ofcourse this issue was not covered or invistigated by our press for unknown (I don't think soo)reasons....!!!
I tryed for long to look on that issue but with no luck, maybe I didn't look that much but it's surely something to concider what I found on the subject.....!!!
===================
"What We Say, Goes!"
How Bush Sr. Sold the Bombing of Iraq
by MITCHEL COHEN
How Bush Sr. Sold the Bombing of Iraq
by MITCHEL COHEN
"The U.S. has a new credibility. What we say goes."
President George Bush, NBC Nightly News, Feb. 2, 1991
In October, 1990, a 15-year-old Kuwaiti girl, identified only as Nayirah, appeared in Washington before the House of Representatives' Human Rights Caucus. She testified that Iraqi soldiers who had invaded Kuwait on August 2nd tore hundreds of babies from hospital incubators and killed them.
Television flashed her testimony around the world. It electrified opposition to Iraq's president, Saddam Hussein, who was now portrayed by U.S. president George Bush not only as "the Butcher of Baghdad" but -- so much for old friends -- "a tyrant worse than Hitler."
Bush quoted Nayirah at every opportunity. Six times in one month he referred to "312 premature babies at Kuwait City's maternity hospital who died after Iraqi soldiers stole their incubators and left the infants on the floor,"(1) and of "babies pulled from incubators and scattered like firewood across the floor." Bush used Nayirah's testimony to lambaste Senate Democrats still supporting "only" sanctions against Iraq -- the blockade of trade which alone would cause hundreds of thousands of Iraqis to die of hunger and disease -- but who waffled on endorsing the policy Bush wanted to implement: outright bombardment. Republicans and pro-war Democrats used Nayirah's tale to hammer their fellow politicians into line behind Bush's war in the Persian Gulf.(2)
Nayirah, though, was no impartial eyewitness, a fact carefully concealed by her handlers. She was the daughter of one Saud Nasir Al-Sabah, Kuwait's ambassador to the United States. A few key Congressional leaders and reporters knew who Nayirah was, but none of them thought of sharing that minor detail with Congress, let alone the American people.
Everything Nayirah said, as it turned out, was a lie. There were, in actuality, only a handful of incubators in all of Kuwait, certainly not the "hundreds" she claimed. According to Dr. Mohammed Matar, director of Kuwait's primary care system, and his wife, Dr. Fayeza Youssef, who ran the obstetrics unit at the maternity hospital, there were few if any babies in the incubators at the time of the Iraqi invasion. Nayirah's charges, they said, were totally false. "I think it was just something for propaganda," Dr. Matar said. In an ABC-TV News account after the war, John Martin reported that although "patients, including premature babies, did die," this occurred "when many of Kuwait's nurses and doctors stopped working or fled the country" -- a far cry from Bush's original assertion that hundreds of babies were murdered by Iraqi troops.(3) Subsequent investigations, including one by Amnesty International, found no evidence for the incubator claims.
It is likely that Nayirah was not even in Kuwait, let alone at the hospital, at that time; the Kuwaiti aristocracy and their families had fled the country weeks before the anticipated invasion. Some defended their country at the gaming tables in Monte Carlo, where at least one member of the ruling family was reported to have gambled away more than $10 million as his fellow rulers called for economic and military assistance from abroad.
As invasions go, Iraq's invasion of Kuwait was relatively -- I stress the word "relatively" -- bloodless. Despite the heart-rending testimonies TV viewers in the U.S. were subjected to night after night, fewer than 200 Kuwaitis were killed. Compare that to such "peaceful" ventures as the U.S. invasion of Panama the year before, which killed an estimated 7,500 Panamanians; or, a year after the Gulf war, the 10,000 Somalis killed by. troops in what was portrayed as a "peace mission" to bring food aid to the allegedly starving region.(4)
How did Nayirah first come to the attention of the Congressional Human Rights Caucus, which put her before the world's cameras? It was arranged by Hill & Knowlton, a public relations firm hired to rally the U.S. populace behind Bush's policy of going to war. And it worked!
