Transforming the Middle East, one neocon deception at a time

No, this isn’t a review of the new film sequel Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen (worldwide 5 day gross $381 million), in which a race of evil alien robots known as the Decepticons return to earth in an attempt to redeem their former glory.

Rather, it’s a commentary on an op-ed in today’s LA Times written by the guy who replaced the treasonous Scooter Libby in Darth Cheney’s Little Shop of Horrors, John P. Hannah.

Prior to his elevation to Cheney’s inner national security sanctum, Hannah was a member of the infamous White House Iraq Group, charged with ginning up a case for the invasion of Iraq. Central to that effort  was a presentation to the UN, embodied in a 48 page draft of fabricated WMD evidence so atrocious that Colin Powell immediately placed the whole thing into the shredder. Just how bad it was can be inferred from the alternate “evidence” that Powell did submit — cartoon drawings of mobile bioweapons labs and other props like a little glass vial of faux anthrax to be delivered to America’s shores by a non-existent fleet of Iraqi drones launched from ships at sea.

Hannah was also Cheney’s main liason to Ahmed Chalabi’s Iraqi National Congress. Chalabi’s main job, for which he was paid an astounding $300,000 per month by the American taxpayer, was to provide Iraqi ex-pats like the notorious “Curveball” willing to lie about Saddam Hussein’s non-existant WMD operation. But like his Dark Lord, Hannah is not content to go quietly into the night to contemplate the disaster he help unleash in the Middle East. On the eve of the first stage of the Bush negotiated US pullback, removal of combat troops from most of Iraq’s major cities, Hannah casts doubt on President Obama’s strategy, writing:

Although President Obama has largely endorsed the Bush timeline for reducing the U.S. military presence in Iraq, far less clear is the extent to which he has also adopted his predecessor’s appreciation for the importance of achieving America’s strategic goals there…Under Obama, Bush’s commitment to winning in Iraq has all but vanished. Convinced from the start that the war was a mistake (a conviction fortified by the Bush team’s post-invasion bungling), Obama has for years been the salesman in chief for a narrative of failure: Iraq is seen as a colossal disaster — a senseless distraction that drained U.S. resources while alienating the rest of the world. While recognizing a vague obligation to help Iraqis forge a better future, Obama’s bottom line comes through loud and clear: The war was a strategic blunder, and the sooner the U.S. can wash its hands of it and re-focus on our “real” priorities in the Middle East, the better.

Couldn’t have said it better myself. Hannah goes on to demonstrate his irony deficient worldview by warning that:

Iraqis listen to his [Obama's] speeches and hear that withdrawal, not victory, is his highest priority. They see that America appears more concerned with engaging a hegemonic Iran than consolidating a democratic Iraq.

Excuse me? If Hannah was truly worried about “a hegemonic Iran”, he wouldn’t have helped transform what was once a possibility into an all too stark reality by engineering the removal of the one man that had, at and with US bidding and support, successfully kept Iranian expansionism in check, Saddam Hussein.

I imagine that in his current digs as a senior fellow at the AIPAC funded Washington Institute for Near East Policy, Hannah is busily preparing a case for invading the next country on the Neocon hit list. After all, as a senior member of the Bush Administration once exhorted:

“Real men don’t go to Baghdad, they go to Tehran.”

Is Joseph P. Hannah a real man?

Or is he a Neo-Decepticon?

I warned you;  now I have to use “Harsh Interrogation Methods.”

It’s time to excise the cancer for the American body politic known as Bush-Cheney Administration. When both Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi and former Grand Inquisitor Darth Cheney agree that critical documents be declassified about how torture was used during the previous eight years, you know the worm has turned.

In other words, it’s time for a truth commission.

Thus far, President Obama has resisted such a commission, arguing that the serious issues facing the country requires that we ignore the law— sorry, the past— and move forward. That puts him on the same page as conservatives like Peggy Noonan, who three weeks ago said on “This Week With George Stephanopoulos“:

Some of life has to be mysterious. Sometimes you need to just keep walking…  It’s hard for me to look at a great nation issuing these documents and sending them out to the world and thinking, oh, much good will come of that.

