Media Coverage of Gulf War I

Winter 1991

Protocols of Persuasion

Protocols of PersuasionEwen identifies several Protocols of Persuasion

1) Creating Circumstances2) Calculated Simulation of Enthusiasm3) Creation of Mood4) Creating Impressions

Fate of Kuwait

Creating Circumstances:Creating circumstances is the art of “mounting events that are calculated to

stand out as ‘newsworthy,’ yet, at the same time, which do not appear to be staged.” (28)

Example:Gulf War I story about Iraqi soldiers killing babies in Kuwaiti hospitals.

Source: anonymous fifteen-year old Kuwaiti girl, called Nayirah, who had testified to the horrific events before the Congressional Human Rights Caucus on October 10, 1990.”

Fate of Kuwait

Eye Witness Account: Iraqi Atrocities

Reports Macleans reports: “Said the teenager: "I saw the Iraqi soldiers come into the hospital with guns and go into the room where 15 [premature] 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.”

Fate of Kuwait

Amnesty International Report on Kuwait

Washington Post reports: “Iraqi forces in occupied Kuwait have tortured and executed hundreds of

unarmed civilians, some of them children, arrested thousands of others and cut off 300 premature babies from hospital incubators, according to a report released here today by Amnesty International.”

Fate of Kuwait

Amnesty International Report on Kuwait

Washington Post continues:“Amnesty also cited accounts from a Red Crescent physician who claimed that

312 babies died in the early days of the invasion after soldiers looted incubators from Razi, Addan and Maternity hospitals. The physician, whose name was withheld, claimed to have helped bury 72 infants at the Rigga cemetery.”

Fate of Kuwait

“Iraq's ambassador to the United States, Mohamed Al-Mashat, angrily denounced the testimony as "a pack of lies."

Who Should we Believe?But, for Nayirah in particular, her nightmarish experiences in Kuwait hold a

terrible truth: "What I saw happen to the children of Kuwait and to my country has changed my life forever. We are children no more."

Who was Nayirah?

Who was Nayirah?

Story was her last was withheld for her protection.

“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.”

Who was Nayirah?

Who organized the Hearing? 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.)

Gassing the Kurds

Saddam Gassed the Kurds, correct?

Washington Post reports: A New Pentagon report “calls into question the widely reported assertion of

human rights organizations and Kurdish groups that Iraq bore the greatest responsibility for the deaths of hundreds of Iraqi Kurds -- women, infants and elderly -- who died at Halabja in what has been described as a vindictive chemical strike ordered from Baghdad in mid-March 1988.”

Gassing the Kurds

Washington Post continues: "We know Iraq does not use cyanide gas," the official said. "We have an

excellent understanding of Iraq's development, manufacture and use of chemical agents," he added, "and we know who doesn't use what."

"We are sure that Iran uses cyanide," the official said. Thus, when the Iranian government said many deaths were from cyanide, "That is a piece of evidence that condemned them."

Gassing the Kurds

Saddam invaded Kuwait, August 1990

Thereafter, there was no question about who gassed the Kurds. As a Nov., 1990 New York Times Op-Ed stated:“The genocidal intentions of the Iraqi regime against its Kurds became

unmistakable in 1988, when Saddam Hussein used poison gas against the Kurds, including the murder of some 5,000 civilians in the town of Halabja alone.”