The Niger Uranium Fiction and How the French Tried to Warn Us About It
[Oh, and Why Bush's "Sixteen Words" Were Not Even "Technically Correct"...Again]
Drum has a summary of the LA Times piece.
The one thing KD gets wrong here--and this is common mistake that I've complained about several times before--is that Bush's claim that "The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa" was "technically correct". (Drum acknowledges, of course, that the claim was "mendaciously misleading.")
Anyway, once again:
'Learned' is a "success term." You can't assert of S that he has learned that p if your best evidence indicates that he's made a mistake. (In fact, you can't even assert it if your best evidence is equivocal and forces you to suspend judgment on the matter.) In such cases all you can assert is something like S has come to believe that p.
The situation is analogous to the case of knowledge claims. If my best evidence indicates that p is false I can't honestly assert that you know that p, but only that you believe that p. If my evidence indicates that p is false (or even that we can't tell whether or not p is true), but I know that Smith has (so far as I can tell) mistakenly come to believe that p, but I tell you that Smith knows or has learned that p, then I am deceiving you.
And that's what Bush did.
There are minor complications here, but they end up not mattering. There are strange and kinda complicated uses of 'know' and its cognates that involve intentional misuse of the term for emphasis, as when people say things like "I just knew Kerry was going to win!" What they mean is that they were really, really sure that he was going to win, but they were wrong. So they didn't know, they just believed fervently. Similarly, there's the "we learned in school" locution we sometimes use to speak about false things we were taught. Again, it's kind of a joke, or intentional misuse of the term for emphasis.
It might be worth noting here that people who've spent more time thinking about it than I have say that Clinton's point about the meaning of 'is' was, in fact, "technically correct." Kinda interesting that no liberals I ever encountered had any inclination to defend Clinton on those grounds. Once it got to that point, people basically called bullshit on him; even if he was, technically speaking, telling the truth, he was still being a weasle. Most of us didn't care about what he was being a weasle about, and thought it was none of Ken Starr's or anybody else's business anyway, and knew that many basically honest people caught in a situation like that would weasle about it, even under oath...but we didn't try to argue that he wasn't weasling just because his claims were "technically correct."
Many Bush supporters are, however, willing to defend Bush's weasling on this vastly more serious point. This is our business, and the weasling matters here in a very profound way. The fact that certain Bush supporters are willing to grasp at this linguistic straw says, I believe, a rather great deal about them.
[Oh, and Why Bush's "Sixteen Words" Were Not Even "Technically Correct"...Again]
Drum has a summary of the LA Times piece.
The one thing KD gets wrong here--and this is common mistake that I've complained about several times before--is that Bush's claim that "The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa" was "technically correct". (Drum acknowledges, of course, that the claim was "mendaciously misleading.")
Anyway, once again:
'Learned' is a "success term." You can't assert of S that he has learned that p if your best evidence indicates that he's made a mistake. (In fact, you can't even assert it if your best evidence is equivocal and forces you to suspend judgment on the matter.) In such cases all you can assert is something like S has come to believe that p.
The situation is analogous to the case of knowledge claims. If my best evidence indicates that p is false I can't honestly assert that you know that p, but only that you believe that p. If my evidence indicates that p is false (or even that we can't tell whether or not p is true), but I know that Smith has (so far as I can tell) mistakenly come to believe that p, but I tell you that Smith knows or has learned that p, then I am deceiving you.
And that's what Bush did.
There are minor complications here, but they end up not mattering. There are strange and kinda complicated uses of 'know' and its cognates that involve intentional misuse of the term for emphasis, as when people say things like "I just knew Kerry was going to win!" What they mean is that they were really, really sure that he was going to win, but they were wrong. So they didn't know, they just believed fervently. Similarly, there's the "we learned in school" locution we sometimes use to speak about false things we were taught. Again, it's kind of a joke, or intentional misuse of the term for emphasis.
It might be worth noting here that people who've spent more time thinking about it than I have say that Clinton's point about the meaning of 'is' was, in fact, "technically correct." Kinda interesting that no liberals I ever encountered had any inclination to defend Clinton on those grounds. Once it got to that point, people basically called bullshit on him; even if he was, technically speaking, telling the truth, he was still being a weasle. Most of us didn't care about what he was being a weasle about, and thought it was none of Ken Starr's or anybody else's business anyway, and knew that many basically honest people caught in a situation like that would weasle about it, even under oath...but we didn't try to argue that he wasn't weasling just because his claims were "technically correct."
Many Bush supporters are, however, willing to defend Bush's weasling on this vastly more serious point. This is our business, and the weasling matters here in a very profound way. The fact that certain Bush supporters are willing to grasp at this linguistic straw says, I believe, a rather great deal about them.
posted by Winston Smith at
9:53 AM
4 Comments:
The British were nowhere near 'knowing' anything of the sort.
Knowledge necessarily implies at least a true belief. There is no good evidence whatsoever that their belief was true.
Moreover, knowledge also implies a valid reason for one's true belief. Neither did the British have this.
Since they had NEITHER TB NOR R, they hadn't even approached KNOWING anything like that purported by the Bush administration.
I'm not sure where you got confused, The Republic, but you might want to read the post again...
Source documents are where it's at.
From the UK's Butler Report:
501. We have been told that it was not until early 2003 that the British Government became aware that the U.S. (and other states) had received from a journalistic source a number of documents alleged to cover the Iraqi procurement of uranium from Niger. Those documents were passed to the IAEA, which in its update report to the United Nations Security Council in March 2003 determined that the papers were forgeries. . . .
503. From our examination of the intelligence and other material on Iraqi attempts to buy uranium from Africa, we have concluded that:
a. It is accepted by all parties that Iraqi officials visited Niger in 1999.
b. The British Government had intelligence from several different sources indicating that this visit was for the purpose of acquiring uranium. Since uranium constitutes almost three-quarters of Niger's exports, the intelligence was credible.
c. The evidence was not conclusive that Iraq actually purchased, as opposed to having sought, uranium and the British Government did not claim this.
d. The forged documents were not available to the British Government at the time its assessment was made, and so the fact of the forgery does not undermine it.
Of course, given that the Bushies had a pretty good idea just how great the UK's *learning* was, even the meticulous word-parsing doesn't wipe the $hit off their faces:
http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-niger11dec11,0,3831325,full.story?coll=la-home-headlines
And one would think the British government would have long disowned such garbage, given all they had to do was ask their putative cross-channel ally. Or maybe they really did know, and chose to purposely play dumb poodle. You know, just to give their US masters some super-secret independent sources on which to hang their smelly laundry.
Post a Comment
Subscribe to Post Comments [Atom]
<< Home