President Trump's clumsy explanation on June 21 of his planned military strike against Iran rapidly collapsed. But it falls within a longer tradition of Executive Branch secrecy and deception regarding history-making United States military and intelligence developments.
Trump claimed via Twitter and then during an interview with NBC's Meet the Press host Chuck Todd that he learned from military officials for the first time just 30 minutes before a planned retaliatory attack on Iran that it would cause an estimated 150 Iranian deaths.
Trump is shown in an NBC News photo with Todd at right during the June 23 interview at the White House.
Trump said that he cancelled the Air Force attack on Iran just before launch because the effect would be disproportionate to Iran's downing of an unmanned drone with no casualties.
Experts, including pundits quoted by name and unnamed sources, promptly disputed Trump's version.
Former U.S. Sen. Barbara Boxer, a California Democrat, told an MSNBC audience, for example, that military officials always gave her casualty estimates early during any advance briefing for her as a senator — and that the military would certainly provide an even more thorough briefing to a president before a major strike. Military and intelligence experts concurred on air.
The New York Times first reported that airplanes were already in the air when Trump aborted the mission, contradicting his account. The Washington Post later reported that Trump had in fact been briefed on casualty estimates early on Thursday, unlike his claim that he raised 
the issue for the first time just 30 minutes before the attack and that "generals" had to research the matter and then get back to him in time for his executive decision.
Other critics roundly criticized Todd and NBC. Aaron Rupar of Vox, for example, published a June 24 column, Chuck Todd’s Trump interview, and the backlash to it, explained. Rupar wrote: "At numerous points throughout the interview, Todd let Trump get away with blatant falsehoods and gaslighting. Todd also teed up a number of softball questions for the president, like 'Do you think you’ve been more successful in business or the presidency?'”
Similarly, the conservative but anti-Trump Washington Post columnist Jennifer Rubin wrote on June 24Trump’s lies need to be exposed in real time.
The dispute over Trump's veracity raises many issues. One involved the sudden resignation of Acting Defense Secretary Patrick Shanahan after someone leaked rumors of a long-ago domestic scandal.
Some 
commentators have claimed that the replacement of Shanahan smacks of internal Trump Administration intrigue. Shanahan's replacement is Secretary of the Army, Mark Esper, (shown at right), a West Point classmate of Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and a purported ally of the administration's most extreme hawks like Pompeo. Shanahan is reported to have been more cautious about embarking on war against Iran than Pompeo.
Whatever the facts on that, one issue noted all too seldom by major media is that dissembling and secrecy have a disturbing history in such presidential decision-making on the most important matters, typically involving war, assassinations and covert backgrounds of elected office-holders.
With a few exceptions, such as the "Weapons of Mass Destruction" hoax leading to the 2003 U.S. coalition attack on Iraq, the mainstream, corporate-owned media are especially reluctant to reassess the past even, or especially, in historically important "national security" matters.
The reasons?
Journalists fear of lost access to powerful officials. By contrast, NBC's Todd showed his eagerness to host Trump and feed him questions regarded as "softballs" by some news colleagues. Journalists often fear also that if they dig too deep they might expose their own news organizations' mistakes or complicity in suppressing previous stories.
Regarding government lies to promote venal policies under the rhetoric of "national security" or other foreign policy goals, the major media may serve as silent partners in elite government intrigues -- and not independent voices, as promoted in conventional wisdom.
For example, our most recent column here, Trump Found His Roy Cohn In Deep State Fixer Bill Barr, reported how the major media and Congress alike have been extremely reluctant even to mention Attorney General William Barr's disgraceful record as a CIA operative and Justice Department apparatchik decades ago in helping cover up heinous, state-sanctioned narcotics and arms smuggling along with associated financial crimes totaling hundreds of billions of dollars in victim losses.
Attorney General William Barr, center, is flanked by Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, right, and Principal Deputy Assistant Attorney General Edward O'Callaghan of the National Security Division,as Barr used pro-Trump language to dismiss the findings of the Mueller Report at Justice Department news conference on April 18, 2019.
In the time since that column, there are new examples of how secrecy surrounds even the most important foreign policy decisions and even when enough time has passed so that they become the focus of historical inquiry.
A vivid example occurred two weeks ago when former U.S. Defense Secretary Ashton Carter spoke at the Atlantic Magazine's headquarters at the Watergate about his new book, Inside the Five-Sided Box): Lessons from a Lifetime of Leadership in the Pentagon.
Carter, shown at right on the cover of his book, had spent three decades at the Pentagon before his promotion from deputy defense secretary to the cabinet position during President Obama's second term.
During Q&A, this reporter noted that the book briefly addressed Obama's failure to enforce his "red line" in Syria during the late summer of 2013 but failed to describe who advocated for war authorization from Congress and who advocated for an immediate strike against the Syrian government led by President Bashar al-Assad.
Carter, now director of Harvard University's Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs and no longer an administration employee, is writing and speaking for "history," I mentioned as a preface to my question.
"I'm not going to tell you that for two reasons," Carter responded. "One, I'm not sure I know because I was deputy secretary at the time....Second, I don't remember that kind of detail and I would never betray that kind of confidence."
That is the not-so-hidden backstory of the radical gutting of American constitutional government now underway to expand and cover up Team Trump's corruption.
Congruent with Barr's view on near-unlimited powers for a president under what others might view as a fascist "unitary executive" theory of the Constitution, Trump's delegation of power could be an attempt to mobilize the Justice Department against his political opponents.
In the structure of the column unfolding below, we next touch briefly on the kind of criminal undertakings common for Trump and Cohn during the future president's early years in business.
Before undertaking that history, however, we must note at the outset the shocking failure of society's watchdogs during recent years to refresh public recollection about Iran-Contra.
Just under Miller's introduction is his transcription of remarks by the lawsuit plaintiffs, some shown below at right, during their March 25 news conference near the federal courthouse and Justice Department headquarters on Pennsylvania Avenue NW in Washington, DC. The event was outside the Newseum, which was charging nearly $25 admission (including to see displays of 9/11 attack debris) but whose management tried to shoo from the public sidewalk the 9/11 lawsuit plaintiffs at right. 
the Fourth Estate and:
A 7,000-word rush transcript of the news conference [following this introduction] at which four individuals spoke about the complaint after filing it in federal court and answered questions. They are Attorneys Mick Harrison and David Meiswinkle of the Lawyers' Committee for 9/11 Inquiry, Richard Gage of Architects & Engineers for 9/11 Truth, and Robert McIlvaine, father of a man killed in the 9/11 attack. No news organization representative was present. A video of the news conference is 
"fake news" or other buzzwords.
lockstep to suppress the outlets. Google and similar high-tech companies are tightly connected with elite intelligence and Wall Street circles.
George H. W. Bush in arranging 1992 pardons for six leading administration officials implicated in the Iran-Contra scandal.
company's move took place without prior notice or subsequent explanation.
Prometheus: Progress, vs. Empire, from Franklin to Kennedy
The public was invited to his dinner lecture before the club's Sarah McClendon speaker society, named in honor of the late White House correspondent and former president of the Washington, DC-based club.
Chaitkin's father, a New York attorney, had fought in the courts to break up the Wall Street and London sponsorship of Adolf Hitler's dictatorship in Germany.
Chaitkin's 1985 book on American political history, Treason in America: from Aaron Burr to Averell Harriman documented from archives of "blue-blood" families, among other sources, the takeover of U.S. policymaking by agents and allies of the British empire. The book is regarded as a classic of investigative history in its field, with 100,000 copies sold. It has been long out of print but has been reissued in a Kindle edition.
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