Kuwaitgate

...to take military action was dubious at best, even according to Kuwait’s own chosen investigator...

...These days, Kuwaiti officials decline to discuss the matter with the press...

...Hill and Knowlton, however, was less willing to wait for the results of the Kroll study...

...Kroll also tracked down other widely publicized sources of incubator claims and found nothing to substantiate them...

...It hired an internationally respected investigator, Kroll Associates, to review the allegations of infant deaths and report the truth to the world...

...Hill and Knowlton vice chairman (and former president of NPR) Frank Mankiewicz sent Schorr the Gnehm cable and some news clippings, including a Reuters dispatch from January 1992, appearing to confirm Nayirah’s charges...

...A few months later, at a hearing of the Congressional Human Rights Caucus, IVayirah relayed her shocking story of babies left to die...

...But shortly after the war ended, Nayirah’s story came into question...

...Hill and Knowlton did...

...Ibrahim Bahbahani, who was identified as a Kuwaiti surgeon during U.N...

...But Hill and Knowlton has kept the pressure on...

...He told Kroll he had made no such statement...

...Its image-repair effort went full steam ahead...

...The meetings led to the formation of a front group, Citizens for a Free Kuwait, which was financed almost entirely by the Kuwaiti government and which paid Hill and Knowlton $11.5 million to get its message to the right people...

...involvement in the Gulf...

...But that should come as little surprise: After all, Hill and Knowlton’s ability to con the powerbrokers is what has kept it on top of the Hill for decades...

...A month later, Amnesty International, which earlier had reported the figure of 3 12 dead, said it had “found no reli(3ble evidence that Iraqi forces had caused the deaths?’ of any incubator babies...

...Another faulty source was Abdullah Al-Hammadi, an internist who had been quoted by Hill and Knowlton as saying he had handled 38 bodies of babies killed by the Iraqis...

...However, Kroll also reported that there was no written record and no consensus among nurses on how many such deaths may have occurred...

...ambassador to Kuwait, Edward W. Gnehm, which insisted that 250 babies had been killed by Iraqi troops...

...But don’t feel sorry for Hill and Knowlton yet...

...Case closed...

...Hill and Knowlton, now under fire, launched an immediate counterattack, releasing a fiercely worded cable by the U.S...

...Tearfully relaying to Congress how she had witnessed Saddam’s soldiers removing Kuwaiti babies from incubators and leaving them to die on a hospital floor, she added a crucial emotional rationale to the economic argument for U.S...

...Today, the validity of Nayirah’s account is in doubt, and Hill and Knowlton is in the unenviable position of defending itself against charges of doctoring evidence...

...MacArthur also revealed that Reps...

...The press latched on to the story, and the reported number of incubator deaths eventually jumped from the 15 stated in Nayirah’s written testimony to 3 12-far more than the total number of incubators in the tiny Arab nation...

...But Hrill and Knowlton remains on the offensive: The I(r0ll report, says company spokesman Tom Ross, is a “vindication of Hill and Knowlton...

...Who’s right...

...The Kroll report to a large degree corroborated the conclusions of Middle East Watch, which stated that after interviewing dozens of Kuwaiti hospital personnel, it “found no basis to the allegation” that Iraqis took babies en masse from incubators and left them to die...

...Security Council hearings (hearings that Hill and Knowlton helped orchestrate), had said he knew of 120 incubator murders...

...Yet Hill and Knowlton seems IO have survived its embarrassment just fine...

...Why had Nayirah put the number of of dead babies at 15...

...for strong military action against Iraq...

...Also, she told Kroll that, contrary to her testimony, which she said had been prepared with the help of Hill and Knowlton, she had not been a volunteer at the hospital, but had only stopped by for a few minutes...

...In addition, the Middle East Watch report revealed that Bahbahani lied about his true identity: He is a dentist...

...Several members of Congress said the testimony influenced their votes to approve military action against Iraq, and President Bush frequently mentioned the incubator story as a reason for military intervention...

...While the text of her testimony, released to the media by the public relations firm before the hearing, used that number, a specific figure was never mentioned in her oral testimony...

