cold blood. In a new Guardian interview, Sites reveals more details of the event and how the footage was released:
"We backed into it," says Sites, with considerable disbelief. "We didn't get to the shooting until a third into the story." He mimics a pompous TV announcer's voice: "'There was a terrifying new technique being used by insurgents: booby-trapping bodies blah blah blah.' We highlighted all the mitigating circumstances to set this up. We made it seem that there was no question that this guy was probably justified."

But, as Sites knew at the time, some of the mitigating circumstances did not apply. The marine who shot the insurgent had himself been shot in the face the day before, a fact reported in Sites' original story. What he did not say was that the shooting was probably an accident, by US forces. Similarly, although marines were aware of the dangers of booby traps in general, the only specific instance of a booby-trapped body in Falluja came at the same time as the mosque shooting.

"If he felt so strongly that this guy was a threat," says Sites, "he knew there were two other guys by me still alive; he never checked them after he shot him, he just spun on his heels. I don't know what was on his mind: the fog of war does strange things to people."

Sites also points out that as the marine left, a fifth Iraqi inside the mosque, who had been hiding under a blanket, popped his head up. The marine ignored him too. And yet, in spite of all that:

The reaction to the video was immediate. Sites began to get 500 "hate mails" a day, including a dozen or so death threats. Every day. The networks outdid themselves: Rupert Murdoch's Fox News, with cheerleaders such as Oliver North and Bill O'Reilly, took it upon itself to attack Sites, while his employer, NBC, tried to have its scoop while denying any responsibility, choosing to describe Sites as a "freelance cameraman".

Sites explains the hypocrisy:

"If the truth is known then people will be able to make the responsible decisions that they need to make in a democracy. And if you're burying it you're not trusting them with that responsibility, you're saying that democracy doesn't work. And to me that was a betrayal of everything I'd spent my whole adult life doing, as well as a betrayal of those very principles of democracy that those soldiers and those marines believe that they're fighting for."

Exactly. Same principle applies in the Deep Throat case: the truth will set you free! And the same can be said for handing over sovereignty to the Iraqi people: make the whole process transparent, let the truth shine like a beacon - and trust them with it!