In this morning’s New York Times, Michael Hayden mounts a stirring defense of the virtues of The Enlightenment — facts, science, pragmatism, humility. He laments that we are entering a post-truth era where truth is whatever you choose to make it. However, he conveniently ignores the fact that he himself is one of the chief enablers of Trump’s rise to power and one of the chief enablers of the post-truth world that he now says he’s against.
Attorney General Jeff Sessions has rightly received reprobation for committing perjury during his Senate testimony and getting away with it. Yet, Mr. Sessions never would have been able to do so without Mr. Hayden. Sometimes, it takes a pathological liar to spot a liar. That is because Mr. Hayden himself repeatedly and brazenly lied with a straight face before the US Senate on April 12th, 2007 regarding the Bush Administration’s torture programs. Mr. Hayden, of course, never was charged with perjury for his blatant lies covering up, for instance, waterboarding, forcing detainees to stand in their own excrement, starvation, punching and kicking, and false statistics.
And well before Donald Trump promised to build his big beautiful wall, make Mexico pay for it, bring back American manufacturing jobs, and give us all faeries and unicorns, Mr. Hayden was doing the same thing, exaggerating the value of the intelligence that was supposedly produced through the use of torture. This is similar to the scene in the children’s book, “The Wind in the Willows.” In it, Toad is a fabulously wealthy animal who is recklessly spending his money on luxuries like motor cars in 1900. His friends all try to get him to stop; finally, his friends confront him at his house and one of them, Badger, takes him into a smoking room, where he tortures him into relenting from speeding in motor cars and smashing them up. But when he brings him out to the rest of his friends, Toad says, “Shant!” When asked about what he had promised Badger in the torture chamber, he said, “Oh, yes, yes! In there! I’d say anything in there!” Similarly, people under torture will say anything, true or not, just to make the torture stop and earn their “rewards” such as being able to go to the bathroom and not have to stand in their own feces. This is the very sort of post-truth thinking that Mr. Hayden says he is against.
And everybody is rightly outraged at what Russia did during the last election by trying to manipulate the outcome. Yet, Mr. Hayden has also enabled the Russians over the years, because, by his own admission, he has done the exact same thing.
Former CIA and NSA Director Michael Hayden on Tuesday implied that the United States, too, has hacked foreign political parties.
The difference between the U.S.’s actions and Russia in the 2016 presidential election, Hayden said, was that “once they got that information, they weaponized it.”
But up until they weaponized information, Hayden said their actions were par for the course.
“I have to admit my definition of what the Russians did [in hacking the Democratic National Committee] is, unfortunately, honorable state espionage," Hayden said during an on-stage interview at the Heritage Foundation.
"A foreign intelligence service getting the internal emails of a major political party in a major foreign adversary? Game on. That’s what we do. By the way, I would not want to be in an American court of law and be forced to deny that I never did anything like that as director of the NSA,” he said.
Mr. Hayden, of course, is lying when he says we have never weaponized information. We have interfered in foreign elections for at least 100+ years, including 80+ such instances since 1946. And he conveniently forgets that the man he worked for, George W. Bush, had a way of confusing fantasy with reality just like Donald Trump does:
There is one story about Bush's particular brand of certainty I am able to piece together and tell for the record.
In the Oval Office in December 2002, the president met with a few ranking senators and members of the House, both Republicans and Democrats. In those days, there were high hopes that the United States-sponsored "road map" for the Israelis and Palestinians would be a pathway to peace, and the discussion that wintry day was, in part, about countries providing peacekeeping forces in the region. The problem, everyone agreed, was that a number of European countries, like France and Germany, had armies that were not trusted by either the Israelis or Palestinians. One congressman -- the Hungarian-born Tom Lantos, a Democrat from California and the only Holocaust survivor in Congress -- mentioned that the Scandinavian countries were viewed more positively. Lantos went on to describe for the president how the Swedish Army might be an ideal candidate to anchor a small peacekeeping force on the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. Sweden has a well-trained force of about 25,000. The president looked at him appraisingly, several people in the room recall.
"I don't know why you're talking about Sweden," Bush said. "They're the neutral one. They don't have an army."
Lantos paused, a little shocked, and offered a gentlemanly reply: "Mr. President, you may have thought that I said Switzerland. They're the ones that are historically neutral, without an army." Then Lantos mentioned, in a gracious aside, that the Swiss do have a tough national guard to protect the country in the event of invasion.
Bush held to his view. "No, no, it's Sweden that has no army."
And then Mr. Hayden wonders why nobody would listen to him when he warned about the perils of Trump.