Deception bought and paid for

Rendon, war seller

Because it illustrates crisply how the CIA & Pentagon procured a campaign of intentional deception of the Congress and the public on pre-war Iraq intelligence, this note fits with the previous post. I thought of adding it there, but that is already too long.

Browsing Steve Clemmons, I came across this post concerning James Bamford's Rolling Stone story on The Man Who Sold the War:

...The illegal arms, according to [Iraqi defector Adnan Ihsan Saeed] al-Haideri, were buried in subterranean wells, hidden in private villas, even stashed beneath the Saddam Hussein Hospital, the largest medical facility in Baghdad. It was damning stuff -- just the kind of evidence the Bush administration was looking for. If the charges were true, they would offer the White House a compelling reason to invade Iraq and depose Saddam. That's why the Pentagon had flown a CIA polygraph expert to Pattaya: to question al-Haideri and confirm, once and for all, that Saddam was secretly stockpiling weapons of mass destruction.

There was only one problem: It was all a lie. After a review of the sharp peaks and deep valleys on the polygraph chart, the intelligence officer concluded that al-Haideri had made up the entire story, apparently in the hopes of securing a visa.

The fabrication might have ended there, the tale of another political refugee trying to scheme his way to a better life. But just because the story wasn't true didn't mean it couldn't be put to good use. Al-Haideri, in fact, was the product of a clandestine operation -- part espionage, part PR campaign -- that had been set up and funded by the CIA and the Pentagon for the express purpose of selling the world a war. And the man who had long been in charge of the marketing was a secretive and mysterious creature of the Washington establishment named John Rendon.

This is another strong reason why President Bush and Vice President Cheney are full of it when they indignantly disavow their clear history of deception with malice aforethought behind the push to invade Iraq and now continue with their bloody, endless war.