Comment by nwienert
6 days ago
Source being that ridiculous fanfic Cheney movie? You’re even further off than me, even high level CIA was divided, along many other orgs that supported it. Where did Colin Powell get his evidence from? And the OSP?
Even if we agreed Iraq wasn’t a good example, it’s irrelevant to the point as I don’t think anyone actually thinks there aren’t powerful and largely behind the scenes figures - defense, lobbying, billionaires, and so on that aren’t actively steering the government away from the will of the people.
They knew there were no WMD.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/mar/18/panorama-iraq-...
That shows some set of intelligence had some sources that told them they don’t, far from proof of anything let alone anything relevant here. And we know several high up yet largely unknown to the public defense ops claimed the opposite, ie, the deep state.
No. The source being that Cheney and Rumsfeld had form going back to the 70's with Team B.
And just like Iraq, they didn't like the story coming out of the CIA that the USSR was a decrepit aging empire that was struggling to maintain parity with NATO. Cheney and Rumsfeld were SURE there were whole secret programs, with secret bases, and secret funding. So they badgered Ford into appointing a parallel team to produce different estimates. That was the whole "missile gap" scare.
Sound familiar? And guess what? It was all bullshit. Just like Iraq turned out to be.
I believe in conspiracies. The 20c was defined by conspiracies! Bolshevism, Naziism, Fascism, Maoism, Scientology, Heavens Gate, etc. The soviets really did fund post-modernism. The CIA really did run the National Review. Those are well documented.
What I don't believe is that Iraq every had even the beginning of a nuclear weapons program. Nobody with any sense did either. All the evidence came from known liars.
As for Powell's evidence: he was a lib, trying to keep the post-war order intact, while Cheney and Bolton were working to blow it up.
Powell knew it was bullshit, but he thought it was a better grade of bullshit that wouldn't make him look like such a moron. All he needed was enough of a figleaf to get either the UN or a compliant Nato to join in. Turns out, the yellow-cake story was such low-grade bullshit he'll never live it down.
There is no fancy latin name for giving known paranoids fantasists like Cheney and Rumsfeld the benefit of the doubt. But there really should be.
I'll grant that Cheney and Rumsfeld have networks in the agencies they could lean on to muddy things. And that deservers the name deep-state. Invisible, and unaccountable.
But you can't really call the gang that led this deep state when they are confirmed by congress, and go on TV.