Hill & Knowlton's yellow ribbon campaign to whip up support for "our" troops, which followed their orchestration of Nayirah's phony "incubator" testimony, was a public relations masterpiece. The claim that satellite photos revealed that Iraq had troops poised to strike Saudi Arabia was also fabricated by the PR firm. Hill & Knowlton was paid between $12 million (as reported two years later on "60 Minutes") and $20 million (as reported on "20/20") for "services rendered." The group fronting the money? Citizens for a Free Kuwait, a phony "human rights agency" set up and funded entirely by Kuwait's emirocracy to promote its interests in the U.S.
"When Hill & Knowlton masterminded the Kuwaiti campaign to sell the Gulf War to the American public, the owners of this highly effective propaganda machine were residing in another country" -- the United Kingdom -- writes Sharon Beder and Richard Gosden in PR Watch. "Should this give pause for thought? Does it demonstrate a certain potential for the future exercise of global political power -- the power to manipulate democratic political processes through managing public opinion," which Hill and Knowlton demonstrated 10 years ago?(5)
All of this is concealed in a new HBO "behind-the-scenes true story" of the Gulf War, which is being released at this crucial political moment. As Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting writes, "HBO's version of history never makes clear that the incubator story was fraudulent, and in fact had been managed by an American PR firm, not Iraq. Curiously, however, the truth seems to have been clear to Robert Wiener, the former CNN producer who co-wrote 'Live from Baghdad.'As he explained to CNN's Wolf Blitzer (11/21/02), 'that story turned out to be false because those accusations were made by the daughter of the Kuwaiti minister of information and were never proven.' Unfortunately, HBO viewers won't know that when they see the film."(6)
In 1998, Hill and Knowlton found a new client -- President Clinton -- who hired them to advise him and to polish his image. The last time they were involved, by the time their lies were exposed TV newscasters were waxing ecstatic over the rockets' red glare, computerized "smart-bombs" bursting in air, and 250,000 people were dead.
Mitchel Cohen is the co-editor of Green Politix, the national newspaper of the Greens/Green Party USA. He can be reached at: mitchelcohen@mindspring.com
NOTES
1. Doug Ireland, Village Voice, March 26, 1991.
2. The use of the Big Lie to manipulate public opinion and neutralize opposition to a particular war was not invented by Bush. See, for instance, James Laxer, "Iraq: US has match, seeks kindle: American leaders have often falsified reasons to attack other countries," (ActionGreens, Mar. 31, 2001). Laxer is a Political Science Professor at York University, Toronto.
3. ABC World News Tonight, 3/15/91.
4. In actuality, people in only certain areas of Somalia were starving -- those that had been subjected to IMF structural adjustment programs. See, Mitchel Cohen, "Somalia & the Cynical Manipulation of Hunger," Red Balloon Collective, 1994.
5. Sharon Beder and Richard Gosden, "PR Watch," Volume 8, No. 2, 2nd Quarter 2001. The PR firm has since been working at the behest of the pharmaceutical industry to ban over-the-counter vitamin and nutritional supplement sales in Europe.
6. Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting, "HBO Recycling Gulf War Hoax?" December 4, 2002.
Mitchel Cohen is the co-editor of Green Politix, the national newspaper of the Greens/Green Party USA. He can be reached at: mitchelcohen@mindspring.com
Yesterday's Features
Kathy KellyCrossing BordersChristmas in Iraq
Kurt NimmoNorth Korea: Calling Bush's Bluff
Elaine CasselHow the Grinch Stole the Pardons
Cairo Declaration Against War on Iraq and in Solidarity with Palestine
Norman MadaraszSecular Steps in Preparing a War: an address at Cairo
Gary LeuppNotes on the Cairo Conference
Neve GordonChristmas Eve in Bethlehem
Kenneth RothAn Open Letter to President Bush on the Torture of Al-Qaeda Suspects
Pierre TristamWar Toys and the National Character
Keep CounterPunch Alive: Make a Tax-Deductible Donation Today Online!
