While re-reading Derek's answer to Le Monde's article, I feel a growing awareness that after 3 years the question Jean-François Etter was asking after two years, "The FSFW, can it be trusted?', would unfortunately receive a NO answer. There is a high cost for lost trust (as explained in this 2002 article of The Harvard Business Review). Quote:
"Of all the factors that can undermine behavioral integrity, among the most dangerous is managers’ inability to see an integrity problem in themselves. The issue often arises because of our natural desire to see ourselves as consistent. In many companies, a manager’s path to success seems to lie in verbal endorsements of espoused values, while his actual behavior is expected to align with certain implicit norms and standards that may be more widely accepted. For example, managers often talk about empowerment without actually yielding any power. When this happens, psychological defense mechanisms activate to divert the manager’s attention from the contradiction so he can feel better about himself. The self-deception tends to perpetuate the problem."
The self-deception does perpetuate the problem. Derek mentioned Reagan's motto, Trust but verify (a Russian proverb) at the bottom of the page 221 of his book Project Unthinkable: by making verification difficult, he has very much eroded the trust part of the equation.