Dude, Where's My Country_ - Michael Moore [36]
Turns out there were no chemical weapons at the site and the earlier reports were completely wrong. ABC did not run a correction or retraction.
The New York Times helped get the weapons of mass destruction ball rolling with this story on September 8, 2002, headlined “U.S. Says Hussein Intensifies Quest for A-Bomb Parts”:
More than a decade after Saddam Hussein agreed to give up weapons of mass destruction, Iraq has stepped up its quest for nuclear weapons and has embarked on a worldwide hunt for materials to make an atomic bomb, Bush administration officials said today. In the last 14 months, Iraq has sought to buy thousands of specially designed aluminum tubes, which American officials believe were intended as components of centrifuges to enrich uranium.
The story? Wrong.
The Washington Post brought us the riveting story of Pfc. Jessica Lynch, the young soldier who was rescued from an Iraqi hospital after being seriously injured during a battle in the Iraqi desert:
Pfc. Jessica Lynch, rescued Tuesday from an Iraqi hospital, fought fiercely and shot several enemy soldiers . . . Lynch, a 19-year-old supply clerk, continued firing at the Iraqis even after she sustained multiple gunshot wounds and watched several other soldiers in her unit die around her in fighting March 23, one official said. . . . “She was fighting to the death,” the official said. “She did not want to be taken alive.”
The New York Times provided more dramatic details of the heroic rescue:
Navy Special Operations forces, called Seals, extracted Private Lynch while being fired upon going in and coming back out. . . . Lynch [was] the first U.S. prisoner of war extracted from enemy hands since World War II and [it was] the first time a woman has ever been rescued . . .
It took some time, but the story soon became more complicated, as The New York Times reported two months later:
It seems the plucky young private may not have fought like Rambo when her supply unit took a wrong turn into an Iraqi ambush. She may not have been shot and stabbed in that firefight, which may or may not have happened, and it seems likely now that she was not mistreated at an Iraqi hospital. Her heroic rescuers did not fight their way up the hospital halls; indeed the hospital staff may have been eager to hand her over.
Lynch was in fact given special medical care by the Iraqi hospital staff for her wounds, none of which was battle-related. An Iraqi nurse sang her to sleep at night, and she was given extra juice and cookies. The hospital staff had already tried to turn her over to U.S. authorities and were, in fact, waiting for them to arrive. Iraqi forces had already vacated the area.
While Lynch recovered in a U.S. hospital, television networks were tripping over themselves to get her exclusive story. CBS even offered her a package deal, with book, concert and TV movie prospects through CBS News, CBS Entertainment, MTV and Simon & Schuster—all under the corporate umbrella of the huge Viacom Corp.
No matter where the Jessica Lynch tale ends up being told, it’s sure to be more Survivor than The Real World. I feel sorry for her, a young woman who volunteered to risk her life to defend the United States, and she ends up being used like this, sandwiched in a mess hall full of whoppers.
#10 Triple Whopper, Biggie Size: “We didn’t lie. And we’re not lying now to cover up the lies we told you before.”
After a few in the media started to do their job and expose the lies of the Bush administration, after Bush struggled to find someone (anyone) to blame all the lying on, and after a major- ity of the American public said that they believe they were not told the whole truth about Iraq, Bush & Co. figured they had better come forward and put an end to this crisis once and for all.
So this is what they did: They biggie-sized the whoppers!
This strategy is called the pile-on effect—if you are caught in a lie, just keep denying it and keep lying no matter what.
Richard Pryor outlined this approach