Both Frank Rich and Maureen Dowd support such a commission in their op-ed pieces today in the NY Times. Rich begins his “Obama Can’t Turn the Page on Bush” by invoking one of the most famous scenes in cinema history:

TO paraphrase Al Pacino in “Godfather III,” just when we thought we were out, the Bush mob keeps pulling us back in. And will keep doing so. No matter how hard President Obama tries to turn the page on the previous administration, he can’t. Until there is true transparency and true accountability, revelations of that unresolved eight-year nightmare will keep raining down drip by drip, disrupting the new administration’s high ambitions.

In her most substantive post in years, Maureen Dowd writes:

Ali Soufan, the ex-F.B.I. agent who flatly calls torture “ineffective,” helped get valuable information from Abu Zubaydah, an important Al Qaeda prisoner, simply by outwitting him. Torture, he told Congress, is designed to force the subject to submit “through humiliation and cruelty” and “see the interrogator as the master who controls his pain.

It’s a good description of the bullying approach Cheney and Rummy applied to the globe, and the Arab world. But as Soufan noted, when you try to force compliance rather than elicit cooperation, it’s prone to backfire.

She goes on to cite Robert Windrem’s account of how Cheney’s office ordered the arrest of a top intel officer in Saddam’s security apparatus and had him water tortured to produce a false Saddam-al Qaeda link. MoDo concludes:

I used to agree with President Obama, that it was better to keep moving and focus on our myriad problems than wallow in the darkness of the past. But now I want a full accounting. I want to know every awful act committed in the name of self-defense and patriotism. Even if it only makes one ambitious congresswoman pay more attention in some future briefing about some future secret technique that is “uniquely” designed to protect us, it will be worth it.

As for the raw political calculus, Rich observes:

The administration can’t “just keep walking” because it is losing control of the story. The Beltway punditocracy keeps repeating the cliché that only the A.C.L.U. and the president’s “left-wing base” want accountability, but that’s not the case. Americans know that the Iraq war is not over. A key revelation in last month’s Senate Armed Services Committee report on detainees — that torture was used to try to coerce prisoners into “confirming” a bogus Al Qaeda-Saddam Hussein link to sell that war — is finally attracting attention. The more we learn piecemeal of this history, the more bipartisan and voluble the call for full transparency has become.

Heaven forbid that the sudden outbreak of “bipartianship” that has flowed so mellifluously from the Rethugs last week be aborted. Naturally, they supported Obama’s flip flops on releasing the torture photos, closing GITMO by January of next year, and keeping the military tribunal kangaroo courts in business.

I must say, however, that the most nauseating moment of watching this morning’s commentariat opine on the issue belongs to Sentaor Jim Webb (Dem-VA) , whom I once supported for VP. Pressed on Obama’s flip-flopping on GITMO and the military commissions by Stephanopolous, Webb reversed his own previous positions, playing the loyal soldier to a fault. As a result, he made Lynn Cheney look like the model of consistency during her appearance today on “This Week.”

The good news is that there is now a definite momentum building for a truth commission, hopefully one that doesn’t have the methodological deficiencies of the 9/11 Commission, and doesn’t take prosecutions “off the table,” as Nancy Pelosi might say.

You just can’t keep sweeping this kind of shit under the carpet without it stinking up the People’s House.

(Graphic from Terminator II)

A typical waterboarding session on Darth Cheney’s day off

Since my April 22 post, Torture In Context, I’ve noticed a number of people pursuing the same logical conclusion from slightly different angles: The reverse engineered SERE torture resistance training used on various al Qaeda captives was not designed to produce actionable intelligence but to elicit false confessions to support the case for the invasion of Iraq.

These have included Paul Krugman, who the following day wrote:

Let’s say this slowly: the Bush administration wanted to use 9/11 as a pretext to invade Iraq, even though Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11. So it tortured people to make them confess to the nonexistent link.

There’s a word for this: it’s evil.

Bob Cesca in his post on HuffPo yesterday titled “The Real Motive Behind the Cheney Family Torture Tour” wrote

It’s apparent that torture was authorized for the purpose of fabricating a case for invading Iraq.“

Tonight Rachel Maddow featured the former NBC investigative producer Robert Windrem, whom I mentioned in my first update on April 23 Torture In Context” Philip Zelikow Edition (but whose name I misspelled), laid the origin of the waterboarding request to Darth Cheney’s door.

