unSpun_ Finding Facts in a World of Disinformation - Brooks Jackson [42]
Later, a Navy pilot, James B. Stockdale, recalled in his memoir that he had “the best seat in the house” that night as leader of a flight of jets sent from the carrier U.S.S. Ticonderoga to help defend the destroyers from their supposed attackers. He said he could see the two destroyers’ every move vividly, but saw no enemy. “There was absolutely no gunfire except our own, no PT boat wakes, not a candle light let alone a burning ship,” he wrote. Stockdale later retired with the rank of admiral, and was Ross Perot’s running mate in the 1992 presidential campaign.
Lyndon Johnson’s secretary of defense, Robert McNamara, was one of the last to concede the mistake. In June 1996, he told interviewers for CNN: “I think it is now clear [the second attack] did not occur. I asked [North Vietnamese] General Giap myself, when I visited Hanoi in November of 1995, whether it had occurred, and he said no. I accept that.”
Disinformation also accompanied the first U.S. war against Iraq, in 1991. One example is a chilling eyewitness account given by a fifteen-year-old Kuwaiti girl who described the Iraqi troops invading her country as baby-killers. In her widely reported testimony before a body of the U.S. House of Representatives, “Nayirah” said she had been a hospital volunteer when the invasion happened: “I saw the Iraqi soldiers come into the hospital with guns. They took the babies out of the incubators and left the babies to die on the cold floor. It was horrifying.”
“Nayirah” ’s testimony was endorsed implicitly by Democrat Tom Lantos and Republican John Porter, the chairmen of the Congressional Human Rights Caucus, who sponsored her appearance. They said her last name must be kept secret to prevent reprisals against her family in Kuwait. Furthermore, the independent human rights group Amnesty International produced a report saying that 312 premature infants had died after Iraqi soldiers turned them out of incubators. President George H. W. Bush repeated the baby-killer story again and again. Seven U.S. senators cited it in speeches backing a resolution to go to war with Iraq.
But the story was false. “Nayirah” turned out to be a member of the Kuwaiti royal family, the daughter of the country’s ambassador to Washington. She had been fobbed off on the Human Rights Caucus by Hill and Knowlton, a public-relations firm paid by Kuwait to whip up anti-Iraq war fever among Americans. Staffers at the Kuwaiti hospital in “Nayirah” ’s story said the things she described hadn’t happened. After more investigation, Amnesty International said it “found no reliable evidence that Iraqi forces had caused the deaths of babies by removing them from incubators,” and Amnesty withdrew its earlier report.
The truth wasn’t revealed until after the United States had expelled Iraq from Kuwait, allowing the ABC reporter John Martin to reach the hospital and interview staff. He broke the news on March 15, 1991, more than five months after “Nayirah” testified. Her identity as the ambassador’s daughter wasn’t revealed until nearly a year later, in January 1992. By then the war against the “baby killers” was long over.
A Military Duty to Lie
In the case of war, accurate information is especially hard to come by. Military commanders consider it their duty to deceive the enemy if that will win battles and save lives among their own troops. Sometimes that means deceiving the public as well, as in the 1982 Falklands War, when Britain sent a fleet to recapture these South Atlantic islands from Argentina. When an invasion seemed near, Sir Frank Cooper, an under secretary at the British Ministry of Defence, discouraged reporters from thinking there would be a Normandy-style operation with “the landing ships dashing