Monday, February 05, 2007

Fourth Anniversary of Powell's Lies

By Robert Parry
February 5, 2007

To make his case for war before the U.N., George W. Bush dispatched the most credible official in his administration, Secretary of State Colin Powell.

Yet, when Powell was assigned to make the case for war, he already counted himself among the growing list of U.S. officials nervous about the quality of the WMD intelligence. Indeed, Powell may have been one of the best positioned officials to know that the threat from Iraq was being exaggerated.

Read on.
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4 comments:

Foster said...

Did not King George the first use a similar tactice when he got authorization for the Gulf War by bringing in to testify before Congress an actress playing the role of a peasant girl from Kuwait who had been horribly tortured by Saddam Hussein?

Mon Feb 05, 02:29:00 PM 2007
Nat Parry said...

You may be thinking of a 15-year-old girl named Nayirah -- she was the Kuwaiti ambassador's daughter who testified (lied) to Congress about babies being torn from incubators in occupied Kuwait.

This is from PRwatch.org:

In fact, the most emotionally moving testimony on October 10 came from a 15-year-old Kuwaiti girl, known only by her first name of Nayirah. According to the Caucus, Nayirah's full name was being kept confidential to prevent Iraqi reprisals against her family in occupied Kuwait. Sobbing, she described what she had seen with her own eyes in a hospital in Kuwait City. Her written testimony was passed out in a media kit prepared by Citizens for a Free Kuwait. "I volunteered at the al-Addan hospital," Nayirah said. "While I was there, I saw the Iraqi soldiers come into the hospital with guns, and go into the room where . . . 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."83

Three months passed between Nayirah's testimony and the start of the war. During those months, the story of babies torn from their incubators was repeated over and over again. President Bush told the story. It was recited as fact in Congressional testimony, on TV and radio talk shows, and at the UN Security Council. "Of all the accusations made against the dictator," MacArthur observed, "none had more impact on American public opinion than the one about Iraqi soldiers removing 312 babies from their incubators and leaving them to die on the cold hospital floors of Kuwait City."84

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.

http://www.prwatch.org/books/tsigfy10.html

Mon Feb 05, 03:28:00 PM 2007
zen said...

I've been wondering how people here would feel if a nation like Iran, or maybe China, went to the UN and pleaded withe the security council with fancy graphics and tiny vials of powder, claiming that action needed to be taken against the US. Then after the UN voted against such action, said nation invaded anyway.

Mon Feb 05, 04:36:00 PM 2007
blin said...

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The consequences of unchecked governance; when the ridiculous becomes sublime.
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Mon Feb 05, 09:02:00 PM 2007

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