President George Bush, NBC Nightly News, Feb. 2, 1991
In October, 1990, a 15-year-old Kuwaiti girl, identified only as Nayirah, appeared in Washington before the House of Representatives' Human Rights Caucus. She testified that Iraqi soldiers who had invaded Kuwait on August 2nd tore hundreds of babies from hospital incubators and killed them.
Television flashed her testimony around the world. It electrified opposition to Iraq's president, Saddam Hussein, who was now portrayed by U.S. president George Bush not only as "the Butcher of Baghdad" but -- so much for old friends -- "a tyrant worse than Hitler."
Bush quoted Nayirah at every opportunity. Six times in one month he referred to "312 premature babies at Kuwait City's maternity hospital who died after Iraqi soldiers stole their incubators and left the infants on the floor,"(1) and of "babies pulled from incubators and scattered like firewood across the floor." Bush used Nayirah's testimony to lambaste Senate Democrats still supporting "only" sanctions against Iraq -- the blockade of trade which alone would cause hundreds of thousands of Iraqis to die of hunger and disease -- but who waffled on endorsing the policy Bush wanted to implement: outright bombardment. Republicans and pro-war Democrats used Nayirah's tale to hammer their fellow politicians into line behind Bush's war in the Persian Gulf.(2)
Nayirah, though, was no impartial eyewitness, a fact carefully concealed by her handlers. She was the daughter of one Saud Nasir Al-Sabah, Kuwait's ambassador to the United States. A few key Congressional leaders and reporters knew who Nayirah was, but none of them thought of sharing that minor detail with Congress, let alone the American people.
Everything Nayirah said, as it turned out, was a lie. There were, in actuality, only a handful of incubators in all of Kuwait, certainly not the "hundreds" she claimed. According to Dr. Mohammed Matar, director of Kuwait's primary care system, and his wife, Dr. Fayeza Youssef, who ran the obstetrics unit at the maternity hospital, there were few if any babies in the incubators at the time of the Iraqi invasion. Nayirah's charges, they said, were totally false. "I think it was just something for propaganda," Dr. Matar said. In an ABC-TV News account after the war, John Martin reported that although "patients, including premature babies, did die," this occurred "when many of Kuwait's nurses and doctors stopped working or fled the country" -- a far cry from Bush's original assertion that hundreds of babies were murdered by Iraqi troops.(3) Subsequent investigations, including one by Amnesty International, found no evidence for the incubator claims.
It is likely that Nayirah was not even in Kuwait, let alone at the hospital, at that time; the Kuwaiti aristocracy and their families had fled the country weeks before the anticipated invasion. Some defended their country at the gaming tables in Monte Carlo, where at least one member of the ruling family was reported to have gambled away more than $10 million as his fellow rulers called for economic and military assistance from abroad.
As invasions go, Iraq's invasion of Kuwait was relatively -- I stress the word "relatively" -- bloodless. Despite the heart-rending testimonies TV viewers in the U.S. were subjected to night after night, fewer than 200 Kuwaitis were killed. Compare that to such "peaceful" ventures as the U.S. invasion of Panama the year before, which killed an estimated 7,500 Panamanians; or, a year after the Gulf war, the 10,000 Somalis killed by
How did Nayirah first come to the attention of the Congressional Human Rights Caucus, which put her before the world's cameras? It was arranged by Hill & Knowlton, a public relations firm hired to rally the U.S. populace behind Bush's policy of going to war. And it worked!
Hill & Knowlton's yellow ribbon campaign to whip up support for "our" troops, which followed their orchestration of Nayirah's phony "incubator" testimony, was a public relations masterpiece. The claim that satellite photos revealed that Iraq had troops poised to strike Saudi Arabia was also fabricated by the PR firm. Hill & Knowlton was paid between $12 million (as reported two years later on "60 Minutes") and $20 million (as reported on "20/20") for "services rendered." The group fronting the money? Citizens for a Free Kuwait, a phony "human rights agency" set up and funded entirely by Kuwait's emirocracy to promote its interests in the U.S.