...Until, of course, it became the master’s worst nightmare...

...Based on more than 250 interviews over a nine-week period, the Kroll report concluded that at least seven babies died because of the looting of incubators...

...The firm has mounted a crafty self-defense, not only effectively quashing criticism, but even prompting journalists to issue retractions based on the flimsiest of evidence...

...Middle East Watch, a branch of the left-leaning Human Rights Watch, was also investigating...

...But it now appears as though one of the key factors in prodding the US...

...Schorr now says he has doubts about whether he should have issued such an apology, and “whether it was indeed a hoax...

...yet Hill and Knowlton stands by the claims made in its original PR effort...

...After The Washington Monthly awarded MacArthur a Monthly Journalism Award in April for his Times op-ed, Mankiewicz fired off a letter to the magazine, published in the June issue, declaring that “the story [Nayirah] told about the incubator turns out to be true...

...There is no doubt that the Iraqis committed numerous and horrible atrocities after invading Kuwait, and some premature infants certainly were among the victims of chaotic wartime conditions, including the disruption of electricity and a shortage of nurses...

...Why would the original “witnesses” have made such charges only to deny them later...

...Tom Lantos and John Edward Porter, who sponsored the congressional hearings, had started a group called the Congressional Human Rights Foundation that had received $50,000 from Citizens for a Free Kuwait, as well as free office space in Hill and Knowlton’s Washington headquarters...

...For that, Hill and Knowlton is probably grateful...

...The only mention in the national press was by The Washington Post...

...The answer is that she didn’t...

...In April, the firm went to court in Frankfurt to force a German television station to publicly retract an alleged implication that Hill and Knowlton knowingly spread a false story...

...Hearing aides This summer, the voluminous Kroll Associates study was released to virtually no attention...

...Hill and Knowlton’s next move, one month later, targeted National Public Radio (NPR) commentator Daniel Schorr, who had casually referred to the incubator story as a “hoax” in an article he wrote for The Washington Post’s editorial page...

...For instance, Dr...

...In March 1991, ABC News interviewed Kuwaiti hospital officials who denied that any babies had been dumped out of incubators by Iraqi troops...

...It conclusively demonstrates that there were incubator atrocities and that Nayirah was a witness to them...

...To find out requires dissecting Hill and Knowlton’s savvy PR efforts on its own behalf...

...It said Nayirah had told Kroll of seeing only one baby outside its incubator in an incident lasting “no more than a moment...

...But he told Kroll he had no direct knowledge of such incidents...

...Human wrongs Hill and Knowlton and the Kuwaiti government began talking in August 1990-shortly after the Iraqi invasion-about ways to drum up support in the U.S...

...The cable offered no evidence of such massive carnage...

...The big bombshell, however, was a story by Harper S magazine publisher Joliln R. MacArthur...

...which appeared in January 1992 on The New York Times op-ed page, revealing that Nayirah was the daughter of the Kuwaiti ambassador to the United States...

...The court sided against Hill and Knowlton, but the case served the firm well, putting news organizations on notice that Hill and Knowlton was not ready to lick its wounds in silence...

...Schorr quickly caved, writing in a June letter in the Post that he had “made a mistake...

...The Middle East Watch report offers a speculation: “We do not know whether these doctors, all employees of the Kuwaiti government, might have become part of that government’s wartime pub1 ic relations effort or whether they were influenced by the rumormongering that often accompanies cataclysmic events...

...For Robert Gray’s Hill and Knowlton, which helped engineer her hearings and testimony, it was a PR masterstroke...

...Meanwhile, the Kuwaiti government set out to get some...

...Mosi: reporters, having apparently been burned by Hill and Knowlton’s handiwork in spreading the original Nayirah story without checking it out...

...Today, opponents of the war insist that the stories of mass murder of Kuwaiti babies were manufactured...

...But again he offered little evidence other than the cable from Gnehm...

...seem to prefer to let the story fade away, passive:ly falling, once again, for the company’s public relations guile...