Two U.S. intelligence officers confirm that Vice President Cheney’s office suggested waterboarding an Iraqi prisoner, a former intelligence official for Saddam Hussein, who was suspected to have knowledge of a Saddam-al Qaeda connection.

(In his post today Windrem underscores the point I made about why the official 9/11 Commission report has an additional reason to be suspect:

Much of the information in the report of the 9/11 Commission was provided through more than 30 sessions of torture of detainees.)

But the best quote of the week goes to former Navy Seal and Minnesota governor Jessie Ventura who on The Larry King Show yesterday said:

You give me a waterboard, Dick Cheney and one hour, and I’ll have him confess to the Sharon Tate murders.

The intent of The Darth Cheney Torture Tour is now obvious. His ‘torture produced actionable intelligence and saved thousands of lives’ frame is a sleight of hand maneuver to obscure its real mission– the elicitation of a false narrative to support the invasion of Iraq.

It’s high time for the MSM to get a clue.

UPDATE 5/15:  Missed this CNN interview yesterday with Colin Powell’s top aide Lawrence Wilkerson saying the same thing.

“Its principal priority for intelligence was not aimed at preempting another terrorist attack on the U.S. but discovering a smoking gun linking Iraq and al Qaeda,” Wilkerson wrote in The Washington Note, an online political journal.

UPDATE 5/15: Joe Conason at Slate has more .

Whether Bush, Cheney and their associates were seeking real or fabricated intelligence, they knowingly employed methods that were certain to produce the latter — as American officials well knew because those same techniques, especially water torture, had been used to elicit false confessions from captured Americans as long ago as World War II and the Korean conflict.

[Image from 3.bp.blogspot.com ]

Darth Cheney’s ancestor getting the story

Last month, I wrote:

3. The “brainwashing” techniques from which the Bush Administration’s torture regime was derived was specifically DESIGNED TO PRODUCE FALSE CONFESSIONS FOR PROPAGANDA PURPOSES. HuLO-OH… (I still recall grainy black and white film of harried looking POWs from the Korean War, denouncing America; dozens of videos of John McCain doing the same thing in Vietnam have yet to see the light of day).

Having failed to produce any real evidence of Saddam’s “imminent threat” to US security, it had to be manufactured. These “confessions” were exactly what was needed to conflate Saddam with Usama bin Laden, Iraq with 9/11. Recall what W. said to Katie Couric in an interview on September 6, 2006:

“One of the hardest parts of my job is to connect Iraq to the war on terror.”

Last week’s passing of Captain Harold E. Fischer Jr, a celebrated and very tortured Chicom POW from the Korean War, provides some context. From his Obit in the NY Times:

He wanted me to admit that I had been ordered to cross the Manchurian border,” Captain Fischer told Life magazine. “I was grilled day and night, over and over, week in and week out, and in the end, to get Chong and his gang off my back, I confessed to both charges. The charges, of course, were ridiculous. I never participated in germ warfare and neither did anyone else. I was never ordered to cross the Yalu. We had strict Air Force orders not to cross the border.”

I will regret what I did in that cell the rest of my life,” the captain continued. “But let me say this: it was not really me — not Harold E. Fischer Jr. — who signed that paper.

It was a mentality reduced to putty.

(h/t Andrew Sullivan via Digby, whose post on this is not to be missed.)

“A mentality reduced to putty.” As in a substance that can be easily shaped and molded into whatever form one’s inquisitors desire.

I’ll repeat what I said earlier: Only a full vetting— and prosecution— of the Bush-Cheney torture regime and the role it played in launching two disastrous wars will allow the US to reclaim any credibility that it is a country dedicated to the rule of law.

Those who are earnest die not; the thoughtless are dead already. Blessed are they who have insight into the deathless state. Those who torture the living will hardly find happiness after death. -The Urantia Book

Demonstrating an “enhanced interrogation technique”

In 1999, Bush’s family biographer, Mickey Herskowitz, reports that W. told him he was intent on invading Iraq, saying that his status as a war time president would give him enough political capital to push through his conservative domestic agenda.

(That would include the privatization of social security whose blood rich corpse would be served up to his Wall Street vampire buddies to feast upon. Not to mention the Oedipal angle of wanting to do his daddy one better by “finishing” the job of deposing Saddam Hussein.)

