"During the Gulf War, the American media was manipulated into reporting exactly what the government and military had wanted them to report."

- Jeff Pavir, host of CBC's Prime Time

Through press releases and media packages, Hill & Knowlton began circulating the accusations that Iraqi soldiers had removed 312 babies from their incubators and left them to die on the cold hospital floor of Kuwait City. This incident had originally been fabricated in a September 5 report to the London Daily Telegraph by exiled Kuwaiti housing minister Yahya al-Sumait. It was reinforced in a later account in the Los Angeles Times by a San Francisco woman identified only as "Cindy" and her travelling companion "Rudi". No last names were given and no photographs were presented as evidence of this claim. Once this unsubstantiated baby atrocity accusation got out, it was repeated over and over again by journalists, having burrowed itself like a virus into the computerized clippings files of major newspapers.

At the October 10 Congressional Human Rights Caucus, Hill & Knowlton produced "Nayirah", a fifteen-year- old Kuwaiti, to provided testimony that was later used in the Citizens for a Free Kuwait media kit. In her passionate account of atrocities in Kuwait city, she stated:

"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."

It was not asked why she didn't bend down to pick up one of the dying infants, and it was not revealed that Nayirah was the daughter of Saud al-Sabah, Kuwait's ambassador to the United States.

Aziz Abu-Hammad, investigator for the New York-based human rights group Middle East Watch, was unable to substantiate Nayirah's report of incubator atrocities. In a December 19 memo, he wrote that it is possible that some of the supposed witnesses "are doing their part in a public relations campaign by the Kuwaiti government, where the truth is stretched a bit." Regardless, Hill & Knowlton had the baby incubator story repeated before the United Nations Security Council chamber in an audiovisual presentation on November 27. The presentation was loaded with anonymous charges of Iraqi brutality and the reiteration of the baby incubator story. A Kuwaiti dentist, claiming to be a surgeon and using a false name, testified that under his supervision 120 newborn babies were buried in the second week of the invasion. Five of the seven witnesses at the U.N. that day - coached by Hill & Knowlton - had used false names without saying they were doing so. Two days after this slick presentation, the Security Council passed Resolution 678 authorizing member states to use military force to evict Iraqi troops from Kuwait. In the five weeks following Nayirah's falsified testimony, the baby incubator story was repeated six times by George Bush in various political speeches, including a speech to the troops near Dhahran:

"It turns your stomach when you listen to the tales of those that have escaped the brutality of Saddam the invader. Mass hangings. Babies pulled from incubators and scattered like firewood across the floor."

When Amnesty International made the unfortunate mistake of publishing a two-sentence description of the incubator story in an 84-page report on human rights violations in occupied Kuwait, George Bush was quick to exploit Amnesty's established credentials by publishing an open letter sent to campus newspapers across the country, using references to the Amnesty version of the incubator story, and stating that

"there's no horror that could make this a more obvious conflict of good vs. evil...".

At the January 8 Congress hearing on Kuwait the war resolution was passed after the Amnesty report was quoted that

"over 300 babies were reported to have died after Iraqi soldiers removed them from incubators."

Amnesty later backed down from the story in the seventh paragraph of a press release, stating that they had found

"no reliable evidence that Iraqi forces had caused the deaths of babies by removing them or ordering their removal from incubators."

Opposition to the incubator atrocity tale was conveniently ignored, until the January 17, 1991 article by Alexander Cockburn in the Los Angeles Times which openly challenged the incubator myth. Unfortunately, by then the bombing of Iraq had already begun. Later, on February 15, Vice President Dan "Potato" Quayle declared,

"There are pictures Saddam doesn't want us to see. Pictures of premature babies in Kuwait that were tossed out of their incubators and left to die."

After the war, Middle East Watch was shown death certificates for 30 Kuwaiti babies who were all buried on August 24, 1990. Of those 30 babies, 19 had died before the Iraqi invasion began, and 11 died during the occupation. None of the 30 were ever shown to have been removed from incubators. All of the witnesses backed off from their original claims of having supervised or participated in the burial of babies.

According to London Amnesty International spokesman Sean Styles,

"we spoke to well over a dozen doctors of different nationalities who had been in Kuwait at the time and they couldn't stand the story up, and it became quite clear to us that credible medical opinion was that this didn't happen."

Andrew Whitley, executive director of Middle East Watch, and part of a two-man investigation in Kuwait, was quoted as having said:

"Soon after we arrived in Kuwait, two weeks after the liberation it became apparant that the story was a complete hoax. We were able to go 'round the hospitals to count the incubators and find that - possibly with one or two that had been misplaced - that none were missing. So none of the incubators were removed in the first place. Moreover, it seemde quite clear that there weren't any deaths which had been deliberately the cause of the Iraqis having gone in and stolen equipment."

The final decision to go to war was made on January 12, 1991 in a Senate vote of 52 to 47 (a margin of 3). Before passing this resolution, six pro-war senators specifically brought forth the baby incubator allegations in their speeches supporting the resolution. Without the incubator allegations the margin of victory within the Senate would not have been sufficient for the war effort to be approved, and hence the war would not have occurred.