Kuwaitgate - killing of Kuwaiti babies by Iraqi soldiers exaggerated

Washington Monthly, Sept, 1992 by Ted Rowse

On October 10, 1990, 15-year-old Nayirah was the most influential girl in the world. Tearfully relaying to Congress how she had witnessed Saddam's soldiers removing Kuwaiti babies from incubators and leaving them to die on a hospital floor, she added a crucial emotional rationale to the economic argument for U.S. involvement in the Gulf. For Robert Gray's Hill and Knowlton, which helped engineer her hearings and testimony, it was a PR masterstroke. Until, of course, it became the master's worst nightmare. Today, the validity of Nayirah's account is in doubt, and Hill and Knowlton is in the unenviable position of defending itself against charges of doctoting evidence.

But don't feel sorry for Hill and Knowlton yet. The firm has mounted a crafty self-defense, not only effectively quashing criticism, but even prompting journalists to issue retractions based on the flimsiest of evidence. Today, opponents of the war insist that the stories of mass murder of Kuwaiti babies were manufactured; yet Hill and Knowlton stands by the claims made in its original PR effort. Who's right? To find out requires dissecting Hill and Knowlton's savvy PR efforts on its own behalf.

Human wrongs

Hill and Knowlton and the Kuwaiti government began talking in August 1990--shortly after the Iraqi invasion--about ways to drum up support in the U.S. for strong military action against Iraq. The meetings led to the formation of a front group, Citizens for a Free Kuwait, which was financed almost entirely by the Kuwaiti government and which paid Hill and Knowlton $11.5 million to get its message to the right people.

A few months later, at a hearing of the Congressional Human Rights Caucus, Nayirah relayed her shocking story of babies left to die. The press latched on to the story, and the reported number of incubator deaths eventually jumped from the 15 stated in Nayirah's written testimony to 312--far more than the total number of incubators in the tiny Arab nation. Several members of Congress said the testimony influenced their votes to approve military action against Iraq, and President Bush frequently mentioned the incubator story as a reason for military intervention.

But shortly after the war ended, Nayirah's story came into question. In March 1991, ABC News interviewed Kuwaiti hospital officials who denied that any babies had been dumped out of incubators by Iraqi troops. A month later, Amnesty International, which earlier had reported the figure of 312 dead, said it had "found no reliable evidence that Iraqi forces had caused the deaths" of any incubator babies. The big bombshell, however, was a story by Harper's magazine publisher John R. MacArthur, which appeared in January 1992 on The New York Times op-ed page, revealing that Nayirah was the daughter of the Kuwaiti ambassador to the United States. MacArthur also revealed that Reps. Tom Lantos and John Edward Porter, who sponsored the congressional hearings, had started a group called the Congressional Human Rights Foundation that had received $50,000 from Citizens for a Free Kuwait, as well as free office space in Hill and Knowlton's Washington headquarters.

Hill and Knowlton, now under fire, launched an immediate counterattack, releasing a fiercely worded cable by the U.S. ambassador to Kuwait, Edward W. Gnehm, which insisted that 250 babies had been killed by Iraqi troops. The cable offered no evidence of such massive carnage. Meanwhile, the Kuwaiti government set out to get some. It hired an internationally respected investigator, Kroll Associates, to review the allegations of infant1 deaths and report the truth to the world. Middle East Watch, a branch of the left-leaning Human Rights Watch, was also investigating. Hill and Knowlton, however, was less willing to wait for the results of the Kroll study. Its image'repair effort went full steam ahead. In April, the firm went to court in Frankfurt to force a German television station to publicly retract an alleged implication that Hill and Knowlton knowingly spread a false story. The court sided against Hill and Knowlton, but the case served the firm well, putting news organizations on notice that Hill and Knowlton was not ready to lick its wounds in silence.

Hill and Knowlton's next move, one month later, targeted National Public Radio (NPR) commentator Daniel Schorr, who had casually referred to the incubator story as a "hoax" in an article he wrote for The Washington Post's editorial page. Hill and Knowlton vice chairman (and former president of NPR) Frank Mankiewicz sent Schorr the Gnehm cable and some news clippings, including a Reuters dispatch from January 1992, appearing to confirm Nayirah's charges. Schorr quickly caved, writing in a June letter in the Post that he had "made a mistake."

Schorr now says he has doubts about whether he should have issued such an apology, and "whether it was indeed a hoax." But Hill and Knowlton has kept the pressure on. After The Washington Monthly awarded MacArthur a Monthly Journalism Award in April for his Times op-ed, Mankiewicz fired off a letter to the magazine, published in the June issue, declaring that "the story [Nayirah] told about the incubator turns out to be true." But again he offered little evidence other than the cable from Gnehm.