The Cheney Standard Lie

The name "Dick Cheney" has become as synonymous with lying as the name "George Bush" is with stupidity. Of course, Cheney's best known lies were that American troops would be welcomed as "liberators" and that the insurgency was in its "last throes." But Cheney does not employ the Gonzales Standard Lying technique of issuing universal denials with the expectation that the opposition won't be able to come up with contrary information. As an experienced Washington player, Cheney has his own special lying technique. The Cheney approach to lying is to create false impressions through manipulating single bits of information or disinformation. Yesterday, for example, Cheney justified the Saddam/Al-Qaeda link by referring to Abu Masab al-Zarqawi's presence in Iraq before the U. S. invasion.

“He took up residence there before we ever launched into Iraq, organized the al-Qaida operations inside Iraq before we even arrived on the scene and then, of course, led the charge for Iraq until we killed him last June.”

In Cheney's statement, there is one indisputable fact. Al-Zarqawi indeed was operating in Iraq before the American invasion in March 2003. That's when Cheney begins manipulating his one fact into a lie. It is well-known that Zarqawi was operating in Kurdish rather than Saddam-controlled territory before the invasion. Consequently, there was no link to Saddam. Moreover, Zarqawi did not become affiliated with al-Qaeda until well after the invasion. Therefore Cheney was lying when he claimed that Zarqawi "organized the al-Qaida operations inside Iraq before we even arrived on the scene . . ."

Altogether, Cheney took one fact (Zarqawi's presence in Iraq) and dressed it up with a couple of lies to create a phony scenario of al-Qaida involvement in Iraq to justify the bigger lie that there was a link between Saddam and al-Qaeda.

Cheney did the same kind of thing when he was talking about mobile bio-weapon labs, Saddam's purported nuclear weapons capability, and other elements in the campaign of deception through which the Bush administration justified the invasion. But why does Dick Cheney still lie in this kind of transparent, easily detectable, fashion when he knows that nobody believes him outside the shrinking universe of Bush die-hards and that the media will refute the lie within an hour of his making it? That's easy. For Republican fund-raising audiences, conservative talk radio, and Bush die-hards in general, the idea that Saddam was linked to al-Qaeda is as incontrovertible a truth as the story of Noah's Ark in the Bible. Because there was a Pentagon inspector general report forthcoming that denied any connection between Saddam and al-Qaida, Cheney was defending a right-wing "truth" against what the right views as the lies of the "government bureaucracy" and "the media." The fact that Cheney was dishonestly manipulating one fact to justify his position was beside the point to the right.

It's also important to remember, however, that Cheney's lying was also beside the point with the broader public until the Bush administration began losing the war.