The growing controversy over the leaked classified memo now threatens to backfire on those responsible, and has provoked a backlash of anger in the intelligence community.

"This is made to dazzle the eyes of the not terribly educated," Greg Thielmann, a veteran of the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research (INR) who retired in 2002, told IPS.

"It begs the question, 'Is this the best they can do'? If you're going to expose this stuff, you'd better have something more than this," he said, adding, "My inclination is to interpret this as probably a very good example of cherry-picking and the selective use of intelligence that was so obvious in the lead-up to the war."

Melvin Goodman, a former top CIA analyst, said the leak is a sign of desperation. "To me, they had to leak something like this, because the neo-conservatives (in the administration) have nothing to stand on."

"They're trying to get the idea out there that, 'Hey, there was a case for war', and they have 'useful idiots' like Safire who say they're right."

[...]

"It shows a cavalier and almost contemptuous regard for the national security rationale for keeping information classified," according to Thielmann. "The objective of silencing the critics is so overwhelming that you have to throw national security secrets to the wind."

Both he and Goodman noted striking similarities between this latest case and the leak last July of the identity of retired Ambassador Joseph Wilson's wife, Valerie Plame, a covert CIA officer.

Wilson had just embarrassed the administration by disclosing his trip on behalf of the CIA to Niger to check out a report that Iraq had bought uranium "yellowcake." He charged that Bush's assertion about the yellowcake in his 2003 State of the Union address was false and that the White House knew it or should have known it at the time.

The evident purpose of the leak to columnist Robert Novak was to discredit Wilson by suggesting that his mission to Niger was suggested by his wife.

In fact, the leak provoked enormous anger in the intelligence community as a major security breach that effectively ended Plame's career as a covert officer, and potentially endangered her life and those of people who had worked with her abroad.

New Leak Smells of Neocon Desperation

As we saw in the run-up to the war, there are always those who are eager to believe the most egregious, transparent lies.

Fleischer's "ability to repeat a lie even after it's been shown, repeatedly, to be false is what separates him from the amateurs."

--Timothy Noah, Slate

(And he's got good company in the Bush administration)
Bush lies.

"The great mass of people will more easily fall victim to a big lie than to a small one."

-- Adolf Hitler (1889-1945), German dictator.
Mein Kampf, vol. 1, ch. 10 (1925)

Awash in a sea of lies, we wait for the tide to turn.
S