1115.org

If you were a ranking member of the Bush hierarchy, why would you stand up and publicly tell a blatant bald-faced lie that you know beforehand will be immediately disputed and exposed for the lie it is? Remember, we’re talking blatant black-or-white lies. Lies that do not lend themselves to parsing or obfuscation or all-a-big-misunderstanding-ha-ha type spin.

Doesn’t make any sense, right? But there was General Hayden yesterday, the director of the CIA, indulging in plain speech about the CIA’s secret torture tapes:

In his statement, General Hayden said leaders of Congressional oversight committees had been fully briefed about the existence of the tapes and told in advance of the decision to destroy them.

“Fully briefed” is a tried-and-trusted tactic. It’s been used over and over again. No one even blinks an eyelid any more when it turns out later that everyone angrily denies being fully briefed. So why didn’t Hayden content himself with that? Why gratuitously add the “told in advance of the decision to destroy them”?

And here, yesterday itself, was the equal and opposite reaction:

But the two top members of the House Intelligence Committee in 2005 said Thursday that they had not been notified in advance of the decision to destroy the tapes.

A spokesman for Representative Peter Hoekstra, Republican of Michigan, who was the committee’s chairman between 2004 and 2006, said that Mr. Hoekstra was “never briefed or advised that these tapes existed, or that they were going to be destroyed.”

When Hoekstra flatly contradicts the administration on “a matter of national security” they have to ask themselves: “What were we thinking?” Jane Harman flatly contradicted Hayden too, of course:

Representative Jane Harman of California, the top Democrat on the committee between 2002 and 2006, said that she told C.I.A. officials several years ago that destroying any interrogation tapes would be a “bad idea.”

“How in the world could the C.I.A. claim that these tapes were not relevant to a legislative inquiry?” she said.

So, coming back to my original question, why on earth would Hayden tell such a stupid lie?

The only thing I can think of is that he didn’t have a choice. He had to produce a mega-whopper. Maybe they have a quota within the administration now? Everyone has to do their bit. Or maybe there’s a super-secret meeting every month, and they pull straws, and Hayden got the short straw for December?

And, just as to not leave any loose ends, why would they do something like that? There must be something much worse that they’re desperately trying to distract us from.