A recent report said that NATO drone strikes have once again killed a large number of civilians including 20 women and 29 children, in a remote region of Afghanistan.

The killing of civilians by drones is an explosive issue in Afghanistan and Pakistan and soon after the story emerged there was a bizarre report that General Petraeus had told Afghan government representatives that all the people killed were members of the Taliban and that he suspected that Taliban sympathizers in the village might have burned their own children in order to make the US look bad.

(The US has apologized for another appalling drone killing of nine children who had been merely gathering firewood. I shudder to think of the number of people who join terrorist groups because of their rage when members of their family and community are killed like this.)

It is always a bad sign when you accuse other people of things that would be unthinkable if said about your own group. The instinct to protect and shield one’s own children seems to be deeply held and universal, is observed in almost all species, and is supported by evolutionary theory. Harming one’s own children is the act of a psychopath and thus rare.

This is what makes Petraeus’s purported statement so offensive. Other commanders are making it even worse by claiming that burning of their children is a common practice among Afghan parents! To accuse an entire village of doing so is a sign of deep desperation and requires a very high level of proof. It is not a charge to be tossed around casually.

I have said many times before that in the immediate aftermath of a major event where a government has likely committed an atrocity, their immediate instinct is to lie their way out if it in order to gain public support, hoping that by the time the truth slowly emerges, people will have forgotten the event or at least passions will have cooled.

We saw this with the case where a US warship shot down an Iranian civilian plane killing everyone abroad. President Reagan and other officials claimed that the dastardly evil Iranian government had deliberately sacrificed their own people by dive-bombing the US warship so that it would be shot down as part of their plan to make the US look bad. This was absurd on its face and was shown later to be a flat-out lie but the US media lapped it up. After all, we like to believe that we are always good and the enemy is always evil.

Then there was the claim that Iraqi soldiers had removed incubators from Kuwait just for the sheer evil pleasure of wanting babies to die. This was also reported unquestioningly by the media but was later shown to be not only false but a deliberate lie planned and implemented by a public relations firm.

Then there was the case of the Brazilian who was shot dead by British police and where every justification given for the killing turned out to be a lie.

Stories that fit so conveniently into a narrative that saves one’s own face and demonizes the enemy have to be treated with deep skepticism. This is why, even though I think that George W, Bush and Dick Cheney are liars and responsible for war crimes, I have never taken seriously the claims of the so-called ‘truthers’ that Bush and Cheney either planned the 9/11 attack or knew about it in advance and allowed it to happen. Such extraordinary claims require a very high bar of proof and nothing close it has been provided.

As I said before, “This is why I always take initial news reports of such events with a grain of salt. I believe that all governments, without exception, lie to their people. They do this routinely and without shame. But most people are uncomfortable accepting this fact and want to believe that their government is trustworthy. And at the early stages of the events, governments and official spokespersons take advantage of people’s trust and use their dominance of the media to make sure that people’s early impressions are favorable. The only reason that governments will hesitate to lie is if the media quickly investigates the original story and gives the subsequently revealed facts as much publicity as the original stories. But as we have see, the present media have largely abdicated that role, playing it safe by simply reporting what the government says.”

It is up to us to suspend belief in obviously self-serving government claims until we see convincing proof.