# Kuwait's money, an unsworn witness, and the story that reached a war vote

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  Kuwait's money, an unsworn witness, and the story that reached a war vote
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In October 1990 a fifteen-year-old named only as Nayirah told a House caucus that Iraqi soldiers had taken babies from incubators and left them to die.

WhenOctober 10, 1990ActorGovernment of Kuwait, through Citizens for a Free Kuwait and the U.S. public relations firm Hill &…Full record at propagandaarchive.org

  Content note. This page quotes an account of infants left to die. It is quoted to show how the campaign worked; investigators did not confirm it. The governments' open messaging in the same crisis is on the companion page, Selling the Gulf War from two capitals.

## What it said

On 10 October 1990 a girl introduced only by her first name told members of Congress that she had volunteered at al-Addan hospital in Kuwait and watched Iraqi soldiers come in with guns:

They took the babies out of incubators, took the incubators and left the children to die on the cold floor.

"Nayirah," Congressional Human Rights Caucus session, 10 October 1990, recorded by C-SPAN, as quoted on the FRAME case study.

Representative John Porter, a caucus co-chair, said that in eight years he had never heard such brutality and inhumanity and sadism. Her surname was withheld; the reason given was the safety of her family in occupied Kuwait.

The story then moved up the chain of American authority. Through the autumn President George H. W. Bush cited it in speeches; later reporting quotes him describing babies pulled from incubators and scattered like firewood across the floor. When the Senate debated the use-of-force resolution, John R. MacArthur later counted seven senators who used the incubator story in speeches for it.

## Who made it and why

The government of Kuwait, occupied since 2 August, wanted the United States to fight. It did not ask in its own name. In August 1990 a group called Citizens for a Free Kuwait was set up in the United States. Its filings under the Foreign Agents Registration Act, as summarized by John Stauber and Sheldon Rampton, show about $11.9 million from the Kuwaiti government over roughly six months, against $17,861 from 78 individuals. About $10.8 million went to the public relations firm Hill & Knowlton.

The people were well connected. Hill & Knowlton's Washington office was run by Craig Fuller, who had been chief of staff to Bush when Bush was vice-president. Frank Mankiewicz, once president of NPR, was vice-chairman and handled the press. Vice-president Lauri Fitz-Pegado ran the Kuwait account. The firm's research arm, the Wirthlin Group, reported about $1.1 million for research for the Kuwaitis.

The venue mattered as much as the witness. The Congressional Human Rights Caucus was an informal bipartisan group founded in 1983 by Representatives Tom Lantos (D-CA) and John Porter (R-IL). It was not a committee of the House. Its witnesses did not swear an oath. That evening, according to Stauber and Rampton, the firm sent a video news release through MediaLink, a service reaching about 700 stations, and parts of it aired on ABC's Nightline and NBC's Nightly News, to an estimated 35 to 53 million viewers.

## What it got right or wrong

The witness was Nayirah al-Sabah, daughter of Saud Nasser al-Sabah, Kuwait's ambassador to the United States. The public learned that on 6 January 1992, a year after the vote, from MacArthur's New York Times op-ed "Remember Nayirah, Witness for Kuwait?"

The corrections came in stages. In December 1990 Amnesty International had reported that 300 premature babies were reported to have died after Iraqi soldiers removed them from incubators, which were then looted. In March 1991 ABC's John Martin reported that babies and other patients had died when staff fled or stopped working, but that Iraqi troops almost certainly had not stolen hospital incubators and left hundreds of Kuwaiti babies to die. On 19 April 1991 Amnesty corrected itself:

it was not established how they had died and the teams found no reliable evidence that Iraqi forces had caused the deaths of babies by removing them or ordering their removal from incubators.

Amnesty International news release, 19 April 1991, as quoted in the Congressional Record, Senate, 16 June 1994, and on the FRAME case study.

Middle East Watch, in February 1992, said there was no truth to the charge, and that the stories were manufactured from germs of truth by people outside the country who should have known better. Kuwait's government then hired Kroll Associates. Its nine-week inquiry, over 250 interviews, did not find the large-scale raids and deaths that Kuwaiti spokesmen had described, though it said it found support for a smaller version. Nayirah told Kroll she had seen one baby out of an incubator for no more than a moment and that she had not been a volunteer but had only stopped by for a few minutes. Hill & Knowlton called the report a vindication.

