Leo Strauss, the Wise, the Gentlemen and the Vulgar; CIA vets forged Niger docs?

They love the taste of blood
I don't know what that means, but I know that I mean it
Maybe they're as evil as they seem
Or maybe I only look out the window when it's scenic

The first lines from Atmosphere's new album. Suits my mood just right... the video of this song (their first music video) "Trying to Find a Balance"(QT) (realmedia) is good, and it struck me that at last section of the melody shows US soldiers rushing into Iraq.

God Bless America, but she stole the B from 'Bless' (Accept it!)
Now I'm too fucked up to dance
So I'ma sit with my hand down the front of my pants
You can't achieve your goals if you don't take that chance
So go pry open that trunk and get those amps

The Atmosphere video moves back and forth, from domestic harmony to civil disorder, the LA riots, US weapons. How do we maintain the balance? How do we keep it together?

I'm about to attack these midterm essays for Contemporary Political Theory. The questions: What is one-dimensional society? and, What is the difference between Critical Theory, orthodox Marxism and social positivism? Ahh, the simple things...

At first when investigating these kinds of things, you feel damn worried when you start to believe things that 99% of America would never buy. But pieces start coming together, and the Rational Official Story becomes pretty tissue paper. When you punch through it, you fear the madness that lies on the other side.

I'm not insane
In fact I'm kind of rational

Here's some suitable reading for the wee hours of the night, when the outside world fades and the intrigues begin. and what better way to get in the mood to think about how people are manipulated than a little more on that strange philosopher, Leo Strauss.

The more you peer into these things, the worse it gets. Look at this marvellous interview with leading Strauss critic Shadia Drury on OpenDemocracy.net (a site which impresses me often). Snips:

The effect of Strauss?s teaching is to convince his acolytes that they are the natural ruling elite and the persecuted few. And it does not take much intelligence for them to surmise that they are in a situation of great danger, especially in a world devoted to the modern ideas of equal rights and freedoms. Now more than ever, the wise few must proceed cautiously and with circumspection. So, they come to the conclusion that they have a moral justification to lie in order to avoid persecution. Strauss goes so far as to say that dissembling and deception ? in effect, a culture of lies ? is the peculiar justice of the wise... Nihilistic philosophers, he believes, should reinvent the Judaeo-Christian God, but live like pagan gods themselves ? taking pleasure in the games they play with each other as well as the games they play on ordinary mortals.

There is no doubt that Strauss?s reading of Plato entails that the philosophers should return to the cave and manipulate the images (in the form of media, magazines, newspapers). They know full well that the line they espouse is mendacious, but they are convinced that theirs are noble lies.

There are three types of men [to Strauss]: the wise, the gentlemen, and the vulgar. The wise are the lovers of the harsh, unadulterated truth. They are capable of looking into the abyss without fear and trembling. They recognise neither God nor moral imperatives. They are devoted above all else to their own pursuit of the ?higher? pleasures, which amount to consorting with their ?puppies? or young initiates. The second type, the gentlemen, are lovers of honour and glory. They are the most ingratiating towards the conventions of their society ? that is, the illusions of the cave. They are true believers in God, honour, and moral imperatives. The third type, the vulgar many, are lovers of wealth and pleasure. They are selfish, slothful, and indolent.

Like Plato, Strauss believed that the supreme political ideal is the rule of the wise. But the rule of the wise is unattainable in the real world. The real Platonic solution as understood by Strauss is the covert rule of the wise. This covert rule is facilitated by the overwhelming stupidity of the gentlemen. The more gullible and unperceptive they are, the easier it is for the wise to control and manipulate them.

For Strauss, the rule of the wise is not about classic conservative values like order, stability, justice, or respect for authority. The rule of the wise is intended as an antidote to modernity. Modernity is the age in which the vulgar many have triumphed.

There's a hell of a lot more! And all of it will make you feel better about reality! Especially when you think about Straussians' mad intelligence manipulations going on at the Pentagon. Seymour Hersh at the New Yorker has been doing a damn fine job looking at this mess. Hersh's "The Stovepipe" (referring to channeling spurious intel up the chain) was just posted on their website: (Agonist on the link)

The point is not that the President and his senior aides were consciously lying. What was taking place was much more systematic?and potentially just as troublesome. Kenneth Pollack, a former National Security Council expert on Iraq, told me that what the Bush people did was "dismantle the existing filtering process that for fifty years had been preventing the policymakers from getting bad information. They created stovepipes to get the information they wanted directly to the top leadership. Their position is that the professional bureaucracy is deliberately and maliciously keeping information from them."

The people in the policy offices didn?t seem to care [that they might be wrong about Iraq plans]. When the official asked about the analysis, he was told by a colleague that the new Pentagon leadership wanted to focus not on what could go wrong but on what would go right. He was told that the study?s exploration of options amounted to planning for failure.

....As the campaign against Iraq intensified, a former aide to Cheney told me, the Vice-President?s office, run by his chief of staff, Lewis (Scooter) Libby, became increasingly secretive when it came to intelligence about Iraq?s W.M.D.s. As with Wolfowitz and Bolton, there was a reluctance to let the military and civilian analysts on the staff vet intelligence.

"It was an unbelievably closed and small group," the former aide told me. Intelligence procedures were far more open during the Clinton Administration, he said, and professional staff members had been far more involved in assessing and evaluating the most sensitive data.

...Senior C.I.A. analysts dealing with Iraq were constantly being urged by the Vice-President?s office to provide worst-case assessments on Iraqi weapons issues. "They got pounded on, day after day," one senior Bush Administration official told me, and received no consistent backup from Tenet and his senior staff. "Pretty soon you say ?Fuck it.?" And they began to provide the intelligence that was wanted.

There's lots on the Niger stuff, including new details about the unknown Italian source. Imagine if those fake Niger uranium documents (Yellowcake-Wilson-Plame Affair) had actually been produced by retired CIA agents because they were pissed off at the hawks for using such terrible intelligence! Theoretically the ex-CIA were hoping someone would catch the hawks selling the lies. And then they saw the State of the Union, and Things took a Turn.

[a source said] that a small group of disgruntled retired C.I.A. clandestine operators had banded together in the late summer of last year and drafted the fraudulent documents themselves.

"The agency guys were so pissed at Cheney," the former officer said. "They said, ?O.K, we?re going to put the bite on these guys.?" My source said that he was first told of the fabrication late last year... "Everyone was bragging about it??Here?s what we did. It was cool, cool, cool.?"

"They thought that it was the only way to go to nail these guys who were not practicing good tradecraft and vetting intelligence... They thought it?d be bought at lower levels?a big bluff." The thinking, he said, was that the documents would be endorsed by Iraq hawks at the top of the Bush Administration, who would be unable to resist flaunting them at a press conference or an interagency government meeting. They would then look foolish when intelligence officials pointed out that they were obvious fakes. But the tactic backfired, he said, when the papers won widespread acceptance within the Administration. "It got out of control."

Just to round things out, it turns out that Saddam never had any damn WMD.

The following instructions [were sent] from the Top Man [Saddam]?"give [UNSCOM] everything... I know all the scientists involved, and they chat. There is no W.M.D."

Jafar explained why Saddam had decided to give up his valued weapons: Up until the 91 Gulf war, our adversaries were regional... But after the war, when it was clear that we were up against the United States, Saddam understood that these weapons were redundant. "No way we could escape the United States." Therefore, the W.M.D. warheads did Iraq little strategic good.

Hot damn! Which suggests another possibility: Saddam planned for this sort of invasion a long time ago, and stashed stuff all over the desert.