Senior officials engineered formal ignorance to evade accountability for illegal acts

Evidence

The Iran–Contra affair is a good case in point. Deceiving and defying Congress, officials in the Reagan administration diverted money from covert, illegal weapons sales to Iran to fund Nicaraguan rebels. The major players in this surreptitious scheme went to great lengths to keep themselves uninformed, instructing their aides and advisors to create a system of “plausible deniability.” … What made this system of collective willful uninformedness so unusual was that it extended throughout the chain of command, with the top overseers of the nation’s international affairs evading accountability for illegal international arms sales to fund a rebel uprising. — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement, 417

Categorization

• DEFINE: Introduces ‘plausible deniability’ as the book’s term for the deliberate construction of official ignorance.
• XREF: Extends the vault’s existing threads on how elites rationalize harmful policy by supplying the concrete upstream mechanism: engineered uninformedness.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement: How People Do Harm…, 417