Naira's emotional testimony riveted human rights organizations, the news mediums, and the Nation. That incident was cited by six Members of the U.S. Senate as reasons to go to war with Iraq. However, it was later discovered that the girl was in fact the daughter of the Kuwaiti ambassador to the United States. It turns out that Lauri Fitz-Pegado had concealed Naira's real identity. Since then, reputable human rights organizations and journalists have concluded that the baby incubator story was an outright fabrication. Every study commissioned by the Kuwaiti government could not produce a shred of evidence that the ambassador's daughter had been back in occupied Kuwait to do volunteer work in a hospital. It was a total fabrication.
Kuwaiti Ambassadors daughter. So George Bush Snr, his administration and many Senators and Congressman must have knowingly told such fabricated lies?
Has anyone seen the programme on HBO? I saw it, and its the usual american war glory/superiority crap (like band of brothers etc)... Nothing negative was shown like u said.
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*Originally posted by Malik73: *
Kuwaiti Ambassadors daughter. So George Bush Snr, his administration and many Senators and Congressman must have knowingly told such fabricated lies?
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Exactly malik, the Republican Adminstration of George Bush Sr utilized dispicable lies and propoganda in order to justify attacking Iraq and imposing an evil sanctions regime on the Iraqi people. And now the Bush Administration is again resorting to spreading misinformation. Yesterday, the whole world witnessed a part of a scam when US Sec Powell addressed the United Nations Security Council, highly praising an intelligance report on Iraq which turned out to be nothing more than an article written by a college student. Almost the entire report was copied word for word from the students article and other journals. Maybe this should be called the 'Bush WMD scam'.
Feb. 6, 2003, 2230 hrs, PST, (FTW) - A story is sweeping the world tonight and it says a great deal about those who are forcing the world into a war it does not want. The famed dossier presented by British Prime Minister Tony Blair to his Parliament was plagiarized from two articles and a September 2002 research paper submitted by a graduate student.
Worse, the Iraq described by the graduate student is not the Iraq of 2003 but the Iraq of 1991. So glaring was the theft of intellectual property that the official British document even cut and pasted whole verbatim segments of the research paper, including grammatical errors, and presented the findings as the result of intense work by British intelligence services.
U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell both praised and quoted that same British report in his presentation at the United Nations yesterday. It is important that readers see and understand the enormity of this violation of public trust for themselves. The story was first broken by Britain’s Channel 4 today and it is appearing in more papers and web sites by the hour. The following links lead directly to the Channel 4 story, to the British “intelligence” report and to the original student paper.
This is interesting DHP, but I thought you were blaming Powell and Bush. I guess you are blaming Blair and the Brits. It wasn’t clear. But thanks for the links. I think, as I watched the Powell Presentation that he only referred to the Dossier that the Brits issued in passing, and didn’t make that as the foundation of his argument. However, I thought he made a very convincing case.
In terms of the incubator story...Kuwaitis paid over 20 millions to Hill and Knowlton to do the PR. H&K will sell their moms to make bucks, dont blame Bush Sr for that, blame stupid Kuwaitis.
In his urgent arguments during the fall and winter of 1990 for military action against Saddam Hussein, President Bush made much of the Iraqi leader’s cruelty toward the Kuwaiti people. Mr. Bush’s allegations of atrocities by Iraqi forces generally went unchallenged. Mr. Hussein’s violent disposal of dissident Iraqis was a matter of record, so few politicians, journalists or human rights investigators were prepared to question the President’s campaign to paint his opponent as Adolf Hitler reborn. Some claims were no doubt true, but the most sensational one–that Iraqi soldiers removed hundreds of Kuwaiti babies from incubators and left them to die on hospital floors–was shown to be almost certainly false by an ABC reporter, John Martin, in March 1991, after the liberation of Kuwait. He interviewed hospital doctors who stayed in Kuwait throughout the occupation. But before the war, the incubator story seriously distorted the American debate about whether to support military action. Amnesty International believed the tale, and its ill-considered validation of the charges likely influenced the seven Senators who cited the story in speeches backing the Jan. 12 resolution authorizing war. Since the resolution passed the Senate by only five votes, the question of how the incubator story escaped scrutiny–when it really mattered–is all the more important. (Amnesty International later retracted its support of the story.)
