Washington Post editorial page editor Fred Hiatt has returned us to the morass of the tiresome debate about whether President Bush lied about the war in Iraq — the same one that bogged down Jon Stewart’s interview with Scott McClellan.

Hiatt quotes a Senate Select Committee on Intelligence report saying “the administration repeatedly presented intelligence as fact when it was unsubstantiated, contradicted or even nonexistent,” suggesting this is equivalent to saying Bush “lied,” and then points to conclusions in the report that appear to exonerate the President.

In response, Brad DeLong lists bullet points from the report that he says are “six of Bush, Cheney, and now Hiatt’s lies”:

• Statements and implications by the President and Secretary of State suggesting that Iraq and al-Qa’ida had a partnership, or that Iraq had provided al-Qa’ida with weapons training, were not substantiated by the intelligence.
• Statements by the President and the Vice President indicating that Saddam Hussein was prepared to give weapons of mass destruction to terrorist groups for attacks against the United States were contradicted by available intelligence information.
• Statements by President Bush and Vice President Cheney regarding the postwar situation in Iraq, in terms of the political, security, and economic, did not reflect the concerns and uncertainties expressed in the intelligence products.
• Statements by the President and Vice President prior to the October 2002 National Intelligence Estimate regarding Iraq’s chemical weapons production capability and activities did not reflect the intelligence community’s uncertainties….
• The Secretary of Defense’s statement that the Iraqi government operated underground WMD facilities that were not vulnerable to conventional airstrikes… was not substantiated by available intelligence information.
• The Intelligence Community did not confirm that Muhammad Atta met an Iraqi intelligence officer in Prague in 2001…

Similarly, Matthew Yglesias calls Hiatt’s editorial “preposterous” and describes the “war sales pitch” as “deeply dishonest,” “not supported by the evidence,” and a “dishonest tapestry.”

Once again, however, the problem with this debate is the way it becomes hung up on the word “lies.” As I noted in the Stewart post (among others), the word “lie” implies an outright falsehood made with conscious intent. But (a) we can never prove intent and (b) most of the Bush administration’s deceptions are exaggerations, false suggestions, and half-truths rather than outright falsehoods (as in DeLong’s list above). Why can’t we just focus on the problems with (b) rather than wasting more time on this pointless debate?