Why Leaders Lie - Mearsheimer, John J_ [8]
Lying is when a person makes a statement that he knows or suspects to be false in the hope that others will think it is true. A lie is a positive action designed to deceive the target audience. Lying can involve making up facts that one knows to be false or denying facts that one knows to be true. But lying is not only about the truthfulness of particular facts. It can also involve the disingenuous arrangement of facts to tell a fictitious story. Specifically, a person is lying when he uses facts—even true facts—to imply that something is true, when he knows that it is not true.1 In such cases, the liar is purposely leading the listener to a false conclusion without explicitly stating that conclusion.
There is always the possibility, of course, that a person who thinks that he is telling a lie has the facts wrong and is inadvertently telling the truth. The reverse might be true as well: a person who believes that he is telling the truth might have his facts wrong. This problem, however, is irrelevant for my purposes, because I am interested in determining whether a person is being truthful—stating facts or telling a story that he believes to be true—not whether he ultimately proves to be right or wrong about the facts. Simply put, my concern is with truthfulness, not the truth.2
Spinning is different from lying, although there will be some cases where the distinction is murky. Spinning is when a person telling a story emphasizes certain facts and links them together in ways that play to his advantage, while, at the same time, downplaying or ignoring inconvenient facts. Spinning is all about interpreting the known facts in a way that allows the spinner to tell a favorable story. It is all about emphasizing and deemphasizing particular facts to portray one’s position in a positive light. With spinning, no attempt is made to render a completely accurate account of events. The basic story being told is distorted, but the facts are not put together so as to tell a false story, which would be a lie. Spinning is exaggeration or distortion, not prevarication. Tiger Woods captured the essence of spinning when he told an interviewer from Sports Illustrated in 2000, “I’ve learned you can always tell the truth, but you don’t have to tell the whole truth.”3
What usually happens in an American courtroom provides a good way of illustrating the difference between lying and spinning. When a witness is called to the stand he is sworn to tell “the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth” and then he is asked a series of questions, which he is expected to answer truthfully. The person in the docket could lie, but the key point is that he is required by law to tell what he believes to be the truth. The attorneys for the plaintiff and the defendant, on the other hand, are primarily interested in winning the case for their clients, not determining the full truth about what happened in the dispute at hand. Accordingly, each makes an opening and closing statement in which he spins the facts of the case in ways that puts his client in the most favorable light. The rival lawyers invariably tell two different stories, but neither is allowed to lie. The American Bar Association, for example, stipulates in its rules of conduct that “a lawyer shall not knowingly make a false statement of fact or law to a tribunal.”4 Spinning, however, is not only permissible; it is what lawyers routinely do for their clients.
The third kind of deception is concealment, which involves withholding information that might undermine or weaken one’s position. In cases of this sort, the individual simply remains silent about the evidence, because he wants to hide it from others. Of course, if he is asked a question about the matter and lies to conceal it, that behavior fits my definition of lying. A good example of concealment is the Bush administration’s decision not to tell the public before the Iraq War began in March 2003 that two key Al Qaeda figures—Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and Abu Zabaydah—had separately told their American interrogators that Osama