"When Hill & Knowlton masterminded the Kuwaiti campaign to sell the Gulf War to the American public, the owners of this highly effective propaganda machine were residing in another country" -- the United Kingdom -- writes Sharon Beder and Richard Gosden in PR Watch. "Should this give pause for thought? Does it demonstrate a certain potential for the future exercise of global political power -- the power to manipulate democratic political processes through managing public opinion," which Hill and Knowlton demonstrated 10 years ago?(5)
All of this is concealed in a new HBO "behind-the-scenes true story" of the Gulf War, which is being released at this crucial political moment. As Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting writes, "HBO's version of history never makes clear that the incubator story was fraudulent, and in fact had been managed by an American PR firm, not Iraq. Curiously, however, the truth seems to have been clear to Robert Wiener, the former CNN producer who co-wrote 'Live from Baghdad.'As he explained to CNN's Wolf Blitzer (11/21/02), 'that story turned out to be false because those accusations were made by the daughter of the Kuwaiti minister of information and were never proven.' Unfortunately, HBO viewers won't know that when they see the film."(6)
In 1998, Hill and Knowlton found a new client -- President Clinton -- who hired them to advise him and to polish his image. The last time they were involved, by the time their lies were exposed TV newscasters were waxing ecstatic over the rockets' red glare, computerized "smart-bombs" bursting in air, and 250,000 people were dead.
Mitchel Cohen is the co-editor of Green Politix, the national newspaper of the Greens/Green Party USA. He can be reached at: mitchelcohen@mindspring.com
NOTES
1. Doug Ireland, Village Voice, March 26, 1991.
2. The use of the Big Lie to manipulate public opinion and neutralize opposition to a particular war was not invented by Bush. See, for instance, James Laxer, "Iraq: US has match, seeks kindle: American leaders have often falsified reasons to attack other countries," (ActionGreens, Mar. 31, 2001). Laxer is a Political Science Professor at York University, Toronto.
3. ABC World News Tonight, 3/15/91.
4. In actuality, people in only certain areas of Somalia were starving -- those that had been subjected to IMF structural adjustment programs. See, Mitchel Cohen, "Somalia & the Cynical Manipulation of Hunger," Red Balloon Collective, 1994.
5. Sharon Beder and Richard Gosden, "PR Watch," Volume 8, No. 2, 2nd Quarter 2001. The PR firm has since been working at the behest of the pharmaceutical industry to ban over-the-counter vitamin and nutritional supplement sales in Europe.
6. Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting, "HBO Recycling Gulf War Hoax?" December 4, 2002.
Mitchel Cohen is the co-editor of Green Politix, the national newspaper of the Greens/Green Party USA. He can be reached at: mitchelcohen@mindspring.com
Yesterday's Features
Kathy KellyCrossing BordersChristmas in Iraq
Kurt NimmoNorth Korea: Calling Bush's Bluff
Elaine CasselHow the Grinch Stole the Pardons
Cairo Declaration Against War on Iraq and in Solidarity with Palestine
Norman MadaraszSecular Steps in Preparing a War: an address at Cairo
Gary LeuppNotes on the Cairo Conference
Neve GordonChristmas Eve in Bethlehem
Kenneth RothAn Open Letter to President Bush on the Torture of Al-Qaeda Suspects
Pierre TristamWar Toys and the National Character
Keep CounterPunch Alive: Make a Tax-Deductible Donation Today Online!
==================================
Nayirah al-Sabah H & K, Nayirah, and the Incubator Baby Atrocities. On October 10, 1990, a 15-year old Kuwaiti girl delivered an emotionally moving testimony to the Congressional Human Rights Caucus. Her written testimony was passed out in a media kit by her CFK handlers. "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."
