Will Hurd Quotes
Disinformation is more than just lying: it's the denial and twisting of reality in order to present some desired image to the rest of the world.
Hurd, Will. Public statement on disinformation. U.S. House of Representatives, 2017.
After the invasion, much of the intelligence upon which America relied on Invading Iraq turned out to be completely wrong. It turned out that the Vice President at least, a major supporter of the invasion, had a role in “shaping” the intelligence and analysis to achieve a policy objective.
The Presidential Campaigns of 2008 and 2012 shocked many Americans for the blatant lies that opponents of President Obama wrote and broadcast and then some of the retaliatory lies that Obama defenders responded with. However, this quotation from a 19th century political historian shows us that blatant lying in American politics is not at all new.
He was asked why the War Office maintained three sets of figures: 1st Earl of Oxford
McClellan after he left his White House Post, reflected on the experience, and wrote a book that described the George W. Bush White House practices many of which he was involved with.
One classic example was the fact that in 2012 about one third of Republicans believed that President Obama was a Muslim when he was a devout Christian. The infamous lie had 3 grains of truth: Obama’s father was a Muslim. his middle name was an Islamic name. and he had lived and gone to school as a young boy in Indonesia, the largest Islamic country.
Alsop, a political hawk was convinced, as many other right wingers were at the time that the Russians had forged ahead of us in offensive missiles. When he asked President Eisenhower, the President never denied it, but never went to Congress to ask for more money to close the “missile gap”. Alsop made this shocking accusation which offended many Americans, but pleased the ultra-hawks and anti-communists. Most of the nation however then believed that there was a missile gap, with varying explanations of Eisenhower’s silence on the matter. Two years later John F. Kennedy, used the “missile gap” when running in 1960 against Nixon by attacking Nixon and Eisenhower for allowing us to fall behind the Russians at have a missile gap. When Kennedy became President, he was very surprised that there was no missile gap favoring the Russians—it was favoring the United States. Eisenhower did not want the Russians to know that he knew exactly what they were producing and deploying in missiles through great espionage sources. By not saying anything in the face of the accusations, the Russians assumed that the Americans really thought that they had more capacity than they did. And Eisenhower wanted that so that they would be secure that the United States had no real knowledge of their missile capacity. If Eisenhower had actually told the nation that the Russians were really behind us, the Russians would suspect a security leak and our sources could be compromised.
William Ballard Hurd is an American politician and former CIA clandestine officer who served as the U.S. representative for Texas's 23rd congressional district from 2015 to 2021. The district stretches about 550 miles (890 km) from San Antonio to El Paso along the U.S.-Mexican border.
