The Big Lie 1.0
By 
A telling anecdote about the selling of the Iraq War:
2) The Sunday after he read the intel, he was out walking with his wife in his McLean neighborhood when "two fit joggers trailed behind us. They stopped and asked what I thought of the intelligence briefings I'd been getting."…— Garrett M. Graff (@vermontgmg) October 14, 2022
4) Leahy went back to the intel officers at the Capitol SCIF and requested "File Eight," and it contradicted what the Bush administration was saying publicly about the WMDs….— Garrett M. Graff (@vermontgmg) October 14, 2022
6) [[Leahy explained to me when I asked him about this incident this month that "File Eight" and "File Twelve" are pseudonyms for specific secret codeword names the joggers told him to ask for.]] ….— Garrett M. Graff (@vermontgmg) October 14, 2022
8) I asked @senatorleahy about this incident when I interviewed him at @bearpondbooks earlier this month, if he knew the joggers ever, and he said, "You don't understand—I didn't *want* to know who they were." …— Garrett M. Graff (@vermontgmg) October 14, 2022
After it became clear that Iraq had no “Weapons of Mass Destruction” even given the ridiculously capacious definition of the term, the Bush administration and its apologists shifted to blaming “the intelligence” for the mistake. But while there was some faulty intelligence most of the case for was either a grossly distorted picture of the available evidence or just flat-out made up.
And 20 years later, there is still no shortage of people willing to believe that the people who lied us into that debacle could totally be trusted when they said that Afghanistan was six months from turning around.