(Originally from Conspiracy Nation Vol. 2 Num. 37)
Hmmmm..... But what about those news stories we kept hearing about, well, for example, that Iraqi soldiers were tearing babies out of incubators and stealing the incubators? Let's ask Robert Parry, author of Fooling America: How Washington Insiders Twist the Truth and Manufacture the Conventional Wisdom (New York: William Morrow and Company, Inc., 1992). What about those incubator babies?
PARRY: A key witness, who alleged that babies were left to die after being pulled from incubators, was introduced at congressional hearings only as 'Nayirah,' her last name withheld supposedly for security reasons. [The witness was,] in reality, the daughter of the Kuwaiti ambassador to Washington... Exhaustive studies of the incubator issue by Middle East Watch and other human rights groups concluded that the incubator claims were false propaganda. However, as the war clouds built in late 1990, the charges were effectively exploited by the Kuwaiti government-in-exile and repeated by President Bush in speeches, whetting the public's demand for revenge against Saddam Hussein and his army.
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O.K. But at least it was a good, clean fight. We "whupped 'em good." Right? Let's ask Dr. Helen Caldicott. What about it, Dr. Caldicott. Was it a good clean fight?
CALDICOTT: How can this country, with such noble principles, have gone so astray? How can they have gone to the [Persian] Gulf, using the weapons of highest technology in the history of the human race, and slaughter men who are running away? Who are driving their trucks, getting away? Retreating.
How could they have buried 250 people alive? Because they wanted to drive their tanks over a trench full of men.
"Oh, well," a Pentagon spokesman said. "Well. It doesn't matter. You either bayonet people or you shoot them or you bury them alive. It doesn't make any difference."
According to the Nuremberg principles, that man would be hanged! (I don't believe in capital punishment.)
But where the hell has this country gone? Of the people who were killed who were civilians in Iraq, 60 percent were children. With their legs blown off. And the men who flew the planes came back and said, "It was a wonderful mission!" And they didn't see the blood. And the whole country cheered and flew flags and tied yellow ribbons on everything they could find. ["The New World Order". Talk by Dr. Helen Caldicott. Available from Pacifica Archives.]
Coming to you from Illinois -- "The Land of Skolnick"