Fast forward to 9/11/01. The dust of the collapsed Trade Towers hadn’t even settled when W. ordered his terrorism Czar Richard Clarke to find a link to Saddam in the attacks. Clarke was dubious, but ordered a review anyway, producing a dry hole (something which Bush the failed oil tycoon was all too familiar with).

Meanwhile, US troops were sent to Afghanistan to hunt down Usama bin Laden. SECDEF Rumsfeld complained that there were no good targets left to bomb there and rapidly warmed to the idea of invading Iraq.  Special ops troops that were originally set to finish off Al Qaeda in Tora Bora were instead reassigned to prepare for Iraq, allowing them to escape and regroup in the hinterlands of Afghanistan and Pakistan (where they have grown even stronger and now threaten to bring down the nuclear armed government of Pakistan).

Despite efforts to provoke Saddam into providing an overt rationale for an invasion, he lay low, forcing the Bushies to explore other means around which a rationale for war could be devised— fixing the facts around the policy, as the Downing Street Memo so artfully put it.

Discussions were had with the Brits to paint a UN logo on a drone and send it flying lazily over Iraq air space where it could be shot down. Ahmed Chalabi was paid $300,000 a month to produce ex-pat informants like “Curveball” to ‘prove’ that Saddam was actively engaged in producing WMD.  Ex-military “consultants” (with monetary ties to defense contractors ready to make a killing supplying product and services to the war effort) flooded the network and cable news shows warning of dire consequences if we didn’t depose Saddam.

Neocons like Richard Perle and Bill Kristol, administration officials like Condi Rice and Darth Cheney, egged on by war mongering talking heads too numerous to mention, took to the airways wielding images of mushroom clouds and cartoons of mobile bio-weapons labs to create an aura of dread in the American people.  Homeland Security helped keep fear alive with their color coded threat charts, displayed so helpfully on the evening news.  Cable news networks ratings soared as they created “war rooms” tricked out with state of the art graphics and martial theme music, eagerly awaiting the latest nosecone videos of missiles slamming into buildings in an orchestrated spectacle of “shock and awe.”

Which brings us to the latest dot in the narrative, the so-called “torture memos.”  The lead story in today’s NY Times reveals that the methods, further detailed in a now declassified Senate Armed Services Committee report INQUIRY INTO THE TREATMENT OF DETAINEES IN U.S. CUSTODY used what are euphemistically called “enhanced interrogation techniques” were originally developed by the ChiComs and North Koreans in the 1950s, and used as a training regime called SERE (Search, Evade, Rescue, Escape) by our own military to help captured troops resist interrogation.

Apparently, some genius in the Bush Administration figured that adopting those same techniques for offensive purposes would mitigate objections that they constituted torture. “Hey, we use them on our own guys, and they don’t suffer any long term effects.” Three major problems with that theory: [Read more →]

A Ditto Head eagerly awaiting his marching orders

Attendees at this weekend’s Wingnut Woodstock (aka the Conservative Political Action Committee) began spilling out of their school buses today, a white smocked Christopher Lloyd checking their names off his clipboard.

The Dream Team of speakers include the usual suspects:

Bill “The Gambler” Bennett, Ann Coultergeist, Rick “Man on Dog” Santorum, David “Oh the Horror” Horowitz, “Mad Maven” Michelle Malkin, Joe the Plumber/Reporter/Economist/Author/Media Whore Wurzelbacher, John “Invade Iran’ Bolton, and the headliner, Rush “The Bloviator” Limbaugh.

Noticeably absent are governors Sarah “Palin’ Around With Terrorists” Palin, and Bobby “The Exorcist” Jindal, both considered leading contenders for the 2012 presidential election but lying low after a series of media flameouts.

Friday’s program agenda includes the following:

Al Franken and ACORN: How Liberals are Destroying the American Election System

New Challenges in the Culture War

Sarah Palin Unplugged

The Key to Victory? Listen to Conservatives

Love Taking Charge? The Common Sense Tool For Kickin’ *** One State at a Time

But the Black Helicopter Bubbas aren’t waiting around for elections they know they’re going to lose, preferring armed resurrection instead. They are currently recruiting soldiers for the revolution over at  Sean Hannity’s web site.

