Their Mouths Are Moving, or How Can You Tell a Politician Is Lying About War?
By David Swanson, American Herald Tribune
Someone asked me to find war lies during the past few years. Perhaps they had in mind the humanitarian pretenses around attacking Libya in 2011 and Iraq in 2014, or the false claims about chemical weapons in 2013, or the lies about an airplane in Ukraine or the endlessly reported Russian invasions of Ukraine. Maybe they were thinking of the "ISIS Is In Brooklyn" headlines or the routine false claims about the identities of drone victims or the supposedly imminent victory in Afghanistan or in one of the other wars. The lies seem far too numerous for me to fit into an essay, though I've tried many times, and they are layered over a bedrock of more general lies about what works, what is legal, and what is moral. Just a Prince Tribute selection of lies could include Qadaffi's viagra for the troops and CNN's sex-toys flag as evidence of ISIS in Europe. It's hard to scrape the surface of all U.S. war lies in something less than a book, which is why I wrote a book.
So, I replied that I would look for war lies just in 2016. But that was way too big as well, of course. I once tried to find all the lies in one speech by Obama and ended up just writing about the top 45. So, I've taken a glance at two of the most recent speeches on the White House website, one by Obama and one by Susan Rice. I think they provide ample evidence of how we're being lied to.
In an April 13th speech to the CIA, President Barack Obama declared, "One of my main messages today is that destroying ISIL continues to be my top priority." The next day, in a speech to the U.S. Air Force Academy, National Security Advisor Susan Rice repeated the claim: "This evening, I’d like to focus on one threat in particular—the threat at the very top of President Obama’s agenda—and that is ISIL." And here's Senator Bernie Sanders during the recent presidential primary debate in Brooklyn, N.Y.: "Right now our fight is to destroy ISIS first, and to get rid of Assad second."
