unSpun_ Finding Facts in a World of Disinformation - Brooks Jackson [8]
The truth is that Kerry was supporting regular increases in intelligence spending for several years prior to the attacks of September 11. But our postelection polling shows most citizens—55 percent—found the statement that Kerry voted for intelligence cuts after September 11 to be “truthful.” That false notion may have cost Kerry votes. And we believe the false picture of Kerry foolishly trying to cut intelligence spending, even after a terrorist attack that U.S. intelligence had failed to prevent, was encouraged by the wording of Bush’s ad and others like it.
The “Wolves” ad was deceptive in more direct ways as well. It said Kerry voted to “slash” intelligence spending by $6 billion, “cuts so deep they would have weakened America’s defenses.” In truth, what Kerry supported was a $1 billion cut (as part of a much broader deficit-reduction package), which would have continued for five years. It amounted to a mere 3.7 percent of total intelligence spending. Would that have “weakened America’s defenses” as the ad claimed? In 1995, when he was a Republican congressman, Bush’s own CIA director Porter Goss had proposed to cut 20 percent of the Central Intelligence Agency’s staff. Kerry’s dollar cut didn’t have to come from the personnel side of the ledger, so Goss’s Republican proposal would have cut more deeply into the human resources of the CIA than Kerry’s. But the Bush deception worked. The public went to the polls with a mental picture of Kerry as much weaker on intelligence spending than his actual record reflected. The Bush team hadn’t lied, exactly. But they gave millions of voters a false picture of Kerry’s actual record on intelligence spending.
* * *
Partisan Falsehoods Most Americans Believed
FALSEHOOD: John Kerry voted for cuts in intelligence after September 11, 2001.
Those finding statement “very truthful” or “somewhat truthful”: 55 percent
FALSEHOOD: The Bush administration permitted members of the bin Laden family to fly out of the United States while U.S. airspace was still closed after September 11, 2001.
Those finding statement “very truthful” or “somewhat truthful”: 52 percent
Source: National Annenberg Election Survey, 2004. Postelection telephone poll of adults, Nov. 10–Dec. 15, 2004. Sample size: 1,731 for both questions. The statistical margin of sampling error is +/–2.4 percentage points.
* * *
Bin Laden Baloney
Implied deception worked against Bush, too. Michael Moore’s highly partisan movie Fahrenheit 9/11 left many viewers, including the authors of this book, with the impression that President Bush had approved a special flight to allow relatives of Osama bin Laden who lived in the United States to get out of the country while U.S. airspace was still closed in the days immediately following 9/11. The movie also strongly implied that the bin Laden clan escaped without being questioned by U.S. officials about where Osama himself might be found, or about any prior knowledge of the attack. A close reading of Moore’s script shows that Moore never stated that as a fact, but his implied message was unmistakable. Over newsreel footage of passengers stranded by the 9/11 grounding of all commercial flights, Moore is heard saying, “Who wanted to fly? No one. Except the bin Ladens.” That is followed by footage of an airplane taking off, accompanied by the booming strains of The Animals’ rock song “We Gotta Get Out of This Place.” Then Moore says, “It turns out that the White House approved planes to pick up the bin Ladens.” But as the final report of the independent 9/11 Commission later documented—possibly to clarify the widely held misimpression Moore had created—the flight carrying the bin Laden relatives didn’t depart until a full week after airspace was reopened to commercial flights. Furthermore, the FBI questioned a number of the family members before they were allowed to leave.
Late in the campaign, Moore