Amidst an otherwise interesting article about how to debunk a myth, the Washington Post tosses a few context-less grenades at the Bush Administration and the War on Terror.
... But the new psychological studies show that denials and clarifications, for all their intuitive appeal, can paradoxically contribute to the resiliency of popular myths.This phenomenon may help explain why large numbers of Americans incorrectly think that Saddam Hussein was directly involved in planning the Sept 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, and that most of the Sept. 11 hijackers were Iraqi. While these beliefs likely arose because Bush administration officials have repeatedly tried to connect Iraq with Sept. 11, the experiments suggest that intelligence reports and other efforts to debunk this account may in fact help keep it alive.
The only link the Bush Administration has made between Saddam Hussein and 9/11 is that our invasion of Iraq is part of a greater Global War on Terror. No Bush Administration official has ever claimed that Saddam Hussein was involved in planning 9/11, but both the attack on the World Trade Center and the invasion of Iraq are part of the same overarching conflict. The Washington Post pathetically mischaracterizes the most important issue of our time to score cheap political points.
And then at the bottom of the story is a control that lets you add an Iraq War body count to your blog!
I doubt the authors of the psychology paper the article was ostensibly about were happy to see their research hijacked.
