Suffer the Little Children:
PR and Lies in Kuwait
exerpted from the book
Toxic Sludge Is Good For You:
Lies, Damn Lies and the Public Relations Industry
"The Torturers' Lobby"
by John Stauber and Sheldon Rampton
Every big media event needs what journalists and flacks alike
refer to as "the hook." An ideal hook becomes the central
element of a story that makes it newsworthy, evokes a strong emotional
response and sticks in the memory. In the case of the Gulf War,
the "hook" was invented by Hill & Knowlton. In style,
substance and mode of delivery, it bore an uncanny resemblance
to England's World War I hearings that accused German soldiers
of killing babies.
On October 10, 1990, the Congressional Human Rights Caucus
held a hearing on Capitol Hill which provided the first opportunity
for formal presentations of Iraqi human rights violations. Outwardly,
the hearing resembled an official congressional proceeding, but
appearances were deceiving. In reality, the Human Rights Caucus.
chaired by California Democrat Tom Lantos and Illinois Republican
John Porter, was simply an association of politicians. Lantos
and Porter were also co-chairs of the Congressional Human Rights
Foundation, a legally separate entity that occupied free office
space valued at $3,000 a year in Hill & Knowlton's Washington,
DC office Notwithstanding its congressional trappings, the Congressional
Human Rights Caucus served as another Hill & Knowlton front
group which-like all front groups-used a noble-sounding name to
disguise its true purpose.
Only a few astute observers noticed the hypocrisy in Hill
& Knowlton's use of the term "human rights." One
of those observers was John MacArthur, author of The Second Front,
which remains the best book written about the manipulation of
the news media during the Gulf War. In the fall of 1990, MacArthur
reported, Hill & Knowlton's Washington switchboard was simultaneously
fielding calls for the Human Rights Foundation and for "government
representatives of Indonesia, another H&K client. Like H&K
client Turkey, Indonesia is a practitioner of naked aggression,
having seized . . . the former Portuguese colony of East Timor
in 1975. Since the annexation of East Timor, the Indonesian government
has killed, by conservative estimate, about 100,000 inhabitants
of the region.''
MacArthur also noticed another telling detail about the October
1990 hearings: "The Human Rights Caucus is not a committee
of congress, and therefore it is unencumbered by the legal accouterments
that would make a witness hesitate before he or she lied . . Lying
under oath in front of a congressional committee is a crime; Iying
from under the cover of anonymity to a caucus is merely public
relations."
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 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."
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."
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.
If Nayirah's outrageous lie had been exposed at the time it
was told, it might have at least caused some in Congress and the
news media to soberly reevaluate the extent to which they were
being skillfully manipulated to support military action. Public
opinion was deeply divided on Bush's Gulf policy. As late as December
1990, a New York Times/CBS News poll indicated that 48 percent
of the American people wanted Bush to wait before taking any action
if Iraq failed to withdraw from Kuwait by Bush's January 15 deadline.
On January 12, the US Senate voted by a narrow, five-vote margin
to support the Bush administration in a declaration of war. Given
the narrowness of the vote, the babies-thrown-from-incubators
story may have turned the tide in Bush's favor.
Following the war, human rights investigators attempted to
confirm Nayirah's story and could find no witnesses or other evidence
to support it. Amnesty International, which had fallen for the
story, was forced to issue an embarrassing retraction. Nayirah
herself was unavailable for comment. "This is the first allegation
I've had that she was the ambassador's daughter," said Human
Rights Caucus co-chair John Porter. "Yes, I think people
. . . were entitled to know the source of her testimony."
When journalists for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation asked
Nasir al-Sabah for permission to question Nayirah about her story,
the ambassador angrily refused.
from the book:
Toxic Sludge Is Good For You:
Lies, Damn Lies and the Public Relations Industry
by John Stauber and Sheldon Rampton
Common Courage Press, Box 702, Monroe, MA 04951
Toxic
Sludge