Deniability

Governmental and Presidential Behavior

In 1974, the Church Committee of the U.S. Senate used the term plausible denial to refer to the government doctrine by which the president could disavow knowledge of CIA plots against various foreign leaders, most notably Fidel Castro. By being kept uninvolved and uninformed, the president could deny any awareness of these activities. If the president was not perceived to be involved, then the entire nation would, by extension, seem to be uninvolved and this perception would not only forestall blame but also prevent any potential for retaliation. The Church Committee outlined a number of important fatal flaws in the logic of this strategy.

In a subsequent governmental invocation of plausible deniability, Admiral John Poindexter used the term during the Iran-Contra Affair. While his usage retained the idea of keeping the president free of information that might be discreditable, he used it more narrowly to suggest that it referred to protecting the president, not the entire government or the American people, from the knowledge of the illegal diversion of funds, which is why Poindexter explained that he took personal responsibility for authorizing the movement of money from Iranian arms sales to the Contras.

In this context of government and political actions, plausible deniability might be seen as a variety of propaganda, a kind of official, preemptive lying, through which a specific narrative is crafted to create a particular impression that either obscures or refutes the actual discreditable actions and behavior of politicians and governments. Douglas Walton suggests that this works by escaping the burden of proof by “putting forward a proposition that a target respondent (or audience) is meant to accept, while building in a defense to shield off the need to respond to any request to justify (or give evidence to support) the proposition queried by the respondent.” These deniability-serving government narratives, according to David Bogen and Michael Lynch, have the wider potential to distort or obscure important details surrounding actual U.S. and government history.

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