Had not the airplanes very visibly slammed into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon in broad daylight on a warm and sunny day, there would likely be by now a large number of people who believed the 9/11 attacks were done by the Feds or the Israelis. (As there is, there are people both in the militia and racial separatist movements and among Marxist and anarchist groups that believe that the attacks were arranged by the U.S. military or the Mossad and that the twin towers imploded through preset explosive charges.)
There are several reasons for the build-up of doubt. First, government investigations dismiss and fail to discuss alternative theories with an intent to rebuke them. There is a tendency to use invective, accusing their opponents of being conspiracy nuts, extremists, mentally unbalanced, etc. This technique can backfire, as The Los Angeles Times has recently learned in connection with the recent gubernatorial election in California.
Second, there is the question of "who watches the watchmen"? In the case of the Warren Commission, the involvement of J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI, and Allen Dulles and the CIA, in a case of a failure by domestic and foreign intelligence to prevent the Kennedy assasination was a bad idea, as was its very establishment by Lyndon Johnson, the most obvious beneficiary of his predecessor's death.
Third, Federal officials have lied frequently. A few phrases will illustrate this. "I did not have sex with that woman...Miss Lewinsky." "I am not a crook." "There is light at the end of the tunnel." Even on the final day of the Branch Davidian siege, when military-type tanks knocked down walls in the building and sprayed tear gas, their loudspeakers were saying, "This is not an attack."
Fourth, the mainstream media has lied frequently, especially in recent years. Remember the staged auto crashes by NBC News, the bogus opinion polls that routinely show liberal candidates with 5-10 percentage point totals higher than the general election, the Washington Post Pulitzer Prise stories of a crack-addicted welfare mother that turned out to be entirely fictional. There is the famed liberal bias that conservatives have railed against since at least the Barry Goldwater Presidential campaign. A plurality (45%) of Americans believe the manstream press is too liberal. Because NPR, the black media, and the alternative press are more openly socialist and anti-Western civilization than the Old Three networks and the "prestige" newspapers, a substantial minority (17%) of Americans see the press as too conservative.
Fifth, the mainstream media usually follows the adage, "If it bleeds it leads." Even in the days before national talk radio and the Internet, alternative newspapers like Rolling Stone on the Left and groups like the John Birch Society on the Right would linger on issues like the Kennedy assassination or the conduct of the Vietnam War. A year or two after the Robert Kennedy assassination, if, say, Alan Stang (John Birch Society affiliated jounralist) or Mae Brussel (foremost leftist conspiracy theorist) came up with a story pinpointing a second assassin, their remarks would have gone basically unchallenged. Those ideas may spread slowly, through tracts or alternative newspapers and then via word of mouth, but they do spread, not unlike tree roots. With the Internet and talk radio in our time, what may have taken a decade to undermine, like the Warren Commission Report, now can be undone in weeks.
There is but one solution: to use as your standard the old legal language "to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, so help me God." Governments must also be held to the same standard of conduct that those same governments insist upon for the private sector. Why should Congress exempt itself from Social Security or labor standards it insists upon for all employers? Why should high level Federal and state officials be not subject to conflict of interest considerations their own civil service and private employers must follow? Why do cities and counties focus their police officers on revenue-enhancing missions like traffic tickets while elected officials pompously insist that it is selfless concern for the public welfare?
Finally, governments, Federal, state, and local, should cease to be an intrusive and expensive intrusion into daily lives of people. Only when the general public sees the civil servant as their ally and not their adversary will underlying attitudes that contribute to public mistrust of governments change for the better
Excellent post. Well said.