The DSM and the Meaning of "Fixed"
By Eric Boehlert*
06/22/2005
Christopher Hitchens becomes just the latest in a long line of mainstream scribes doing their best to undercut the importance of the Downing Street Memo. (Notice how the Right hasn't had to spend much time undermining the DSM, not when Dana Milbanks, Michael Kinsley, Hitchens and the New York Times will do their dirty work for them.)
Hitchens opts for the trusty, it's-old-news fallback position. You know, despite the fact president Bush at nearly every public opportunity in the fall of 2002 said war was a last option, every journalist in D.C. just knew it was game on. Okay, they didn't actually report that, or highlight that Bush was being disingenuous with his give-peace-a-chance rhetoric, but just the same, it was so obvious people.
But what's curious is that Hitchens tries to prop up the theory that the DSM is all a trans-Atlantic misunderstanding, a semantics mix-up, surrounding the use of "fixed." From the DSM ("C," as most people by now know, is Sir Richard Dearlove, head of Britain's Secret Intelligence Service):
"C reported on his recent talks in Washington. There was a perceptible shift in attitude. Military action was now seen as inevitable. Bush wanted to remove Saddam, through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD. But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy."
Hitchens, mocking the notion that the top-secret passage contains news, writes, "Well, if that doesn't prove it, I don't know what does. We apparently have an administration that can, on the word of a British clerk, 'fix' not just findings but also 'facts.' Never mind for now that the English employ the word 'fix' in a slightly different way—a better term might have been 'organized.'"
According to Hitchens, the White House wasn't trying to cook the books, it was simply attaching, or organizing, the intelligence, as any smart war planner would. In other words, it all depends on what the meaning of fixed is.
That theory was first raised in a June 8, article in USA Today. The paper quoted, Robin Niblett of the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a Washington think tank, who suggested it would be easy for Americans to misunderstand the reference to intelligence being “fixed around” Iraq policy. “ ‘Fixed around' in British English means ‘bolted on' rather than altered to fit the policy,” he told the paper.
During a June 16, NPR interview, New York Times correspondent Todd Purdum, who last week wrote the leaked British documents were "not so shocking," noted the "side controversy about whether the use of 'fixed' was the British, Oxford English dictionary sense of 'attached to, connected to,' as opposed to the 1919 World Series being fixed. I think there's lot of contextual evidence that the writer [of the DSM] meant the intelligence would be attached to the policy."
Is there "contextual evidence"? To see, simply take Hitchens' advice and replace the misunderstood "fixed" with the more precise "organized" and see how the now-famous passage on war intelligence would read:
"C reported on his recent talks in Washington. There was a perceptible shift in attitude. Military action was now seen as inevitable. Bush wanted to remove Saddam, through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD. But the intelligence and facts were being organized around the policy."
Slight problem, right? Why does that final sentence start with "But." If Hitchens is correct, and the memo merely suggested Bush and allies were doing due diligence, there would be no need to start the sentence with "But." (i.e. "Bush wanted to remove Saddam, though military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD. The intelligence and facts are being organized around the policy.") However, if fixed meant Bush and his top aides needed to monkey around with the CIA's intelligence, then of course that sentence would have to start with "But," in order to highlight the fact that despite attempts to hang the rationale for war on WMD's, the intelligence needed to be molded.
Or, well, fixed.
huffingtonpost.com
*A senior writer for Salon and a former contributing editor to Rolling Stone, Boehlert is at work on his first book, "Lapdogs: How Bush Got the Press to Heel." It will be published by The Free Press in 2006. |
