I have been studying deceit for a long time, since I can remember, I think. Not that I am a liar or was a liar. I have lied a bit like anyone else. Possibly less. I have been lied to. A lot. Lying is one of the essences of humankind, like laughter. We even lie to ourself in order to motivate our laziness into superb action.

 

On a grand scale, governments lie. They always have. Sometimes it is for “our” benefit, often it’s a way to get away with murder. Often it’s a simple “massage of the truth” and to make us swallow the idea we’re useless barnacles on the butt of society. Lies sometimes come from our misunderstanding of something and from our wish not to appear to be an idiot. Thus we fabricate a story which could be plausible and forget the “caveats”. One lie leads to another, etc. Other times we wish to do something that is knowingly wrong. We lie about our intentions. 

Governments are experts at this and they train more and more professional personnel in this art form. Press secretaries are employed to express a twisted contorted position as if it was acceptably straight. Some ministers like ScoMo do it themselves. 

And there is “intelligence”.

In governments, “intelligence” is composed of two main parts: 1) assessing the information coming out of other government, secrets, lies or otherwise. 2) producing fake information for the consumption of other governments about their own capabilities.

“Intelligence” is very complex. In the USA, there are now 17 large “intelligence” agencies, including the CIA. They have clout. They know stuff. They are assigned an array of missions relating to national defense, foreign relations, homeland security and law enforcement. They work at deceiving others and avoid to be deceived. These days they employ a lot of personnel — over 5 million government employees and private contractors, to a cost of about US$100 billion. Most employees need special “clearance” and those who expose the dirt in this system shall be shot. Simple. 

Dithering Trump seems to ignore this “intelligence” gathering...

In the Age of Deceit, I exposed the USA as the biggest liars on the planet. This was 13 years ago. I still believe so. With varying degrees, after George W Bush and his lying neocons, Obama continued the lies in his own elegant smooth style. Now, the artful dodger Donald Trump does not “really lie" but appears so confused and so crass in his loony actions that he hides his real intentions well. He may not know what he is doing or saying, but this is beside the point. 

In parallel, the “Putin-Trump Inquiry” is also based on suppositions and possibilities that have nothing to do with the truth, but with creating a “circus show”, a bit like a comedy routine with a ventriloquist, in order to amuse a bunch of losers — the Democrats, who would lie with aplomb as well at this level, if given a chance.

Australian “intelligence”-ops has just been exposed for spying on Timor Leste, while negotiating a “fair” treaty, for an “unfair” result. This was really uncouth. Really bad. This was done at the time of one of Australia’s biggest duplicitous overseer on this score — a certain Alexander Downer. Alexander has recently been also outed as a principal actor in the “Putin-Trump” investigation. Possibly the major player in this saga, relaying “explosive information” gathered over a boozy night with an unreliable character. It’s not by accident. 

Alexander cannot be trusted by anyone anymore, unless they have rocks in their heads. In my view he could not be trusted back then in the Howard ministry. he was a liar. I still believe that Alexander has been a spy on behalf of the Americans, or at least an "American Pusher" — that is to say a guy who will do anything to make sure America comes first, even before Australia. I could be wrong. 

Both of us mainly go back to the days when every single day, Downer would claim that “Saddam has weapons of mass destruction”. Before this crazy war even started, I even flippantly counted 8,500 times that Downer claimed that "Saddam has weapons of mass destruction”. 8,500! I guess he believed he was like Paul Joseph Goebbels, the minister for disinformation in Hitler’s cabinet. Repeat repeat repeat repeat whatever, until people believe the bullshit.

I could not buy this of course. I knew through various means, as explained in various places on this site, that Saddam did not have any WMDs. None. Zero. I tried to alert the media about this then, but I got no reply. Nothing. Nada. Not even a niet.

So I followed the evolution of this fake news saga in 2001-02-03 that was going to lead to war against Iraq as a crude, yet powerful Double-Cross — a disinformation campaign that was using many tenticular avenues to promote war, while having no reasons for it. Alexander was one of these avenues: the foghorn. The relentless foghorn. John Howard was also bullshitting relentlessly. I don’t remember much about General Peter Cosgrove, but we’ll deal with him later on.

There were too many loose ends to the claim of "Saddam has weapons of mass destruction” and yet the media was lapping it up. Not a scribe was asking questions. The “intelligence was quite damning” was the line. End of story. When do we start bombing? The prospect of war was titillating for the media. At last, some Army glory and some courageous soldiers to ink the page with — a change from dogs being run over by a bus in Blandsville. 

It’s a simple as this. It’s frightening. That is the way much of the media operates, while claiming to know. And IT’S GETTING WORSE, especially in regard to Russia. 

