Facebook vs. the public toilet

Broadcasting one’s impassioned message was harder back in the old days. For most of us, the public restroom was enough. One found a pen, composed an impassioned plea, then sat with trousers at ankles, and scrawled something on the toilet wall. Further dissemination required moving to the next stall. You see the limitations, right?

If your message was important, you repeated it once or twice a year; for me and my kind (part-time janitors) painted it over.  Hey, it was money.

Facebook has changed, if not the intellectual level, at least the method of posting your truths. It’s still nonsense, but your friends must deal with it. You’ve. scrawled it on your (Facebook) wall.

This Facebook post…” Bush Lied…”  is nonsense.  What interests us is whether the poster is a liar (knows it is false) or a dupe (believes it to be true); the ‘Bush lied’ is at best facile. See note below.

For if Bush lied, so did I.  When I left the USAF Counter-Deception Directorate in 1989, the Soviet-trained Iraqi Denial and Deception (D&D) program was sophisticated and effective. International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) weapons inspectors after Operation Desert Storm (1990-91) inspecting Iraqi weapons facilities were stunned to discover that Saddam Hussein and Iraq were months from assembling a functioning and deliverable nuclear weapon. Pre-Iraq invasion (2003), consensus Western (and Russian FSB) assessment was that Saddam Hussein maintained a nascent WMD capability which would be ramped up once the weapons inspectors were withdrawn. In the end, Saddam Hussein’s sophisticated deception operations resulted in his hanging (Let that be a lesson to you, liar).

Whether s/he is liar or dupe, Facebook has that one disadvantage: the shit house wall is anonymous; Facebook is not.  Thus, your cousin/nephew/friend posts nonsense incessantly. It takes you several hours to fact check. In the meantime s/he has posted four more times. It takes but a moment to create a lie; it takes forever, it seems,  to discern and articulate truth.

The solution is to dismiss all your cousin/nephew/friend says or posts.  But, like your loud- and foul-mouthed Uncle Frank back in the day, you put up with his unending B.S., now and then, telling him to shut up, then mollify forever his hurt feelings.  I mean, just because he is a serial liar, doesn’t mean he’s cast from the family or the friendship is over.

The problem remains that now and then Uncle Frank speaks truth.   Every so often the heretics and crackpots might just be right.  We’ll look into that next post…a liar who had spoken the truth. It’s slippery, I tell you.

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 Note: That Saddan wanted and was working on developing nuclear weapons is largely true, though the timeline depends on which part of the program you mean, and it’s worth being precise about when this became known.

The “crash program” (the closest match to “months away”): After invading Kuwait in August 1990 and facing a likely US-led war, Saddam ordered Project 601 — a covert effort to divert IAEA-safeguarded highly enriched uranium (HEU) from French- and Russian-supplied research reactors rather than wait years for Iraq’s slower enrichment programs. The IAEA later assessed that if this diversion had succeeded, Iraq could have had roughly 25 kg of HEU — enough for a single low-yield device — by the end of 1991. Coalition bombing (Jan–Feb 1991) disrupted the effort, partly without the coalition even knowing that’s what it was hitting.The main enrichment program: Iraq’s larger, longer-running effort (electromagnetic isotope separation, or EMIS, plus centrifuge work) was found by post-war UN/IAEA inspectors — led by David Kay — to be 18 to 30 months from having enough weapons-grade material via that route, not “months” in the sense of weeks.

Caveat: This wasn’t public knowledge before or during the war. US and other prewar intelligence estimates had Iraq five to ten years away and badly underestimated the program’s scale (about $5–10 billion invested, 7,000 scientists, 20,000 workers). The “Iraq was closer than we thought” finding only emerged after the war, once UN Security Council Resolution 687 mandated IAEA inspections starting in May 1991 — publicized through David Kay’s October 1991 Senate testimony and a 1992 Physics Today article he co-wrote. So the accurate framing is: Iraq was likely months to a couple of years from a crude device, but this was a post-war discovery, not something accurately reported beforehand.Sources:Iraq Nuclear Overview – Nuclear Threat InitiativeDavis & Kay, “Iraq’s Secret Nuclear Weapons Program,” Physics Today, July 1992Iraq and weapons of mass destruction – WikipediaSearching for the Truth About Iraq’s WMD: An Interview with David Kay – Arms Control Association