Her story was never corroborated. It was later proved false, but not until after it had successfully been used to argue the case for the first Persian Gulf War to the US Public, the US Congress, and the UN. Nayirah declined to reveal her last name, allegedly out of fear of Iraqi reprisals. She, as it turned out, was no ordinary Kuwaiti hospital volunteer. Nayirah was actually the daughter of Kuwait's ambassador to the US, and a member of the al-Sabah royal family. Later investigations by Amnesty International proved that she had never worked at the al-Addan hospital at all, and there were no accounts to corroborate her story. The royal family spurned all subsequent attempts by the media to interview her.Adding another, less obvious layer to the overall deception, the Congressional Human Rights Caucus was not a real Congressional committee, either. It was only a name that was given to an association of politicians, chaired by California Democrat Tom Lantos and Illinois Republican John Porter, who were both members of the Congressional Human Rights Foundation. Employing the sort of double blind twist one might expect to find only in classical CIA-type foreign government front organizations, the Congressional Human Rights Foundation itself was not a real Congressional body, either. It was a legally separate entity from the US Congress, occupying free office space, valued at $3,000 per year, at Hill & Knowlton's Washington DC office. H&K created the entire fiction of Nayirah's testimony for a fee of $11.5 million from the Kuwaiti government, laundered through CFK."Of all the accusations made against the dictator, none had more impact on American public opinion than the one about Iraqi soldiers removing 312 babies for their incubators and leaving them to die on the cold hospital floors of Kuwait City." --- John McArthur, author of The Second Front.
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so what do you think about this issue....?!?!
6 comments:
I had read about this before, lol. I don't remember hearing any of that, but I was only 8 or so at the time of the first war. I think it's ironic and sad at the same time. Things like this always made me wonder though, how bad actually was Hitler? Granted, there were a ton more witnesses then just a lone teenager, but come on, if Hussein was worse then Hitler in terms of Kuwait, Hitler must have just stole ice cream from little kids or something.
hi waleed,
nice way to say it....!!!
beats anything I had in my sleeve...
you use what you can win with...!!
"الّي تفوز به العب به"
sorry you didn't make it to the meeting, will post soon on it....!!!
and I'll send you my number via e-mail.....
Dear Khobiz,
welcome to my humble blog, hope you'll enjoy it...
as for the way this propaganda was showed or manupilated...
I don't condem nor approve it, but it gave us a way to free our country....
but what's more importantly was why didn't our media talk or refer to this subject.....?!?!
especially when on the liberation day they hosted on Al-Rai T.V. some poeple who showed us the real heroes of kuwait, and what happened to some of them, especially the detail of "Qabazard's suffering fromthe the head shot and his dieing moments....!!! all after these years when we should have showed the world these stories to tell them....?!?!
why did we kept our mouths shut and became the bad guy's as aposing saddam's "suffering camp"
and why didn't we say every thing....?!?! what were we waiting for....?!?!
That's funny, as an American, I don't remember any of that. I stayed glued to the TV during that war, but perhaps I just didn't watch TV leading up to the war. I've quit arguing with Muslims about all of these conspiracy theories about the US did this or that. I argued with them for years and brought them a lot of truth about the ridiculous conspiracy theories they seems to believe. I admit that the US government have not been saints. I doubt a country could make it being a saint in this world as there are none. But there is just no way they do all of the crazy things some of you try to accuse them of doing. But all of your countries are up for grabs now, because the US will not be helping anyone ever again, that's for sure. I do wish you people would help the Sudanese, though. Somebody needs to help those poor people.
Exzombie,
no matter what really happened and whether or not it was a lie, what horrifies me is your statement of the war being relatively "bloodless!" Ofcourse, football stadiums turned into torture courts is relatively "bloodless." Babies being shot in front of their mother is relatively "bloodless!" The list would go on and on! And the people who I personally know who died would also go on and on. I certainly do not appreciate you calling the war "bloodless" as it insults every true kuwaiti citizen who fought for his or her country.
On the last comment i posted, i do apologize since i just realized it was not written by you but basically it gives you an idea of what I think of this situation
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