Books about spies and traitors - and the congressional hearings that follow the exposure of traitors - generally assume that false-negative errors are much worse than false-positive errors.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
Many intelligence reports in war are contradictory; even more are false, and most are uncertain.
I've learned the hard way at the national level that any erroneous statement will very quickly be magnified. So, as someone who talks for a living, I've learned to check, double-check and triple-check my sources.
In 2004, I wrote 'What We've Lost,' a book about the Bush administration. It sold only reasonably well, in part, I think, because the book was a horrific downer, an unrelenting account of the administration's actions, bungles, deceptions, half-truths, untruths, and downright corruptions.
Mistakes, after all, are endemic to foreign and military policy given the unpredictability of events and the difficulty of securing reliable information in a place like Iraq.
All humans make mistakes. But there is no room or allowance in the fevered world of conspiracy theorists for mistakes, human errors, anomalies, or plain incompetence, though the latter, from the highest levels on down, is endemic to our society.
I'm interested in the truth, and unauthorized biographies are not. Yes, I would like to correct those errors someday.
If you're going to write a good book, you have to make mistakes and you have to not be so cautious all the time.
History books that contain no lies are extremely dull.
An error is the more dangerous in proportion to the degree of truth which it contains.
Honest error in the face of complex and possibly intractable problems is a far more important source of bad results than are bad motives.