Letter From America (About Lies, Lies, and Intimidation)

When Truth Dies, Justice Is a Fast Follower

by Ben Shapiro  
28 Nov 2014
BreitbartNews

 

On Monday night, after the release of the grand jury verdict rejecting indictment of Officer Darren Wilson in the Ferguson, Missouri shooting of 18-year-old black man Michael Brown, President Obama took to the microphones. “We need to recognize that this is not just an issue for Ferguson, this is an issue for America,” he said. “[T]here are still problems and communities of color aren’t just making these problems up.”

Obama was wrong, at least in the case of Darren Wilson. In viewing thousands of pages of FBI interviews and grand jury testimony, it becomes eminently clear that many members of the local community did make up the story about Michael Brown being executed by Wilson – and pressured others to lie to police or keep silent.

According to the St. Louis County Police Investigative Report, the mob mentality took root almost immediately after the shooting. By the time detectives arrived at the scene of the incident, there was “a large crowd of bystanders and a large uniformed police presence at the scene when detectives arrived.” That crowd included both Brown’s mother and his stepfather, according to witness testimony. The police report states, “Many individuals were clearly upset and were expressing their frustration, by at times yelling obscenities and threats, and attempting to encroach on the crime scene itself.”

It got worse:

As the scene investigation continued, there were several large groups of hostile individuals around the perimeter of the crime scene. The investigation of the scene was interrupted several times by death threats directed toward police officers and gunshots being fired by an unknown persons around the crime scene.

According to the police report, a bevy of witnesses described intimidation from the local community, as well as falsification of testimony. One witness initially told police she didn’t want to “get involved for fear of retaliation.” She said, “I don’t know these people. I have to live here.”

Another female witness told police, “I don’t know nothin’.”

An adult male near the scene “commented to detectives as they walked by that he witnessed the incident and the officer was ‘in the right’ and ‘did what he had to do.’ He added the statements being made by bystanders in the complex were inaccurate. The detectives momentarily stopped to speak with the male who was clearly uncomfortable speaking with detectives. The male indicated he was not making any further comments or identifying himself.”

Two more witnesses, one male and one female, “said they were afraid to speak about what they witnessed. Both said they were worried about retaliation from people who live in the area.” One “began crying and said she could not talk about it.” The male said that he saw Brown inside the vehicle. He turned away, and when he turned back, “the male began moving quickly toward the officer and he heard several more gunshots.” Both witnesses refused to provide recorded statements.

One witness told police that “she had been speaking to her neighbors about the incident, and her neighbors were getting upset at what they believed happened. Their beliefs were inconsistent with what she witnessed.”

Yet the witness told police “that although present during the incident, and seeing the entirety of what happened, he would not be speaking to police for fear of retaliation from neighborhood residents. He also stated the information being broadcast by the news outlets was not accurate information and there were ‘blatant lies from those giving accounts of what they saw.’ He said there were multiple people present when the shooting occurred and even those people, when interviewed by the media, were giving false statements.”

Still another witness told police he had “already told investigators from Saint Louis County Police Department and the Federal Bureau of Investigation that he was not willing to formally discussed the incident, but he was willing to discuss his fears.” He said “threats… had been made to the residents of Canfield Green Apartment Complex. He said notes had been posted on various apartment buildings threatening people not to talk to the police, and gunshots were still being fired every night.” He said “there were at least 10 other people who were outside and saw exactly what happened. He was not willing to provide names of any of those individuals.” He said Wilson told Brown “no less than 10 times to get down” while they were both on the street. He said Brown never had hands raised.

In FBI interviews, witnesses repeated such accusations. Witness 10, whose account backed Wilson’s story, said, “I just wanted to come forward and just tell it how I seen it. Because I feel like it’s very rare that somebody’s gonna come forward and tell actually what happened.” Witness 14, who initially said Brown was shot from behind before changing his story to accord with the facts, stated:

You have to understand the mentality of some of these young guys they have nothing to do. When they can latch on the something they embellish it because they want something to do. This is something they giving the okay now we got something we can get into… The majority of them do not work. They all they do is sit around and get high all day… two people never seen these people before in my life in the whole time I have been out there and I sit out there a lot. Came up threatenin’, hey y’all better not say nothing, ah, you’ll snitching and all.

