A short synopsis of the star wars program for those who don't know:

Under Regan's administration the US Department of Defense developed a program nicknamed the "Star Wars program." This was a program designed to destroy any incomming missles on US territory. However, it was met with some marginal successes and some huge failures, so the project was scrapped as it was then known. Later, it was funded under a different name, and the government focused on using missles to shoot down other missles instead of lasers from satelites in space. This current program has continued on, under many different names.

My question is did the government lie to its citizens about the Stars wars program, specifically, failure. I think so. The government had everything to lose and nothing to gain by announcing that it was capable of shooting down enemy weapons from space via a laser. We would be the only nation in the World with this type of technology, we would be able to shoot down any incoming missle before it hit land and thus know who was attacking us and retaliate (almost as if we had the first strike) laying a crucial blow against any country in the beginning. It would defeat their morale early on, and attack them in the heart of their own country. It is for these reasons that I think the U.S. currently has the ability to shoot down missiles with lasers.

I think they did have a partial failure due to the lack of tech back then, but if you notice they have attached lasers to 747s now... Maybe it's easier to shoot it down with something in the atmosphere vs. in orbit?

I wouldn't doubt though that they can shoot a missle down from space now and they probably either won't tell us they can flat out or they will say they used one of these planes to shoot it down. The latter could throw off the rest of the world's country's and they would try to emulate the airplane tech we developed while keeping the satellite strategy a secret weapon.