Ironic that the national security state infrastructure that Darth Cheney, Alberto Gonzalez, and W put in place might just be used against their ideological ilk.

[Image from flicker.com]

That Great White Hunter, Vice President Darth Cheney, is famous for shooting near-captive birds and genteel lawyers in the face. Now his would-be successor, Sarah Palin, an avowed hunter and NRA pinup gal, whom MSNBC analyst Pat Buchanan called “McCain’s new girl,” is picking up where Cheney left off.

In an op-ed to the NY Times earlier this year, she wrote:

This month, the secretary of the interior is expected to rule on whether polar bears should be listed under the Endangered Species Act. I strongly believe that adding them to the list is the wrong move at this time…

The Center for Biological Diversity, an environmental group, has argued that global warming and the reduction of polar ice severely threatens the bears’ habitat and their existence. In fact, there is insufficient evidence that polar bears are in danger of becoming extinct within the foreseeable future — the trigger for protection under the Endangered Species Act. And there is no evidence that polar bears are being mismanaged through existing international agreements and the federal Marine Mammal Protection Act.

The state takes very seriously its job of protecting polar bears and their habitat and is well aware of the problems caused by climate change. But we know our efforts will take more than protecting what we have — we must also learn what we don’t know.

Sounds a lot like former SecDef Rumsfeld’s famous dictum that there are “known unknowns” and such to justify the US invasion and occupation of Iraq.

Kinda like waiting to see if the snake venom is actually going to kill the victim before going to the expense of rushing him to the emergency room.

Russian Prime Minister Vladamir Putin Implicates McSame

Two week ago, in my post titled Was Georgia’s Aggression An August Surprise? , I noted speculation from the likes of Randi Rhodes, Greg Sargent at TPM and Daily Kos’s Hunter that Georgia’s aggression against South Ossetia seemed to bear a “Made in the USA” label, designed to benefit Cold Warrior John McSame’s presidential ambitions.

Now comes this.

Putin accuses U.S. of orchestrating Georgian war

8/28/08

SOCHI, Russia (CNN) – Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin has accused the United States of orchestrating the conflict in Georgia to benefit one of its presidential election candidates.

In an exclusive interview with CNN’s Matthew Chance in the Black Sea city of Sochi Thursday, Putin said the U.S. had encouraged Georgia to attack the autonomous region of South Ossetia.

Putin told CNN his defense officials had told him it was done to benefit a presidential candidate — Republican John McCain and Democrat Barack Obama are competing to succeed George W. Bush — although he presented no evidence to back it up.

“U.S. citizens were indeed in the area in conflict,” Putin said. “They were acting in implementing those orders doing as they were ordered, and the only one who can give such orders is their leader.” [...]

Adding fuel to the fire was a visit by one of Darth Cheney’s top national security aids to Georgia shortly before the war began, as reported in the LA Times.

Why was Cheney’s guy in Georgia before the war?

What was a top national security aide to Vice President Dick Cheney doing in Georgia shortly before Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili’s troops engaged in what became a disastrous fight with South Ossetian rebels — and then Russian troops?
[snip]

Pursuing The Right: Inside this Week’s Urantian Sojourn Magazine

Oooh you’re so jaded! Not the neocon “right,” you silly jelly beans, but the real “Right,” as in the Right Stuff.~ This week’s headliners tell the story of real love between the Obamas, the kind of love that we all search for; real love, given freely, without conditions. The Love that “conquereth all.”

Forever in contrast, the purveyors of hate in all its forms will one day disappear like dew before the sun, but until then, they should be exposed to the growing light of a new day dawning; the dawning of The Right Stuff. As the World Court War Crimes tribunal began deliberations, George W. Bush began groveling for leniency by spilling his guts about Darth Cheney’s evil plans for subjugation of the world. Cheney’s already famous quip, “I don’t recall doing evil” is just a portent of the unprecedented trial which continues to produce new indictments nearly every week. And don’t miss Angelina Jolie’s remarkably persuasive entreaty for summary execution of all public officials who betray the public trust, and her powerful call to recognize social and political disloyalty as being the most heinous of all crimes.