Witness 14 added that within one minute of the shooting, there were 70 or 80 people “saying things that didn’t happen,” and they “started embellishing it when the stepfather showed up.” They lied, he said, when they said the officer “ran up behind him shot him in the back.” They lied, he said, when they said he had “his hands straight up in the air.” They lied, he said, when they stated that Brown was shot while down. “They had it in they mindset of what happened,” he continued. “They are set they are looking for a reason to explode, that’s what they, ‘cause they don’t have anything to do… They got nothing else to do they running all day they’re drinking and-and getting high all day we see this all the time.”

And indeed, witness testimony showed that witnesses routinely embellished their accounts, changed them to fit autopsy results as those results broke in the media, and even lied about seeing the events at all.

After Dorian Johnson, Brown’s alleged accomplice in robbing a local convenience store, went on television and told his false story about Brown having been shot from behind and raising his hands before being killed, witnesses began shifting their own testimony to match. Multiple witnesses said they knew Johnson, and one said she had spoken with him before talking to the FBI. Two witnesses brought handwritten notes to police matching in wording and other respects.

At least 12 witnesses claimed that Brown was shot from behind, which was factually false. At least 16 witnesses said Brown’s hands were up when he was shot, which was factually false. One witness said Wilson used a Taser, then a gun: false. Another said she witnessed the events, but admitted she was blocks away when the events occurred. Still another witness said there were two officers involved in the shooting, and admitted she couldn’t tell what she’d seen and what she’d read about the case. One witness admitted in testimony to changing his story to “coincide with what really happened.” Another witness said that he was friends with Brown, and that Brown was shot while on his knees. When informed that such a story contradicted all physical evidence, the man admitted that he had not seen the shooting and then asked if he could leave because he was “uncomfortable.”

The looting and rioting and protesting are all secondary to the astroturfed case against Officer Darren Wilson in the first place. At least in Ferguson, one “community of color” did make this problem up. The media went along with it, ignoring the intimidation and the witness’ lying. And an innocent man, by all available physical evidence and a vast majority of the reliable witness testimony, could have gone to prison or death row because of it.

Ben Shapiro is Senior Editor-At-Large of Breitbart News and author of the new book, The People vs. Barack Obama: The Criminal Case Against The Obama Administration (Threshold Editions, June 10, 2014). He is also Editor-in-Chief of TruthRevolt.org. Follow Ben Shapiro on Twitter @benshapiro.

Douglas Wilson’s Letter from Moscow

Ten Theses on Postmodernism

Posted on Sunday, September 29, 2013  

By Douglas Wilson 

This important post originally ran May 10, 2010 at Blog and Mablog.

1. Truth is objective, ultimate, absolute, personal, alive, and triune.

2. Because of this ultimate reality, it is possible for creatures who were fashioned by this living God to know Him as the personal and ultimate truth, as well as to know lesser truths in the created world that we see all around us. We know Him apart from that world, and we know Him through and in that world. We know. Some of us only wish we didn’t.

3. Objective truth does not mean uninterpreted truth. Objectivity in our knowledge of truth means that our interpretation lines up with God’s interpretation of it.
Thinking God’s thoughts after Him is not the same thing as guessing or having opinions. The standard of absolute knowledge is how God knows a thing. The standard of creaturely knowledge is how we know a thing, measured against what God ordained as possible for a creature in our circumstances to know.

4. The fact that truth is objective does not mean that it is constructed out of rough cut two by fours. Those two-inch deep dogmatists, ostensible defenders of the faith, who think that objectivity stands or falls with their pat answers are a big part of our problem. They only provide the pomos with a conservative group to feel superior to, and to have a reasonable point in feeling that way.

