Official Truth manipulating

According to the official Congressional Record of Dec. 21, 2005, Sens. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.) and Jon Kyl (R-Ariz.) held a long conversation on the Senate floor about an amendment bearing Graham's name that restricts the legal rights of detainees in the military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

"I agree entirely," Graham responds to Kyl at one point. "I have just been handed a memorandum on this subject," Kyl says later. Another Republican senator, Sam Brownback of Kansas, interrupts the two with his own commentary.

But those exchanges never occurred. Instead, the debate -- which runs 15 pages and brims with conversational flourishes -- was inserted into the Congressional Record minutes before the Senate gave final approval to the legislation.

The briefs filed in support of the government do not make clear that the Graham-Kyl debate was manufactured. In their friend-of-the-court brief, filed in February, Graham and Kyl note that the "Congressional Record is presumed to reflect live debate except when the statements therein are followed by a bullet . . . or are underlined."

The Graham-Kyl exchange is not marked in either way, although a C-SPAN recording and other records make clear that the discussion never happened.


This is just one example of "respected" officials carrying on a practice of "Massaging the numbers", or exercising their "creativity".

Yes, the U.S.Government prosecuted Ken Lay (ENRON) and was going to send him to prison. Yet, in almost every government office, and every high corporate boardrooms, the practice continues.

My own experience was with a State Law Enforcement Agency. If you looked at how many Officers were supposed to be "out on the Road", it was 85. When you dug deeper, 8 were "Special Duty" doing more or less clerical tasks in the Office. A little farther on, you found out that 3 or 4 more were "On Loan" to District HQ or State HQ for investigative or Staff jobs. So, in truth, counting those off with injuries, there were 60 officers for three shifts, in an area of 150 miles of freeway, and hundreds of miles of county roads to cover.