By Sean Malloy
"This is a firm whose business is not just to persuade you which margarine to buy but which human rights abuses should lead a country to war and which can be overlooked in the interests of trade." — Liz Jackson's introduction to ABC Radio National's Background Briefing, March 24.
Producer Kirsten Garrett lifted the lid on Hill & Knowlton, one of the largest public relations companies in the world, and its role in the Gulf War.
Hill & Knowlton was paid a fee of about US$11 million to act for a group called "Citizens for Free Kuwait" — an organisation funded by the Kuwaiti ruling family.
Hill& Knowlton's job was to persuade the United Nations and the US people to support military intervention against Iraq.
One of the stories that stirred world media after the Iraqi occupation of Kuwait was "baby atrocities".
"While I was there, I saw Iraqi soldiers come into the hospital with guns, they took the babies out of the incubators and left them to die on the cold floor", testified a tearful 15-year-old Kuwaiti woman, called Nayirah, to a human rights hearing in the US Congress in October 1990.
"A month later in November", according to Background Briefing, "the UN Security Council took the unusual step of convening a public forum to address human rights in Kuwait.
"Several Kuwaiti doctors testified to seeing dead babies, to burying hundreds of dead babies and to the incubator story in general terms.
"Two days after that, the UN approved war against Iraq and at the same time Washington was also preparing to vote whether or not to go to war."
Kirsten Garrett interviewed John MacArthur, a writer and publisher of Harpers magazine, who first broke the real story behind the "baby atrocities".
"In World War I the British and the French very successfully demonised the Germans, and they did it by claiming monstrous atrocities committed by the Germans against babies and pregnant women.
"After the war a Belgian committee of inquiry found that all this was fake — that Germans had killed civilians, but that none of the atrocities against babies and the slaughter of the innocent had ever occurred.
"Right after the Gulf War it came out that the baby incubator story was almost certainly false", continued MacArthur.
"Reporters followed it up and went to hospitals and asked the doctors this, any of the things that had been claimed by the Kuwaiti propagandists and their public relations firm Hill & Knowlton, and no-one saw anything. They had heard the rumour but they never saw a single baby removed from a single incubator and, moreover, none of the incubators had been stolen and taken back to Iraq, which was the motive claimed for removing the babies from their incubators.
"So I thought this is incredible: is it possible that the war was started on the basis of this one atrocity story?"
Garrett also interviewed investigator Aziz Abu Hamad, who works for a US-based human rights group, Middle East Watch.
Hamad interviewed workers from Kuwaiti hospitals and neonatal wards and maternity units and established that no such incidents took place.
The Background Briefing report noted that Nayirah is the daughter of the Kuwaiti ambassador to the US and also a member of the Kuwaiti ruling family.
One of the doctors who testified to the UN forum turned out to be a dentist, not a doctor. He claimed to have supervised the burial of 120 other babies. He later changed his claims, admitting he didn't know where the babies came from or how they died or exactly how many there were.
Since the war the Kuwaiti government has hired an investigation firm to try to find evidence that bolsters their initial claims.
According to MacArthur, it can't be proved that Hill & Knowlton fabricated the baby story, but an internal memo issued when pro-war hype was waning emphasises a focus on human rights in Kuwait and the need to present "eyewitnesses".
During the war Hill & Knowlton produced VNRs — Video News Releases — which became the basis of television news of the war around the world.
Production teams supporting the war were able to gain access to the front lines and were assisted by US forces with transport and information.
The rest of the media were not allowed to move or report without permission and approval of the US military.
Robert Dielenschneider was the president of Hill & Knowlton at the time. Background Briefing played excerpts from a talk given by Dielenschneider to media students about the Gulf War, public relations and Hill & Knowlton.
"We took raw film footage, we put raw film footage with sound, we tried to depict what was happening in terms of the atrocities that were taking place in Kuwait: the pillaging, the rapes, the murders that were going on in Kuwait", Dielenschneider boasted.
"With one VNR we reached 61 million people in the US, with another VNR we reached 35 million people in the US. Our VNR's also went to Sky Channel and AsiaSat to literally millions of people throughout the world to demonstrate the plight of
"We found the press kit was extremely important because the media, controlled by the Department of Defence — very effectively in my view, by the way — really couldn't get all the information needed. So these press kits came in very handy and there was all kinds of information aimed at telling the media exactly what was going on in Kuwait on a real time basis and giving them the kind of information that would enable them to get their job done."
John MacArthur summed up the relationship between public relations firms like Hill & Knowlton and governments.
"The most important decision makers these days when it comes to governmental affairs are not people in government, are not the civil servants, not the elected officials; it's lobbyists. Because lobbyists are the ones that control all the power.
"What makes it so ironic and somewhat frightening is that they have no mandate and no real accountability to anyone except who's paying the piper.
"It comes down to money, which gets into the larger issues, because suddenly then you have government decisions being made on the money that is being thrown around, not on the ideas or the substance or logic of what is being discussed. And that gets fairly serious because it gets to the whole base and the whole legitimacy of government in general."