unSpun_ Finding Facts in a World of Disinformation - Brooks Jackson [9]
The radio ad also said, “We don’t know whether Osama’s family members would have told us where bin Laden was hiding. But thanks to the Bush White House, we’ll never find out.” That was utterly false. The FBI had questioned the family members—almost two dozen of them. Here’s some of what the 9/11 Commission’s final report said on that point:
Twenty-two of the 26 people on the Bin Ladin flight were interviewed by the FBI. Many were asked detailed questions. None of the passengers stated that they had any recent contact with Usama Bin Ladin or knew anything about terrorist activity [pp. 557–58].
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False Radio Ad
MEDIA FUND: “Flight Home”
Announcer: After nearly 3,000 Americans were killed, while our nation was mourning the dead and the wounded, the Saudi royal family was making a special request of the Bush White House. As a result, nearly two dozen of Osama bin Laden’s family members were rounded up—not to be arrested or detained, but to be taken to an airport, where a chartered jet was waiting…to return them to their country. They could have helped us find Osama bin Laden. Instead the Bush White House had Osama’s family flown home, on a private jet, in the dead of night, when most other air traffic was grounded.
We don’t know whether Osama’s family members would have told us where bin Laden was hiding. But thanks to the Bush White House, we’ll never find out.
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Furthermore, the 9/11 Commission said that the bin Laden family members might not have been interviewed had they simply departed the country in the usual way, rather than leaving on a charter flight with special White House clearance:
Having an opportunity to check the Saudis was useful to the FBI. This was because the U.S. government did not, and does not, routinely run checks on foreigners who are leaving the United States. This procedure [chartering a flight] was convenient to the FBI, as the Saudis who wished to leave in this way would gather and present themselves for record checks and interviews, an opportunity that would not be available if they simply left on regularly scheduled commercial flights [p. 557].
Fifty-two percent of the people we polled found it truthful that the Bush administration let the bin Laden family leave the United States while airspace was still closed. In this case it was mostly Democrats who were deceived (perhaps because they wanted to be; more on that later): 70 percent of them found the false statement truthful. But nearly half the independents were taken in, too: 48 percent found it truthful. And more than one third of Republicans—36 percent—also bought the myth that Bush let the bin Laden clan skedaddle when airports were still closed.
Nonstop Deception
Political deception doesn’t stop when elections are over. Even in nonelection years, interest groups now weigh in on legislative and other policy debates with TV ad campaigns on which they spend tens of millions of dollars. In 2005:
• In a radio ad by a conservative group called Freedom-Works, former Republican House leader Dick Armey misleadingly claimed a proposed reform of asbestos litigation set aside “billions of…tax dollars as payoffs to trial lawyers.” In fact, trial lawyers had opposed the measure; it would have cut into their legal fees.
• A liberal group called Campaign for America’s Future ran a grossly misleading newspaper ad claiming that Wall Street stockbrokers stood to get a $279 billion windfall from the individual Social Security accounts that Bush outlined in some detail in 2005. FactCheck.org