Concealment, deception, and outright lies have characterized U.S. national security policy for decades. Lies are an integral part of national security operations.
(Xinhua) -- Just when America is in the middle of a grave opioid crisis leading to more accidental deaths across the country than ever before, Washington has begun arresting and indicting Chinese individuals and companies on fentanyl-related charges, spinning anti-China lies and blaming China for its own inadequate supervision.
But lying and buck-passing won't make those problems disappear, nor can they fool all the people all the time. The truth is, the more lies America piles up, the less credibility it holds on the world stage.
NATIONAL SECURITY POLICY FEATURES DECEPTION
Over the years, under the banner of "freedom, democracy, and human rights," the United States has wantonly slandered countries and stoked wars and disturbances. They beautified aggression and interference as promoting so-called "democracy" and glorified looting and killing as "upholding justice" and "protecting human rights." Examples abound.
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| Photo taken on Feb. 19, 2020 shows the Pentagon seen from an airplane over Washington D.C., the United States. (Xinhua/Liu Jie) |
In 1964, the U.S. government claimed that U.S. warships were attacked by torpedo boats from the Democratic Republic of Vietnam in the Gulf of Tonkin. The U.S. Congress then passed the so-called "Tonkin Gulf Resolution," approving the government's full involvement in the Vietnam War. In 2005, the U.S. National Security Agency released a report acknowledging a "high probability" that there were no Vietnamese ships in the U.S. warships' vicinity at the time.
In 2003, the United States launched a war against Iraq on the grounds it possessed weapons of mass destruction. Now, 20 years have passed, and no such weapons have turned up. In Sudan, a U.S. missile attack destroyed a pharmaceutical factory on claims that it was "producing chemical weapons." One employee was killed and eleven others wounded in the attacked factory, which was later found to be producing medicines for the local Sudanese people.
"Concealment, deception and outright lies have characterized U.S. national security policy for decades. Lies are an integral part of national security operations. They seek credibility for government policy. They mislead adversaries, cover up mistakes and failures," said an article published on the Australian website The Conversation.
TEACHING LYING
"I was the CIA director. We lied, we cheated, we stole ... we had entire training courses. It reminds you of the glory of the American experiment." This is a line from a speech by former U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo in Texas in 2019.
That is probably the most truthful sentence uttered in his career.
The U.S. government may be diligent, but it seems to struggle with the art of deception.
From "forced labor" claims, "COVID-19 origins tracing," a "spy balloon" to "fentanyl," none of these "assignments" were proven rigorous, even by U.S. standards. These lies fabricated by the U.S. side have proven untenable.
In 2020, Pompeo launched his China-free 5G network plan, baselessly alleging some Chinese enterprises, especially Huawei, threatened the data privacy of U.S. citizens and businesses. He toured several EU countries to get buy-in.
His pitch failed to convince America's allies. The Spanish and German governments bashed the spy claim, confirming Huawei's devices are safe and reliable. Britain gave in to pressure and banned Huawei, which "had nothing to do with national security," simply "because the Americans told us we should do it," a former minister admitted.
European leaders have good reason to be doubtful. Former German Chancellor Angela Merkel and other senior European officials have painfully learned that their data privacy is not a priority for their trans-Atlantic ally, after all.
The United States blamed China for its fentanyl epidemic, which kills 70,000 Americans every year. The reality is a handful of life-saving bills have been smothered amidst electoral politics and partisan strife over four administrations and two decades.
The intended learning outcome? As Nicaraguan Foreign Minister Denis Moncada once pointed out, the United States "uses human rights as part of a strategy to perpetuate its hegemony and cut off the independent development paths chosen by different peoples around the world."
LOST CREDIBILITY
"I worry about the country a lot because what we're seeing -- and I think anybody who just takes a deep breath and looks at what's going on -- that we are in an arena, an era, of what I call the normalization of untruths," former White House chief medical adviser Anthony Fauci said in July.
"There are so many misrepresentations and distortions of reality and conspiracy theory that it almost becomes normalized," Fauci said.
In recent years, the domestic economic growth of the United States has been sluggish, middle-class incomes have stagnated, and the gap between the rich and the poor has been increasing. Faced with its own structural problems, the U.S. government has chosen to blame other countries and seek scapegoats.
"For most ordinary people in the Western world, but especially in the United States, China is a great distraction -- a mental abstraction -- from the very real, serious and concrete day-to-day problems confronting their societies today," South China Morning Post said in a report published in June.
But lies are counterproductive, and America's international credibility continues to decline.
Moncada said in June that the United States has double standards on human rights and lacks respect for other states' sovereignty. The international community should be united in solidarity to defend the Charter of the United Nations, address hegemonism and other acts, and build a just world with shared common interests.
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