On the streets of a modern day Imperial capital:
"_ maintains what we call the Strategic Intelligence Estimate. This is a document updated on a daily basis which gives our assessment of the political and military strength of our adversaries. Because of the nature of our work, and because serious mistakes made in the past, we have three assessment teams who make the estimated Best Case, Worst Case and Middle Case. The terms are self-explanatory, are they not? When we make a presentation to the ___, we generally use the Middle Case estimate, and for obvious reasons we annotate our estimates with data from the other two."
"So when he was called to give his assessment to the ___"
"Yes, Young J__, the ambitious little bastard who wants my job as a wolf wants a sheep, was clever enough to bring all three with him. When he saw what they wanted, he gave them what they wanted."
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"But he lied to the ___" S__ nearly shouted.
"Not at all. You think J__ is foolish? He handed over an official _ intelligence estimate drawn up under my chairmanship, by my department heads."
This is what a half-truth looks like. You could fill in the blanks with words like Cheney, White House and the CIA. It may even sound like a conversation that George Tenet might have with a reporter. Instead it from Tom Clancy's novel Red Storm Rising published back in 1986. In the novel, one enterprising KGB official feeds the Best Case scenario to his Politburo masters. He tells them that the NATO alliance is weak and therefore the Warsaw Pack would be able to defeat them in a conventional war. Of course that not what happens in the book. NATO and the Warsaw Pack become locked in a high-tech war of attrition that leads the world to the brink of nuclear war. But it was more than simply feeding politicians bad intel, but giving them exactly what they wanted.
The same thing happened in the halls of the Pentagon and the White House:
Of course, they went several step further than simply handing over a pre-existing intelligence dossier. Instead they created one out of whole cloth, combining the bits from the Best Case scenario and the Worse Case scenario. From the Best Case column they choose information that showed how weak the Iraqi military was and how the people of Iraq would rally around their "liberators." From the Worst Case column they pulled dire predictions of deadly stockpiles of deadly chemicals and pathogens, ready to be unleashed upon the world at a moments notice (how could an army, indeed a nation, in disarray be able to launch a sophisticated attack with WMD or hide the development of such weapons is beyond me). They didn't lie, not outright. I'm sure there where experts who believe both possibilities, but the people of experience who where either ignored or pushed out and with them their notes on the margins, the ones that said things like "maybe" or "it's possible." Instead they delivered documents shock full of half-truths, and as any five-year old would tell you a bunch of half-truths only gives you one big fat lie.