The Big Lie Technique

Nation: On The Defensive, Bush Uses Distortion And Deception

(The Nation)  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, U.S. 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-U.S. 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.