5. Truth is more complicated than an eight-foot-long stud wall, with the studs on sixteen inch centers. But it is also more organized than a sticky, undifferentiated mass. We do not have to choose between simplistic and unyielding, and complex and incoherent. How about complex and unyielding?

6. When the pomos taught us that all truth claims were disguised power grabs, they were telling us more about their purposes than they were actually intending to. So Christians who believe the press releases put out by the National Institute for Coordinated Experiments (NICE) really need to get out more.

7. On a related front, the pomo rot has gotten to the realm of science, producing something called “post-normal science,” and you can see the results in phrases like “global warming,” “sustainability,” and every other form of statist hoohah and tyrannical cant. Christians who go for this stuff, unwittingly or not, are just carrying bricks for Pharaoh. Doesn’t matter if they have John 3:16 stenciled on the side of their hod.

8. When modernity announced that the modern age was built by their guys, the secularists, the Christians who believed them were way too easily duped. There should have been less gullibility around here and more checking. Secularism did not fill the houses with good things, did not dig the wells, and did not create great and goodly cities (Dt. 6:10-11). The law required us to give the glory to God for these good things. Instead we have now fallen for the pomo lie that they are not actually good things. The modernist says that “my power and the might of my hand has gotten me this wealth” (Dt. 8:17). The pomo says, “Yeah, well, to say that you can actually get water out of your wells is logocentric, imperialistic, self-serving, and totalizing.” And the consistent Christian just thanks Jesus for all the stuff.

9. The inconsistent Christians writes articles for academic journals explaining how it turns out that the Scriptures, rightly understood, were all along saying just when the latest breeze from off the Zeitgeist Bay would seem to indicate they ought to have been saying. Currently, since the breezes are south by southeast, this actually means saying that the Scriptures can’t be rightly understood, but we can try to fix that later. When you are in the mood for some respectability, and that old familiar ache settles in your evangelical throat, don’t let the fundamentalists get in the way. They think the truth is made out of two by fours anyway, and they will be happy to provide you with any additional cover you might need as you slink out of the faith to accept a post at Calvin College.

10. Jesus is Lord, and not just in our hearts. The only consistent Christian answer to all the contemporary pushing and shoving is some form of resurgent Christendom. We can debate the details later.

Zero Credibility

A Mouth In the Shape of a Polygon

Let’s assume that most governments around the world of any consequence study the utterances of the President of the United States.  Are his words to be taken seriously?  Is he bluffing?  Is there a hidden message?  What is hyperbole or literary license?  If so, what is the real message beneath the trope?

All political leaders eventually realise, if they did not know it to begin with, that credibility, if you have it, is an enormous boon.  It buttresses one’s influence and power far beyond laws, rules, and institutional power.  In a democracy it is electorally life-threatening to lose one’s credibility.  If it gets to the point where a growing majority of people disbelieve what a leader says, and he is sinking in the credibility, stakes it is only a matter of time until he is rejected by voters.

In recent decades we have seen politicians rise up–usually on the Left–who believe that politics is all about focus groups.
  Saying what people want to hear becomes, in their minds, the artifice of the possible.  Focus groups inform the leaders about what people like and how they respond to words and phrases.  The leader delivers: whammo, popularity soars.  The huge risk–one that eventually bites with relentless savagery–is that the focus-group driven leader eventually becomes perceived as “all talk and no do”, or as the Texans say, all hat and no cattle.

President Obama is way down this no-exit street.  He has talked a big game.  He has made stupid commitments which he could never possibly meet.  But to focus-group politicians this does not matter in the slightest–as long as poll numbers stay up.  Only it does matter.  Voters do not look kindly upon politicians that have taken them for a cynical ride.

President Obama is one of the most stupid and mendacious politicians in recent Western history.  The best one can say of him is that he has genuinely believed that mendacity is the game and he has played it fully and fairly and actively.  So why would people be offended?  Everyone knows that politics is a focus-group guessing and delivering game, right?  Everyone knows that politics is all about cynical manipulation–and Obama has applied himself with great energy.

