Were they really duped? Remember the Kuwaiti Ambassador's daughter impersonating a nurse back in '91 and testifying to Congress that she saw Iraqi soldiers taking Kuwaiti babies out of incubators? Did the Washington Post collectively forget that story that was 100% lies?
http://www.esquire.com/cgi-bin/printtool/print.cgi?pages=9&filename=%2Ffeatures%2Farticles%2F200
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SOME EXCERPTS:
In July 2003, The Washington Post published a heartrending front-page story about Hanna under the headline A LONE WOMAN TESTIFIES TO IRAQ'S ORDER OF TERROR. Post reporter Peter Finn had accompanied her on a tour of Al Kelab al Sayba, Loose Dogs Prison, and his piece turned her into a bona fide hero.
Fearful that her outspokenness had put her life in jeopardy, U. S. authorities moved Hanna, her seventy-two-year-old mother, and her two young children out of a homeless shelter and into a trailer in the Green Zone. There, for the next three months, they lived under twenty-four-hour guard, just a few feet from the office of Ambassador L. Paul Bremer, head of Iraq's Coalition Provisional Authority, in one of Saddam's palaces.
THE STORY OF HANNA'S sufferings won the hearts and minds of the Americans in Baghdad. Grateful for her cooperation in identifying her attackers--several of whom were then being considered for important positions in the new government--the Coalition Provisional Authority bestowed medallions of honor on Hanna. Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz toured Loose Dogs Prison and testified about her before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. "Her courage in coming forward to offer U. S. officials what is very likely credible information," he said, would help the coalition "root out" Baathist killers. Her story became a defining parable in Washington of a world gone mad, in which dictators had been given license to terrorize their people without consequence. But all that was changing now, as strongmen always fall.
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"I've been in seventy countries and taken testimony about many atrocities--including right after My Lai," said Donald Campbell, a New Jersey superior court judge who served as the coalition's top judicial advisor. "And I have to tell you that I found her story to be the most compelling and tragic I've ever heard."
Her story became a favorite in particular among conservatives. The blogs spread the word; one, Townhall.com, proclaimed it "justification alone for Bush's Operation Iraqi Freedom."
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I met Hanna on August 24, 2004, eleven months after she, her mother, and her children were airlifted by U. S. military transport out of Baghdad to California.
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Her recklessness shocked me. I'd been a reporter for twenty-five years and considered myself a professional skeptic, yet I'd been duped. I consoled myself with the thought that I was in good company. If I'd been duped, so had the Pentagon, the Coalition Provisional Authority, and one of the nation's most esteemed newspapers. On the other hand, I understand that the relationship between a journalist and a source is based on trust. I'd never met anyone who played with that relationship as cynically as Hanna. She could coolly size up her audience, calculate what they wanted to hear, and work it to her advantage.
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If the Americans had spoken to Iraqi neighbors or family, they might have learned one of the most persistent rumors surrounding Hanna: that it was Jeanne d'Arc, the nurturing grandmother who whiled away her days in the Green Zone flipping through a deck of cards, who sent her daughter to jail, on charges of prostitution.