Last night, Dick Cheney also said this:

American soldiers and Marines serving in Iraq go out every day into some of the most dangerous and unpredictable conditions. Meanwhile, back in the United States, a few politicians are suggesting these brave Americans were sent into battle for a deliberate falsehood. This is revisionism of the most corrupt and shameless variety. It has no place anywhere in American politics, much less in the United States Senate.

Again, see chapter 8 of All the President’s Spin for more on the falsehoods that were used to make the case for war. And under “revisionism of the most corrupt and shameless variety,” of course, one might file the administration’s post-war campaign to spin its pre-war claims and twist the evidence about what was found in Iraq, which we lay out in great detail in chapter 9 of ATPS.

Let’s consider one man’s post-war campaign of revisionism and deception: Dick Cheney. In April 2003, trailers were found that could have been used to produce biological weapons. However, most intelligence experts within the US government disagreed. Nonetheless, Cheney touted them as evidence of Saddam’s weapons programs. CIA director George Tenet was forced to privately correct Cheney (p. 194). After claiming that Saddam had weapons programs before the war, Cheney and others switched to claiming Saddam had “WMD capability” (p. 196). Cheney also selectively quoted David Kay’s report on Iraqi weapons programs, twisting its conclusions (p. 200), and misleadingly cited Saddam’s possession of uranium, which was a waste product that could not be used in nuclear weapons without refinement (p. 206-207). In October 2003, he hyped the fact that there were “active terror camps in Iraq” before the war, neglecting to mention that the camps in question — those of the al Qaeda offshoot Ansar ar-Islam — were located in an area of northern Iraq that Saddam had not controlled since the Gulf War (p. 209-210). And Cheney frequently linked 9/11 and Iraq rhetorically, while continuing to float unproven suggestions of an Iraq-9/11 link as late as January 2004 (p. 215-216, 211-212).

Last night, Cheney also floated the notion that criticizing President Bush in terms he finds “untruthful” hurts the troops:

One might also argue that untruthful charges against the Commander-in-Chief have an insidious effect on the war effort itself. I’m unwilling to say that, only because I know the character of the United States Armed Forces — men and women who are fighting the war on terror in Iraq, Afghanistan, and many other fronts.

This is yet another suggestion that dissent is somehow unpatriotic.