Lie Society

...the legacy of Watergate was a 15 percent decline in voter participation-this despite massive government accountability reforms...

...While that’s a depressing thought, it holds within it an opportunity...

...There, psychiatrist Ewen Cameron put her through more than four months of partial sensory deprivation, including 16 LSD injections and weeks of “psychic driving” using repetitive brainwashing tapes...

...Almost three decades after the Surgeon General’s report and the thalidomide scandal, the congressional subcommittee that oversees the FDA is still a fount of information on drug companies that have suppressed evidence about dangerous side effects discovered during premarket testing...

...Gone with the Soviet threat is the biggest excuse for big lies-lies about the harmful effects of nuclear weapons production, about our government’s domestic spying, about the need for gold-plated weapons systems...

...Yet as we change laws regarding official lying, it’s critical to change public expectations, too...

...History suggests that when lies are exposed, the cultural and political damage may be further reaching than the Hanford When leakers of high-level secret...

...About the same time the Hanford Downwinders were soaking up their radiation, inklings began to develop that tobacco companies had been lying for decades about their products, sitting-with the government’s help-on solid evidence of the link between smoking and lung cancer that could have prevented millions of premature deaths...

...Not only do corporations lie, but some feel righteous in doing so...

...But before long, even ordinary citizens like Laura Lee Bailie could be sacrificed for slightly less critical causes...

...But doing nothing threatens us with a society not all that far from the one Milton Mayer wrote about in his 1966 book, They Thought They Were Free: What happened [in Nazi Germany] was the gradual habituation of the people . . . to being governed by surprise...

...Ten years later, and 30 years after the brainwashing began, the subjects had been neither notified nor compensated, and the agency was strenuously blocking litigation on behalf of nine victims...

...And that if honesty is sacrificed, those politicians and corporate leaders should be made to pay...

...During a recent investigation of 27 Street firms dealing in government-backed securities, 18 admitted to lying in an attempt to comer larger slices of the market...

...Let’s start with the most sinister of all government lies: denial of the harmful effects of nuclear weapons tests...

...The American version of the greater good theory seemed to be that the separation of powers had worked so well that it was no longer needed, and that the market economy had provided so many benefits that corporations could be trusted to voluntarily act in the public interest...

...CIA director Stansfield Turner told Congress he would notify all the experimental subjects and take steps to help them...

...That lowered standard shouldn’t be disturbing solely to the ethicist...

...markably comfortable with the lie...

...Of course, only a political scientist desperate for a dissertation would blame all corporate deceit on the government’s example...

...Cameron “depatterned” him with a series of intense electroshocks and LSD trips, then put him in a drug-induced “sleep” for 23 days...

...In the fifties, a senator lied to the nation about the Communist conspiracy...

...In one court case, the CIA fought against releasing evidence of the official apologies to Canada, claiming that exposure of those innocuous letters would damage-all together, now-national security...

...two California inmates are freed after 17 years in prison for murder after three “witnesses” adkit they lied in their originaJ trial testimony...

...While the ability to say “I cheated on my wife” or “I inhaled” may not have a direct effect on coven...

...Tawana Brawley, Jimmy Swaggart, and Milli Vanilli may be exaggerations of the phenomenon, but they’re hardly aberrations...

...520 other coal companies are now under investigation for similar offenses...

...Marxist dogma is based on doing just about anything for the greater good...

...And how easy it was to rationalize it to yourself...

...Lie and let die Lying has fostered a cynicism far more durable than the enemies that inspired it...

...Addressing our national character flaw is hardly the government’s exclusive responsibility-imagine the enforcement bureau of the Department of Official and Nonofficial Honesty...

...Val Orlikow, wife of a Canadian politician, became a victim of CIA deception when she went to the hospital in 1956 for treatment of postpartum depression...

...I was . . . bounced helplessly off one trench wall and then off the other...

...Unfortunately, Congress is currently considering watering down its whistleblower statute...

...There are plenty of causes of Amenca’s current immobility besides deception-hut as an explanation, don’t sell it short...

...In 1978 the agency finally admitted in internal memoranda that it had been at son Tom was born with numerous birth defects and health problems...

...Why shouldn’t Americans be cynical...

...That may be just the tip of the scandal...

...Where trucks and tanks had stood before the detonation, there was nothing...

...A few years later, Ralph Nader’s Unsafe at Any Speed documented the great lengths to which General Motors went to blanket its bad news...

...With the death of communism, what better time to kick the habit...

...aid thal helped Saddam Hussein build up his military and about the extent of allied “friendly fire” deaths, and we throw parades to celebrate our “victory...

...Only 19 percent of voters surveyed recently thought Bill Clinton was an honest man...

...It wasn’t just the AEC that rationalized ruining lives with the excuse of national security...

...But the AEC and its offspring, the Department of Energy (DOE), concealed their knowledge of Hanford’s emissions-27,000 times the 1-131 output of Three Mile Island-for four decades...

