British Sources confirm the definition of "Fixed" once and for all.

[LightningFlash]

http://mediamatters.org/items/200506170003

"British sources confirm that meaning of "fixed" -- as in "manipulated" or "cooked" -- is the same in Britain and America

Conservatives have attempted to dismiss the Downing Street memo, a secret British intelligence document indicating that intelligence officials there believed that the Bush administration was manipulating intelligence to support its case for war in Iraq by insisting that the term "fixed" has a different meaning in British English than in the United States. The memo describes Sir Richard Dearlove, head of the British foreign intelligence agency MI6, stating that in Washington, "the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy." In fact, British reports -- including one that quoted the memo itself six weeks before the British Sunday Times published its full text on May 1 -- refute the notion that "fixed" means anything different in British parlance.

Robin Niblett, executive vice president and chief operating officer of the Center for Strategic and International Studies, claimed that "'Fixed around' in British English means 'bolted on' rather than altered to fit the policy." In an exclusive interview with Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice on the June 15 edition of MSNBC's Hardball with Chris Matthews, Rice eagerly agreed with Matthews's suggestion that in Britain the word "fixed" really "means just put things together." In the June 20 issue of the conservative Weekly Standard, contributing editor Tod Lindberg wrote of the memo: "'Fix' here is clearly meant in its traditional sense, in the sort of English spoken by Oxbridge dons and MI6 directors -- to make fast, to set in order, to arrange."

Other conservatives questioned the meaning of "fixed" without explicitly suggesting transatlantic miscommunication. On the June 10 edition of PBS' NewsHour with Jim Lehrer, National Review editor Rich Lowry claimed "it was meant in the sense that the intelligence is supporting the policy asking questions like what will a post-invasion Iraq look like and questions of that nature." National Review Online contributing editor James S. Robbins also doubted the meaning of "fixed around the policy" in a June 6 column and in a June 16 article on the conservative website CNSNews.com. The June 14 edition of CNN's Inside Politics cited a commentary making this argument by the conservative blog Dean's World........"

The last and most laughable strawman for P.N.A.C and the rest is dead. Now demand that the corporate media do their jobs, for once in their lifetime, and APOPLOGIZE to everyone!!!!!

Demand that they apologize or else we're all stop watching-and we already know how BAD their viewership is already.....And how fast its sinking.

Go to it!!!! http://www.rumormillnews.com/MEDIA_EMAIL_ADDRESSES.htm

[kittenpants]

1. jolly good, guv'nah!

[On the Road]

2. My Question Always Was:

If that's common usage in the UK, how come nobody the English never interpreted that way? How come Blair or his supporters couldn't convince people of that "natural" usage.

[LightningFlash]

3. Because Blair rhymes with Bliar...And he lied.

And lied again and again and again and it's all on record. He tried to convince his team that "fixed" was a "put together" euphanism....

[TahitiNut]

4. "The fix is in."

There's not a sycophantic neocon on the planet that wouldn't know what that means, both in the UK and the colonies. Indeed, rather than expressing puzzlement, they'd be trying to get a piece of the action. And they did.

[zoeb]

5. It's all a pack of lies

"'Fixed around' in British English means 'bolted on'

"fixed" -- as in "manipulated" or "cooked"

to make fast, to set in order, to arrange."

"the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy."

I think it all reads the same. It's a semantics game and it should be called for what it is - a pack of lies!

[evilkumquat]

6. Why Does This Remind Me Of...

...when Bill Clinton (our last elected President) was being forced to testify about his affair with the Beefy Beret and was being soundly berated (from both sides) for his admittedly weak defense of "That depends on how you define insert term here."

I mean, come on, that is exactly what the Repugs are doing now!

I do not expect the MSM to hit them for this, but John Stewart better the hell!

What is next? Bill Frist saying "I did not make a diagnosis of that woman."

Oh, wait...

Evil Kumquat

[kansasblue]

7. These foreign languages are sooooo tough!

That goodness for a translation!

[Igel]

8. I'll repeat how I took it before.

"Chosen to suit". Not "altered to fit."

"Chosen to suit" precisely matches the context and syntax of the sentence; it also precisely matches what Lowry implies.

I'd expect a different preposition for if the semantics were "changed".

But, silly me, I still think words need to be defined in context, in such a way as to make the passage coherent (in the sense of Halliday & Hasan).

[evermind]

15. Nah - Oxford English Dictionary doesn't have "chosen to suit", but

it does have "fraudulently arranged" (sense 12(b) in my copy of the concise OED). As in "the race (election, etc.) was fixed".

See my post at http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=132x1864438#1864608 for the full story on this sentence. In short, the most important word is not "fixed", but "but". This guarantees that the verb has a negative sense.

