Incubator lie

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The incubator lie describes the long spread fact that Iraqi soldiers killed Kuwaiti premature babies during the invasion of Kuwait in August 1990, the beginning of the Second Gulf War , by tearing them out of their incubators and letting them die on the ground. This claim was made by Nayirah as-Sabah (also Naijirah ) in the United States Congress in 1990 . It had an influence on the public debate about the need for military intervention in favor of Kuwait and has been quoted many times by the then US President George HW Bush and by human rights organizations . It was only after the US-led military intervention to liberate Kuwait that the story turned out to be the invention of the American PR agency Hill & Knowlton . This was paid for by the Kuwaiti government in exile in order to support a recapture of Kuwait through public relations.

statement

A young woman from Kuwait, who introduced herself by her first name “Nayirah”, made a tearful statement to an informal human rights committee of the US Congress on October 10, 1990 : She had volunteer work as a Kuwaiti auxiliary nurse at Al Adnan Hospital Kuwait City and witnessed the invasion of Iraqi soldiers. She said, "I saw the Iraqi soldiers come into the hospital with rifles ..., take the babies out of the incubators, take the incubators and leave the children on the cold floor where they died."

It was only after the war that it became known that she was the fifteen-year-old daughter of the Kuwaiti ambassador Saud Nasir as-Sabah to the USA . Her father sat as a listener in the audience during her testimony before the congressional committee. Her report was fictitious and the teenager had never worked there.

While in exile, the Kuwaiti government commissioned the American PR agency Hill & Knowlton for ten million US dollars to publicize American military intervention in favor of Kuwait. H + K was commissioned by the sham organization Citizens for a Free Kuwait , which in turn was founded and financed by the Kuwaiti government. The agency launched a series of PR activities, including the fictional incubator story. Two nurses from the maternity ward in question later stated that the young person did not work there and that the incidents she described never took place.

Shared responsibility of the US government

The knowledge of the PR process and the shared responsibility of the US government for the incubator lie are controversial in research.

According to Michael Butter, for example, only the PR agency actually knew about the process and initiated it. In contrast, Andreas Elter represents:

“So the work of the US advertising agency for the Kuwaiti people bore the signature of the White House in a way. President Bush was briefed on every step by Fuller. However, it cannot be proven whether he also gave his personal consent for the baby story. What remains, however, is that there were close personal contacts between the US government and an agency that was demonstrably telling lies. The same agency was even employed directly by the US government in a different context. "

- Andreas Elter

effect

Nayirah's account played a large role in the US decision-making about an intervention in Iraq. President Bush mentioned the lie at least ten times in a few weeks. Amnesty International published an 84-page report on human rights violations in Kuwait on December 19, 1990, over two months after the girl's appearance , containing the incubator lie. It was also repeated on January 8, 1991 by a senior Amnesty International official before the Committee on Foreign Affairs. The US Senate finally voted on January 12, 1991 with 52:47 votes for an intervention in the Second Gulf War . The House of Representatives voted 250 to 183 for the war.

reception

The PR campaign is an example of targeted media manipulation and disinformation in order to make politics, media and the public ready for war ( war cause lie ). Amnesty International tried to verify the story after the liberation of Kuwait and was eventually forced to publicly admit that it had been caught by a fake.

literature

  • Mira Beham: War Drums: Media, War and Politics . German Taschenbuch-Verlag, Munich 1996, ISBN 3-423-30531-2 .
  • John R. MacArthur : The Battle of the Lies: How the US Sold the Gulf War . Preface by Dagobert Lindlau . dtv, Munich 1993, ISBN 3-423-30352-2 (English: Second Front: Censorship and Propaganda in the 1991 Gulf War . Translated by Friedrich Griese).

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Statement of October 10, 1990 and observations. on YouTube
  2. ↑ a b How PR Sold the War in the Persian Gulf, excerpted from Toxic Sludge Is Good For You. Chapter 10. prwatch.org, accessed July 8, 2014 : “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. "
  3. ^ Deception on Capitol Hill. In: The New York Times. January 15, 1992, accessed on July 8, 2014 (English): “How did the girl's testimony come about? It was arranged by the big public relations firm of Hill & Knowlton on behalf of a client, the Kuwaiti-sponsored Citizens for a Free Kuwait, which was then pressing Congress for military intervention. "
  4. ↑ "Nothing is what it seems". About conspiracy theories . Suhrkamp, ​​Berlin 2018. ISBN 978-3-518-07360-5 , pp. 89f
  5. ↑ Elter, Andreas: The war seller: History of US Propaganda 1917-2005. Frankfurt a. M .: Suhrkamp. 2005, p. 241, quoted in: Anton, Andreas & Schink, Alan. (2019). Review of Michael Butter (2018). "Nothing is what it seems." About conspiracy theories. In: Zeitschrift für Anomalistik, Volume 19 (2019), pp. 471–486
  6. ^ Walton, p. 128
  7. ^ Douglas Walton: Appeal to pity: A case study of theargumentum ad misericordiam . In: Argumentation . tape 9 , no. 5 , 1995, ISSN  0920-427X , p. 769–784 , p. 771 , doi : 10.1007 / BF00744757 (English, dougwalton.ca [PDF; 1000 kB ]).
  8. ↑ Alexander Cockburn: Right Stuff . In: London Review of Books . tape 13 , no. 3 , 1991, pp. 9 (English, online ).
  9. ↑ Walton, p. 772
  10. ^ Sara Fritz, William J. Eaton: Congress Authorizes Gulf War: Historic act: The vote in both houses, supporting Bush and freeing troops to attack Iraq, is decisive and bipartisan. It is the strongest move since Tonkin Gulf . In: Los Angeles Times . January 13, 1991 (English, online ).
  11. ^ John Stauber, Sheldon Rampton: How PR Sold the War in the Persian Gulf. In: Toxic Sludge Is Good For You: Lies, Damn Lies and the Public Relations Industry. prwatch.org, 1991, accessed July 8, 2014 .