The Duping of America

"Basically, cooked information is working its way into high-level pronouncements and there's a lot of unhappiness about it in intelligence, especially among analysts at the CIA," former CIA counter-intelligence head Vincent Cannistraro told the Guardian last October. This was a month after the Pentagon's intelligence agency reported it lacked credible evidence that Iraq had chemical weapons, despite the Bush administration's many assurances otherwise. Yet here we are, nine months later, and these allegations are just making their way into America's mainstream.

There is a sense of deja vu in all of this, of course. Well before George Bush delivered his ultimatum to the United Nations, the Sydney Morning Herald revealed the president's true intentions. "Even if Baghdad readmits United Nations arms inspectors, the United States will still pursue a 'regime change' policy, with or without the support of its allies," Colin Powell asserted, eight months before UN inspectors returned to Iraq. And, true to form, nine months before the American media reported on John Poindexter's new role at the Pentagon, the Guardian had it covered.

And so, as people across the globe invariably wonder why US citizens are so naive and malleable, reporters and pundits are either stunned to learn that the Bush administration hyped the threat posed by weapons of mass destruction, or even worse, assure Americans it doesn't matter, because in this particular version of democracy, the ends justify the means. The implied assertion is: You don't need to know the truth because quite frankly, you can't handle the truth.

Or perhaps it's something deeper? More than forty years ago, John F. Kennedy addressed this phenomenon at a commencement address at Yale University. "For the great enemy of truth is very often not the lie -- deliberate, contrived and dishonest -- but the myth -- persistent, persuasive, and unrealistic," he said. "Too often we hold fast to the cliches of our forebears. We subject all facts to a prefabricated set of interpretations. We enjoy the comfort of opinion without the discomfort of thought."
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