Lying in any form is evil. In a fair and just democracy, public officials who lie should be considered civil rights violators. However, in a fair and just democracy, justice does not pick and choose, and justice is not blind. Justice doesn’t care whether someone is the President of the United States or whether someone is a computer scientist in Silicon Valley trying to make a successful start-up of their own.
In our democracy, unfortunately, justice is just the opposite. A man who was the head of the biggest lie in America in the 21st century and a lie that led to more than half a million innocent deaths, President George W. Bush, now has a museum built in his honor down in Texas and is living a comfortable life playing golf and painting. Another man who aided in lying to the American public about the fact that the only chemical weapons found in Iraq were ones produced with help from the United States before 1991 and that their leader had not produced and had no interest in producing nuclear weapons, Vice President Dick Cheney, is now a well-respected television news pundit.
People like Condoleezza Rice and Donald Rumsfeld, who appeared on TV regularly in the months leading up to the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq and lied to the citizens of this nation and fear mongered the public into believing that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction he was ready to fire at any second, now live comfortable and relaxed lives.
NBC Nightly News anchor Brian Williams also lied to the public in 2003 when he told his viewers that he had been aboard a helicopter shot down by RPG fire in Iraq in the U.S.-led invasion of the country when in fact he wasn’t. On Feb. 4 of this year, Williams went on air and apologized for his “mistake in recalling the events of 12 years ago.”
In the hours, days and weeks that followed, #BrianWilliams went viral on the social media and, on Feb. 10, he was suspended for six months without pay.
It is not outrageous that Brian Williams was suspended, but it is outrageous that the people who led this nation into a useless and endless war in the first place left scot-free. Dick Cheney authorized the use of illegal torture techniques on dozens of innocent people as a part of the Iraq war, according to recently released CIA torture documents.
People on the social media went crazy about the lie that Brian Williams told, but there was no overwhelming outrage last year when it was proven that Dick Cheney lied to the public about being not aware of any torture going on in Iraq. He even came out and said that if he had the chance, he would do everything in Iraq all over again, whether legal or not.
It is these types of people who pounded the drums of war, and finally, someone is paying the price of the lies surrounding that war. However, it is not the people who led to the death of more than 4,000 American soldiers and to the countless American soldiers who now suffer from PTSD as a result of the war and to the hundreds of thousands of innocent Iraqi civilians, women, children, men and elderly, it is Brian Williams, a news anchor. Of all the lies that involved Iraq in the past decade and a half, Brian Williams’s is the least severe.
In a fair and just democracy, Brian Williams ought to be held accountable for his lie, but so should Condoleezza Rice, so should Donald Rumsfeld, so should Collin Powell, so should Dick Cheney, so should George W. Bush and so should every single person in that administration and every single person who spread countless lies day after day about the now-destroyed and utterly corrupt and nonfunctioning skeleton of Iraq.
By Abdul-Rahman Abdul-Kafi