Even though a story can be incredibly preposterous in the Western mind, it can resonate deeply in other parts of the world, Todd Leveanthal, 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, an
exception, cited Kuwaiti medical personnel who went into exile after the
incasion, 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 Irelandin 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.