[Igel]

16. "Fraudulently arranged" will do, since your dictionary appears

to be inspired. (As opposed to the ability of users of the language--like lexicographers--to devise their own definitions.)

But the crucial difference is between "arranged" and "fabricated." Nobody denies the former meaning, but everybody is taking great pains to believe the latter. I can fix a race, in that I alter conditions to produce an outcome; I can also fix the numbers, in which I don't alter the conditions, but the numbers. Polysemy. Neat word.

[evermind]

17. Well, yeah, but there's not really any room for doubt that some of

the "intelligence" was essentially lies: the Niger nukes, eg. Plus all the hogwash that Chalabi was feeding to the OSP, and the press, some of which at least Wolfowitz seems to have had at least some faith in.

I think, if you fix a race, or an election, it means the result is - at least in some sense - a "fabrication"; but there's a whole other can of semantic worms, I imagine.. ;-)

Check out the story of Hussein Kamel, Saddam's son in law (I think McGovern made a reference during his initial presentation to the recent DSM forum). The story is at http://www.middleeastreference.org.uk/kamel.html

Very briefly: "Gen. Hussein Kamel, the former director of Iraq's Military Industrialization Corporation, in charge of Iraq's weapons programme, defected to Jordan on the night of 7 August 1995, together with his brother Col. Saddam Kamel. Hussein Kamel took crates of documents revealing past weapons programmes, and provided these to UNSCOM" - this guy knew all about Iraqi WMD.

In his debriefing interview, he stated:

* "I ordered destruction of all chemical weapons. All weapons - biological, chemical, missile, nuclear were destroyed"
(p. 13).

* "I made the decision to disclose everything so that Iraq could return to normal." (p.8)

* "we changed the [VX] factory into pesticide production. Part of the establishment started to produce medicine ... We gave insturctions not to produce chemical weapons." (p.13).

Pretty categorical. See the link for his whole interview.

However:

* Prime Minister Tony Blair in his statement to the House of Commons on 25 February 2003, said: "It was only four years later after the defection of Saddam's son-in-law to Jordan, that the offensive biological weapons and the full extent of the nuclear programme were discovered."

* President Bush declared in a 7 October 2002 speech: "In 1995, after several years of deceit by the Iraqi regime, the head of Iraq's military industries defected. It was then that the regime was forced to admit that it had produced more than 30,000 liters of anthrax and other deadly biological agents. The inspectors, however, concluded that Iraq had likely produced two to four times that amount. This is a massive stockpile of biological weapons that has never been accounted for, and capable of killing millions."

* Colin Powell's 5 February 2003 presentation to the UN Security Council claimed: "It took years for Iraq to finally admit that it had produced four tons of the deadly nerve agent, VX. A single drop of VX on the skin will kill in minutes. Four tons. The admission only came out after inspectors collected documentation as a result of the defection of Hussein Kamal, Saddam Hussein's late son-in-law."

* In a speech on 26 August 2002, Vice-President Dick Cheney said Kamel's story "should serve as a reminder to all that we often learned more as the result of defections than we learned from the inspection regime itself".

Now that sort of cherry-picking is so egregious as to amount to fabrication, imo. There *is* such a thing as lying by omission. The intent is clearly there to leave the hearer with the impression that the weapons programmes were active, which the speakers had no reason to believe, and every reason not to believe, from Kamel's statements.

All this is documented and footnoted at the link..

[Doctor_J]

9. Someone needs to tell Tweety

he's the whore that's been saying "fixed" had some good connotation.

[KansDem]

10. But...but...USAToday said it didn't mean that at all!

As I recall, USAToday said it meant something like "'bolted on' rather than altered to fit the policy."

http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/2005-06-07-bush-blair_x.htm

You mean, USAToday is wrong?!?!

:cry:Kansdem, who just realized USAToday reports inaccurate information...

[Liberal In Texas]

12. What!? No "pie chart"?

According to the "prestigious" USA Today:

USA TODAY chose not to publish anything about the memo before today for several reasons, says Jim Cox, the newspaper's senior assignment editor for foreign news. "We could not obtain the memo or a copy of it from a reliable source," Cox says. "There was no explicit confirmation of its authenticity from (Blair's office). And it was disclosed four days before the British elections, raising concerns about the timing."

Do these guys know how to use the internet?

What a rag.

[gratuitous]

11. Next word to baffle the conservatives

"Intelligence."

[Straight Shooter]

14. And, after that ...

What is the precise meaning of the word "around"?

[seemslikeadream]

13. the grin in number 10 downing street

SMIRK A LITTLE SMIRK FOR ME VIDEO>