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. “I am convinced it was not a mine,” he said at a panel convened by the U.S. Naval Institute on April 22, 1998.
The United States has gone to war on the basis of false factual claims more than once since then. In August 1964, when President Lyndon Johnson asked Congress to give him practically unlimited authority to attack North Vietnam, he believed the enemy had attacked two American destroyers, the U.S.S. Maddox and the U.S.S. Turner Joy, on the night of August 4, 1964. We now know they hadn’t. The Maddox had indeed been attacked the previous day, and there were bullet holes and photographs to prove it. But the second “attack” on the two ships was the result of jittery nerves and spurious readings of radar and sonar signals by U.S. sailors. Though the Navy claimed to have sunk two enemy PT boats during the second engagement, it never produced photographs, bodies, or wreckage to support that claim.
Later, a Navy pilot, James B. Stockdale, recalled in his memoir that he had “the best seat in the house” that night as leader of a flight of jets sent from the carrier U.S.S. Ticonderoga to help defend the destroyers from their supposed attackers. He said he could see the two destroyers’ every move vividly, but saw no enemy. “There was absolutely no gunfire except our own, no PT boat wakes, not a candle light let alone a burning ship,” he wrote. Stockdale later retired with the rank of admiral, and was Ross Perot’s running mate in the 1992 presidential campaign.
Lyndon Johnson’s secretary of defense, Robert McNamara, was one of the last to concede the mistake. In June 1996, he told interviewers for CNN: “I think it is now clear [the second attack] did not occur. I asked [North Vietnamese] General Giap myself, when I visited Hanoi in November of 1995, whether it had occurred, and he said no. I accept that.”
Disinformation also accompanied the first U.S. war against Iraq, in 1991. One example is a chilling eyewitness account given by a fifteen-year-old Kuwaiti girl who described the Iraqi troops invading her country as baby-killers. In her widely reported testimony before a body of the U.S. House of Representatives, “Nayirah” said she had been a hospital volunteer when the invasion happened: “I saw the Iraqi soldiers come into the hospital with guns. They took the babies out of the incubators and left the babies to die on the cold floor. It was horrifying.”
“Nayirah” ’s testimony was endorsed implicitly by Democrat Tom Lantos and Republican John Porter, the chairmen of the Congressional Human Rights Caucus, who sponsored her appearance. They said her last name must be kept secret to prevent reprisals against her family in Kuwait. Furthermore, the independent human rights group Amnesty International produced a report saying that 312 premature infants had died after Iraqi soldiers turned them out of incubators. President George H. W. Bush repeated the baby-killer story again and again. Seven U.S. senators cited it in speeches backing a resolution to go to war with Iraq.
But the story was false. “Nayirah” turned out to be a member of the Kuwaiti royal family, the daughter of the country’s ambassador to Washington. She had been fobbed off on the Human Rights Caucus by Hill and Knowlton, a public-relations firm paid by Kuwait to whip up anti-Iraq war fever among Americans. Staffers at the Kuwaiti hospital in “Nayirah” ’s story said the things she described hadn’t happened. After more investigation, Amnesty International said it “found no reliable evidence that Iraqi forces had caused the deaths of babies by removing them from incubators,” and Amnesty withdrew its earlier report.
The truth wasn’t revealed until after the United States had expelled Iraq from Kuwait, allowing the ABC reporter John Martin to reach the hospital and interview staff. He broke the news on March 15, 1991, more than five months after “Nayirah” testified. Her identity as the ambassador’s daughter wasn’t revealed until nearly a year later, in January 1992. By then the war against the “baby killers” was long over.
A Military Duty to Lie
In the case of war, accurate information is especially hard to come by. Military commanders consider it their duty to deceive the enemy if that will win battles and save lives among their own troops. Sometimes that means deceiving the public as well, as in the 1982 Falklands War, when Britain sent a fleet to recapture these South Atlantic islands from Argentina. When an invasion seemed near, Sir Frank Cooper, an under secretary at the British Ministry of Defence, discouraged reporters from thinking there would be a Normandy-style operation with “the landing ships dashing up to the beaches and chaps storming out and lying on their tummies and wriggling up through barbed wire.” Relying on that, British reporters told the public that “hit and run” attacks were to be expected, rather than a major battle. Reporters in the United States and elsewhere followed suit, and were badly misled—as were the Argentine defenders. They were taken by surprise the following night when a full-scale amphibious operation commenced at points around an inlet called San Carlos Water on East Falkland Island. The roughly sixty Argentine defenders were overwhelmed, and soon at least 4,000 British troops were ashore. From that secure beachhead, they advanced on the island’s major settlements and forced an Argentine surrender less than a month later.
