Intrinsically Preposterous?

Those who post on DU are a wealth of material...

"On the topic of the Beast of Baghdad, January's Esquire brings an interesting article by Sara Solovitch reporting her discovery that Jumana Hanna's accounts of rape and torture at the hands of Uday Hussein don't appear to have the intimate connection to reality trumpeted by the Bush Administration and by such reporters as Peter Finn of the Washington Post, who promoted her in the Post in July of 2003.Hanna poured out her story to many eager ears belonging to Finn; Bernard Kerik (surely an expert in mendacity); a New Jersey Superior Court Judge called Donald Campbell, who was the coalition's top legal adviser; Paul Wolfowitz; Hanna's shrink, Paul Linde; and finally Solovitch, who was hired to co-write Hanna's story. Solovitch says she began to entertain some doubts when pondering Hanna's claim to have received an MA in accounting from Oxford, but somehow put off making a simple phone call to Oxford till she had spent a lengthy period of presumably well-paid toil checking other aspects of Hanna's story.I could have saved the publishers a wad of money. In atrocity stories there are some things that don't ring true, even when dealing with such well-credentialed butchers as Saddam and his sons. Take the story, subsequently identified as one concocted by a Western intelligence agency, that Uday had put some of his victims through a wood chipper. Anyone using these chippers knows the damn things jam if inconvenienced by anything with a diameter larger than that of a stick of asparagus, let alone an Iraqi human, however scrawny. Uday's chipper, whose origin can probably be traced to a scene in the movie Fargo, just didn't pass muster, same as the incubator story from the first Gulf War, first identified in this column as intrinsically preposterous.Among the horrors of Uday's boudoir divulged by Hanna to many, including Solovitch, was the following:"She was raped for days. A virgin when she entered, she heard the guards ask "Master Uday" what he wanted to do with her blood. He ordered them to sprinkle it around the rim of his whiskey glass like salt on a margarita."That's the point at which any person equipped with minimal power to suspend willing belief should have said, "Oh, come on!" No call to Oxford would have been necessary. But then, there's no ear more credulous than the one that yearns to believe."

I read this several times looking for the proof that the story was fabricated. The smoking gun is the phrase "intrinsically preposterous." Well then, it must have been made up.

From www.counterpunch.com