March 14, 2006 (4:30pm) / 20
concluded that the magazine was pressured into issuing an insincere retraction. As perseverance
experiments depend absolutely on the credibility of the retraction, such conclusions would
prevent us from making valid inferences about the extent of perseverance in this experiment.
In both of these respects, the Guantánamo Bay experiment differs from traditional belief
perseverance experiments. And both differences may exaggerate the extent of political belief
perseverance. What happens in an experiment in which these differences do not appear?
5
Experiment 2: John Roberts and the Abortion Clinic
Bombing
On August 8, 2005, NARAL Pro-Choice America (formerly the National Abortion Rights Action
League) released a television advertisement that accused Supreme Court nominee John Roberts
of “supporting violent fringe groups and a convicted clinic bomber.” The ad begin by depicting
an abortion clinic in ruins, segued to injured women in wheelchairs, and ended with a voiceover
admonition that “America can’t afford a Justice whose ideology leads him to excuse violence
Opponents and supporters of abortion rights were quick to criticize the ad as “blatantly
untrue” and “deceptive.” They noted that Bray v. Alexandria, the case in which Roberts was
accused of supporting violent anti-abortion protesters, was not about clinic bombing. (It was
about nonviolent blockades of clinics.) The only connection to bombing seemed tenuous: six
years before the Supreme Court heard Bray, one of its defendants had been convicted for his role
in the bombing of several clinics. As Solicitor General, Roberts argued the Bush administration’s
position before the Court, which, in a 6-3 decision, agreed with much of that position (Barge
Convention