The American Dream [1]
Submitted by Sheldon Rampton [2] on
"In all of Iraq, Jumana Hanna was the bravest witness to the horror of Saddam's regime, telling the Americans of torture, rape, and mass murder," writes Sara Solovitch. Paul Wolfowitz [3] recounted her story to the Senate Foreign Relations Commitee. Her suffering was described in agonizing detail in a Washington Post story by Peter Finn [4]. But when Solovitch signed on to write a book about Hanna, she discovered that her story was fiction. The woman lionized as a brave survivor of Saddam Hussein's prisons was apparently a homeless prostitute who successfully scammed U.S. officials into giving her a new life in the United States. "Far from being a story about the indomitability of the human spirit," Solovitch realized, "Hanna's tale now seemed to open a window on the coalition's naivete - the willingness of its leaders to believe almost anything that fit their agenda." (Faced with Solovitch's revelations, the Washington Post has retracted its original story [5].)