The release of new information that President Franklin Roosevelt and subsequent U.S. presidents — both Republican and Democrat — knew that the Soviet Union was responsible for the Katyn Massacre demonstrates without a doubt the dishonesty and cynicism of the U.S. Government:

The American POWs sent secret coded messages to Washington with news of a Soviet atrocity: In 1943 they saw rows of corpses in an advanced state of decay in the Katyn forest, on the western edge of Russia, proof that the killers could not have been the Nazis who had only recently occupied the area.

The testimony about the infamous massacre of Polish officers might have lessened the tragic fate that befell Poland under the Soviets, some scholars believe. Instead, it mysteriously vanished into the heart of American power. The long-held suspicion is that President Franklin Delano Roosevelt didn’t want to anger Josef Stalin, an ally whom the Americans were counting on to defeat Germany and Japan during World War II.

It was common knowledge that the Soviets had murdered 22,000 of Poland’s military and civilian leadership in 1940, but beginning with FDR and continuing through the administration of George H.W. Bush, the “official” line was agnosticism. No doubt, the Machiavellian answer will be that the administrations did not want to exacerbate Cold War tensions, but the reality is much darker. After all, it was the U.S. Government that gave us the “Operation Keelhaul” massacres that forever are a stain to this country.

The bottom line is that governments are in the murder and massacre business. There is no “American Exceptionalism” to this except for the fact that the American government has been “exceptional” in its enthusiastic support for the most bloody-handed governments in history. And the bloodshed goes on and on and on.