...A generation ago, Dow Chemical used the veil of national security to keep soldiers in the dark about Agent Orange...

...And today, when we look with wonder at how many young people buy Oliver Stone’s JFK conspiracy theory, or how many African-Americans believe that white people have a “plan” for their destruction, it should occur to us that that’s the natural consequence of so many lies brought to light...

...Still, we Americans aren’t entirely hypocritical...

...MKULTRAgedy It’s ironic that Americans fell into the national security lie just as they began fighting a nation with vast expertise in the technique...

...Just think of how many times you’ve lied to disengage from a dinner date, a. job responsibility, a forgotten familial obligation...

...Classifying a document ought to be a difficult nndertalung, not an everyday habit...

...fault, and the U.S...

...Oliver North admits he lied and we not only forgive him, we pay him to tell us about it...

...In the eighties, they lied about the Iranian and Iraqi arms deals...

...Among 28 neighboring families, only one has escaped cancer, thyroid disease, and serious birth defects...

...In the sixties, they lied about the number of dead in Vietnam...

...With their votes and actions, Americans must let public officials know that they consider honesty a basic obligation of government and corporations, whether the subject is S&L,s, bank overdrafts, or time-bomb breasts...

...In 1946, Bailie had a stillborn daughter, and the next year, her What had happened...

...These troops were never informed of the dangers they faced...

...And when someone is caught classifying unnecessarily, the penalty should be severe...

...And yet the needle hardly flutters...

...Dr...

...But 45 percent said they’d still vote for him...

...A survey by executive headhunters recently concluded that more than 40 percent of executives lied on their resumes...

...And in America, the biggest and best lie has long been “national security...

...Americans bought the gambit-public confidence in government and private institutions soared during precisely the period when the military, the CIA, and the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) were using the dark to do their darkest deeds...

...As we lie our heads off, we’re also fairly tolerant of the habit in others...

...And then there’s Wall Street...

...But as corporations grew more sophisticated, they similarly grew more sophisticated in using and hiding deception...

...The ground felt hot beneath my feet...

...every town in 19thcentury America boasted a few entrepreneurs hawking snake oil wrapped in promises...

...The same kind of thinking prompted the military last year to exaggerate the success ‘of the Patriot missile in the Gulf war-the latest in a string of deceptions used by the Reagan and Bush administrations to lobby Congress to prop up Star Wars research...

...Unfortunately it’s not that easy anymore...

...Meanwhile, 13 coal companies admitted last month (after a three-year Department of Labor investigation) to lying to their workers and the government about the amount of disease-causing coal dust in the mine air...

...Lie Society The cold War‘s Over, But its legacy of lying remains by Peter Gray 0ne ordinary morning-it was March 27, 1992-1 opened up my New York Times and here’s what I found: One in four scientists suspect that their peers lie about their work...

...Asking people to do something about official lying may seem wildly idealistic...

...sands of young soldiers, their parents, and We Americans love to think of ourselves itself about Vietnam...

...By age 18, Tom Bailie was permanently sterile...

...For 20 years, the AEC and its contractor, General Electric, exposed residents of Idaho, Oregon, and Washington-the “Hanford Downwinders”-to whopping doses of radioactive iodine (1-131) and other dangerous substances...

...His parents and both sisters have had cancer...

...make it easier for determined liars to be caught by protecting those who attempt to expose them...

...So why harp on it now...

...But forget statistics...

...The ash continued to fall, and we had nowhere to go for shelter...

...Dick Cheney lied about giving George Bush advance notice of his own involvement in the scandal (or else Bush lied about not getting it...

...MKULTRA also funded numerous experiments in the U.S., the records of which have never been fully revealed...

...Cameron told neither of these patients, nor dozens like them, that his “treatments” were mind control experiments sponsored by the CIA’S supersecret “MKULTRA” program...

...apologized privately to Canada...

...One year, 80 of the 200 calves born on Bailie’s farm near the AEC’s plutonium facility at Hanford, Washington were deformed...

...Besides making it harder for officials to deceive the public, we must also w radiation...

...No matter sealed up so tight by the inner government how much we hate to be lied to, we are rethey will probably never be unstuck...

...If profit were the only reason to lie, effective government regulation might suffice...

...For the first time in half a century, we have a chance to safely renounce our willingness to lie and to be lied to-a chance to realign our moral compass...

...Most five-year-olds can identify the harm that comes from lying, but perhaps we adults need it spelled out more dramatically...

...and an op-e:d notes that as a Silverado Bank officer, Neil Bush approved a $100 million loan to his business partners and then, straight-faced, claimed he never suspected it was a conflict of interest...

...Thus one of the great tasks of a democratic society is to constantly expose and punish official lyingwarding off that deadening “gradual habituation” by actively opposing dishonesty in public, and personal, life...

...With my morning coffee, I got one piece of toast, two eggs, and six lies...

...Meanwhile, the facts as Huck Finns, but there’s a little of the about the Castro assassination plots were King and the Duke in all of us...

