Like Father, Like Son--How Bush Sr. Demonized Saddam Hussein
mgke...@yahoo.com
public relations firms were hired to mobilize US opinion against
Hussein. Participating firms included the Rendon Group, Neill & Co.,
the "Coalition for Americans at Risk", the "Freedom Task Force" and
"Citizens for a Free Kuwait". Hill & Knowlton, however, served as the
mastermind for the campaign. The man running Hill & Knowlton's
Washington office was Craig Fuller, one of Bush's closest friends and
inside political advisors. Craig Fuller was chief of staff to Bush when
he was vice-president.
"Hill & Knowlton produced dozens of video news releases at a cost of
well over half a million dollars, but it was money well spent,
resulting in tens of millions of dollars worth of "free" air time. The
VNRs were shown by eager TV news directors around the world who rarely
(if ever) identified Kuwait's PR firm as the source of the footage and
stories. TV stations and networks simply fed the carefully-crafted
propaganda to unwitting viewers, who assumed they were watching "real"
journalism. After the war Arthur Rowse asked Hill & Knowlton to show
him some of the VNRs, but the PR company refused. Obviously the phony
TV news reports had served their purpose, and it would do H&K no good
to help a reporter reveal the extent of the deception. In Unreliable
Sources, authors Martin Lee and Norman Solomon noted that "when a
research team from the communications department of the University of
Massachusetts surveyed public opinion and correlated it with knowledge
of basic facts about US policy in the region, they drew some sobering
conclusions: The more television people watched, the fewer facts they
knew; and the less people knew in terms of basic facts, the more likely
they were to back the Bush administration.78"
One of Hill & Knowlton's front groups was the "Congressional Human
Rights Caucus". It actually occupied free office space valued at $3,000
a year in Hill & Knowlton's Washington, DC office. On October 10, 1990,
this caucus held a hearing on Capitol Hill for the purpose of
distributing it's propaganda, PR against Hussein. Outwardly, the
hearing resembled an official congressional proceeding, but appearances
were deceiving. In reality, the Human Rights Caucus was simply an
association of politicians and therefore it's witnesses were allowed to
lie with impunity without fear of legal recourse.
Hill & Knowlton's largest PR coup came in the form of a well-rehearsed
lie by, "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
http://tinyurl.com/yzzrx4
FREEP THIS!
FREEP THIS!
mgke...@yahoo.com
FREEP THIS! wrote:
> http://www.kdp.pp.se/old/chemical.html
Here's some George Bush quotes on nation building:
Nov. 6, 2000 George W. Bush
Let me tell you what else I'm worried about: I'm worried about an
opponent who uses nation building and the military in the same
sentence. See, our view of the military is for our military to be
properly prepared to fight and win war and, therefore, prevent war from
happening in the first place.
Oct. 11, 2000 George W. Bush
Somalia. It started off as a humanitarian mission then changed into a
nation-building mission and that's where the mission went wrong. The
mission was changed. And as a result, our nation paid a price, and so I
don't think our troops ought to be used for what's called nation
building. I think our troops ought to be used to fight and win war. I
think our troops ought to be used to help overthrow a dictator when
it's in our best interests. But in this case, it was a nation-building
exercise. And same with Haiti. I wouldn't have supported either.
Oct. 11, 2000 George W. Bush
I think what we need to do is convince people who live in the lands
they live in to build the nations. Maybe I'm missing something here. I
mean we're going to have kind of a nation-building corps from America.
Absolutely not. Our military is meant to fight and win war. That's what
it's meant to do and when it gets overextended, morale drops.
Oct. 4, 2000 George W. Bush (Presidential debate, Oct. 4, 2000)
I think we've got to be very careful when we commit our troops. The
vice president and I have a disagreement about the use of troops. He
believes in national building. I would be very careful about using our
troops as nation builders.
mgke...@yahoo.com
FREEP THIS! wrote:
> http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1760007/posts
"War in Iraq: Not a Humanitarian Intervention
By Ken Roth
. . .
Because the Iraq war was not mainly about saving the Iraqi people from
mass slaughter, and because no such slaughter was then ongoing or
imminent, Human Rights Watch at the time took no position for or
against the war. A humanitarian rationale was occasionally offered for
the war, but it was so plainly subsidiary to other reasons that we
felt no need to address it. Indeed, if Saddam Hussein had been
overthrown and the issue of weapons of mass destruction reliably dealt
with, there clearly would have been no war, even if the successor
government were just as repressive. Some argued that Human Rights
Watch should support a war launched on other grounds if it would
arguably lead to significant human rights improvements. But the
substantial risk that wars guided by non-humanitarian goals will
endanger human rights keeps us from adopting that position.
Over time, the principal justifications originally given for the Iraq
war lost much of their force. More than seven months after the
declared end of major hostilities, weapons of mass destruction have
not been found. No significant prewar link between Saddam Hussein and
international terrorism has been discovered. The difficulty of
establishing stable institutions in Iraq is making the country an
increasingly unlikely staging ground for promoting democracy in the
Middle East. As time elapses, the Bush administration's dominant
remaining justification for the war is that Saddam Hussein was a
tyrant who deserved to be overthrown-an argument of humanitarian
intervention. The administration is now citing this rationale not
simply as a side benefit of the war but also as a prime justification
for it. Other reasons are still regularly mentioned, but the
humanitarian one has gained prominence.
Does that claim hold up to scrutiny? The question is not simply
whether Saddam Hussein was a ruthless leader; he most certainly was.
Rather, the question is whether the conditions were present that would
justify humanitarian intervention-conditions that look at more than
the level of repression. If so, honesty would require conceding as
much, despite the war's global unpopularity. If not, it is important
to say so as well, since allowing the arguments of humanitarian
intervention to serve as a pretext for war fought mainly on other
grounds risks tainting a principle whose viability might be essential
to save countless lives.
In examining whether the invasion of Iraq could properly be understood
as a humanitarian intervention, our purpose is not to say whether the
U.S.-led coalition should have gone to war for other reasons. That, as
noted, involves judgments beyond our mandate. Rather, now that the
war's proponents are relying so significantly on a humanitarian
rationale for the war, the need to assess this claim has grown in
importance. We conclude that, despite the horrors of Saddam Hussein's
rule, the invasion of Iraq cannot be justified as a humanitarian
intervention."