To me, there are two kinds of lies. There are innocent white lies, usually told to keep the peace (and they usually end up backfiring). Then there are malicious lies, where the person is trying to initiate or perpetuate a scam. That is the worst kind of lies.
The lies that the Tower are guilty of telling are those whoppers that are intended to keep alive a scam. First, they have shady roots in the first place. Then they lie to hide Booze Rutherford's drinking problem (seems a lot of "new light" happens when he is drunk). They lie about 1975. They lie about the pedophiles. They lie about the UN scandal. They lie that things are getting better when they are not. They lie that the world is getting worse, when it is still the same. They lie by tampering with the Bible itself to support their own doctrines, and then they lie again to tell me that the King James version had all those errors.
No, they are not lying to try to make anyone feel better (such lies, especially when it's by children, are forgivable since often they are lying so as to not hurt someone after they made a mistake). The Tower, however, is lying to keep a scam going. And they are super aggressive at shutting down web sites that expose dissonant viewpoints--what they want is to have no such material available, so they can perpetuate the illusion that they are perfect and that the world is evil. All they really want is total control of all information, and they will stop at nothing to get it. And, as such, the Watchtower Society's lies are no innocent white lies intended to protect one's feelings.
As for the honnders lying, that too is often done in an attempt to keep people in the scam. They lie to achieve whatever ends they have in mind--whether it is to keep a brother single and celibate, or to get ever more money and service time out of people (the deficits at the end of the assemblies are prime here), or to make the organization look clean when it's not. They will lie to prevent authorities with due warrants from accessing records that could get the whole organization some embarrassment. They will lie to tell you that things are all right, or that they are going to work out, when they know $&*^ing well that they are not. The few that only find themselves too thinly stretched and unable to fulfill commitments are far more forgivable than the ones that lie about the other above items (which are much more common).