There are endless examples, but we will cite just one.  Pump petrol prices.  Obama has talked out of so many sides of his mouth on this issue, with such guile and duplicity, that this particular orifice has assumed the shape of a polygon. Here is the Wall Street Journal‘s summary:

‘The American people aren’t stupid,” thundered President Obama yesterday in Miami, ridiculing Republicans who are blaming him for rising gasoline prices. Let’s hope he’s right, because not even Forrest Gump could believe the logic of what Mr. Obama is trying to sell.

To wit, that a) gasoline prices are beyond his control, but b) to the extent oil and gas production is rising in America, his energy policies deserve all the credit, and c) higher prices are one more reason to raise taxes on oil and gas drillers while handing even more subsidies to his friends in green energy. Where to begin?

Obama’s shape-shifting has nothing to do with telling the truth, but all to do with titillating the electorate as seen through focus-groups.  The WSJ exposes the contradictions”

It’s true enough that oil prices can’t be commanded from the Oval Office, so in that sense Mr. Obama’s disavowal of blame is a rare show of humility in the face of market forces. Would that he showed similar modesty in trying to command the tides of home prices, car sales (“cash for clunkers”), or the production of electric batteries.

Naturally, global oil prices are far more complex than the simplistic jibes designed to appeal to xenophobic voters.  But Obama has used all the “explanations” under the sun, when it has suited him, leaving him looking like a politician sucking on a porcupine.

The oil price surge has several likely sources. One is the turmoil in the Middle East, especially new fears of a supply shock from a conflict with Iran. But it’s worth recalling that Mr. Obama also blamed the last oil-price surge, in spring 2011, on the Libyan uprising. Moammar Gadhafi is now gone and Libyan oil production is coming back on stream, yet oil prices dipped only briefly below $90 a barrel and have been rising since October. Something else must be going on.

Mr. Obama yesterday blamed rising demand from the likes of Brazil and China, and there is something to that as well. But this energy demand is also not new, and if anything Chinese and Brazilian economic growth has been slowing in recent months. 

 Obama’s actions are speaking far louder than words.  He has relentlessly opposed increasing oil production and supply in the United States, even while publicly protesting that he supported it.  He still engages in this verbal legerdemain.

In early 2010, he proposed to open some new areas to drilling but shut that down after the Gulf oil spill. According to the Greater New Orleans Gulf Permits Index for January 31, over the previous three months the feds issued an average of three deep-water drilling permits a month compared to the historical average of seven. Over the same three months, the feds approved an average of 4.7 shallow-water permits a month, compared to the historical average of 14.7.

Approval of an offshore drilling plan now takes 92 days, 31 more than the historical average. And so far in 2012, an average of 23% of all drilling plans have been approved, compared to the average of 73.4%.
Oh, and don’t forget the Keystone XL pipeline, which would have increased the delivery of oil from Canada and North Dakota’s Bakken Shale to Gulf Coast refineries, replacing oil from Venezuela.

The reality is that most of the increase in U.S. oil and gas production has come despite the Obama Administration. It is flowing from the shale boom, which is the result of private technological advances and investment. Mr. Obama has seen the energy sun rise and is crowing like a rooster that he made it happen.

When other governments  look at the words of this politician, they doubtless conclude either that the man is so confused he is well out of his depth, or that he is artfully duplicitous and not a thing he says can be believed at face value.  The worrying thing is that this can become really dangerous.

Internationally, Obama’s credibility is now shot through with more holes than a swiss cheese.  Consequently, he is neither believed nor listened to.  We have never seen a more striking example of this than his recent protestations to Israel and Iran that, “I think that the Israeli government recognizes that, as president of the United States, I don’t bluff.” He went on, “I also don’t, as a matter of sound policy, go around advertising exactly what our intentions are. But I think both the Iranian and the Israeli governments recognize that when the United States says it is unacceptable for Iran to have a nuclear weapon, we mean what we say.”

