No outright lies, just half-truths - Cleaning up Bush's uranium fumble

[NNN0LHI]

http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/columnists/chi-0307160233jul16,1,2402870.column

Published July 16, 2003


WASHINGTON -- President Bush's critics are overreacting a bit when they accuse him of "lying" in his now-famous 16 words of questionable Iraqi weapons claims. He did not lie. He simply told half of the truth, the half that helped him to make his case for going to war against Iraq.

Lying is not the same thing as telling a convenient half-truth. Remember Bill Clinton?

Clinton's critics excoriated him for telling half-truths to wriggle his way out of personal embarrassment. It must be amusing for Clinton to see many of his tormentors now defending the half-truths that Bush told in order to wriggle this country into a war.

The 16 words in the president's State of the Union address in January went like this: "The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa."

On its face, that statement is not false. But the president did not reveal the other half of that statement's story: that our own CIA disbelieved what the British had "learned."

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