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Lying Time Again
She gave her name as Nayirah and it was explained that she couldn't be fully identified as her family was still trapped in Kuwait. Nayirah was fifteen years old and was speaking before a Congressional Human Rights Caucus, just months after Iraq had invaded Kuwait in August 1990. She said she was a refugee who had been working as a volunteer in a Kuwaiti hospital throughout the first few weeks of the Iraqi occupation.
"I volunteered at the al-Addan hospital. While I was there I saw the Iraqi soldiers come into the hospital with guns, and go into the room where fifteen babies were in incubators. They took the babies out of the incubators," she sobbed, "took the incubators and left the babies on the cold floor to die."
This horrific story became the lead item in newspapers, on radio and television, not just in the USA, but across the world. Amnesty International took out a full-page advertisement condemning Iraq. Six members of the US Senate said that this was good enough reason to go to war. President George Bush the First cited the incident in his speeches. It was repeated at the United Nations Security Council when Dr Ebrahim, a surgeon, stated that he had buried forty babies pulled from the incubators by the Iraqis.
On November 29, 1990, the UN authorised use of "all means necessary" to eject Iraq from Kuwait. By January 12, 1991, when the US Congress authorised the use of force against Iraq, the number of premature babies removed and left on the cold floor to die had climbed to 312.
Nayirah, in fact, was a member of the Kuwaiti Royal Family and the daughter of Saud Nasir al-Sabah, the Kuwaiti ambassador to the United States. She hadn't worked in a Kuwaiti hospital and was in the USA when the Iraqis invaded. And, Dr Ebrahim was a dentist, not a surgeon, who, after the war, when the scam was exposed, and 100,000 Iraqis had been killed, admitted that he had never buried any babies or seen any.
Their stories were fabrications. Nayirah had been coached in her testimony by Lauri Fitz-Pegado of the Public Relations company, Hill & Knowton, hired by the Kuwaiti government to win American support for the war under the rubric 'Citizens for a Free Kuwait'. It didn't matter that the Emir of Kuwait, whom the USA was going to reinstate, had, four years earlier, disbanded the token national assembly and intimidated and censored the media. Free Kuwait sounded good.
Lauri Fitz-Pegado was a former Foreign Service Officer at the US Information Agency. She had previously been a lobbyist for the dictator, Jean Claude ("Baby Doc") Duvalier, President of Haiti.
Hill & Knowton's president, Craig Fuller, was one of George Bush the First's closest friends and political advisors when Bush was Vice-President under Reagan.
Last September, US television's ABC's 'Primetime Thursday', interviewed Parisoula Lampsos, a 54-year-old woman of Greek extraction who had lived in Baghdad most of her life. She is one of the sources used by Pentagon intelligence officials who claim that Saddam Hussein has links to al Qaeda, links which are being used by Bush and Blair to justify the forthcoming war.
Parisoula claims that she was Saddam's mistress, that he was a Viagra enthusiast who enjoyed listening to Frank Sinatra singing, 'Strangers in the Night', as well as torture victims crying for mercy. She says she watched him preen in front of a mirror declaring, "I am Saddam. Heil Hitler!" She said that she had once seen Osama Bin Laden at Saddam's palace and that in the mid 1990s Saddam had given money to him.
Parisoula - the woman who launched a thousand Hawk missiles.
The first casualty when war comes, is truth," said American Senator Hiram Johnson in 1917. When Britain was fighting the Boer War the British press carried hundreds of atrocity stories, including one about Boers attacking Red Cross tents while brave British doctors and nurses were treating the wounded. Documentary footage caused outrage when shown in British cinemas. But it was completely false and was shot on Hampstead Heath in London, using actors.
In September 2002 Tony Blair published a dossier on Iraq's chemical and biological programme, yet the CIA believes that the source of that report - an Iraqi defector - cannot be trusted and might be 'embroidering' his story.
Last Wednesday the BBC Radio 4's 'Today' programme quoted sources from British Intelligence taking issue with the way Tony Blair was distorting their reports in order to make a case for war. Sections of the CIA have made similar allegations that its reports are being 'cooked' by the Pentagon to sustain a case which may not exist.
On Wednesday, the US Secretary of State, Colin Powell, made his presentation to the UN about Iraq's alleged chemical, biological and nuclear weapons' programme and links to al Qaeda. In the course of his speech he called attention to "the fine paper that the United Kingdom distributed … which describes in exquisite detail Iraqi deception activities." But within twenty four hours it emerged that large parts of the British 'intelligence' dossier were a 'cut-and-paste' job, taken from published academic articles, some of them ten years old, indicating a real dearth of fresh and original intelligence conclusively showing that Iraq actually possesses weapons of mass destruction.
I watched Colin Powell interpret satellite photographs. He claimed they showed Iraqis cleaning up a chemical munitions bunker and their lorries taking away the contraband. Why didn't the satellites track the lorries and reveal their location to the UN weapons inspectors? If Saddam Hussein has chemical and biological weapons why didn't he use them against US and British forces when they drove him out of Kuwait? Why didn't he pass them on to al Qaeda during the past twelve years of humiliation, when the no-fly zone was imposed on his air force, and when half a million Iraqi civilians were dying because of the embargo and through the spread of cancerous diseases from the depleted uranium shells fired by the US and Britain during the Gulf War?
We have been lied to repeatedly so we cannot now believe George Bush or Tony Blair. Support the anti-war movement and get out and march next Saturday!
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© 2007 Irish Author and Journalist - Danny Morrison