Rush Limbaugh, the man Ronald Reagan once called “the Number One voice for conservatism in our Country,” began serving a federal prison term for incitement to riot at the Democratic Convention of 2008. A grateful nation has welcomed his self-imposed “vow of silence” pending his “vindication of all wrong-doing” through the appeals process. You go, girlfriend.

Meanwhile, John McCain, already stumbling around the rapidly shrinking neocon talking head circuit fresh from divorce court, was blathering on in Dingus, Missouri this past week, where a trio of POWs handing him both sides of his own lying ass. A must read.

Even before the dust had settled from Obama’s landslide victory, the implosion of the GOP was a fait accompli, as Bill Krystal knowingly mused, “The pie will not go back in the pan.” The end of the two-party stranglehold on American politics just may be the biggest change wrought yet by the Obama revolution; get the big picture with our special report.

Until next week. . .

McClatchy News Services reports:

Cheney on Wednesday told the U.S. Chamber of Commerce that “oil is being drilled right now 60 miles off the coast of Florida.”

“We’re not doing it. The Chinese are in cooperation with the Cuban government.”

”Even the communists have figured out that a good answer to high prices is more supply,” he added. “Yet Congress has said … ‘no’ to drilling off Florida.”

The claim was immediately repudiated by U.S. Sen. Mel Martinez, R-Fla., an independent congressional report, industry experts and other observers, who said there is zero evidence that China is drilling in Cuban waters.

China doesn’t even hold a lease to drill offshore…

With both parties squabbling over what to do about rising gasoline prices, Democrats had seized on the remarks to bash the GOP, accusing it of spreading the Cuba-China rumor as a “scare tactic” to force Congress to lift a ban that prevents drilling along the Outer Continental Shelf and in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.

Same old scare tactics Darth Cheney and his his oil buddies used to launch the Iraq war and drive up the price of oil 600% since 2002.

Former Bush Administration Press Secretary Scott McClellan’s new tell-all book, What Happened:Inside the Bush White House and Washington’s Culture of Deception, hasn’t even officially hit the bookshelves yet and there is already a ton of reviews and political analyses, thanks to advance copies provided to the well-connected. My local Borders is not among the elite, however, so I’m going to have to rely on others for the accuracy of the quotes provided herein.

The emerging consensus is that the book contains little, if any, in the way of new revelations. What’s being emphasized is that judgments about same are coming from a once loyal Bushie insider. McClellan was one of the Administration’ chief propaganda mouthpieces, a go-to guy responsible for bamboozling the public and what he describes as the “complicit enablers” of the Fourth Estate.

The latter is probably the real public policy meat of the book. And the one guaranteed to receive the least amount of analysis by that self-same media, if the controversy over the Pentagon’s reverse embed “message force multipliers” is any precedent. This makes it ripe for evisceration by the liberal blogosphere. (See, for instance, the perspectives of the relentless Glenzilla, and Editor and Publisher’s Glenn Mitchell .)

Meanwhile, the right wing blogosphere and their counterparts in the MSM will do what they do best–ignore the message and attack the messenger, especially since they haven’t found any actual factual content to take issue with.

Given that the MSM and the blogosphere are our virtual agora (where just about everything has been said but not everyone has had a chance to say it), I’ll direct my comments to a dimension of the story that I haven’t seen addressed yet– what Scottie’s little morality tale tells about the ingenious ability of the human mind to deceive itself and others. And how that, in turn, can be used to appraise Scottie’s own truthfulness.

————

Deception, in both human and non-human primates, was selected early on by evolution for its obvious survival advantages. Tossing a rock into the brush to fool a rival sentinel, or distracting a fellow tribal member from a piece ripe fruit (or a ripe female) would help insure an individual’s genes would be propagated down the evolutionary time tunnel to thee and me.

Naturally, conspecifics developed such that the ability to detect deception in others was also selected, precipitating an evolutionary arms race of sorts. Effective deception detection, especially since the inception of human language, requires the ability to read a variety of neurolinguistc “tells.” These include facial expression, parlance, prosody, voice quality, eye movements, small movements of extremities, and emotional microexpressions. (Stevens, et al. (2007). Deception, Evolution , and the Brain. Evolutionary Cognitive Neuroscience. MIT Press, 18, 517-540)

What, then, is the adaptive response, the counter to the counter? How does the deceiver mask all these powerful yet subtle electro/chemical/somatic clues, working so insidiously behind conscious awareness to betray our true, i.e false, intentions?