The very fact that Obama has had to come out and say such things betrays that in fact neither country really believes what he is saying–and now Obama knows it.  He is being forced, now, to protest too much.   But his lack of credibility and truthfulness cloys around him as a bad smell.  Ironically, he has evoked Teddy Roosevelt’s maxim of “taking softly and carrying a big stick” even as he is being forced to talk loudly saying, “I really mean it.”

As soon as anyone feels the need to thus asseverate, they betray their credibility as long gone. 

>The Religion of Peace

>Don’t Offend Us, Or Else . . .

There have been cultures in the past which have institutionalised dissembling, deception and lies. The West, built upon the foundations of the Christian faith and the Ten Commandments, of which only vestiges now remain, still struggles to come to terms with institutional lying or ideologically driven deception. Almost everyone assumes that in the public square people endeavour to speak the truth.

In some Asian cultures, lying or camouflaging the truth, is very common. Stories abound of Japanese and Chinese (often regarded as inscrutable to Westerners) who manifest excessive politeness, yet inwardly despise the barbarian. The truth tends to come out at 3 am in the bars when the sake has freely flowed. The Japanese, of course, are culturally attuned to the practice of layers of deception (or deflection of the truth); they can “read through” the the dissembling. They understand what is going on.

The Cold War was largely a war fought by the respective intelligence agencies. A polite term was invented for the lies that were deliberately told to lead one’s “cold enemy” astray. That term was “disinformation”. Using lies as a weapon against the enemy has a long and noble history. It was celebrated and lionized, of course, by that ancient Chinese military strategist Sun Tzu. But the West largely accepts that in warfare such lying is fair play and within the rules of cricket.

But what happens when the West is faced with a foe or a people which is ideologically committed to lying or deceiving the West whilst there is no war in sight? The result is that the West as a whole becomes an easy dupe–or, as Lenin put it, a useful idiot. Islam is the foe. Or, more accurately, Islam sees the West as one of its foes which must be conquered and subdued as the religion of Muhammed spreads over the globe. Its religious teaching and ideology endorses telling untruths and lies to non-Muslims. To the committed Muslim the infidel is not owed the truth. If the infidel is blocking the expansion and influence of Islam he deserves to be misled and deceived in order to be defeated.

In the US Congress, Representative Peter King is about to kick off a series of hearings to explore how US citizens are recruited to become Islamic terrorists who seek to kill US citizens in their own country. It has the Left in apoplectic conniptions–but that’s another story. “Moderate” Islamic leaders in the US are also professing outrage. They are warning of the great damage these hearings will cause.

These “moderate” leaders have been busy assuring everyone that Islam is not a violent religion and that Islamic people are, well, just like everyone else. They have condemned terrorism and violence in the name of Islam. Now, however, they are saying something in addition. They are telling the “useful idiots” that if these hearings are held, Islamic people in the US will be radicalised and will become willing terrorist recruits. The proposition appears to be: if you say something to offend us, we will react with retaliatory violence.  Does anyone sense a slight contradiction here? Both cannot be true. But the Islamic leader appears to have no difficulty whatsoever in speaking out of both sides of his mouth with a very straight face probably because prevarication is an acceptable tactic when dealing with an infidel.

The proposition that Samuel Huntingdon provoked Islamic people to terrorism (as some self-styled moderate Muslims argue) or that somehow Huntingdon is responsible for the radicalization and terrorism of Muslims because of his book Clash of Civilizations would be absurd, unless Islamic ideology teaches that criticism and verbal argument should be dealt with by deadly force.

An interesting question is, which is the lie: the proposition that Islam is not intrinsically violent, or the threat that King’s hearing will provoke Islamic Americans to violence and terrorism?

In the nineteen sixties, Bobby Kennedy–then US Attorney General–called for a series of hearings into the role and operations of the Mafia in the US. Nobody at the time argued that the hearings were unfairly discriminatory against the Italian minority. Nor did anyone have the chutzpah to argue that as a result of the hearings Italians would be offended and radicalised and that the Mafia would get many more recruits.

