Just how big is "The Big Lie?"

by Kagro X

Springboarding from emptywheel's post (and therefore doing almost precisely what I just admonished the writers of TPMCafe for doing), I take special note of Josh Marshall's observation on the Pincus/VandeHei article. Josh discusses what he sees as the upshot of the article's closing paragraphs:

Here we have some of the cobweb of lies, large and small, brushed back, ones the falsity of which has remained somehow unspeakable in high political debate despite all their transparency.

As Pincus and Jim VandeHei rightly say, twin attacks -- one aimed at Wilson for blowing the whistle, the other at the CIA, an elaborate fraud perpetrated upon the American people (and perpetuated through last year's SSCI report) in which the CIA, which had repeatedly tried to prevent the president from publicizing and validating the bogus Niger uranium claims, was forced to take the blame for not warning the president of their falsity.  [emphasis mine]

Josh sees this attack as aimed at, "cover[ing] up the big lie -- the administration's knowing use of bogus WMD reports to convince the country to go to war."

I see it through my own frame, which I laid out here.

Question two: Is it plausible to say that Rove (or any other administration official) intended to "impair or impede the foreign intelligence activities of the United States?"

[...]

With respect to [that question], consider the revelations of Seymour Hersh, in his October 2003 piece in  The New Yorker, entitled, "The Stovepipe."

Kenneth Pollack, a former National Security Council expert on Iraq, whose book “The Threatening Storm” generally supported the use of force to remove Saddam Hussein, told me that what the Bush people did was “dismantle the existing filtering process that for fifty years had been preventing the policymakers from getting bad information. They created stovepipes to get the information they wanted directly to the top leadership. Their position is that the professional bureaucracy is deliberately and maliciously keeping information from them.       

“They always had information to back up their public claims, but it was often very bad information,” Pollack continued. “They were forcing the intelligence community to defend its good information and good analysis so aggressively that the intelligence analysts didn’t have the time or the energy to go after the bad information.

Ordinarily, there would be a strong presumtion against seeing in bureaucratic or political infighting between political appointees and career professionals a serious effort to "impair or impede the foreign intelligence activities of the United States." It is, after all, something that happens all the time. Something that's easily dismissed as "just politics." The question, though, is whether it's ever risen to the level of "dismantling" the established intelligence vetting process,  whether any other administration would have characterized the intelligence community's bureaucratic intransigence as an effor to "deliberately and maliciously" keep information from them, and whether an active program of "flooding the zone" with challenges to good information in order to keep intelligence operatives too busy to combat bad information might not be just what we're looking for: impairment and impeding of the foreign intelligence activities of the United States.

So, what's "The Big Lie" here? Is it Josh's guess, "the administration's knowing use of bogus WMD reports to convince the country to go to war?" Or is it the set-up for his guess? That, "all of this, of course, meant to cover up the big lie?"

What I'm asking is, what's bigger? The lies the administration used to convince the country to go to war? Or the lie that the administration only fought the intelligence community after the fact, to cover its tracks when caught?

Is the administration covering up the lengths to which it went to prevent the exposure of its mistaken reliance on bad intelligence? Or is the administration covering up the lengths to which it went to promote intelligence developed by its own, parallel intelligence structure, a plan which required the simultaneous undermining and the destruction of the credibility of the country's established (read: authorized and legitimate) intelligence structure, which refused to give them what they wanted?

The answer to that question is the difference between "just politics," and "we're not kidding when we whisper the word 'treason.'"

Comments

[Mimikatz]

Throw in the Niger forgeries. Clearly they fought the intelligence community both before and after the war broke out. They manipulated the intel that did come in, teasing out every possible connection between Saddam and WMD, Saddam and al Qaeda. They promoted the Chalabi hacks who told them what they wanted to know without checking their veracity. And the forged Niger documents, whether they knew they were forged or not. They tried to shut down those who disagreed. Cheney and Libby led the charge. And Bolton was in the middle of it. Rove probably got in on the details only at the end, when they needed someone to smear Wilson to detract form the controversy over the 16 words and the fact that Wilson had showed they knew or should have known that the Niger uranium evidence (like the aluminum tube evidence) was bogus.