...nuclear test site employees in Nevada, claiming they were lied to about the dangerous levels of radiation to which they were exposed, are suing the government...

...Who knows what they’re lying about now...

...CIA operations, it will give us the moral valence to get indignant the next time we open the New York ‘Times to a breakfast of big, slippery lies...

...Joseph Goebbels, Hitler ’s h4arlin Fitzwater, was the first in modem times to observe that big lies work best...

...H]e managed to function, work, and exist, but barely...

...to receiving decisions deliberated in secret...

...Today, without even that superficial justification, a subsidiary, Dow Corning, has apparently employed similar deception in marketing silicon breast implants...

...Unfortunately, all this lying isn’t just a political problem...

...And that’s just the A section...

...Just look at a week’s worth of coverage of the House bank scandal...

...oversight, such corporate lying served a different, but also commanding, master: the bottom line...

...The lie is a little like smog: It blankets us, but we hardly notice...

...In Countdown Zero, former Marine 2nd Lieutenant Thomas Saffer described an atomic bomb test he watched from an open trench just two miles away: With my eyes tightly closed, I could see the bones in my forearm as though I were examining a red x-ray...

...Another doctor described Logie’s life afterward’ as “marginal...

...A group of Marines, dressed as though they were taking a casual stroll in the desert, [were] standing in the contaminated area...

...In fact, until 1986, when the DOE was finally forcled to release a damning heap of documents, officials insisted that there were “no observable health effects” from Hanford...

...What’s the connection...

...And Tom Foley seemed to dissemble about his assiduousness in following up on the early General Accounting Office reports...

...the federal government and Rockwell Corporation admit to lying about their handling of radioactive waste at the Rocky Flats nuclear weapons plant...

...Dow Corning’s employees, like employees everywhere, probably have done their fair share of lying, too...

...In the seventies, a president used the CIA and the FBI to help hide the most embarrassing political scandal in American history...

...After Robert Logie’s leg pains were incorrectly diagnosed as psychosomatic, Dr...

...to believing that the situation was so complicated that the government has to act on information which the people could not understand or so dangerous thal, even if the people could understand it, it could not be released because of national security...

...To lie, and lie righteously, seems to be the one trickle-down effect that’s actually trickled down...

...According to Alien Ink, a recent study of the FBI’s surveillance of American writers, FBI officials privately admit they keep two sets of files on some of their citizen-targets: one to release under FOIA, and another with the real stuff...

...For instance, after the government indicted the law firm that represented Charles Keating’s S&L for its extreme efforts to conceal the institution’s financial problems, other law firms rallied around it...

...Big bother With the government setting the tone, it’s little surprise that the 20th century saw prevarication become standard operating procedure in American business...

...Everything had been vaporized or tossed hundreds of yards...

...A library could be stocked with similar stories from the 300,000 veterans who were exposed to nuclear weapons tests in Nevada and the sbuth Pacific...

...So intent were the generals and scientists on preserving the lie that they didn’t even advise Hanford’s citizens about such simple measures for limiting radiation exposure as avoiding fresh produce and milk...

...But it’s essential that it start there, with better oversight of national security programs and less secrecy about them: two obvious keys to preventing replays of Hanford and MKULTRA...

...While a 15-year-old who dissembles to cover her Friday night tracks might not say, “Well, Dow Coming and the Department of Defense do it, too,” our cultural toleration of institutional deceit surely has an effect on the way we conduct our own lives...

...Which brings us to the eighties and Irancontra, which was steeped in so many lies that historians may never get to the bottom of it...

...It’s not just faceless institutions doing innocent citizens wrong...

...A few House members, when confronted with their overdrafts, lied outright about the frequency of their check-bouncing and the amounts involved, while others came up with excuses worthy of a grade schooler without homework...

...a letter to the editor defends a law firm that lied on behalf of its client, Charles Keating...

...Obviously, democracy ensures neither honesty nor integrity...

...The exposure of the cigarette companies and car manufacturers made headlines and changed the way many people felt about business, but those busts did Is such deception a thing of the past...

...While national security lying served to protect the government from criticism and not scare other corporations straight...

...The Bush administration lies about the covert U.S...

...Three who asserted they had not lied lost money...

...In the sixties and seventies, the military lied to thouPeter Gray, a senior science and policy writer for Friends of the Earth, is a contributing editor of The Washington Monthly...

...The lies surrounding Vietnam convinced tens of thousands that the only answer was tuning out...

...Thanks to the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) and more sophisticated investigative reporting, it’s surely less common, but as Iran-contra reminds us, it’s overly optimistic to think that big-time government deception is obsolete...

...can face prison as punishment but over-classifiers are not even demoted, the system isn’t properly balanced...

...On the few occasions when AEC officials commented on such episodes, they attributed them to poor livestock management...

...Today, with the end of the Cold War, we have a unique opportunity to erase this deepening national character stain...

...What made such concealments possible was a perversion of the well-warranted secrecy of the Manhattan Project...