Activity 18, The Incubator Baby Incident
Some newspapers challenged the story. On September 30, 1990, the Seattle Times published an interview with a Palestinian physician contradicting the incubator allegations. On December 10, USA Today reported:
INCUBATOR STORY DISPUTED
A doctor just out of Kuwait challenges assertions by President Bush and Kuwait exiles that invading Iraqi soldiers had dumped babies out of incubators.
"Babies are dying in hospitals because Iraq's invasion has driven away staff who could save their lives," says Icelander Gisll Sigurdsson, who left Kuwait three weeks ago.
The incubator charge has been levied by Bush repeatedly when he recounts Iraqi atrocities.
"That news was not true," Sigurdsson said in Amman, Jordan. "However there were lots of babies who died because of lack of staff over the last few weeks."
Source: USA Today, December 10, 1990, p. 7A.
Truth is the first casualty, people always say gloomily at the prospect of war. Just how rapidly this happens can be illustrated by the case of the premature Kuwait babies, supposedly left to die last August by Iraqis who then removed the incubators to Baghdad. It has become the tale used by the Kuwait government in exile, as well as by President Bush, who invoked Iraqi horrors inflicted upon the innocent children of Kuwait in his speech. It should be said right away that there are thousands of examples of such Iraqi brutality and denial of elementary human rights, not just in Kuwait but in Iraq. But the story of baby mass murder is untrue.
Does it matter that the Iraqis, amid their looting and murders, did not kill scores if not hundreds
of babies by stealing their incubators? It does matter. War brings a deluge of propaganda designed
to gull us and to protect government. The incubator myth shows how quick we are to believe
something when it grabs so savagely at our instincts.
Source: Adapted from Alexander Cockburn, "Sifting for the Truth on both Sides," Los Angeles Times, January 17, 1991.
After the war, John Martin of ABC News interviewed Dr. Mohammed Matar, director of Kuwait's primary health care system and his wife Dr. Fayeza Youssef, chief of obstetrics at the maternity hospital. They reported that the story was not true and was simply propaganda. Dr. Fahima Khafaji, a pediatrician in the maternity hospital, reported that the Iraqis did not do so at her hospital.
On January 6, 1992, John R. MacArthur, publisher of Harper's Magazine, revealed that "Nayirah," who offered testimony before the Congressional Human Rights Caucus on October 15, 1990, was really the daughter of Saud al-Sabah, Kuwait's ambassador to the United States. It was also disclosed that Hill and Knowlton, a large public relations firm, had helped prepare her testimony, and that she had rehearsed before video cameras in the firm's Washington headquarters.
The testimony presented before the United Nations Security Council on November 27 by the unidentified Kuwait refugee turned out to be Fatima Fahed, wife of the Kuwait minister of planning and a prominent Kuwait television personality. Dr. Issah Ibrahim, who also offered testimony at the Security Council, was really Dr. Ibrahim Behbehani, a dentist. When questioned after the war, he admitted that he had not seen babies taken from the incubators.
A subsequent private investigation by Kroll Associates--a firm paid by the Kuwait government--found a single, brief incident, in which perhaps a half dozen infants were removed from incubators during the occupation. They offered no evidence to support this position.
On February 4, 1992, the U.S. Ambassador to Kuwait, Edward W. Gnehm, claimed that there were three witnesses to the removal of babies from incubators. He railed against the "smug and cynical" human rights investigators and journalists who had challenged the story. He, however, refused to release the names of the witnesses. Two days later, Middle East Watch staff examined Gnehm's statement and concluded there was no hard evidence that such an incident had ever occurred.
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