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By Root 742 0

Council. “They could then confirm publicly they had seen the prisoner.” That did it: delegation members betrayed no hint of doubt that it was the former tyrant who was now in U.S. custody; they even berated him for his actions as Iraq’s president. “Why did you have Sayyid Muhammad al-Sadr murdered in 1999?” asked one. “Saddam Hussein, you are cursed by God,” said another. “What do you say now about the mass graves?” challenged a third. The prisoner didn’t bother denying his identity; instead, he justified his acts by calling his victims “criminals…thieves, traitors…Iranians.” Arab news media carried compelling narratives of the meeting.

The process provides a classic instance of what scholars call “converging on certainty,” when different methods all arrive at the same conclusion.

* * *

SWORN TESTIMONY

People don’t generally go to jail for lying to a reporter, but they can be imprisoned for perjury if they are shown to have lied under oath. For that reason, we can give greater weight to sworn testimony than to unsworn statements such as news releases, news conferences, or TV interviews. Lying to a congressional investigating committee or an FBI agent or a bank examiner can also be a criminal offense, so unsworn statements made to official inquiries also deserve weight, though not quite as much as statements made under oath.

SELF-INTEREST

If somebody stands to profit (or to avoid loss), we naturally give his or her statements less weight than those of a neutral observer. We don’t dismiss a statement just because it’s made by a big corporation, or by a trial lawyer who stands to gain a multimillion-dollar fee by suing that corporation, but we don’t accept such a statement at face value, either. We just assume that each party is probably giving us only one side of the story, and we look for additional evidence. We have to be alert to the possibility that a partisan is twisting the facts, either deliberately or because he or she is honestly blind to facts on the other side.

CONFESSIONS

A statement does deserve special weight, however, when the person speaking makes a confession, or states facts contrary to his or her own interest. An example occurred when President Bush answered a question on December 12, 2005, by saying, “How many Iraqi citizens have died in this war? I would say thirty thousand, more or less, have died as a result of the initial incursion and the ongoing violence against Iraqis.” His administration had previously refused to estimate civilian casualties, but now the president was in effect endorsing figures of the Iraq Body Count project, which compiles them from public, online media reports and eyewitness accounts. Bush’s statement is evidence that the U.S. government can’t refute the Iraq Body Count tabulation (which had risen to a minimum of more than 52,800 by January 2007). There are some higher estimates, disputed figures from the British medical journal The Lancet, which we’ll have more to say about later. Our point here is that Bush’s embrace of the Iraq Body Count figure is what lawyers call an “admission against interest”—a truth that it hurt him to say. We should count that as evidence that at least that many Iraqis had died.

REPUTATION OF THE AUTHORITY

When a medical study appears in The New England Journal of Medicine, we know it has gone through a systematic screening process called peer review, in which other knowledgeable scientists are asked to comment or point out possible flaws. The original author may then respond with clarifications or additional data. By contrast, we should always be skeptical of “scientific breakthroughs” that are announced at a news conference without any independent review by other experts. For example, when a news conference in 2002 proclaimed the birth of the first cloned human being (supposedly named “Eve”), it created a brief sensation. But good reporters were quick to point out that the man behind the announcement, a French former journalist named Claude Vorilhon, had renamed himself Rael, claimed to be a direct descendant of extraterrestrials