Lying for a Living: The White House Comments on the Downing Street Memo

I wonder if they’re getting nervous now in the West Wing.

As the drumbeat grows louder, the White House finally decided to comment on the Downing Street Memo.

But only in typical Bush administration fashion. Which means rhetorical games, little lies, and big ones hidden in the context of what is said and not said.

So, for example, when White House spokesman Scott McClellan finally responded to questions put to him over the last week about the memo, he of course said that he hadn’t read it. That’s really rich. It’s a bombshell, they know it’s a bombshell, he’s getting peppered with questions about it every day, various media around the country are picking up the story, and it was a huge factor in the British election on May 5th, splashed all over the media there. And we’re supposed to believe that the White House press secretary hasn’t read a two page memo?

But McClellan was actually only warming up with that bit of inanity. He then decided that he could nevertheless comment on the content of a document which he hadn’t read. So he argued that the memo’s revelation that the White House was ’fixing’ the intelligence and facts around a decision to go to war that had already been made was "just flat-out wrong". And he said that "Anyone who wants to know how the intelligence was used only has to go back and read everything that was said in public about the lead-up to the war".

Well, I’m glad you suggested that, Scott. And, even though I’m sure you hoped that I’d join most of the rest of America in allowing your little diversionary tactic to send me careening away from this story and toward breaking reports on the Michael Jackson trial, I thought it would be fun instead to do just what you suggested. Here’s a couple of things I found that were "said in public about the lead-up to the war":

* "Our intelligence officials estimate that Saddam Hussein had the materials to produce as much as 500 tons of sarin, mustard and VX nerve agent." (George Bush, in his State of the Union address - 1/28/2003)
* "Our intelligence sources tell us that he has attempted to purchase high-strength aluminum tubes suitable for nuclear weapons production." (Bush, in the same speech)
* "The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa." (Bush, in the same speech)
* "We know he’s been absolutely devoted to trying to acquire nuclear weapons, and we believe he has, in fact, reconstituted nuclear weapons." (Dick Cheney, on Meet the Press - 3/16/2003)

These are just some of the gems from that period, and I want to thank Mr. McClellan for reminding us all to go back and see "how the intelligence was used".

In fact though, Scott, it was completely abused. We know that, not only because none of these fantasies have proven remotely true, but because we have also learned how this ’intelligence’ was developed, prior to public consumption.

First, they cherry-picked whatever they wanted to use, generally from the most unreliable sources (which tells you a lot right away about the true picture they were seeing). Much of the WMD evidence used to justify the war, for example, came from a single source, code-named ’Curveball’, whose German handlers described as "crazy" and a drunkard, and whose friends called a "congenital liar". Of course, in the Bush administration, drunken crazy liars can grow up to be president some day, so I suppose nobody particularly flinched at Curveball’s resume.

Then they sent the Vice President of the United States down to Langley to twist the arms of junior CIA analysts trying to serve their country (note to McClellan: That is not the same thing as serving the Bush administration). The LA Times reported that "One analyst who argued in late 2003 that Curveball had lied was ’read the riot act’ by his director, accused of ’making waves’ and ultimately forced to leave the office. Another analyst who urged the agency to issue a reassessment of Iraq’s chemical weapons program was ’told to leave’." I think we can all see where this was going.

Still, though, when even cherry-picking and the intimidation of intelligence analysts proved insufficient, they simply lied. McClellan might describe some of their statements as "flat-out wrong", but actually that would be far too charitable. The canards listed above are all classics of knowing deceit, but the one about the yellowcake from Niger is perhaps the most telling. The administration had been told by the CIA months earlier to cease making this claim (and in fact, they did stop, for a while), because it was transparently and therefore laughably bogus. Still, it somehow found its way into the State of the Union address, arguably the biggest bully-pulpit on the planet.

After the uproar the line generated rightly arose, we were supposed to believe that it had somehow slipped by, despite the massive vetting and intense scrutiny to which such a speech is subjected. When that failed to quiet a (for once) noisy press, a scapegoat finally had to be given up by the administration in sacrifice for this blunder. It was to be Stephen Hadley, Condoleezza Rice’s deputy in the first term. The punishment for Mr. Hadley’s screw-up? He got promoted to her job, as National Security Advisor, and his supervisor during this debacle got promoted to Secretary of State. In the old days, people resigned for ’mistakes’ far less prominent and far less lethal than this. Hell, Surgeon General Joycelyn Elders got fired for saying that "masturbation is part of human sexuality"!

But, of course, it’s ridiculous to believe that any of these bits were ever mistakes, anyhow. These guys were working out of the Joseph ""If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it" Goebbels playbook, and blunders one-thousandth the size of these could never get past Karl Rove’s famously rigorous propaganda machine.

So the White House was being every bit as disingenuous as it was arrogant to trot McClellan out and have him play like he hadn’t read the Downing Street Memo (though of course he had, and had probably soiled his pants as well, when he saw what it revealed), and then to pretend that this top-secret insider’s document was erroneous when it showed that the Bush team had been gaming the world by lying about intelligence on Iraq.

But the best was still yet to come. According to CNN,

McClellan insisted the process leading up to the decision to go to war was "very public" - and that the decision to invade in March 2003 was taken only after Iraq refused to comply with its "international obligations."

"The president of the United States, in a very public way, reached out to people across the world, went to the United Nations and tried to resolve this in a diplomatic manner," McClellan said.

"Saddam Hussein was the one, in the end, who chose continued defiance. And only then was the decision made, as a last resort, to go into Iraq."

Of course, this is an utter and complete distortion of the historical record. It was the Bush administration which rushed to war, yanking the inspectors out before they could finish their job - no doubt precisely so they couldn’t finish their job and reveal an absence of WMD. It was also Bush himself who, according to Bob Woodward, had popped into a White House meeting in March of 2002, a full year before the war (not to mention also before the congressional vote, the inspectors, the Security Council vote and second non-vote, etc.), to exclaim "Fuck Saddam. We’re taking him out."

The Bush administration likes to pretend that they sought at all costs to avoid the war, but that a recalcitrant and menacing Iraq forced the hand of reluctant Sheriff America, which sought only to protect its national security. Notwithstanding that Saddam was no picnic (but which fact somehow only bothered us when it bothered us), everything about this scenario is patently false. Bush rushed to war in Iraq as fast as he could get there, even letting bin Laden slide to do it.

But the real kicker is this. Behind this facade of peace-loving resoluteness, the administration had, of course, stacked the deck so that there was no possible way the war could be avoided. If Saddam had rejected the weapons inspectors (which Tony Blair, in the Downing Street Memo, outwardly hopes he will), it would have been war. If Saddam had admitted that he had the WMD, or the inspectors had found such weapons, Bush would have invaded on that pretext. Alternatively, when Saddam declared that he possessed no WMD, Bush called him a liar whose "continued defiance" therefore meant he had to be taken out.

In fact, with respect to who was lying and who was not, just the opposite was true, and it is a measure of the extent to which George W. Bush has degraded America and its presidency that he could succeed in making Saddam Hussein look honest by comparison. When Bush said, in October 2002, "if Iraq is to avoid military action by the international community, it has the obligation to prove compliance with all the world’s demands", he was lying through his teeth. Iraq had, in fact, met those conditions, and still the war - a war (again, from the Memo) already decided upon and even covertly begun months earlier - would be launched in its full glory.

More often implied than overtly spoken, this false premise of hostilities which could somehow have been avoided was nevertheless, in fact, the biggest lie of the entire war.

David Michael Green (pscdmg@hofstra.edu) is a professor of political science at Hofstra University in New York.

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