None of this means the occupation was gentle. Amnesty's December 1990 report documented torture, the execution of hundreds of unarmed civilians, and thousands of arrests. Kuwait counts about 605 people missing from the invasion; remains of 59 Kuwaiti and third-country nationals were identified from a burial site found at Samawa in 2019 and 2020. The documented crimes were serious. The campaign put the one story investigators could not confirm in front of the public instead.

## Congress decides on war and is owed honest evidence

Article I gives Congress the decision to go to war, and on 12 January 1991 it decided: 52-47 in the Senate, 250-183 in the House. That is the deliberation the Constitution requires, and it has a right to honest evidence. Here a foreign government's paid case reached it through an American-sounding citizens' group, a session in a House building that looked like a hearing, and the lips of the President. Each step hid the source a little more. The FARA filings were public. Nobody at the caucus table or watching at home was shown them.

The fix is not to stop foreign governments from speaking. Kuwait was an invaded country and had every right to make its case. The fix is disclosure at the point of persuasion: a witness's relationship to the government paying for the campaign, stated when she speaks, and an oath when the setting borrows the look of a hearing. Lantos wrote in January 1992 that her being the ambassador's daughter made her a more credible witness. Perhaps. Then it should have been said in October 1990, so citizens could weigh it themselves.

What is not shown matters too. The record does not show that the story changed the Senate's result; seven speeches and a five-vote margin show it was used, not that it decided anything. It does not show that Lantos, Porter or Bush knew who she was in October 1990. MacArthur asked for a congressional inquiry into the co-chairs' ties to the firm. This site does not go further than the record.

## Its legacy

CBC's The Fifth Estate broadcast "To Sell a War" in December 1992, and it won the 1993 International Emmy for documentary. As the next war with Iraq approached, the story came back as a warning: the Christian Science Monitor ran "When contemplating war, beware of babies in incubators" in September 2002, and Democracy Now! debated it with MacArthur in December 2003. The closest U.S. case in the archive is the 2003 Security Council slide of mobile biological-weapons labs, where a claim resting mainly on one defector was shown before a war and later found unsupported. The difference is that it came from U.S. intelligence, not a foreign government's PR firm.

An older American parallel sits in this site's own yellow-press case study: a vivid image of cruelty that outran the reporting, at a moment when the country was deciding on war. The questions carry from one case to the next. Who pays for the "citizens" group? Is this a sworn hearing or a room in a federal building? Why is the witness's name withheld, and what else is withheld with it? When an official repeats a story, has anyone added evidence, or only authority?

## Sources

- FRAME case study "The Nayirah testimony: a Kuwaiti government PR campaign at a House human rights caucus," for the chronology, figures, quoted passages, and the documented and not-shown findings.

- John R. MacArthur, "Remember Nayirah, Witness for Kuwait?", New York Times, 6 January 1992; MacArthur, Second Front: Censorship and Propaganda in the Gulf War (Hill and Wang, 1992).

- John Stauber and Sheldon Rampton, "How PR Sold the War in the Persian Gulf," in Toxic Sludge Is Good for You (1995), PR Watch.

- C-SPAN, clip of the 10 October 1990 caucus session; Tom Lantos Human Rights Commission, history.

- Washington Post, 19 December 1990, on the Amnesty report; Congressional Record, Senate, 16 June 1994, quoting Amnesty's April 1991 release and the Kroll findings.

- Middle East Watch, Kuwait's "Stolen" Incubators: The Widespread Repercussions of a Murky Incident, 6 February 1992.

- U.S. Senate roll call vote 2, 102nd Congress, 12 January 1991; U.S. House History on the 1991 use-of-force resolution.

- Walter Kälin, UN Commission on Human Rights, E/CN.4/1992/26; International Commission on Missing Persons, Kuwait; ICRC Tripartite Commission statement.

- Christian Science Monitor, 6 September 2002; Democracy Now!, 2 December 2003.

- Paley Center, The Fifth Estate, "To Sell a War" (CBC, 1992).

- FRAME collection record "Mobile Production Facilities for Biological Agents (UN Security Council slide)."

Canonical: https://americanpropaganda.org/case-studies/nayirah-testimony-1990/