There is another perspective to take on Anthony Gregory’s thoughtful piece today, and that is the lying that is done continuously by state agents. First, the FBI Manual instructs agents to lie, and the reasoning goes as follows: anyone who might be a suspect in a crime “has forfeited his right to the truth.”

Take the Martha Stewart case, for example. The reason that Stewart even spoke to the FBI was because government agents were illegally leaking grand jury material to the New York Times (the penalty for that is five years in prison, by the way) with the purpose of damaging the stock price of Stewart’s company and, thus, forcing her to take action that would stop the financial bleeding. No one from the Department of (In)Justice ever faced even a sanction for brazenly smashing the law and lying about it.

When I covered the Tonya Craft trial last year on one of my blogs, I was astounded at the lying done by both police and prosecutors. Yet, because the prosecutors control the grand jury process, no one who lied during the trial was indicted for perjury, and the prosecutors suborned perjury from numerous witnesses.

In other words, the state can lie and does so with impunity. And it all is perfectly legal because the lying is done “under color of law.” Thus, we have the double standard: it is a crime for anyone to lie to a police officer, but the police officer is trained to lie. By the way, cops have a term for lying on the stand: “testilying.” Not only do police lie, but they are proud of it.