Lying by Omission is Still Lying

I want you to read this carefully, those few percentage out there who still support this President, and still believe against all evidence that he doesn't lie.

He held a town hall type meeting today, and for the first time I'm aware of in a very long time, the audience was not pre-screened and regular American citizens were actually allowed in.

One of the people there, an older gentleman, asked a question which contained this:

...you said there were three main reasons for going to war in Iraq: Weapons of mass destruction, the claim that Iraq was sponsoring terrorists that attacked us on 9/11, and that Iraq had purchased nuclear materials from Niger. Now all three of those turned out to be false...

The President, in his response, said:

First, if I might correct a misperception, I don't think we ever said, at least I know I didn't say that there was a direct connection between September the 11th and Saddam Hussein. We DID say that he was a state sponsor of terror. ... I was very careful never to say that Saddam Hussein ordered the attacks on America.

It's that last sentence that's really telling. "I was very careful never to say that Saddam Hussein ordered the attacks on America." Why, pray tell, would you be very careful not to state something, unless you were trying very carefully to give the opposite impression? You are "very careful" not to explicitly say something for one of two reasons: Because you want someone to believe it with plausible deniability, or because you honestly don't want the wrong impression out there. When poll after poll showed (and continue to show, to some extent) that large numbers of American citizens believed that Iraq was involved in 9/11 and the Administration did no more to disabuse people of that notion than to make sure that their wording was careful to never explicitly CONFIRM it, it makes it quite clear that their agenda was not about the truth.

If you're working a logic puzzle, those sorts of hair splitting arguments may come into play. But in point of fact, trying very hard to tie the two events together in the minds of American citizens is not truthful, if you know it isn't true, even if you never explicitly say that it is.

There hasn't been a speech yet given by any top Administration official that involved Iraq in which 9/11 was not invoked. Some of the speeches stop only just technically short of the line of actually saying Hussein was involved in 9/11.

Whether he ever explicitly said it or not, this is word parsing just as bad as that President Clinton engaged in, when he said his answer depended on what the definition of "is" is.

Liam.