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To: LLCF who wrote (32681)	4/30/2003 1:22:29 AM
From: Raymond Duray	Respond to of 74559

WMDs? What's that? Here's a historical, hysterical and hilarious tale of the complete stupidity of the American public. Apparently you can sell anything to them. Especially Bush Family Wars for Profit: Here's a new detail on the deceit that was used to "sell" Poppie's Gulf War, starring Stormin' Norman, General Powell (as hisself) and a cutie Quwaiti not named Nayirah. (BTW, Nayirah got paid $2 MM for being such a good liar. Nice work when you can get it.) commondreams.org (a) Few will forget the heart-rending testimony before a congressional committee by the sobbing 15 year-old Kuwaiti girl called Nayirah on October 10, 1990: “I saw the Iraqi soldiers come into the hospital with guns, and go into the room where 15 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.” No congressperson, no journalist took the trouble to probe the identity of “Nayirah,” who was said to be an escapee from Kuwait but was later revealed to be the daughter of the Kuwaiti ambassador in Washington. With consummate skill, the story had been manufactured out of whole cloth and the 15 year-old coached by the PR firm Hill & Knowlton, which has a rich history of being “imbedded” in Republican administrations. Similar unsubstantiated yarns made their debut several weeks later at the UN, where a team of seven “witnesses,” also coached by Hill & Knowlton, testified about atrocities in Iraq. (It was later learned that the seven had used false names.) And in an unprecedented move, the UN Security Council allowed the US to show a video created by Hill & Knowlton. All to good effect. The PR campaign had the desired impact, and Congress voted to authorize the use of force against Iraq on January 12, 1991. (The UN did so on November 29, 1990.) “Nayirah’s” true identity did not become known until two years later. And Hill & Knowlton’s coffers bulged when the proceeds arrived from its billing of Kuwait. Interestingly, the General Manager of Hill & Knowlton’s Washington, DC office at the time was a woman named Victoria Clarke. She turned out to be less successful in her next job, as Press Secretary for the re-election campaign of President George Bush in 1992. But she is now back in her element as Assistant Secretary of Defense for Public Affairs. ******************** You gotta love a trooper like Victoria "Tory" Clarke. She was interviewed by C-SPAN last weekend and the softball and soft-brained interviewer asked her how she saw her "mission". She replied, after a thoughtful moment's reflection, "I'm an advocate for the military." And that is how we end up having books written with titles like "The Banality of Evil".