A little reportorial investigation would have done a great service to the democratic process. Americans would have been interested to know the identity of “Nayirah,” the 15-year-old Kuwaiti girl who shocked the Congressional Human Rights Caucus on Oct. 10, 1990, when she tearfully asserted that she had watched 15 infants being taken from incubators in Al-Adan Hospital in Kuwait City by Iraqi soldiers who “left the babies on the cold floor to die.” The chairmen of the Congressional group, Tom Lantos, a California Democrat, and John Edward Porter, an Illinois Republican, explained that Nayirah’s identity would be kept secret to protect her family from reprisals in occupied Kuwait. There was a better reason to protect her from exposure: Nayirah, her real name, is the daughter of the Kuwaiti Ambassador to the U.S., Saud Nasir al-Sabah. Such a pertinent fact might have led to impertinent demands for proof of Nayirah’s whereabouts in August and September of 1990, when she said she witnessed the atrocities, as well as corroboration of her charges. The Kuwaiti Embassy has rebuffed my efforts to interview Nayirah. Today, we are left to ask why Mr. Lantos and Mr. Porter allowed such glaring omissions. What made Nayirah so believable that no one on the caucus staff bothered to check out her story? One explanation might lie in how Nayirah came to the Congressmen’s attention. Both Congressmen have a close relationship with Hill and Knowlton, the public relations firm hired by Citizens for a Free Kuwait, the Kuwaiti-financed group that lobbied Congress for military intervention. A Hill and Knowlton vice president, Gary Hymel, helped organize the Congressional Human Rights Caucus hearing in meetings with Mr. Lantos and Mr. Porter and the chairman of Citizens for a Free Kuwait, Hassan al-Ebraheem. Mr. Hymel presented the witnesses, including Nayirah. (He later told me he knew who she was at the time.)
Until he started working on the Kuwait account, Mr. Hymel was best known to the caucus for defending the human rights record of Turkey, a Hill and Knowlton client criticized for jailing people without due process and torturing and killing them. He is also one of the firm’s lobbyists for the Indonesian Government, which has killed at least 100,000 inhabitants of East Timor since 1975. Mr. Lantos’s spokesman says that Hill and Knowlton’s client list doesn’t concern the Congressman, who accepted a $500 contribution from the firm’s political action committee in 1988. In fact, Mr. Lantos and Mr. Porter allowed the Congressional Human Rights Foundation, a group they founded in 1985, to be housed in Hill and Knowlton’s Washington headquarters. The firm provides a contribution to the foundation in the form of a $3,000 annual rent reduction, and the Hill and Knowlton switchboard delivers messages to the foundation’s executive director, David Phillips. Hill and Knowlton’s client, Citizens for a Free Kuwait, donated $50,000 to the foundation, sometime after Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait on Aug. 2, 1990. (The foundation’s main supporter is the U.S. Government-financed National Endowment for Democracy.) Since the gulf war, Hill and Knowlton’s collaboration with the Lantos-Porter human rights enterprise has been strengthened by the naming of the firm’s vice chairman, Frank Mankiewicz, to the foundation’s board in October 1991. Perhaps the Congressmen and directors were impressed by the recent addition of China to Hill and Knowlton’s prestigious portfolio of clients. (The firm’s clients, Indonesia and Turkey, were notably absent from the foundation’s 1990-91 list of human rights “activities.”) Congress and the news media deserve censure for their lack of skepticism about the incubator story. As for Representatives Lantos and Porter, they deserve a medal from the Emir for their work on behalf of the Kuwaiti cause. But their special relationship with Hill and Knowlton should prompt a Congressional investigation to find out if their actions merely constituted an obvious conflict of interest or, worse, if they knew who the tearful Nayirah really was in October 1990.
