http://www.consortiumnews.com/2003/102203.htmlsnip
Time and again, Bush and his administration have replaced the principle that good intelligence makes for good policy with the near-opposite approach: you start with a conclusion and then distort all available information to sell the pre-ordained policy to a gullible, ill-informed or frightened public.
The WMD intelligence was pushed through a kind of backward filter. Instead of removing the imprecision that comes with raw intelligence, the Bush administration’s intelligence process let through the dross as long as it fit with Bush’s goal of bolstering political support for the war.
As the Iraqi death toll mounts and the price tag for the U.S. occupation grows, a similar process of intelligence manipulation is now being applied to the so-called “reconstruction” phase. Bush and his surrogates are picking and choosing the evidence that is designed to sell the public on the notion that “Operation Iraqi Freedom” is still going great.
The administration’s misleading rhetoric has switched from exaggerating the danger posed by Saddam Hussein to exaggerating the gains attributable to the invasion. New half-truths and lies are quickly replacing the old ones, lest Americans begin to wonder how they had been misled by the previous bogus rationales.
Unlike the fictional president in Tom Clancy's “Sum of All Fears” – who was tricked into that “really bad information” – Bush and his team have actively sought out the bad information and assembled it as justification for going to war. This administration, which can sometimes be stranger-than-fiction, didn't just peer into the fog of war. It set up the fog machine.