Submitted by John Stauber on
Tonight's HBO movie "Live from Baghdad" has journalists repeating the false Iraqi-baby-killing scam perpetrated by Hill & Knowlton PR in 1990. That outrageous stunt before a make-believe congressional committee was part of a multi-million dollar propaganda campaign funded by Kuwait to make sure the US went to war. The crying teenage witness "Nayirah" seen in tonight's HBO film was actually the daughter of Kuwait's ambassador to the U.S. A year later journalists documented that her babies-thrown-from-incubators testimony was false, but most people still remember it as true. TV critics including Tom Shales of the Washington Post are giving the PR scam new life and a new spin. Shales writes that in tonight's HBO film "The horror wreaked on Kuwait is brought back vividly during a sequence in which [CNN producer Robert] Wiener and his team travel to Kuwait to investigate allegations that Iraqi troops had ripped babies out of incubators as part of their plundering -- remember? Too late, Wiener realizes that he and CNN have been duped by the Iraqis for propaganda purposes and that they were allowed into Kuwait only so the Iraqis could use them to help discredit the incubator allegations." But who was and is duping whom? Hill & Knowlton PR duped Shales and the rest of the nation back in 1990 and now tonight's HBO piece will reinforce that Big Lie. For the REAL story of the baby-killing PR scam read the on-line excerpt from our book Toxic Sludge Is Good For You.
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