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in American English.
The 'center of gravity' is a bit different. American English has developed a bit differently from British English, and the older meaning has pretty much vanished from site here; the newer meanings have certainly travelled back to influence British English, and it's likely the semantic shift was beginning at or before the time the colonies were settled.
Originally fasten, secure, attach. Since things that come unfastened are frequently broken it then yielded "repair". A race that isn't going your way can be "fixed", i.e., you can ensure the "correct" outcome. Since data that doesn't say what you wanted to is "broken", you can "repair" it by "correcting" the numbers. Everything seems to to back to either "secure" or "repair".
British tends a bit more to what we Americans would consider the older definition, which still shows up in "get a fix" (military, not narcotics, usage that one), "fixate" and "fixation."
"The facts were being fixed" sounds strongly like "fabricated, made up, altered" to my ears. I'd expect the sentence to continue, "the facts were being fixed to support the policy...".
Given a location, I see the meaning shifted slightly more to "secured" or "fastened", maybe "anchored". I personally can't say "the facts were being fixed around the policy" to mean "fabricated". That was the touchstone for the facts, around which they may have been selected, but it wasn't like there was a unanimity that Iraq had no WMD and was producing none; the CIA, and, no doubt, British intelligence reports yielded a welter of opinions--yes, no, maybe. Only 'yes' were selected. This is willfil manipulation of facts, a chosing of facts to support a given hypothesis or goal. This I expected.
I personally consider "the facts were being fixed" to be playing with potential garden-pathing for political gain. A garden-path sentence is of the sort "put the apple on the mat into the box". If you just quote "put the apple on the mat" it means something rather different from "put the apple on the mat into the box." You can lexically garden-path: "John put the shot on the table" vs. "John put the shot on the table a good 25 feet": in one case, he's a hunter, in the other engaging in track and field. In this case, the syntax is being chosen to fix the meaning of the word "fix" around a certain interpretation.
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