A simple lesson in definitions

In a weekend interview with the New York Times, now-former chief weapons inspector David Kay said that the real failure in the months leading up to the attack on Iraq was the inability of US intelligence

to detect that Iraq's unconventional weapons programs were in a state of disarray in recent years under the increasingly erratic leadership of Saddam Hussein....

[I]n general, Dr. Kay said, the C.I.A. and other agencies failed to recognize that Iraq had all but abandoned its efforts to produce large quantities of chemical or biological weapons after the first Persian Gulf war, in 1991. ...

Dr. Kay said the fundamental errors in prewar intelligence assessments were so grave that he would recommend that the Central Intelligence Agency and other organizations overhaul their intelligence collection and analytical efforts.

Kay is placing the blame for the administration's wildly wrong claims about Iraqi WMDs on an astonishingly massive intelligence failure. This line of argument has already started circulating energetically to head off charges of White House deceptions regarding the "threat" from Iraq.

It's an odd sort of defense, since it boils down to "We weren't lying, we were just exceedingly stupid." Be that as it may, there is another point to be made here.

Those intelligence reports, even when they on balance concluded that Saddam did have supplies of banned weapons, contained caveats and questions and often noted that a lack of hard information made confident assessments difficult if not impossible. But when the White House "rolled out its product," as Andrew Card put it, the product being a campaign to convince the public to support a war on Iraq, those reports were both cherry-picked to isolate and emphasize the most fearsome conclusions and washed clean of those caveats and questions. "Possibly" became "certainly." "Probably" became "definitely." "Might be" became "is." "Could do" became "has done."

Well, this is from my American Heritage Dictionary.

lie, n. 1. A false statement deliberately presented as being true; a falsehood. 2. Something meant to deceive or give a wrong impression.
lie, v., intr. 1. To present false information with the intention of deceiving. 2. To convey a false image or impression.

What's the common thread running though all these definitions? Intent. Say something false believing it to be true, you haven't lied. You're wrong, but you haven't lied. Say something true intending to mislead or deceive, you have lied, the technical truth be damned. As a noun, a lie can be simply defined as "a communication intended to deceive."

So even assuming Kay is both precise and correct in what he's saying, it still means that when Bush, Cheney, Rice, Powell, Rumsfeld, all the rest, when they came out and told us in breathless, urgent tones about intelligence reports and threats of "mushroom clouds," when they presented possibilities and opinions as demonstrated fact, they lied. They lied repeatedly and consistently and intensely. And we can't ever forget that.

Appealing to "intelligence failures" doesn't change that fact. In some ways, it makes it worse, because it means not only did they lie, but their lies were based on the results of incompetence. They didn't even have the right information to lie about. And that is really pathetic.

Footnote: Another fascinating little tidbit from Kay.

Dr. Kay said the basic problem with the way the C.I.A. tried to gauge Iraq's weapons programs is now painfully clear: for five years, the agency lacked its own spies in Iraq who could provide credible information.

During the 1990's, Dr. Kay said, the agency became spoiled by on-the-ground intelligence that it obtained from United Nations weapons inspectors. But the quality of the information plunged after the teams were withdrawn in 1998.

At that time, Iraq kept saying that part of its resistance to inspections was drawn from the fact that the US was using the UNSCOM team as a cover to spy on Iraq. The Clinton administration vociferously denied the charge, calling it false, outrageous, and all the other usual loud reactions, noting that doing so would seriously undermine the UN inspectors' mission and we of course would never dream of doing such a thing.

Now Kay just casually tosses it out as if there was nothing at all to it. Amazing what a few years and an invasion will accomplish for the truth.