[Kagro X]

I agree. It certainly has the feeling of being Cheney's operation, and that perhaps Rove becomes involved only when it threatened to draw the president in, on account of the 16 words. But unfortunately for Karl, his act of loyalty to his man is an act in furtherance of a conspiracy to dismantle and discredit the intelligence services of the United States. D'oh.

[emptywheel]

The big lie? Their goals and purpose. We know, of course, that BushCO has no interest in democracy. That's just a convenient fig leaf. They're after empire here, and they're going to cover that over with all the resources they've got.

But the empire thing? Even that isn't the big lie. The big lie is who is going to be invited to be a participant in this empire. It's not you or I, obviously, or France or Germany or the other countries that didn't respond to Bush's threats. But even more, it's not all the working class white people in the red states. The reason why BushCO needs to keep it secret is because they need their willing participation for a while yet, so they don't have to resort to martial law too soon, before they're strong enough.

I've said this to a million people on the Internet. These people are not fascists. Because their project is not a national project. Rather, they're dismantling the notion of nation-state--which is central to fascism--and replacing it with a kind of corporate feudalism that is every bit as barbaric as feudalism's first incarnation. Probably worse.

I've got to stop reading so much about spooks and conpiracies.

[dksbook]

This sentence of yours above is particularly helpful in thinking about this "Is the administration covering up the lengths to which it went to prevent the exposure of its mistaken reliance on bad intelligence? Or is the administration covering up the lengths to which it went to promote intelligence developed by its own, parallel intelligence structure..." In other words, for those of us who are not such subtle thinkers, the question is, "Were they trying to cover up how stupid they were in relying on the Chalabi crowd, or were they trying to cover up their deliberate creation of false evidence of WMD in order to pursue a war?" My question still remains - What is the real reason they wanted to go to war? Enrich Haliburton? Spend so much we would be forced to dismantle the New Deal? Have a dandy little war to make Jorge look good to his daddy and daddy's friends? Or was it done by a dark cabal of neo-cons for the good of the State of Israel? I really just can't figure it out. Was it all just stupid, or incredibly, deliberately, evil?

[Meteor Blades]

No, emptywheel, you need to keep reading so much about conspiracies so you can keep writing about them. As we know, some of them are for real.

[Kagro X]

Good question, dksbook. Unless we just outright assume that the administration is, in fact, a criminal syndicate with no interest in functioning as a federal government, per se, we must instead assume that they envisioned some means by which the war would inure to the benefit of the United States and the national security.

Where things got hairy was when certain others with hands on the levers of power appeared to disagree. And from that point on, it seems the administration took its "mandate" to mean that it had carte blanche to cut corners when it came to overcoming its opposition. Rather than have a protracted policy battle which could take decades and would require many successive administrations in the control of neo-cons, they decided it was worth going for it all in one fell swoop. And that's what led them to explore admittedly faster, but extralegal, methods.

[emptywheel]

Btw,

I just want to go on the record that I don't think they're a criminal syndicate. But I do think they're trying to dismantle most of the federal government. Rearrange it all so it does little besides protect property and fight war. And then, when they've exhausted our military and built up their own security forces (or the wacky technology not to need it), then they'll get rid of the remnants.

[Kagro X]

Too late! You're insane! We all saw it!

[dksbook]

I appreciate y'all taking my question seriously. I am just a Texas grandmother with too much time on her hands, but I think that is the question somebody on this blog otta think about - somebody smart, like y'all. I, personally, think they are trying to dismantle the part of the government that protects the common good, and others in the gov't are using that for their own purposes, mainly to play global politics (read, Middle Eastern politics) for murky motives. I see no real US strategy in all this, no thinking about where this would take us 10, 50, 100 years from now - it just looks like giggling pre-teens playing their version of chess while drinking their parents' beer. And it scares me.

[anon]

It is like a takeover of a company but this company, the govt, gets to print $ and borrow endlessly so it is the ultimate compamy to takeover trash and throw into the debt hole. It is not an "administration" it is a club of grifters who are destroying our house our country.