What Is The Truth?

What is the Truth?
On the surface this seems like a simple question.  The truth is what really happened, what someone really said, what someone really saw.  The lies are simply falsehoods, the opposites of truth.  Black and white.  Easy.  Well, not so easy after all.

An event happens.  Someone sees it happen.  People are involved in it.  But, from a purely objective point of view, the event only happened one way.  The actors in the situation only acted in a certain.  The suspect did a certain thing.  The truth should be so easy, especially in the United States of America, the Land of the Free. 

But what really happens?

An event occurs, a person commits some illegal or unethical or deadly act, and is sooner or later (usually) arrested, detained for trial, and convicted or not, depending on the evidence...the truth.  Here is where the truth suddenly becomes, well, less than truthful.

The facts of the event are published by the media, and we are already at 50-50 on accuracy.  But before this "true" version even cools on the local paper, the "authorities" of one agency are another are putting out THEIR version of the truth.  Still not too hard, but then what happens.  The "government" puts out their "corrected" version of the truth.  Now there are three "truths" in use.  The people actually involved - witnesses, suspects, innocents, whoever - by now realize that there is something ... well, wrong, with the "truth" that is being passed of to the public.  Before long there are six or seven different versions of the "truth" and at least that many revisions of the revisions of the truth.

How long has this been going on?  Probably since Cain killed Abel back in the Garden of Eden, but I will concern myself only with the United States since, say about December 8, 1941.  It was about the next day after Pearl Harbor that a nasty rumor began washing ashore from Great Britain. It seems apparently a cable had been intercepted by the British that alluded to a Pearl Harbor attack by the Japanese.  And the cable had possibly been withheld from Washington by a certain prime minister.  There were apparently eyewitnesses to the deception, but so many stories have been told since that time, that I doubt the real truth will be known.  Whatever the truth, the persistent rumor that Pearl Harbor could have been prevented continues to this day.

The Roswell Incident.  There is no need to even write about it.  There was the simple truth, told on the first day in the local newspaper...a flying saucer had crashed, bodies were found with it.  Within twenty-four hours the flying saucer was "correctly" identified as a weather balloon.  Later the bodies were said to be crash dummies, but an alert investigator found that the particular crash dummies were not used until in the early fifties.  And on and on.  Probably the truth can never be found out.

John F. Kennedy, our beloved president, was shot by a lone gunman, who was then killed by an irate member of the public.  So many truths and lies have been told, revised, retold, and corrected, that the real truth is hopelessly lost in all the fabrications, misleading communications, and rumors.  The idea that one man took all the shots at the President that day is almost absurd.  Bullets all fired from the same direction but his body, his head flung in two directly opposite directions.  Another shot took off part of his skull.  Again, we will never know the whole truth on this tragic murder.

The list goes on...

The point is that Julian Assange, with whom I have no particular sympathy, upset a lot of people, probably endangered a lot of people worldwide.  Wikileaks no doubt exposed some sensitive information that resulted in a lot of embarrassment for several governments, including our own.  He was warned by several people to stop his publication and turn over the names of those selling information to him.  Then suddenly Mr. Assange is suspected of some sexual offense.  His Wikipleak organization collapses, the people (illegally or not) supplying him with their hacked information were exposed.  Then the "truth" began making the rounds through the world press.

It turns out, lo and behold, that Mr. Assange is a pervert.  But there is something else in the air now.  It appears that the United States is trying to somehow get Mr. Assange extradited to the United States and into the secret, illegal court system put in place under the PATRIOT ACT.  (Oh, don't get me started on THAT!)
Let's think about this for a minute.  The people who either stole the information or simply spirited it out of their own offices made it available to Wikileaks.  I do not agree with their actions.  It is, in my opinion, a cowardly and disgraceful act to release information that the person knows will result in harm or death to someone, or compromise national security of this nation or any other.  But, the way this situation has played out is most interesting.

Remember, Mr. Assange was arrested for sexual assault of one kind or another, a violation of the laws of whatever nation he was in at the time.  He is in custody in England, but it turns out that the Swedish want to extradite him.  Remember, he is suspected of breaking a criminal law.  But he has really hacked off the United States and several other nations by promoting the flow of leaked information.  Now the rumor is that the United States is attempting to setup a deal in which the Swedish extradite Assange from England, then the United States extradites him from Sweden to...Gitmo Bay.  Of course everyone in power is denying all this, but by now so many versions are out there that no one can really determine the truth...except those propagating the lies (if lies they are) that resulted in Mr. Assange's arrest.

So the various governments are telling us that Mr. Assange is a common criminal, a sex pervert.  Yet, it appeared, prior to his arrest, that there was no legal way to stop Wikileaks.  Suddenly Mr. Assange is the said pervert, and things get easy.  First Assange is arrested, then extradited, then finally lost somewhere in the shuffle, again, likely ending up on Gitmo Bay.  And presto, the trouble is solved.  Those left behind at Wikileaks are afraid to continue publishing their ill-gotten information.  And Mr. Assange is nowhere to be found. 

What about the truth?  Oh it is somewhere out there.  But what is the truth?  Was Wikileaks breaking the law?  Was Mr. Assange a pervert?  We will never know, I am afraid, because there are already several different "truths" out there.  And in the end, the only thing we will know for sure is that Mr. Assange walked out of the English courts into oblivion.