There were a few hiccups in the Iraq disinformation campaign though. David Kelly in the UK was one of these hiccups, diplomat Joe Wilson was another one in the US and Andrew Wilkie in Australia exposed the simple fact that there was not enough “ticks in the boxes” for the case for war against Saddam.

By this stage, I already knew that all the information about the WMDs had been concocted. See other exposés about this on this site. I also had exposed my parallel deductions, as well: The simple fact that we were told that “Saddam’s WMDs were powerful, could hit Cyprus within 45 minutes and we did not know where they were hidden", should have send shivers down the spine of any military General geniuses. 

Warfare 101: one does not attack when one is in this “unknowing” situation. It’s suicidal. This is the result of the analysis that J C Masterman would have had to come to. So Masterman would have come to the conclusion that the information was bullshit, considering the eagerness for war from the protagonists — Bush, Blair and Howard — was building up like steam in a pressure cooker, with their Generals awaiting the starter flag like dogs going after a stick. 

The generals would have had to be in the loop of the deception, otherwise THEY WOULD NOT HAVE COMMITTED TROOPS TO ATTACK SADDAM, had he got those awful weapons as described. The losses would have been too great: Gus estimates about 15,000 troops dead by end of the first week.

The information I had from Germany and other countries in Europe had been scathing. This was going to be a war based on bullshit. Nothing new. Most wars are based on bullshit — or beliefs that have been frothed up to suit. Even Clinton’s war on Yugoslavia was one of those, eventually increasing the numbers of “victims” by a hundred factor, to make us swallow yet another war.

This is the privilege of self-righteous liars. They convince themselves. They try hard to convince us with their bullshit. We saw this with Libya and now Yemen, Syria, etc… Remember Colin Powell at the UN...

I have many books in various languages about “intelligence” and the psychology is quite precise about “manipulation” with adaptation of processes. Military Intelligence demands more than “hunches” in order to win. Re-reading Andrew Wilkie’s book, Axis of deceit, brings back to surface what happened at the time, in regard to his own Australian situation. I believe that, as an expert analysts, he could see there was not enough credible information to make a choice for war. He made a detailed SECRET report as to what such war would actually cascade into, including famine and terrorism. 

Yet Wilkie was surprised that no WMDs were found in Iraq. 

I was not surprised. I knew there was none. Even Hans Blix knew that.

But the fascinating part is that it is highly plausible that, after Wilkie had resigned from his office in disgust at the government’s warmongering, Alexander Downer passed on Wilkies’s SECRET report to the “press”, in this instance to the infamous Andrew Bolt, who HAD TO KNOW THE SECRET REPORT in order to write about it:

Wilkie, in his one  written assessment of Iraq, and in his real area of expertise, issued warnings that turned out with hindsight to be very alarmist… The war happened all right, yes there were no refugees, and [no] huge casualties. There was no flooding, no toxic gases from burning oil wells and no humanitarian disaster of any kind. Saddam did not unleash germ warfare or incite “mass panic”. Nor is there any starvation in Iraq… Wilkie, honestly using his judgement, got all that wrong. Yet he wanted us to trust his judgement on something he was not an expert in — Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction. And to trust him above all his colleagues.

Here is a self-inflicted painful demolishing of Andrew Bolt’s own arse. 

History has shown that at least 5,500 US soldiers died in Iraq, more than 30,000 got maimed, and due to “not counting casualties” the estimates of this war resultant oscillates between 250,000 minimum and one million Iraqi dead. In regard to unleashing germ warfare, David Kelly, the expert in this area was certain that Saddam did not have any — and the only Anthrax that killed five people in the US came from a US lab. There were also a lot of refugees that fled to neighbouring countries — about 4 million people. So Andrew Bold was writing big shit. As well Wilkie was professionally fully versed in the area of weapons of mass destruction, contrarily to Bolt’s claim which was designed to belittle Wilkie — in support of John Howard’s CONservative politics. 

Another point that Wilkie had raised was the increase in “terrorism”. This became a sore point when Al Qaeda operatives blew up a train in Madrid and Mick Keelty, the Australian Federal Police Commissioner, pointed out the obvious link since Spain had been a participant in the invasion of Iraq. Of course, our Downer was “furious" and said that Keelty "was expressing a view which reflects a lot of the propaganda we’re getting from Al Qaeda.” Of course, General Peter Cosgrove sheepishly (?) sided with the government.

It is likely that the invasion of Iraq, was seen by Al Qaeda as an opportunity to strike, though Al Qaeda did not exist in Iraq, before then. 

So, is there more to say about Downer’s clowning? Plenty more, and plenty has been already mentioned on this site. 

Now, a chip of the old block, his daughter Georgina, is vying for an MP position, eventually joining the “Liberal (CONservative) government of her dad and grand-daddy, Sir John Downer.… 

May the debill help us defeat this dynasty that started with Alexander's own grand-daddy... 


Gus Leonisky

Your local bullshit analyst