Quote Originally Posted by Fuchs View Post
Wikipedia:


They had a fixed idea. To assert that one's fixed idea is a fact is lying as long as you don't have enough evidence.
Is Wikipedia authoritative now?

So who gets to say what enough evidence is? Following this definition Aristotle was a liar because he war wrong about there only being four elements! He looked at the evidence he saw, came out with an assertion and taught it as truth. He could have done any of the tests that were later done to prove that there were multiple elements, but he chose not to.

In the end, there was a lot of indication that Saddam had WMD, as stated above even some of Saddam's own thought they did. So it is not as though this wasn't something that was WIDELY believed. But if we flip this around and rolled into Iraq and found WMD, then would you be a liar, or everyone who asserted to that Iraq didn't have WMD? Saddam would, because he would have known better. Everyone else would have just been wrong.

This is no trivial item, and I will fight this tooth and nail because calling people liars who act on intelligence and get it wrong is a very bad precedent. There is always conflicting information, and it is always a guessing game. If you try and turn intelligence analysts who are wrong from merely being in error, into morally reprehensible evil creatures, you set up an incentive system whereby no one will ever be willing to make any assertions. There is no such thing as 100%, and I fault the Bush administration for passing things off as being 100% for political reasons, but going with your best estimate is what you have to do, and sometimes you are wrong. That doesn't make you a liar, though.