4) Delegated lying/Team lying:
Iraq was involved with 9-11 hijacker Mohamed Atta, via an Iraqi agent who met him in Prague in the spring of 2001, and thus the Iraqi regime may have participated in some fashion in 9-11. (summary of major, long-lasting propaganda theme)
Comment: For the most outrageous, easily disproved, yet highly effective lies, such as the Iraqi connection to 9-11, sometimes the wise course is to assign personnel far removed from the president to push the lie. That way, the president's credibility won't suffer when the facts - known to the administration months before it stopped peddling the lie - come out. And in a perverse fashion, the man at the top of this disinformation pyramid, the president, GAINS credibility for the disinformation in his own speeches, because commentators will note what a cautious and careful performance it was, given that he steered clear of the not-yet-confirmed 9-11 connection.
The farther out of the loop the designated lie-pushers are, the better: The administration can more easily keep from them the intelligence data that flat-out refutes the lie, which helps those lie-pushers who are more convincing when they THINK what they're saying might be true than when they know for a fact it's not true. For our purposes, whether the speaker believes what he says is irrelevant. What matters is that the administration is consciously deceiving the public.
Iraq was involved with 9-11 hijacker Mohamed Atta, via an Iraqi agent who met him in Prague in the spring of 2001, and thus the Iraqi regime may have participated in some fashion in 9-11. (summary of major, long-lasting propaganda theme)
Comment: For the most outrageous, easily disproved, yet highly effective lies, such as the Iraqi connection to 9-11, sometimes the wise course is to assign personnel far removed from the president to push the lie. That way, the president's credibility won't suffer when the facts - known to the administration months before it stopped peddling the lie - come out. And in a perverse fashion, the man at the top of this disinformation pyramid, the president, GAINS credibility for the disinformation in his own speeches, because commentators will note what a cautious and careful performance it was, given that he steered clear of the not-yet-confirmed 9-11 connection.
The farther out of the loop the designated lie-pushers are, the better: The administration can more easily keep from them the intelligence data that flat-out refutes the lie, which helps those lie-pushers who are more convincing when they THINK what they're saying might be true than when they know for a fact it's not true. For our purposes, whether the speaker believes what he says is irrelevant. What matters is that the administration is consciously deceiving the public.