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The Big Lie Technique

by Open-Publishing - Friday 18 November 2005
7 comments

Wars and conflicts Governments USA

by Robert Scheer

At a time when approximately 57 percent of Americans polled believe that President Bush deceived them on the reasons for the war in Iraq, it does seem a bit redundant to deconstruct the President’s recent speeches on that subject. Yet, to fail to do so would be to passively accept the Big Lie technique—which is how we as a nation got into this horrible mess in the first place.

The basic claim of the President’s desperate and strident attack on the war’s critics this past week is that he was acting as a consensus President when intelligence information left him no choice but to invade Iraq as a preventive action to deter a terrorist attack on America. This is flatly wrong.

His rationalization for attacking Iraq, once accepted uncritically by most in Congress and the media easily intimidated by jingoism, now is known to be false. The bipartisan 9/11 Commission selected by Bush concluded unanimously that there was no link between Al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein’s secular dictatorship, Al Qaeda’s sworn enemy. And a recently declassified 2002 document proves that Bush’s "evidence" for this, available to top Administration officials, was based on a single discredited witness.

Clearly on the defensive, Bush now sounds increasingly Nixonian as he basically calls the majority of the country traitors for noticing he tricked us.

"Reasonable people can disagree about the conduct of the war, but it is irresponsible for Democrats to now claim that we misled them and the American people," the President said at an Air Force base in Alaska. "Leaders in my Administration and members of the United States Congress from both political parties looked at the same intelligence on Iraq, and reached the same conclusion: Saddam Hussein was a threat."

This is a manipulative distortion; saying Hussein was a threat—to somebody, somewhere, in some context—is not the same as endorsing a pre-emptive occupation of his country in a fantastically expensive and blatantly risky nation-building exercise. And the idea that individual senators and members of Congress had the same access to even a fraction of the raw intelligence as the President of the United States is just a lie on its face—it is a simple matter of security clearances, which are not distributed equally.

It was enormously telling, in fact, that the only part of the Senate which did see the un-sanitized National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq—the Republican-led Senate Select Intelligence Committee—shockingly voted in the fall of 2002 against the simple authorization of force demanded by a Republican President. Panicked, the warmongers in the White House and Pentagon pressured CIA Director George Tenet to rush release to the entire Hill a very short "summary" of the careful NIE, which made Hussein seem incalculably more dangerous than the whole report indicated.

The Defense Intelligence Agency finally declassified its investigative report, DITSUM No. 044-02, within recent days. This smoking-gun document proves the Bush Administration’s key evidence for the apocryphal Osama bin Laden-Saddam Hussein alliance—said by Bush to involve training in the use of weapons of mass destruction—was built upon the testimony of a prisoner who, according to the DIA, was probably "intentionally misleading the debriefers."

Yet, despite the government having been informed of this by the Pentagon’s intelligence agency in February 2002, Bush told the nation eight months later, on the eve of the Senate’s vote to authorize the war, that "we’ve learned that Iraq has trained Al Qaeda members in bomb-making and poisons and gases."

The false Al Qaeda-Hussein link was the linchpin to Bush’s argument that he could not delay the invasion until after the United Nations weapons inspectors completed their investigation in a matter of months. Perhaps, he feared not that those weapons would fall into the wrong hands but that they would not be found at all.

Boxed in by international sanctions, weapons inspectors, US fighter jets patrolling two huge no-fly zones and powerful rivals on all his borders, Hussein in 2003 was decidedly not a threat to America. But the Bush White House wanted a war with Iraq, and it pulled out all the stops—references to "a mushroom cloud" and calling Hussein an "ally" of Al Qaeda—to convince the rest of us it was necessary.

The White House believed the ends (occupying Iraq) justified the means (exaggerating the threat). We know now those ends have proved disastrous.

Oblivious to the grim irony, Bush proclaims his war without end in Iraq the central front in a new cold war, never acknowledging that he has handed Al Qaeda terrorists a new home base. Iran, his "Axis of Evil" member, now has its disciples in power in Iraq. Last week, top Bush Administration officials welcomed to Washington Iraq Deputy Prime Minister Ahmed Chalabi, who previously was denounced for having allegedly passed US secrets to his old supporters in Tehran and was elected to a top post in Iraq by campaigning on anti-US slogans.

Under Bush’s watch, we not only suffered the September 11 terrorist attacks while he snoozed, but he has failed to capture the perpetrator of those attacks and has given Al Qaeda a powerful base in Iraq from which to terrorize. And this is the guy who dares tell his critics they are weakening our country.

http://www.thenation.com/doc/20051128/scheer1116

Forum posts

  • Bush has no shame. He exploits religion, patriotism, family, flag and the very words "freedom" and "democracy" A President who invades a country by deceit, kills 20,000 civilians to catch one "regime person", has 150,000 troops with heavy weapons training them on the Iraqis day and night, demolishing their homes and industries, stealing their oil, is hardly fit to pronounce the words "freedom" and "democracy." He has spread filth on those words, he has spread filth on our democracy, on our constitution.
    He evidently thinks that being a AWOL from the Texan National Guard has given him vast war experience in which he can use Shock and Awe, Torture and Abuse, and kill anyone in his path to glory. His choice of cabinet shows the kind of scoundrel he is. Ashcroft, Rumsfeld, Cheney, Wolfowitz, Rove, Condi are devious and sanguinary people, not to be given any trust. You can tell much about a person by the friends he chooses, or the associates he nominates.

