By SALMAN RUSHDIE
Wednesday 11 April 2001

The current hit single It Wasn\'t Me, by Shaggy (featuring Rikrok), celebrates, with wickedly infectious glee, the uses of shamelessness. A man caught red-handed cheating on his girl - a man watched by said girl making love to someone else on the sofa, in the shower, on the bathroom floor - must, or so the song tells us, at all costs, and in the face of all the evidence, deny, deny, deny.

Now who and what does this remind us of?

There have been some great champions of brazen denial in recent years: Diego Maradona ignoring the video evidence of his notorious hand-balled goal against England and ascribing it to the \"hand of God\"; O.J.Simpson swearing to dedicate his life to finding his wife\'s \"real\" killer (any hot leads, O.J.?); the British Conservative politicians Neil Hamilton and Jonathan Aitken denying their proven corruption to the point of their economic ruination; and of course the great denier himself, Bill Clinton, passim, from \"I did not have sex with that woman, Ms Lewinsky\", to the rejection of any improprieties in his last-gasp \"Pardongate\".

The barefaced denial, the giving of the lie direct, has become, in this age of saturation media coverage, an increasingly prominent feature of public life. It is now routine for even the age\'s greatest monsters - the war criminals of Cambodia or the former Yugoslavia - to deny their atrocities, knowing that their power of access to the world\'s airwaves is almost certainly greater than any journalist\'s power of access to the truth.

When great crimes are openly admitted - Timothy McVeigh boasting about the Oklahoma bombing, the Taliban taking pride in the destruction of the Bamiyan buddhas - it\'s so un-usual that you find yourself fighting the urge to praise the criminals for their plain speaking.

I once sat in a courtroom in Alice Springs, listening to the testimony of a truck driver accused of murder - of having deliberately crashed his vehicle into a bar he\'d been thrown out of, killing and maiming many people.

The man had clearly been carefully coached in the important contemporary art of saying the thing that is not. His dress was sober, his eyes downcast, his manner shocked and decent; and for a long time, and almost persuasively, he denied his guilt.

But in the end the coaching couldn\'t save him. After he\'d repeatedly denied that he was the sort of man who could do such a thing, he made the mistake, under cross-examination, of saying why. \"For me to half-destroy my truck,\" he explained reasonably, \"is completely against my personality.\"

The jury quickly found him guilty and threw away the key. What did it for him was that flash of unpalatable truth. A more skilful liar - or rather, denier - would have known better.

\"It wasn\'t me.\" Many such consummate exponents of the arts of brazen obfuscation are currently in the news. In Britain, successive governments have colluded with the British agricultural lobby to unleash not one but two plagues upon the world.

The first, bovine spongiform encephalopathy, or BSE, was the result of (1) turning cows into cannibals and then (2) allowing farmers to save energy costs by giving their cattle food that hadn\'t been boiled long enough or at high enough temperatures to kill the deadly germs.

But, of course, the Tory government of the day did not admit its complicity; nor did the farm lobby own up to its part. Instead, both parties pretended, for a long time, that the links between BSE and its crossover human variant, Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, or CJD, were \"unproven\".

And now here comes foot and mouth, and we discover that three years ago the present Labor government declined to outlaw the use of pig swill as feed (even though many of Britain\'s European partners had done so), and failed, once again, to ensure that the swill was boiled long enough or at high enough temperatures to be safe.

Once again, the decision was cash-driven: the farm lobby wanted to cut corners and save money, and the farm lobby got its way. Do we hear the government or the lobbyists admitting they were wrong? Of course not. \"It wasn\'t us, it was this Chinese restaurant that imported illegal meat.\" So that\'s all right, then. We can just blame the Chinese. We all know the kinds of things they eat.

Meanwhile, in India, the government led by the Bharatiya Janata Party has contracted an acute case of snout-in-trough disease. The sting operation carried out by the excellent website tehelka.com - what a difference the Internet has made to press freedoms in India! - showed many of the country\'s leaders accepting bribes on videotape.

There have been some resignations, but no admissions of guilt, and much talk, by the shamed leaders and other governing party figures, of a sinister \"conspiracy\" against the ruling coalition.

The new president of the BJP has spoken of creating a code of conduct for people in public life, but at the same time has refused to expel his corruption-tainted predecessor. Apparently, and in spite of the video evidence, it wasn\'t necessarily him.

And now, as the United States, the world\'s greatest contributor to global warming, repudiates the Kyoto treaty designed to reduce environmentally harmful greenhouse gas emissions, President George W. Bush goes so far as to claim that the link between greenhouse gases and global warming has not been proven. (\"It wasn\'t us.\")

This is what the cigarette companies used to say about cancer, and it\'s about as persuasive. But the President has a big megaphone, and if he goes on repeating his claims he may even make them stick for a long, damaging time.

Just sometimes a song stumbles on a truth about the spirit of the age. The Shaggy/Rikrok hit is cheerfully unrepentant about its amoral little discovery. Deny your wrongs and you will right them. As Nancy Reagan might have put it, \"just say no\".

It\'s plainly an irresistible proposition. You hear it everywhere right now, hanging in the air like a mantra.

All together now: \"It wasn\'t me ...\"