You're absolutely right about the Big Lies, including how the Bush admin ruined a CIA agent's career (and whatever operations she'd been a part of) because her husband pointed out that the claims about Iraq getting yellowcake from Iraq was nonsense.

I remember one day in 1983 on the USS Ranger watching an air show we were giving for a Guatemalan general off the Pacific coast of Central America. A few months later I read on the one-page blurb of news we got every few weeks (pre-internet, y'know) that very same Guatemalan general had taken over his country in a coup. I checked the date of the coup...and it was the very day after the air show. Gee, *why* were we there?