The Great Lie of the Gulf war: How a false testimony changed the public view of the war
On 2 August 1990, the Iraqi Army invaded and occupied Kuwait, committing numerous atrocities across the country which was met with international condemnation and brought immediate economic sanctions against Iraq by members of the UN Security Council.
35 nations led by United States formed a coalition, largest military alliance since World War II launched Operation Desert Storm. The initial conflict to expel Iraqi troops from Kuwait began with an aerial and naval bombardment on 17 January 1991, continuing for five weeks. This was followed by a ground assault on 24 February. This was a decisive victory for the coalition forces, who liberated Kuwait and advanced into Iraqi territory. The coalition ceased its advance and declared a ceasefire 100 hours after the ground campaign started.
However, at start of it only 63% of American general population was in favour of war while 31% opposed it. This all changed on a single event, the now notorious “Nayirah testimony”.
On October 10th, 1990, a 15-year old girl who provided only her first name, Nayirah, appeared before the United States Congressional Human Rights Caucus and gave a testimony which was then used by US Government and organizations as justification of the Gulf War.
In her emotional testimony, Nayirah claimed that after the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait she had witnessed Iraqi soldiers take babies out of incubators in a Kuwaiti hospital, take the incubators, and leave the babies to die.
The effect was instanteous. Nayirah’s testimony was widely publicized. Hill & Knowlton (an American PR firm), which had filmed the hearing, sent out a video news release to MediaLink, a firm which served about 700 television stations in the United States.
That night, portions of the testimony aired on ABC’s Nightline and NBC Nightly News reaching an estimated audience between 35 and 53 million Americans.Seven senators cited Nayirah’s testimony in their speeches backing the use of force. President George Bush repeated the story at least ten times in the following weeks. 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,” and of “babies pulled from incubators and scattered like firewood across the floor.”Her account of the atrocities helped to stir American opinion in favor of participation in the Gulf War.
Even Amnesty International , a British NGO, corraborated her story by publishing several independent reports about the killings and testimony from evacuees.
The Testimony:
In her Oral 4 minute testimony, she stated:
Mr. Chairman, and members of the committee, my name is Nayirah and I just came out of Kuwait. My mother and I were in Kuwait on August 2nd for a peaceful summer holiday. My older sister had a baby on July 29th and we wanted to spend some time in Kuwait with her.
I only pray that none of my 10th grade classmates had a summer vacation like I did. I may have wished sometimes that I can be an adult, that I could grow up quickly. What I saw happening to the children of Kuwait and to my country has changed my life forever, has changed the life of all Kuwaitis, young and old, mere children or more.
My sister with my five day old nephew traveled across the desert to safety. There is no milk available for the baby in Kuwait. They barely escaped when their car was stuck in the desert sand and help came from Saudi Arabia.
I stayed behind and wanted to do something for my country. The second week after invasion, I volunteered at the AlIdar (phonetic rendering) Hospital with 12 other women who wanted to help as well. I was the youngest volunteer. The “other” women were from 20 to 30 years old.
While I was there, I saw the Iraqi soldiers come into the hospital with guns. They took the babies out of the incubators, took the incubators and left the children to die on the cold floor. It was horrifying. I could not help but think of my nephew who was born premature and might have died that day as well. After I left the hospital, some of my friends and I distributed flyers condemning the Iraqi invasion until we were warned we might be killed if the Iraqis saw us.
The Iraqis have destroyed everything in Kuwait. They stripped the supermarkets of food, the pharmacies of medicine, the factories of medical supplies, ransacked their houses and tortured neighbors and friends.
I saw and talked to a friend of mine after his torture and release by the Iraqis. He is 22 but he looked as though he could have been an old man. The Iraqis dunked his head into a swimming pool until he almost drowned. They pulled out his fingernails and then played electric shocks to sensitive private parts of his body. He was lucky to survive.
If an Iraqi soldier is found dead in the neighborhood, they burn to the ground all the houses in the general vicinity and would not let firefighters come until the only ash and rubble was left.
The Iraqis were making fun of President Bush and verbally and physically abusing my family and me on our way out of Kuwait. We only did so because life in Kuwait became unbearable. They have forced us to hide, burn or destroy everything identifying our country and our government.