But then that was another day and Italian Americans did not have spokesmen for whom lying was a weapon in an ideological and religious war. Nor did Italian Americans have a common ideology of world religious domination by force of arms if necessary.

>A Terrorist By Any Other Name . . .

>Politicians and the Truth

In recent years we have seen various governments (all left wing, it should be noted) that have focused an awful lot of energy upon constructing and manipulating public perception. Labour under Blair in the UK, Labour under Clark in New Zealand, Labour under Rudd in Australia, and Democrats under Obama in the US have all had an unhealthy preoccupation with “spin”, trying to massage a message, telling the electorate how they should think, not by constructing a coherent or compelling argument so much as by revising the vocabulary and the categories applied to anything and everything.

It is the politician as salesman. It is politics in a Wittgensteinian post-modern world. Now, to be sure, all politicians engage in this to a certain extent. It is part of the territory, sadly. But some administrations seem to substitute spin for effective government, as if they were one and the same thing. To govern is to spin–at least that’s how it appears. “You can’t handle the truth,” seems to be the consensus view about voters and the public.

Of course, in the long run, it all wears a bit thin.
The administration that spins eventually becomes itself “spun” as weak, insubstantial, and above all, untrustworthy. Smart oppositions press the point constantly. So Tony Abbott’s characterisation of Kevin Rudd can gain traction because the mud finds places upon which to stick: “(h)e has called Rudd dishonest, deceptive and a serial promise-breaker, a toxic bore, a prime minister who hides behind a “wall of incomprehensible words and an army of spin doctors”.” (Sydney Morning Herald)

The Obama administration believes it is vulnerable to criticism over terrorist attacks. Its polling has told it that the public thinks it is “weak” on combating terrorism. It is currently very busy extolling every advance, and downplaying every reverse. In particular, every lawless terrorist act, is rapidly reframed to be called a criminal deed, rather than an act of terror. Why? Criminals are ordinary, a dime a dozen, part of everyday life. Consequently, the word “terrorist” has now lost a good deal of its meaning.

Major Nidal Hasan who shot colleagues at Fort Hood was definitely not a terrorist because he was acting alone, we were told. In the lexicon of the White House, a terrorist has to be part of a conspiracy; you have to be planning with other people to commit an act of terror. President Obama insisted in his first public announcement that the murderous beast who tried to blow up the Detroit bound airliner on Christmas day was acting alone. (He had to retract this later when it became evident that he was in fact part of a conspiracy.) But why was it important to make the point? Because in the White House lexicon it would mean that he was not a terrorist. He would be simply a criminal or madman. He could not be used as evidence that the Obama administration is “soft” on terrorism. Category revision is the classic move of a spin doctor.

In the most recent case of the murderous man who flew his aircraft into a building in Austin, Texas ,the first thing the White House spokesman wanted to communicate once again was that it was not an act of terror. Why? He was acting alone.

In truth all of these acts are terrorist acts. It is incumbent on leaders worthy of the name that they should tell the truth–especially on such life-and-death matters. Terrorism is nothing more nor less than the attempt to advance a political goal by killing or harming others, with the intent to scare people and governments politically, so they will do what the terrorist wants. There is always an intended public message in a true terrorist act. There is always murderous intent to kill innocents. There is always an intent to make others afraid so they will be cowed into compliance. It has nothing to do with whether one is acting alone or in concert.

Thus, Nidal Hasan’s murders were a terrorist action. The suicide plane hitting a building in which the IRS was working was also a terrorist act. Most mass shootings are terrorist acts.

The more politicians attempt to spin it another way, the less credible they become. In the end people want the truth. They can handle it. They respect leaders who insist upon it–in fact, the credibility and authority of leaders who prove themselves honest rises substantially.

May God in His mercy grant us honest leaders.

>What is Truth?

>Pontius Pilate Would Feel Right at Home

History has been repeated. The outgoing Labour Government has been exposed as once again cooking the books and swindling the nation. (For those who wish to review the in’s and out’s the NZ Herald Editorial gives a judicious and balanced summary of the facts.) These and other instances have served to remind us of how corrupt the previous administration actually became. Its corruption was systematic and endemic. But so deeply infected with the spirit of lying was the former government that it had become to a degree unconscious, artless, and “normal”.

