October 2002

Views expressed are those of the authors, not necessarily of the AFSC.

First Casualties

Excerpted from "In war, some facts less factual," Scott Peterson, The Christian Science Monitor, 6 Sept 2002.

When George H.W. Bush ordered American forces to the Persian Gulf--to reverse Iraq's August 1990 invasion of Kuwait--part of the administration case was that an Iraqi juggernaut was also threatening to roll into Saudi Arabia. Citing top-secret satellite images, Pentagon officials estimated in mid-September that up to 250,000 Iraqi troops and 1,500 tanks stood on the border, threatening the key US oil supplier. But when the St. Petersburg Times in Florida acquired two commercial Soviet satellite images of the same area, taken at the same time, no Iraqi troops were visible near the Saudi border--just empty desert.

"It was a pretty serious fib," says Jean Heller, the Times journalist who broke the story.

Shortly before US strikes began in the Gulf War, the St. Petersburg Times asked two experts to examine the satellite images of the Kuwait and Saudi Arabia border area taken in mid-September 1990, a month and a half after the Iraqi invasion. The experts, including a former Defense Intelligence Agency analyst who specialized in desert warfare, pointed out the US build-up--jet fighters standing wing-tip to wing-tip at Saudi bases--but were surprised to see almost no sign of the Iraqis.

"That [Iraqi buildup] was the whole justification for Bush sending troops in there, and it just didn't exist," Ms. Heller says. Three times Heller contacted the office of Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney (now vice president) for evidence refuting the Times photos or analysis--offering to hold the story if proven wrong. The official response: "Trust us." To this day, the Pentagon's photographs of the Iraqi troop buildup remain classified.

The roots of modern war propaganda reach back to British World War II stories about German troops bayoneting babies, and can be traced through the Vietnam era and even to US campaigns in Somalia and Kosovo. While the adage has it that "truth is the first casualty of war," senior administration officials say they cherish their credibility, and would not lie. In a press briefing last September, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld noted occasions during World War II when false information about US troop movements was leaked to confuse the enemy. He paraphrased Winston Churchill, saying: "Sometimes the truth is so precious it must be accompanied by a bodyguard of lies." But he added that "my fervent hope is that we will be able to manage our affairs in a way that that will never happen. And I am 69 years old and I don't believe it's ever happened that I have lied to the press, and I don't intend to start now."

Last fall, the Pentagon secretly created an "Office of Strategic Influence." But when its existence was revealed, the ensuing media storm over reports that it would launch disinformation campaigns prompted its official closure in late February. Commenting on the furor, President Bush pledged that the Pentagon will "tell the American people the truth."

Critics familiar with the precedent set in recent decades, however, remain skeptical. They point, for example, to the Office of Public Diplomacy run by the State Department in the 1980s. Using staff detailed from US military "psychological operations" units, it fanned fears about Nicaragua's leftist Sandinista regime with false "intelligence" leaks. Besides placing a number of proContra, antiSandinista stories in the national US media, that office fed the Miami Herald a make-believe story that the Soviet Union had given chemical weapons to the Sandinistas. Another tale--which happened to emerge the night of President Ronald Reagan's reelection victory--held that Soviet MiG fighters were on their way to Nicaragua. The office was shut down in 1987, after a report by the US Comptroller-General found that some of their efforts were "prohibited, covert propaganda activities."

In the fall of 1990, members of Congress and the American public were swayed by the tearful testimony of a 15-year-old Kuwaiti girl, known only as Nayirah. In the girl's testimony before a congressional caucus, she described how, as a volunteer in a Kuwait maternity ward, she had seen Iraqi troops storm her hospital, steal the incubators, and leave 312 babies "on the cold floor to die." Seven US Senators later referred to the story during debate; the motion for war passed by just five votes. In the weeks after Nayirah spoke, President Bush senior invoked the incident five times, saying that such "ghastly atrocities" were like "Hitler revisited."

But just weeks before the US bombing campaign began in January, a few press reports began to raise questions about the validity of the incubator tale. Later, it was learned that Nayirah was in fact the daughter of the Kuwaiti ambassador to Washington and had no connection to the Kuwait hospital. She had been coached--along with the handful of others who would "corroborate" the story--by senior executives of Hill and Knowlton in Washington, the biggest global PR firm at the time, which had a contract worth more than $10 million with the Kuwaitis to make the case for war.

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