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*Originally posted by NYAhmadi: *
This is interesting DHP, but I thought you were blaming Powell and Bush. I guess you are blaming Blair and the Brits. It wasn’t clear. But thanks for the links. I think, as I watched the Powell Presentation that he only referred to the Dossier that the Brits issued in passing, and didn’t make that as the foundation of his argument. However, I thought he made a very convincing case.
In terms of the incubator story...Kuwaitis paid over 20 millions to Hill and Knowlton to do the PR. H&K will sell their moms to make bucks, dont blame Bush Sr for that, blame stupid Kuwaitis.
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No that would never do NYA,everything must point to Bush and Blair,no matter the stretch,it seems this is the way of the forum lately,or at least the vocal minority.
The Incubator Hoax revealed the levels of deception the Bush Senior Administration would go to in order to justify war. Today we are again seeing a desperate attempt by the Bush Propoganda machine to mislead the world.
This article says that the Pentagon is debating whether to resurrect its propaganda operations in allied and adversarial countries. One can’t help but be reminded of the baby incubator hoax that was manufactured by the U.S. government in 1990 to fan the flames of war against Iraq. At that time, the Iraqis were accused of removing hundreds of Kuwaiti babies from incubators and leaving them to die on hospital floors.
The Americans even went so far as to present sworn testimony from 15 year-old “Nayirah” in front of the Human Rights Caucus. Who could forget the tearful account of that witness as she described the alleged savagery of Iraqi soldiers killing little Kuwaiti babies in cold blood?
Later investigations proved that the story was an elaborate hoax concocted by the American government and a high-profile U.S. public relations firm. The star witness was identified as Nayirah al-Sabah, the daughter of the Kuwaiti ambassador to the United States at the time.
**Even though the story was a complete sham, the accusations had the tremendous effect of strengthening public opinion against Saddam Hussein and ultimately served as one of the many pretexts leading up to the Persian Gulf War in 1991. This is the dark side of the U.S. “propaganda machine.” **
DHP…so beautiful, you will paste a letter to the editor here and that also from a “world famous Toronto Star”, and that also some 2 month old. Couldn’t find anything more recent? What do you have to say about Hill and Knowlton being paid by the Kuwaitis? If your country were occupied by a madman, wouldn’t you use a little propaganda?
Nya, that letter/article just confirms what ive said in all my posts here. Everyone knows the truth behind the Incubator HOAX that it was fabricated by CNN and publicised by Hill and Knowlton which was controlled by George Bush's Chief of Staff at the time Craig Fuller. The whole affair was masterminded by the Bush Adminstration. Analysts are stating, that it was this hoax that led to Congress sanctioning war against Iraq.
DHP..please help me understand. Do you really believe that the US should have left Saddam alone in 1991? Let him stay in Kuwait, and later move on to Saudi Arabia and other places wherever his heart desires? Is that what you are saying? By the way, the President does not "require" congress's permission to go to war, it is nice to have it, but he alone is the Chief of the Armed Forces. He has power under the constitution to authorize war for 90 days without going to Congress.
Nya, ignoring the actual facts seems to be one of your virtues.. Lol! Let me repeat what ive said in another way.. in order to justify war against Iraq, the Administration needed the support of Congress, the US public and also the support of the International community. Their links to PR firms allowed even unsubstantiated facts and lies to be publicised. Lies such as the CNN incubator hoax rallied support for war against Iraq.
Btw, the kuwait ambassadors daughter who gave testimony accusing Iraqis of killing babies was in fact trained and told what to say by Hill & Knowlton. In order to rally support for war, Mr.Bush mentioned the incubator hoax in five of his speeches and even several senators made speeches about the incubators.