Reporters complained bitterly about the way in which they had been manipulated. Sir Terence Lewin, chief of the British defense staff, responded: “I do not see it as deceiving the press or the public; I see it as deceiving the enemy. What I am trying to do is to win. Anything I can do to help me win is fair as far as I’m concerned, and I would have thought that that was what the Government and the public and the media would want, too, provided the outcome was the one we were all after.” That’s the way military commanders have seen it since the time of the Greeks and the Trojans. The Chinese general Sun Tzu summed it up 2,500 years ago: “All warfare is based on deception.” We doubt that will change any time soon.
It is especially difficult to get the facts right in the chaos and confusion of war, as the Tonkin Gulf incident amply illustrates. The Prussian general Carl von Clausewitz famously observed in 1832 that leaders in battle operate in a kind of feeble twilight like “a fog or moonshine.” And because so much military information is classified, the public is in even worse shape when it comes to getting accurate information about war. Often the truth emerges only in histories written a generation or more after the event.
* * *
The Fog of War
The great uncertainty of all data in war is a peculiar difficulty, because all action must, to a certain extent, be planned in a mere twilight, which in addition not infrequently�
��like the effect of a fog or moonshine—gives to things exaggerated dimensions and unnatural appearance. What this feeble light leaves indistinct to the sight, talent must discover, or must be left to chance.
—GENERAL CARL VON CLAUSEWITZ, On War (1832)
* * *
We can’t say how history would have turned out had American citizens known the truth about the Maine, or the truth about what happened in the Tonkin Gulf, or the truth about the Iraqi “baby killers” in 1991, or the truth about Saddam Hussein’s lack of chemical, biological, or nuclear weapons in 2003. In each case the United States had other reasons for war: the desire to grab pieces of Spain’s doddering empire in 1898; the wish to evict an aggressor from Kuwait and its oilfields in 1991. Perhaps none of the wars would have been averted. But then again, had the public known the facts, war fever might well have run lower, and leaders might have acted differently. We can never know for sure. What we do know is that the Spanish-American War, the Vietnam War, and two Iraq wars were begun, at least in part, under false pretenses.
When war talk runs hot, keep an open mind and keep asking yourself, “I wonder how this will look when the history books are written?”
Fortunately, it’s not as hard to get current, accurate information about other matters that bear on our well-being. Even in a world of spin, ordinary citizens can call up reliable sources of information quickly and easily on the Internet. Do you want more information on that miracle prescription medication you saw advertised on television? The full list of side effects is only a few keystrokes away at the Food and Drug Administration’s website, and reputable consumer sites contain information about whether it works as well as advertised or is any better than cheaper generic drugs. At www.worstpills.org, for example, you can find strong criticisms of even FDA-approved medications by an aggressive consumer advocate, Dr. Sidney Wolfe. Does that tax-avoidance maneuver you’re hearing about seem a bit fishy? The IRS has lots of information about tax scams that it would like to share with you. Has your uncle Bob sent you an e-mail with the subject line “You must read this,” which turns out to be a much-forwarded claim that mass marketers are about to run up charges on your cell phone with unwanted sales calls? You can debunk that easily at any of the several websites that specialize in puncturing urban myths, and get authoritative word directly from the Federal Trade Commission itself.
In this chapter, we’ve been stressing that facts are important. We now turn to how to tell which facts are most important, and how to tell the difference between evidence and random anecdotes. Later on we’ll tell you how you can get those facts yourself, using some of the techniques we use every day at FactCheck.org.
Chapter 6
The Great Crow Fallacy
Finding the Best Evidence
TERRY MAPLE WASN’T SURE, BUT HE THOUGHT HE MIGHT HAVE seen a crow using cars to crack walnuts. He had spotted the crow dropping nuts on the pavement one day as he drove through Davis, California. Maple couldn’t know that his curious observation would give rise to a twenty-year legend that would significantly elevate crows’ status on the avian IQ scale. We tell the story here as a cautionary tale to those with a tendency to draw fast conclusions from limited evidence.
Maple, a psychology professor at the University of California–Davis, published an article in 1974 describing the single crow and its behavior. The title was “Do Crows Use Automobiles as Nutcrackers?” Maple couldn’t answer the question, and it wasn’t even clear whether the crow he saw had managed to crack the nut it dropped: “I was, unfortunately, unable to return to the scene for a closer look,” he wrote. The professor correctly called his observation “an anecdote,” meaning an interesting story that suggested crows might use cars to crack walnuts, and that future research might settle the question.
Jump ahead three years, to a November morning in 1977. A biologist named David Grobecker observed a single crow dropping a palm fruit from its beak onto a busy residential street in Long Beach, California. The bird seemed to wait, perched on a lamppost, until a car ran over the fruit and broke it into edible fragments. Then it flew down to eat. This happened twice in the space of about twenty minutes. Grobecker and another biologist, Theodore Pietsch, published an article the following year whose title, “Crows Use Automobiles as Nutcrackers,” suggested they had answered the question posed by Maple. “This is indeed an ingenious adjustment to the intrusion of man’s technology,” the authors concluded.