    • American’s have no shame either! Their leadership Bush reflect the will of the people.

      United we stand! Support our troops!

      ...you don’t care that half a million Iraqis are already killed? Or, do you?

  • George Bush and his band of criminals intentionally want to destroy this country— running up huge foreign debt and deficits, making Americans the target of revenge by using torture and illegal weapons (e.g., white phosphorous), overextending and fatiguing our military so America is weak/vulnerable if there is a new crisis, exporting American white collar jobs overseas to create work insecurity, encouraging cheap labor from Mexico to increase American unemployment, angering already impoverished citizens with budget cuts to allow the wealthy get richer, encouraging Arab oil dependence rather than encouraging alternatives fuels, failing to secure our borders after 4 years of emphasis on “Homeland Security”, allowing billions of dollars to disappear without question in Iraq, allowing known weak levees to break (denying the funds to strengthen them) and then allowing thousands to die from days of neglect, adding another 200 billion dollars to our debt to pay for Katrina damage (rather than renege on tax breaks), outing an undercover agent who protected US security interests, ignoring concerns of global warming that threaten the planet’s stability, polarizing the country by promoting far right wing policies, failing to ensure enough flu vaccine last year and lagging way behind on preparing the US for the current threat of bird flu, etc.

    The neocons want chaos. They are not incompetent. I believe their disasters are part of their plan. Brownie did a great job. George Tenet deserved a Medal of Freedom. Chalabi is a hero.

    These people are NOT STUPID---it took a lot of strategic planning to get Bush and other right wing Republicans ‘elected’ into office so Republicans would have total control. It took a lot of manipulative plotting to have a “Pearl Harbor’ (9/11) that would convince Congress to vote for going to war with Iraq and enact the Patriot Act. Think about it. These people are very smart, not stupid. There is a purpose to the DISASTERS they have INTENTIONALLY CREATED. What is their true goal—what are they really after? I doubt they are INCOMPETENT.

    • Two elections are not stolen in a thriving Democracy due to ’incompetence’.

      MSM control and complacency for the past 1.5 years due to intimidation from the Dan Rather debacle is not due to a lack of strategy.

      Preaching Jesus & the Bible, despite policies contrary to Christian values, is not void of manipulative shrewdness.

      You have to wonder about it taking 4-5 days for the administration to respond to Katrina. The entire world knew what was happening in NO, but not Brownie or Bush?

      It just doesn’t add up.

    • Yes, they want instability. They will use it to change the form of government in the U.S. into a fascist form of government. Problem solution . They create the problem 911 and the terrorist threat and enact the solution the Patriot Act which strips americans of their civil rights and shreds the constitution. The patriot act was never intended to stop terrorist it was enacted to arest americans who do not buy this governments fascism. The terrorist threat is also used to invade Iraq for oil resouces. Thats why according to Bush he does not know where Osama is and does not care. Because he had no intentions of ever catching him. Why should he care when 911 was a inside job. Bush has more problems that he will create before his term is up. They do not care about the national debt at 8 trillion dollars because this will be the final blow to america when our economy goes bust in anouther depression. Whereby once this is done and panic hits the streets they will impose martial law and thus install their FASCIST form of government.

    • Yes, I agree 100%. 9-11 was an inside job and Bush never had any intention of going after Osama. No logical President would abandon the hunt for the murderers of 3000 innocent Americans at the WTC, diverting resources to a new battleground known to be impossible to win (per Bush Sr). No sincere secretary of defense would allow caches of weapons to be stolen, thus arming a predicted violent insurgency. No leader with American interests at heart would shut out respected opinions from experienced analysts in order to start a [preemptive] war, the MOST SERIOUS DECISION an administration ever is forced to make.

      The post 9-11 battle cry heard from cowboy George: “Wanted Dead or Alive” left an indelible mark on the mind of every American. Every American’s attention was captured by the devastation of 911 (even those normally oblivious to current events) and by Bush’s subsequent strong resolve to protect the American people.

      [It is likely that many of Bush’s remaining supporters fall into the category of ‘typically oblivious citizens’---those who have no clue how his policies adversely affect their lives on a daily basis, but only rely on the image of his post-911 bravado.]

      Thus, the purpose of the 911 tragedy was to allow the rest of the neocon agenda to occur.

    • OUT OF IRAQ. BUSH OUT!

      JAIL THE MURDERERS, THE TRAITORS!

      US MILITARY MUST PERFORM THEIR SWORN DUTY TO PROTECT THE COUNTRY AND ARREST THE COMMANDER-IN-CHIEF.