unSpun_ Finding Facts in a World of Disinformation - Brooks Jackson [55]
The message referred to North’s televised testimony before a Senate committee investigating the Iran-Contra affair. North, now a conservative political commentator, was then a lieutenant colonel in the U.S. Marine Corps and had played a key role in the scandal as a White House military aide involved in secretly aiding the Contra rebels of Nicaragua in their attempt to overthrow the leftist president of Nicaragua, Daniel Ortega. But the message was totally false. In 1987, bin Laden was in Afghanistan fighting the Soviet Union, not the United States. He didn’t form al Qaeda until the following year. Gore didn’t question North: he wasn’t even a member of the Iran-Contra investigating committee. The man questioning North was John Nields, the investigating committee’s lawyer. The security system cost $13,800 (according to North’s subsequent indictment) and not $60,000.
Yet this nonsense still circulates. Our inbox at FactCheck.org contains messages from dozens of people who have received the hoax, asking us whether there is anything to it. A woman who said she lives just blocks from the site of the World Trade Center called us in January 2006 after her brother sent her a version of the message complete with color photos of the Twin Towers burning. She said that despite her expressions of skepticism, her brother insisted it was true. There were plenty of reasons for the sister to question the message. Why isn’t North himself hammering away at it constantly on Fox News, where he is host of a weekly program? Would Al Gore really have asked softball questions such as “Why are you so afraid of this man?” at a nationally televised hearing?
The brother swallowed this bunkum, we suspect, because he wanted to believe it. The Ollie-Osama-Al fairy tale made liberal Democrats look like fools and the hard-nosed conservative North look like a prophet. It also shifted blame for the failure to foresee the 9/11 attacks away from incumbent President George W. Bush. While we can’t read the brother’s mind, he probably fell into the “root for my side” trap we described in Chapter 4. What’s certain is that he failed to adopt the active open-mindedness that could have saved him from being fooled. We know this because he not only failed to note the warning signs that made his sister doubt this tale, he also failed to make even a feeble effort to look for contrary evidence. And he could have found that evidence with no more effort than it took him to forward the fable to his sister.
What Ollie Really Said
As we write this, an Internet search for the keywords “Oliver North” plus “bin Laden” brings up literally dozens of articles disputing the hoax. That would have told our correspondent’s brother that, at the very least, there were serious doubts about the accuracy of the story, and that a little more research was called for. The very first hit on our search was an article headlined “Oliver Twisted,” which flatly declares that the story of the hearing is false.
Why should we believe this article and not an e-mail message, which may have come from a trusted friend or relative? Actually, we shouldn’t believe either of them, not automatically. So far we’ve discovered only that the e-mail may be a hoax and that we need to dig more deeply.
First, we evaluate the “Oliver Twisted” article. It gives the sources of its information in footnotes, thus enabling us to check what’s being said. Also, the article appears on Snopes.com, a website that has been around for years and is run by two California folklore experts, Barbara and David P. Mikkelson, who are devoted to examining the many urban legends that have migrated to the Web. That’s another point in favor of Snopes.com, a site that isn’t pushing any particular political agenda or point of view. As