Cover-up

From The Black Vault Encyclopedia Project

When a scandal breaks, the discovery of an attempt to cover up the evidence of wrongdoing is often regarded as even more scandalous than the original deeds.

Typically, a cover-up draws an entire organization, or sometimes only its leadership, into complicity in covering up a crime that may have originally been committed by a few of its members. This is often regarded as tacit approval of that behaviour.

Some cover-ups are successful (by the simple fact no one can confirm one). Most fail, however, due to the nature of cover-ups to entail more manpower, more resources, and thus leave too much evidence and too many dangling threads for investigators to find.

The crime itself being covered can be relatively minor, such as a 'third-rate burglary' as Watergate began, but the cover-up adds so many additional crimes (Obstruction of justice, Perjury, payoffs and bribes, in some cases suspicious suicides or outright murder) that the cover-up itself supplants the original crime.

Contents 1 Reasons 2 Examples 3 See also 4 Copyright

Reasons

As commentators note, "Why even cover-up a crime if the cover-up is going to make things worse?" There are reasons:

• As noted earlier, some cover-ups are successful. Those are the ones we never hear about, or are left to conspiracy theory advocates who find that without evidence their theories can be ignored by the mainstream.
• The people committing the crime and/or subsequent cover-up can be operating on the assumptions that "We're too smart to get caught," or otherwise believe in an arrogant fashion they are above the law.
• The people committing the cover-up may think they can control the investigation in some way.
• The crime committed may be linked somehow to other crimes, and the cover-up occurs in order to keep all those other crimes from being known. Some of the reasons behind the attempted Watergate cover-up were to hide other illegal covert activities.

Examples

• The Dreyfus Affair
• The Watergate scandal
• The Dutch Tessa-case
• The recent Roman Catholic sex abuse cases
• The My Lai Massacre
• The Plame Affair Scandal
• The 9/11 conspiracy theories Cover-up

See also

• Coincidence theory
• Propaganda
• Media manipulation
• Gatekeeper (politics) Left Gatekeepers

Copyright

"Original data received from Wikipedia on April 01, 2006. Credit given to original authors can be seen Here."