Let’s be honest for a moment here. You, gentle reader, have probably cheated on a report at least once in your life. A book report cribbed from the book in question’s dust jacket? An essay loosely copied from someone else? A colleague’s memo sent out under your own name? Hey, it happens. These are generally unimportant things.

But what happens when reports on really important things are fudged? Things related to, say, the ability to destroy the world? And what if the dishonest people aren’t schoolchildren or the co-worker who always steals your pencils? What if they’re senior US government officials, respected scientists and captains of industry?

The reports in question purport to prove that the suspiciously phallic Son of Star Wars defence system works. It indeed appears capable of intercepting enemy missiles and destroying them before they reach US soil. And so another wasted $8.3 billion goes into the coffers of the friends and family of the American oligarchy.

But now the U.S. Congress’s General Accounting Office are investigating allegations of fraud in the scientific results. TRW and Boeing might have altered data clearly showing that the defence system cannot distinguish between real missiles and decoys. Seconds have been stripped from detailed flight reports: only 18 out of 60 seconds remained in one instance.

MIT’s professor Theodore Postol examined some of the data, and found that the interceptor’s “attention was hopping almost randomly from one target to another”. Those conducting the experiment “simply chose those periods when [the interceptor] happened to be looking at the right target”. The Defense Department’s Criminal Investigation Service (DCIS) concluded that the discrimination technology “cannot and will not meet the contract requirements” and that TRW was willing to repeatedly falsify documents submitted to the United States on this program.”

To date no decision has been reached on whether anyone will be prosecuted for duping the American public into paying for an unworkable system. And development on this very expensive and highly dangerous lemon goes on.

Popularity: 7% [?]

Barbara Rosenberg believes that the 2001 anthrax attacks in the United States might have been a derailed CIA experiment. And as far as crackpots go, Dr Barbara Rosenberg has pretty good bona fides. She’s director of the Federation of American Scientists’ Chemical and Biological Weapons Program.

Four years ago, the CIA commissioned a study on the likely impact of anthrax sent through the mail. On the BBC’s Newsnight Rosenberg stated: “Some very expert field person would have been given this job and it would have been left to him to decide exactly how to carry it out. The result might have been a project gone badly awry if he decided to use it for his own purposes and target the media and the Senate for his own motives as not intended by the government project.”

The CIA denies this. Their man in charge of the 1998 study was Dr William Capers Patrick, who adds that he “may have met the person behind the attack”, though. “Possibly, possibly, I could have talked to these people. But it would have been within the context of their having a need to know.”

Popularity: 8% [?]

According to media reports, Zimbabwean leader Robert Mugabe is guilty of erecting “torture camps where suspected opponents are being murdered and mutilated” and massacring an “estimated 20,000 people in the Eighties”. Zimbabweans have even started calling some of Mugabe’s rogue youth brigades “The Taliban”.

So why isn’t the Bush administration including Mugabe’s government in the phantom “Axis of Evil”? Is the legendary Bush cluelessness mystical enough to explain this? Is it a purely racist “it’s only Africa, and they’re only monkeys” type of approach? Or, as is most likely, do the Bush family and its associated organs simply not have any oil interests in Zimbabwe? As Ricky Tomlinson from the Royle Family would say: “Human rights my arse.”

Popularity: 4% [?]