This deeply shameful situation begs the question about the function and place of truth and lies in any human culture. What is wrong with lying? What is truth? Can there be an objective standard of truth? Are there such things as white lies? What happens when lying becomes institutionalised and normal cultural practice?

We are rapidly learning the answer to the last question. Lying and dissembling, acting in a deceptive and misleading manner, has become the norm within modern Athenian culture. We see its manifestation and fruits on every hand.

One of the most shameful, yet completely accepted, examples of institutionalised lying is found in our judicial system. The adversarial nature of criminal and civil courts requires barristers to give a one-sided presentation of the truth. It encourages them not to tell the whole truth. Now of course the theoretical justification for this is that in the clash of opposing advocates, each seeking to put their case in the most favourable light, we will have a situation where we will most likely expose the actual truth of the matter.

There is much to commend this approach. The proverb says: “The first to plead his case seems right until another comes and examines him.” (Proverbs 18:17) The courts must be places where above all else the truth is sought, discovered, and presented. The Bible calls judges gods: that is, they bear the imprimatur of God Himself, and they do His work, since all judgment belongs to Him.

But the institutions of justice have elided from their Christian design and intentions as Athens has taken over. Now, the point is not justice, but to get a “result”. For the prosecution, the result sought is condemnation; for the defence, acquittal. But neither prosecution nor defence are under obligation to tell the “whole truth” as they know and understand it. Witnesses, including the accused if they give evidence, are under oath to tell the whole truth and nothing but the truth; advocates are not so bound.

Advocates are expected to manipulate, distort, exaggerate, twist, dissemble, and massage the truth. When they do that they are seen to be doing a thorough, professional job. This is shameful.

If an advocate is entitled to lie, why not a witness? Why not the police? No, modern Athenian systems of justice have adopted a cavalier attitude to truth-telling.

Another sacred cow is client attorney privilege. We believe this has been abstracted into an absolute which, in modern jurisprudence, means that advocates are expected to conceal and dissemble. This parlous situation which has undermined the respect for truth in modern Athens could be easily solved.

Firstly, place all advocates under oath to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.

Secondly, institute serious penalties for perjury Anyone who seeks to pervert the course of justice by lying or dissembling should be adjudged guilty of the same crime which is being tried and be given the same penalty by the court. It is shameful that our modern system of justice merely winks the eye at perjury. It is formally wrong, yet no condemnation or serious penalties attach.

This would mean that if witnesses (whether for prosecution or defence) are found (that is, proven beyond reasonable doubt) to have knowingly and willfully lied to the court in a case of, say, theft, or assault and battery, regardless of whether the accused were convicted or not, they would be judged guilty of theft or assault and battery and sentenced accordingly.

Thirdly, make advocates (both prosecution and defence) subject to charges of perjury. If advocates are shown to have knowingly sought to mislead the court they should be liable to charges of perverting the course of justice and of perjury.

These simple measures would radically unclog our court systems and would do a great deal to restore respect for truth and for justice itself. Trials would be shorter. Justice would be better served. Juries would be more prepared to serve. The truth would be discovered more expeditiously.

Is such reform likely? No, not at all.

Athenian commitment to the truth is shallow and publicly acceptable. Parliament, for example, remains the highest court of the land, yet misleading the House (while still formally forbidden) is openly and knowingly done by all parties and virtually all representatives. Parliament should be a public scandal, but given the institutionalised and legalised mendacity of Athens, its lying and dissembling is accepted as normal and largely appropriate. Truth or lying has become a matter of gamesmanship. When the highest court in the land manifests institutionalised and habitual lying, mendacity is fair game everywhere.

For Athens, lying is a sport everyone plays—its moral justification is simply whether one is successful or not. Any lying is acceptable, as long as one’s purposes are served and one can get away with it.