Perjured Testimony…

I’m going to try to avoid political commentary here and instead present the following information solely as a matter of historical record. Before the United States entered the First Gulf War, a congressional hearing was held in Washington, D.C., where a 15-year-old Kuwaiti girl named Nayirah gave testimony. Here’s an account of it:

“Before the caucus and a television audience, Nayirah recalled how, in the second week after the invasion, she had been volunteering at the al-Addan hospital in Hadiya when it was ransacked by Iraqi soldiers. “I saw the Iraqi soldiers come into the hospital with guns,” she testified, struggling to hold back tears. “They took the babies out of the incubators, took the incubators, and left the children to die on the cold floor.”” Citation.

Nayirah also testified that Iraqis had tortured her friend and burned entire neighborhoods. “[B]ut the story of babies being removed from incubators was the one that everyone remembered, defining for Americans the brutality of the Iraqi Army.” Id.

The American public was outraged and the baby incubator story was repeated by Bush leading up to the US-led coalition force ground invasion - Desert Storm, right?

Returning to Nayirah, it was later revealed that her testimony before the congressional committee was not truthful. She was not a nurse in Kuwait, nor did she witness Iraqi soldiers removing babies from incubators and leaving them to die on the “cold floor”. In reality, Nayirah was the daughter of Kuwait's ambassador to the United States and a member of the country’s ruling family — he was also seated just four chairs away from her during the hearing. The entire story had been made up with the help of an American public relations firm and was designed to drum up support for an invasion.

Many months into the conflict, American stealth fighters dropped two laser-guided smart bombs (bunker busters) into an air raid shelter housing 400 civilians - many of whom were women and children sleeping at the time. The first bunker buster cut a path followed by the second, which detonated deep. The heat from the blast was so intense that a journalist later wrote that “bodies [were] fused together so that they formed entire blocks of flesh”. It was also reported that not all of the occupants died immediately, as blackened flesh-infused handprints were discovered on the concrete ceiling of the shelter. Today, the structure is preserved as a memorial. Nothing beside remains, round the decay of that Colossal wreck.