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September 30, 2006

Miniter - Disinformation

The book is Disinformation 22 Media Myths That Undermine the War on Terror by Richard Miniter, copyright 2005, Regnery Publishing Inc.

I did my first book review on this blog, on Friedman's The World is Flat, because I felt the book was really important and informative. This book, Disinformation, is in my opinion not as significant. But it's a worthwhile book so I figure, why not write a brief record of reading it.

From the whole title I expected a partisan diatribe on the irresponsible leftist media. The book itself is very different in tone, so I suspect the title was imposed by a publisher with an eye toward target market segments. Miniter is a careful researcher who has worked on the (London) Sunday Times investigative team and whose articles have appeared in the NY Times, Washington Post, Christian Science Monitor, and other respected publications. Each discussion of one of the myths starts with a direct quote of its source or one of its proponents, and by no means are all the quotes from leftists or liberal media. Some are even from President Bush.

Myth #1 "Bin Laden was trained and funded by the CIA; Bin Laden got his start, in Afghanistan, with CIA assistance." Careful research with quotes from people all across the spectrum shows in the Afghan war against Russia the CIA funded native Afghans, through Pakistan's intelligence service. The CIA did not provide any money or training for Arabs or other foreign fighters. Bin Laden and the CIA had no connection.

#2 "Bin Laden has a vast fortune and is able to finance terrorism out of his own pocket." Bin Laden's father was immensely rich but he also had a very large family. Bin Laden only had access to a relatively small fraction of the fortune. Saudi Arabia prevented Bin Laden from inheriting, and Sudan nationized the businesses Bin Laden had in that country. Bin Laden is not poor, but he can't finance much of anything out of his own pocket.

#3 "Bin Laden is on dialysis". I hadn't heard this one, but evidently it is a widespread myth and utterly wrong.

$4 "Before 9/11 no one had heard of Bin Laden." Before 9/11 there were more than 17,000 mentions of his name in major newspapers and 180 mentions in major news magazines.

#5 "Bush Knew - Pres Was Warned of Possible Hijackings Before Terror Attack" NY Post headline. This is based on a briefing paper presented to the President August 6, 2001. The transcript of that paper shows it was very general, made no predictions, and dealt solely with past or present events, not future.

#6 "Israel attacked the twin towers; Mossad warned Jews to stay home so no Jews died on 9/11." Jews died along with many other people on 9/11. The whole blame-Israel thing has no basis.

And so it goes, one myth after another falling to investigation of the facts. I'll just review a few more.

#11 "There is no evidence that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction." When I think of a "weapon of mass destruction" I think of an atomic bomb. It is true no atomic bombs were found. But the phrase weapons of mass destruction includes chemical and biological weapons as well as nuclear. Bear in mind that the UN inspection program was a farce and Saddam was busy hiding stuff. Here are some things that were found:
- 1.77 metric tons of enriched uranium, the kind used to make atomic bombs
- 1000 radioactive materials in powdered form used in radioactive dirty bombs
- numerous chemical weapons warheads
- 1500 gallons of chemical agents for weapons
- bombs containing the nerve agent sarin
- projectiles with mustard gas
Miniter also reports on and/or quotes 11 non-partisan experts on Saddam's efforts to develop nuclear and other weapons of mass destruction.

#16 Terrorism is caused by poverty. A forensic psychologist, Marc Sageman, gathered information on 400 terrorists from public records. He expected to find the same personality profiles as with non-political murderers. To his surprise three quarters of the terrorists were upper middle class, 90% came from caring intact families, and 63% had gone to college (very unusual in the third world). The average age was 26 and 73% were married. Only 4 out of 400 had evidence of emotional problems or thought disorders. These were their society's "best and brightest."

Posted by rob at 08:28 AM | Comments (0)