For nearly twenty years, others cited these two published accounts as evidence of exceptional intelligence in crows. Indeed, some crow fanciers remain convinced—largely on the basis of these two anecdotes—that crows have learned how to use passing cars to crack nuts. But it turns out that although crows are smart birds, they are almost certainly not that smart.
How do we know? Because we now have some real data, not single observations or anecdotes. There is a big difference, as the rest of this story illustrates.
The data come from a study published in The Auk, the journal of the American Ornithologists’ Union, in 1997 by the biologist Daniel Cristol and three colleagues from the University of California. Cristol’s study was based on more than a couple of random observations. He and his colleagues watched crows foraging for walnuts on the streets of Davis for a total of over twenty-five hours spread over fourteen days. Just as they had expected, they saw plenty of crows dropping walnuts on the street. Crows, seagulls, and some other birds often drop food onto hard surfaces to crack it open. An estimated 10,000 crows were roosting nearby, and 150 walnut trees lined the streets where the study was conducted. But did the crows deliberately drop walnuts in the path of oncoming cars? The scientists watched how the crows behaved when cars were approaching; then, soon after, they watched how crows behaved at the same places when cars were not approaching, during an equivalent time period.
What they found, after 400 separate observations, was that there was no real difference. In fact, crows were just slightly more likely to drop a walnut on the pavement when no car was approaching. The birds also were slightly more likely to fly away and leave a nut on the pavement in the absence of a car, contrary to what would be expected if the birds really expected cars to crack the nuts for them. Furthermore, the scientists noted that they frequently saw crows dropping walnuts on rooftops, on sidewalks, and in vacant parking lots, where there was no possibility of a car coming along. Not once during the study did a car crack even a single walnut dropped by a crow.
The authors concluded, reasonably enough: “Our observations suggest that crows merely are using the hard road surface to facilitate opening walnuts, and their interactions with cars are incidental.” The title of their article: “Crows Do Not Use Automobiles as Nutcrackers: Putting an Anecdote to the Test.” The anecdote flunked.
LESSON: Don’t Confuse Anecdotes with Data
ONE OF OUR FAVORITE SAYINGS—VARIOUSLY ATTRIBUTED TO DIFFERENT economists—is “The plural of ‘anecdote’ is not ‘data.’” That means simply this: one or two interesting stories don’t prove anything. They could be far from typical. In this case, it’s fun to think that crows might be clever enough to learn such a neat trick as using human drivers to prepare their meals for them. It’s also easy to see how spotting a few crows getting lucky can encourage even serious scientists to think the behavior might be deliberate. But we have to consider the term “anecdotal evidence” as something close to an oxymoron, a contradiction in terms.
Now, it’s true that the crow debate continues. Millions of people saw a PBS documentary by David Attenborough that showed Japanese crows putting walnuts in a crosswalk and then returning to eat after passing cars had cracked them. That scene was inspired by an article in the Japanese Journal of Ornithology by a psychologist at Tohoku University. But the Japanese article wasn’t based on a scientific study; it merely reported more anecdotes: “Because the [crows’] behavior was so sporadic, most observation was made when the author came across the behavior coincidentally on his commute to the campus.” That was two
years before Cristol and his colleagues finally published their truly systematic study. So for us, the notion that crows deliberately use cars as nutcrackers has been debunked, until and unless better evidence comes along. Even Theodore Pietsch, who coauthored the 1978 article that said crows do use cars as nutcrackers, has changed his view. “When Grobecker and I wrote that paper so long ago, we did it on a whim, took about an hour to write it, and we were shocked that it was accepted for publication almost immediately, with no criticism at all from outside referees,” he told us. “I would definitely put much more credibility in a study supported by data rather than random observation.” So do we, and so should all of us.
Seeing versus Believing
Avoiding spin and getting a solid grip on hard facts requires not only an open mind and a willingness to consider all the evidence, it requires us to have some basic skills in telling good evidence from bad, and to recognize that mere assertion is not fact and that not all facts are good evidence. As counterintuitive as it may seem, the most basic lesson is that our own personal experience isn’t necessarily very good evidence. It’s natural to trust what we can see with our own eyes, what we can touch with our own hands and hear with our own ears. But our own experience can mislead us.
LESSON: Remember the Blind Men and the Elephant
IT IS A NATURAL HUMAN TENDENCY TO GIVE GREAT WEIGHT TO OUR immediate experience, as the ancient fable of the blind men and the elephant should remind us. In the version written by the nineteenth-century American poet John Godfrey Saxe, six blind men feel different parts of the elephant and conclude variously that it is like a snake, a wall, a tree, a fan, a spear, or a rope. Then they argue. Saxe’s poem concludes:
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