http://www.fair.org/extra/best-of-extra/gulf-war-not-true.html
Special Gulf War Issue 1991
Gulf War Stories the Media Loved
-- Except They Aren't True
"Even though a story can be incredibly preposterous in the Western mind, it
can resonate deeply in other parts of the world," Todd Levanthal, a U.S.
Information Agency specialist on disinformation, told the New York Times
(9/16/90). "The key is predisposition to believe, not the crudity of the
charge." While the point of the article was to portray Arabs as
conspiratorial and irrational, the U.S. media's acceptance of crude charges
about the official enemy demonstrates that a "Western mind" is no barrier
to a "predisposition to believe."
Most U.S. news outlets uncritically accepted the story that 300 premature
babies died when Iraqi soldiers removed them from incubators, which were
sent to Iraq as loot. Alexander Cockburn (The Nation, 2/4/91), an
exception, cited Kuwaiti medical personnel who went into exile after the
invasion, who said that babies were still in incubators at Kuwait's
Maternity Hospital in September, and that empty incubators had not been
taken.
After the end of Iraqi occupation, the
New York Times (2/28/91) offered
this two-sentence retraction, buried five-sixths of the way through an
article: "Some of the atrocities that had been reported, such as the
killing of infants in the main hospitals shortly after the invasion, are
untrue or have been exaggerated, Kuwaitis said. Hospital officials, for
instance, said that stories circulated about the killing of 300 children
were incorrect."
A "Captain Karim," ostensibly a former bodyguard of Saddam Hussein, was
featured on 60 Minutes (1/20/91), as well as prominent TV outlets in
Europe, making sensational charges about Saddam, e.g., "He become very
happy when he see anyone in the acid bath." But as reported by Doug Ireland
in the Village Voice (2/12/91), an investigation by French intelligence
could find no evidence that Karim ever worked for Saddam, and labeled him a
"mythomaniac" who had frequent contacts in Paris with Saudi military and
intelligence officers.
Indulging in wishful thinking, Time's "Grapevine" page (2/11/91) asked "Is
Saddam Cracking Up?" The piece claimed that Saddam was blinking very
rapidly during his CNN interview the previous week: 40 times a minute, vs.
20-25 during an interview in June. Time consulted John Molloy, who trains
salespeople to handle stress, who said, "When salesmen start blinking,
they're usually in trouble. The guy looks like he's falling apart."
To put Saddam's blinking in perspective, Greenpeace's Peter Dykstra did a
little research of his own: George Bush's eyes, he found, flickered at a
Saddam-like 34 to 38 blinks per minute, while Michael Dukakis' showed a
positively psychotic 74 b.p.m. Among the most reassuring eyes found by
Greenpeace were Dan Quayle's, blinking a sane 20 times per minute.
The New York Times' editorial page (1/14/91) reported that "Baghdad Betty,"
an Iraqi government propaganda broadcaster, had told U.S. troops: "G.I.,
you should be home.... While you're away, movie stars are taking your
women. Robert Redford is dating your girlfriend. Tom Selleck is kissing
your lady.... Bart Simpson is making love to your wife."
When George Bush called Iraqi radio "ridiculous," the editorial said, "he
couldn't know how right he was." But the joke was on the Times: The story
it gleefully reported as fact was actually a joke Johnny Carson told on the
Tonight Show (8/22/90). On Jan. 31 1990, Carson said that his joke had been
"reported as a fact on CNN, Entertainment Tonight, Garrick Utley's Year-End
Wrap-Up [on NBC], and in this issue of Time magazine [1/21/91]." In
Carson's original joke, it's dad Homer Simpson instead of Bart -- a
slightly more plausible scenario, since Bart is eight years old.
