The Good Lie
by digby
Lying to congress is an honorable act:
On March 12 of this year, Senator Ron Wyden asked James Clapper, the director of national intelligence, whether the National Security Agency gathers “any type of data at all on millions or hundreds of millions of Americans.”
“No, sir,” replied the director, visibly annoyed. “Not wittingly.”
Wyden is a member of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence and had long known about the court-approved metadata program that has since become public knowledge. He knew Clapper’s answer was incorrect. But Wyden, like Clapper, was also under an oath not to divulge the story. In posing this question, he knew Clapper would have to breach his oath of secrecy, lie, prevaricate, or decline to reply except in executive session—a tactic that would implicitly have divulged the secret. The committee chairman, Senator Diane Feinstein, may have known what Wyden had in mind. In opening the hearing she reminded senators it would be followed by a closed session and said, “I’ll ask that members refrain from asking questions here that have classified answers.” Not dissuaded, Wyden sandbagged he [sic] director.
This was a vicious tactic, regardless of what you think of the later Snowden disclosures. Wyden learned nothing, the public learned nothing, and an honest and unusually forthright public servant has had his credibility trashed.
Click the link above to see how Emptywheel dispatches all of this with her usual alacrity, pointing out that this back and forth had been going on for many months.
This has been a common view among the hawks for some time, however. Here’s a previous example:
He mocked the sanctimony of all who “sermonized about how terrible lying is.”
Granted, lies were told, he said, but it hardly makes sense to “label every untruth and every deception an outrage.”
He also condemned the “disconcerting and distasteful whiff of moralism and institutional self-righteousness” that led Congress to conduct hearings on the deceptions coming from the White House and he denounced the result as “a witch hunt.”
So said the House Republican who led the defense of the Reagan administration during the Iran-Contra hearings, the same Rep. Henry J. Hyde of Illinois who is leading the impeachment inquiry against President Clinton.
In 1987, when President Reagan and his top national security advisors were accused of lying to Congress and the public about their secret arms sales to a terrorist state, it was Hyde who argued forcefully for a more nuanced view of lies and deception. Lying is wrong, he said, but context counts.
While Reagan’s aides may have lied, they did so for the larger purpose of fighting communism in Central America, Hyde argued.
“It just seems to me too simplistic [to condemn all lying],” he said in 1987. “In the murkier grayness of the real world, choices must often be made.”
Now, as chairman of the Judiciary Committee, he has espoused a zero-tolerance view of lying. No exceptions can be made for lying to cover up an embarrassing sexual affair, he said.
“For my friends who think perjury, lying and deceit are in some circumstances acceptable and undeserving of punishment, I respectfully disagree,” Hyde said Tuesday. “The truth is not trivial. Playing by the rules is not trivial.”
Just don’t lie about unauthorized fellatio or personal steroid use. That will not stand.
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