[extropy-chat] Who thinks the Bush admin lied over Iraq? On what basis?

[Matthew Gingell]

On Jul 11, 2005, at 10:43 PM, Brett Paatsch wrote:

> I wonder on what basis those that are convinced of it, are
> so convinced? Please, give only opinions based on hard facts.

Here's how I look at it. I light a candle, then I call 911 and tell  
them "I'm at 123 Foobar Street and there's a fire in my house." I  
haven't lied, in that I haven't made any statement I know to be  
false: I really am at 123 Foobar Street, and there really is a fire.  
But I'm being dishonest in the sense I can reasonably expect the  
listener to come to a false conclusion.

The Bush administration spent a year putting Saddam Hussein and Osama  
bin Laden in the same sentence. They invented a rhetorical umbrella  
called the "War on Terrorism" as part of a deliberate campaign to  
conflate the threat posed by Iraq and the threat posed by Al Qaeda.  
They deliberately blurred the line between "tactical nonconventional  
capability" and "weapon of mass destruction." And the American people  
came to the false conclusion that Iraq posed a clear and present  
danger and that invading it was a sensible way of fighting the people  
responsible for 9/11.

I can't point to anything they said which they knew to be false, but  
the case they were willfully deceptive is, in my mind, overwhelming.  
I acknowledge there is a distinction between that and an outright  
unambiguous lie, but I don't find that distinction terribly  
interesting. That is, I don't really care whether they said "imminent  
threat" or whether they said "grave and gathering threat" - the fact  
that if you look hard enough there exists a defensibly parsing of the  
words that came out of their mouths doesn't, as far as I'm concerned,  
to get them off the hook.

Matt