unSpun by Brooks Jackson

Author:Brooks Jackson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction
ISBN: 9781588365828
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2008-10-16T16:00:00+00:00

Fighting Words

Getting the facts wrong can—in fact, often does—lead to the worst of human calamities, war. The U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in 2003 is only the most recent example. Six weeks before it began, 76 percent of Americans in a Time/CNN/Harris Interactive poll answered “yes” when asked, “Do you think Saddam Hussein currently provides assistance to Osama bin Laden’s Al-Qaeda terrorist network, or don’t you think so?” Only 15 percent said “no.” The widespread belief that Saddam was aiding Al-Qaeda was later declared unfounded by the bipartisan 9/11 Commission. Nothing that can fairly be called evidence has ever surfaced to support the notion. And of course, now we know that Saddam Hussein had dismantled his nuclear weapons program and gotten rid of stockpiles of chemical and germ weapons, contrary to what the public was told by the president and the CIA before the war.

But the Iraq War isn’t the first one Americans have fought on the basis of false beliefs. We’ve been making that mistake for more than a century.

On February 15, 1898, an explosion ripped through the hull of the American battleship U.S.S. Maine and sank her in Havana harbor with the loss of 266 lives. Soon the cry “Remember the Maine, to Hell with Spain” was on the lips of war hawks; the incident led to the Spanish-American War and the loss of another 3,000 American lives. But did the Spanish sink the Maine? Probably not.

Spain always denied any responsibility, and indeed had no sane reason to provoke the militarily superior Americans into a war that eventually cost it Cuba, the Philippines, Puerto Rico, and Guam. A century of historical inquiry has produced no documentary evidence of a Spanish plot. A mine might have been set by somebody else, perhaps a Cuban trying to provoke the United States into attacking Spain. But even that is now considered unlikely.

To be sure, two official naval inquiries, in 1898 and 1911, did conclude that the Maine was sunk by a mine. But in 1976, Admiral Hyman Rickover (the legendary officer who pushed through the development of the nuclear-powered submarine) conducted a private inquiry that concluded that the sinking was an accident. “We found no technical evidence…that an external explosion initiated the destruction of the Maine,” Rickover wrote, adding, “The available evidence is consistent with an internal explosion alone,” probably a coal fire that touched off a powder magazine. Coal fires, smoldering undetected, were a common hazard in the navies of that time.

Rickover’s conclusion was questioned by a 1998 study commissioned by National Geographic magazine, using advanced computer modeling. But the study was inconclusive: “The sum of these findings is not definitive in proving that a mine was the cause of the sinking of the Maine, but it does strengthen the case in favor of a mine as the cause,” the magazine said. Even that tentative statement was quickly contradicted by Otto P. Jons, executive vice president of Advanced Marine Enterprises, the very engineering company that conducted the Geographic study. Jons emphatically disagreed with his subordinates.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.