I want to emphasize that Kuwait is our mother and the Emir our father. We repeated this on the roofs of our houses in Kuwait until the Iraqis began shooting at us, and we shall repeat it again. I am glad I am 15, old enough to remember Kuwait before Saddam Hussein destroyed it and young enough to rebuild it
Thank you.
Although Nayirah did not specify how many babies were in the incubators in her oral testimony, in the written testimony distributed by Hill and Knowlton, it read “While I was there I saw the Iraqi soldiers come into the hospital with guns, and go into the room where 15 babies were in incubators.” The testimony was not given under oath.
The Revelation:
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.
On March 15 1991, 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 and discovered that Iraqi troops “almost certainly had not stolen hospital incubators and left hundreds of Kuwaiti babies to die.”
Everything was cleared up on January 6, 1992, when The New York Times published an op-ed piece by John MacArthur entitled “Remember Nayirah, Witness for Kuwait?”. He revealed that Nayirah (full name Nayirah al-Ṣabaḥ) was the daughter of the Kuwaiti Ambassador to the U.S., Saud Nasir al-Sabah. Furthermore, it was revealed that her testimony was organized as part of the Citizens for a Free Kuwait public relations campaign, which was run by the American public relations firm Hill & Knowlton (yes them) for the Kuwaiti government.
MacArthur noted that “the incubator story seriously distorted the American debate about whether to support military action” and questioned whether “their [Representatives Lantos and Porter] 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.” The story earned MacArthur the Monthly Journalism Award from The Washington Monthly in April 1992, and the Mencken Award in 1993.
It has been speculated by Mitchel Cohen that she and her family may had left he country like others when the invasion began and wasn’t there in Kuwait when it all unfolded.
The Response:
On January 15, 1992, the CEO of Hill & Knowlton, Thomas E. Eidson, responded to the concerns raised by MacArthur in a letter to the editor to The New York Times. Eidson stated that “at no time has this firm collaborated with anyone to produce knowingly deceptive testimony”, asserting that the firm “had no reason to question her veracity when she testified following her escape from Kuwait.”
Tom Lantos, a close friend of Bush and co-chairman of Congressional Human Rights Foundation, concealed her identity from Bush. In an interview, Lantos stated that he had concealed Nayirah’s identity at the request of her father in order to protect her family and friends. He then wrote a letter to MacArthur, entitled “Kuwaiti Gave Consistent Account of Atrocities”. Accusing that:
“Mr. MacArthur’s deceptive article serves only the cynics who seek to rewrite the history of the Persian Gulf war”
Despite the several deflections from the side, MacAruthr pointed out that the testimony was secretly retracted.
Investigations:
Subsequent investigations, including one by Amnesty International, found no evidence for the incubator claims.
Middle Rights Watch, a division of Human Rights watch, investigated and interviewed several people, including the doctors that worked at the hospital which she had mentioned were interviewed by an investigator, Aziz Abu-Hamad. It was reported:
“The doctors told him the maternity ward had 25 to 30 incubators. None was (were) taken by the Iraqis, and no babies were taken from them.”
Amnesty International reacted by issuing a correction, with executive director John Healey subsequently accusing the Bush administration of “opportunistic manipulation of the international human rights movement”. The Retraction stated that it:
“found no reliable evidence that Iraqi forces had caused the deaths of babies by removing them or ordering their removal from incubators.”
Conclusion:
Following this, al-Sabah’s testimony has come to be regarded as a classic example of modern atrocity propaganda.
John R. MacArthur, who authored Second Front: Censorship and Propaganda in the Gulf War, has noted that “at the time, it was the most sophisticated and expensive PR campaign ever run in the U.S. by a foreign government.”
“In the end, the question was not whether H&K effectively altered public opinion, but whether the combined efforts of America’s own government, foreign interests, and private PR and lobbying campaigns drowned out decent and rational, unemotional debate.”
This should serve as a lesson to rest of world about the false propaganda that can be easily spread and how one should be careful to believe everything they read.
Like in this case, nobody thought to confirm the story.
A little reportorial investigation would have done a great service to the democratic process. — John MacArthur
