By Joachim Hagopian, via Veterans Today.com:
Last week two Army whistleblowers have gone public with their personal observations and experience as research professors at the US Army War College boldly announcing to the world that the US Army is full of liars. Drs. Leonard Wong and Stephen J. Gerras, both fellow West Point graduates and career Army officers who at one time taught leadership at their alma mater, have written a 52-page monograph entitled “Lying to Ourselves: Dishonesty in the Army Profession.” It criticizes US military leadership for its grossly rampant failure to be honest. In order to improve the corruption they have encountered, from inside the Army’s research center and military graduate school on leadership, they write:
Untruthfulness is surprisingly common in the U.S. military even though members of the profession are loath to admit it. Further, much of the deception and dishonesty that occurs in the profession of arms is actually encouraged and sanctioned by the military institution.
Wong and Gerras cite the undue pressures placed on military officers of lower ranks ensuring that their troops, duties and/or workloads are maintaining the high standards of performance required. systematically causes them to project overly-inflated, false renditions. In such a rigid, hierarchically structured chain of command as found in the US Army, subordinates will tend to resort to great lengths to deceptively cover up the truth for purposes of appearance sake. Wong and Gerras add:
Until a candid exchange begins within the Army that includes recognition of the rampant duplicity, the current culture will not improve… The end result is a profession whose members often hold and propagate a false sense of integrity that prevents the profession from addressing – or even acknowledging – the duplicity and deceit throughout the formation.
No sooner was the unflattering War College report released, Veterans Today stated that its efforts to run the public document were initially hacked by the government’s cyber-warfare brigade. Even The Daily Mail got attacked by viruses. Without a virus, it’s available in PDF here.
David Swanson in his powerful article “US Army Claims to be Full of Liars” takes the two Army critics to task by confronting the circumspect, narrow domain of deception perpetrated by the Army to just hiding less than stellar performance records. He asks what about the constant lying to Congress and the nation about wars being winnable, about the depraved war crime cover-ups, about the sinister truth of Empire wars themselves? This overt avoidance of honestly taking on the bigger lack of moral truth that Wong and Gerras have selectively omitted from their report, their refusal to be honest in Swanson’s words about “the mission of mass murder – makes them ‘ethically numb.’” His point is well taken as Swanson calls them out, “You’re lying to yourselves.”
State Department whistleblower Matthew Hoh spells out the truth in more detail:
The culture of lying that is endemic and systemic in the Army, as found by researchers with the Army War College, finds its expression in America’s pointless wars, a one trillion dollar-a-year, pork-filled and inaudible national security budget, chronic veteran suicides, an expanded and more globally robust international terrorist movement, and untold suffering of millions of people and political chaos throughout the Greater Middle East perpetuated by our war policies.
Ask any veterans and even active duty personnel anonymously about truth in the military and the majority will overwhelmingly report that honesty is a foreign word in their leaders’ vocabulary as well as their behavior, particularly the military’s top leadership. The professors’ timely paper underscores the current vacuum of honesty and integrity that’s at the heart of today’s crisis in leadership in this nation. From our military leaders to political leaders to our corporate leaders to our courts, academia, medicine, virtually across the boards – leaders all lie because it’s a mandatory requirement in order to function in the morally polluted environment and thoroughly broken system in which they have so cunningly navigated to the very top echelons of power. To reach the pinnacle point in this power pyramid operating in both America and throughout the globe, one must be a psychopathic, power-craving, power-lusting liar. Every successful player in this closed, insulated system if they were honest for once would admit this truth that virtually everyone else outside the system has plainly come to see for many decades. But then it’s the nature of the beast for psychopaths to habitually lie to the point they don’t even realize it.
