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Desrtopa comments on What causes people to believe in conspiracy theories? - Less Wrong
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Well, the Downing Street Memo does seem to imply that he had already written the bottom line before the investigation into whether Iraq possessed WMDs had made much headway. He may well have believed that that Iraq possessed WMDs, but it seems that he had committed to the conclusion the public was going to be presented with regardless of the state of the evidence.
Having the bottom line written already is not the same thing as lying. Neither is a good thing where rational dialogue is concerned, but the claim "Bush lied" has in most common moral frameworks a very different meaning than "By a host of systemic effects and severe cognitive biases, the Bush administration gave a deeply inaccurate summary of the situation." In order to be better rationalists we need to try to be aware of how frequently apparent lies are likely just severe biases.
But deliberately misrepresenting the data in order to support a particular conclusion, that which the memo alleges, is lying about the state of the evidence, whether he and other members of the administration believed the conclusion or not.
This is interesting, in that having reread the memo, I still don't see it as saying that the data was deliberately misrepresented, and having just reread the Wikipedia page, I still don't get that attitude. I don't think this is due to bias on my part, since if I have any biases in this regard it would be biases that would make me want to think that Bush lied.
The memo says things like:
That doesn't sound like deliberate lying to me. The administration had massive systemic problems. This isn't the only example of this problem. A substantial fraction of the administration seemed to think that their personal wishes effectively determined what reality would do. (See for example Rove's comment about the "reality-based community").
It is difficult to underestimate human capacity for mendacity but it is equally hard to underestimate human capacity for self-deception.