In a word, self-deception. By convincing ourselves of our own lies, we can more effectively deceive others. Thus are deliberate falsehoods consigned to the unconscious, which requires fewer metabolic resources to maintain.

(Further refinements in the evolution of self-deception involves the use of the narrative and autobiographical parts of the brain to construct false but plausible versions of a given reality. Other psychological phenomena that testify to the power of human deception include confabulation, delusion misidentification syndrome, delusion redupliciation syndrome, false memories, and false recognition; ibid.)

—————

Fast forward to the Chimpocentric Universe, whose present coordinates in the time-space manifold are found at 1600 Pennslyvania Ave, Washington, D.C., USA, Urantia.

Imagine, if you will, a master manipulator— call him Darth Cheney— has taken control of the White House. In order to mask his true intentions, he removes himself from public scrutiny as much as possible, setting up a redundant, deception detection deflection machine composed of people convinced of their own integrity and idealistic correctness, all the better to propagate his desired falsehoods with a patina of complete sincerity.

The first brick in the firewall was, of course, our easily manipulatable, intellectually incurious president. A self-described CEO who doesn’t even bother to follow the news. An undoubting, unreflective, man born to privilege who doesn’t understand the meaning of the word “accountability.” For instance, when he was asked by Timmeh on MTP whether in retrospect he saw Iraq as a war of choice or of necessity, W. [told Scottie] that he was “puzzled” by the question, and indeed he was. “Puzzled” was also word used initially by Administration hacks to describe their reaction to McClellan’s book.

Here was a president, the very personification of self-deception, who immediately surrounded himself with eager sycophants only willing to feed his malignant narcissism and delusions of messianic grandeur, carefully insulating him from anything that might cause him even a moment of cognitive dissonance (if for no other reason than to not be on the receiving end of one of his legendary outbursts of rage). A president who, according to McClellan, invaded Iraq because he saw an “opportunity to create a legacy of greatness.”

By his own account, McClellan has finally seen through the years of spin and propaganda— he can’t quite bring himself to call them “lies.” He decries the replacement of public policy with the Bushie mindset of the permanent political campaign, so relentlessly overseen by Karl Rove who lied to his face about his own treasonous role in the Plame-Wilson outing.

Scottie says he still admires Bush, but realizes now that Bush is deluded, clinging to the hope that he will somehow be vindicated by history for what the rest of us outside the “White House bubble” see as his monumental, strategic and operational blunders. Scottie’s disillusionment with the Great Man began when in 1999, at a hotel “somewhere in the Midwest,” Bush replied to rumors that he had once been a cocaine user by telling him:

“The media won’t let go of these ridiculous cocaine rumors. You know, the truth is I honestly don’t remember whether I tried it or not. We had some pretty wild parties back in the day, and I just don’t remember.’

Says McClellan:

“I think he meant what he said in that conversation about cocaine. It’s the first time when I felt I was witnessing Bush convincing himself to believe something that probably was not true, and that, deep down, he knew was not true. And his reason for doing so is fairly obvious— political convenience. . .”

I hate to tell you this, Scottie, but “political convenience” is only the tip of the cognitive iceberg. But do go on.

“[Bush] has a way of falling back on the hazy memory to protect himself from potential political embarrassment. In other words, being evasive is not the same as lying in Bush’s mind…It would not be the last time Bush mishandled potential controversy. But the cases to come would involve the public trust, and the failure to deal with them early, directly and head-on would lead to far greater suspicion and far more destructive partisan warfare.”

Perhaps ten years from now Bush won’t remember ordering the invasion and destruction of Iraq. Or that he wasn’t greeted as a liberator in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina stopped by for a visit. . .

The authors of The Urantia Book write:

Never hesitate to admit failure. Make no attempt to hide failure under deceptive smiles and beaming optimism. It sounds well always to claim success, but the end results are appalling. Such a technique leads directly to the creation of a world of unreality and to the inevitable crash of ultimate disillusionment.

Young Scottie seems to have gotten the message. But I sincerely doubt that old man Bush ever will. He has been culturing deception for far too long.