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Following on this morning's frontpage topic, I would recommend Gabe Schoenfeld's close reading of the coverage surrounding the Center for Public Integrity database. Schoenfeld, I think, expounds nicely on James Joyner's quip that "Being proven wrong is not 'lying.'" He writes:

Toward the end of its story, the Times notes that “officials have defended many of their prewar statements as having been based on the intelligence that was available at the time — although there is now evidence that some statements contradicted even the sketchy intelligence of the time.”

But that is an absurd way of putting it, minimizing and obscuring some central facts. Would it not have been more honest for the newspaper of record to recall that however “sketchy” the intelligence, it was not presented by the CIA to the administration as sketchy at all? Rather, it was presented as an iron-clad case, most memorably by CIA director George Tenet as a “a slam-dunk.” And would it not have been more honest to point out that the post-war studies of Iraq’s WMD program, like the Duelfer Report, had the benefit not merely of hindsight but the ability of investigators to roam freely through Iraqi archives and facilities? Back in 2002 and early 2003, when the U.S. was gearing up for war, things looked very differently than they did afterward.

This brings us back to the question which we began. What is a false statement? Did the Bush administration lie when it relied on the CIA’s estimates of Iraq’s WMD program, or is it the Center for Public Integrity that is now doing some lying, with the New York Times brazenly helping them along?

* Schoenfeld's number is 532; ours was 935. One of these things is not like the other...