----- Original Message ----- From: "Dan Minette" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: "Killer Bs Discussion" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Sent: Friday, December 17, 2004 6:07 PM Subject: Re: "God Is With Us" L3
> > ----- Original Message ----- > From: "Dave Land" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > To: "Killer Bs Discussion" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > Sent: Friday, December 17, 2004 5:14 PM > Subject: Re: "God Is With Us" L3 > > > > > Considering the success of the Hill & Knowlton PR effort behind > > "Nayirah's" testimony, I'm not surprised that your embassy staffer > > believes that s/he saw what s/he believes was evidence of what has > > been quite thoroughly debunked. > > It might be worthwhile to see exactly what an eyewitness saw soon after > Kuwait was liberated instead of stating with certainty that what she > thought she saw was debunked. Looking at the condition the hospital was > left in after the Iraq troops had left does afford one the ability to > obtain information that can thereafter be interpreted by a number of folks. > I've seen truths about nuclear power, for example, "debunked" in the > popular press. > > In short, it would seem useful to get more information about what the > eye-witness saw and then compare it to the sources of the debunking, than > to categorically reject the report of an eye-witness to the aftermath. > http://www.snopes.com/military/stamp.htm Atrocity rumors are never new; they are merely retooled as circumstances change. In the ramp-up days towards the Gulf War, we were told Iraqi soldiers had rampaged through a Kuwaiti hospital, grabbing premature babies up out of incubators and tossing them to the floor to meet their deaths on the cold, hard tiles. Never mind that this apocryphal hospital was never pinpointed nor the grieving families of these infants located, the story spread like wildfire, inflaming passions against the Iraqis and stiffening resolve to fight them tooth and nail if it came down to that. [Columbia Journalism Review, 1992] "I saw the Iraqi soldiers come into the hospital with guns. They took the babies out of the incubators ... and left the children to die on the cold floor." This was the story told by "Nayirah," the fifteen-year-old Kuwaiti girl who shocked a public hearing of Congress's Human Rights Caucus on October 10, 1990. Nayirah's testimony came at a time when Americans were wondering how to respond to the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait on August 2. Her story was cited frequently in the congressional debate over war authority, which was approved by only five votes in the Senate. President Bush mentioned it often as a reason for taking firm action. It was a major factor in building public backing for war. As many are now aware, the incubator story was the centerpiece of a massive public relations campaign conducted by Hill and Knowlton [a PR firm] on behalf of a group called Citizens for a Free Kuwait, for a fee of $11.5 million. After the war, the group revealed that it was financed almost entirely by the Kuwaiti government. A few babies did die during that conflict, but as a result of needed supplies not reaching hospitals, not because enemy soldiers threw them to the floor and left them to die there. http://www.prwatch.org/books/tsigfy10.html In fact, the most emotionally moving testimony on October 10 came from a 15-year-old Kuwaiti girl, known only by her first name of Nayirah. According to the Caucus, Nayirah's full name was being kept confidential to prevent Iraqi reprisals against her family in occupied Kuwait. Sobbing, she described what she had seen with her own eyes in a hospital in Kuwait City. Her written testimony was passed out in a media kit prepared by Citizens for a Free Kuwait. "I volunteered at the al-Addan hospital," Nayirah said. "While I was there, I saw the Iraqi soldiers come into the hospital with guns, and go into the room where . . . babies were in incubators. They took the babies out of the incubators, took the incubators, and left the babies on the cold floor to die."83 Three months passed between Nayirah's testimony and the start of the war. During those months, the story of babies torn from their incubators was repeated over and over again. President Bush told the story. It was recited as fact in Congressional testimony, on TV and radio talk shows, and at the UN Security Council. "Of all the accusations made against the dictator," MacArthur observed, "none had more impact on American public opinion than the one about Iraqi soldiers removing 312 babies from their incubators and leaving them to die on the cold hospital floors of Kuwait City."84 At the Human Rights Caucus, however, Hill & Knowlton and Congressman Lantos had failed to reveal that Nayirah was a member of the Kuwaiti Royal Family. Her father, in fact, was Saud Nasir al-Sabah, Kuwait's Ambassador to the US, who sat listening in the hearing room during her testimony. The Caucus also failed to reveal that H&K vice-president Lauri Fitz-Pegado had coached Nayirah in what even the Kuwaitis' own investigators later confirmed was false testimony. http://www.csmonitor.com/2002/0906/p01s02-wosc.html More recently, in the fall of 1990, members of Congress and the American public were swayed by the tearful testimony of a 15-year-old Kuwaiti girl, known only as Nayirah. In the girl's testimony before a congressional caucus, well-documented in MacArthur's book "Second Front" and elsewhere, she described how, as a volunteer in a Kuwait maternity ward, she had seen Iraqi troops storm her hospital, steal the incubators, and leave 312 babies "on the cold floor to die." Seven US Senators later referred to the story during debate; the motion for war passed by just five votes. In the weeks after Nayirah spoke, President Bush senior invoked the incident five times, saying that such "ghastly atrocities" were like "Hitler revisited." But just weeks before the US bombing campaign began in January, a few press reports began to raise questions about the validity of the incubator tale. Later, it was learned that Nayirah was in fact the daughter of the Kuwaiti ambassador to Washington and had no connection to the Kuwait hospital. She had been coached - along with the handful of others who would "corroborate" the story - by senior executives of Hill and Knowlton in Washington, the biggest global PR firm at the time, which had a contract worth more than $10 million with the Kuwaitis to make the case for war. "We didn't know it wasn't true at the time," Brent Scowcroft, Bush's national security adviser, said of the incubator story in a 1995 interview with the London-based Guardian newspaper. He acknowledged "it was useful in mobilizing public opinion." xponent Too many Hits To Bother With Maru rob _______________________________________________ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
