Perjured Testimony…
At the Davis W. Hewitt Law Office, I try to avoid drifting into politics. Every once in a while, however, I feel like commenting on past or present events. I’ll do my best to stay objective and just present the historical record. Before the United States entered the First Gulf War, a congressional hearing was held in Washington, D.C., where a 15-year-old Kuwaiti girl named Nayirah gave testimony. Here’s an account of it:
“Before the caucus and a television audience, Nayirah recalled how, in the second week after the invasion, she had been volunteering at the al-Addan hospital in Hadiya when it was ransacked by Iraqi soldiers. “I saw the Iraqi soldiers come into the hospital with guns,” she testified, struggling to hold back tears. “They took the babies out of the incubators, took the incubators, and left the children to die on the cold floor.”” Citation.
Nayirah also testified that Iraqis had tortured her friend and burned entire neighborhoods. “[B]ut the story of babies being removed from incubators was the one that everyone remembered, defining for Americans the brutality of the Iraqi Army.” Id.
The American public was outraged, the baby incubator story was referenced by Bush a few times, and the US led coalition forces began their ground invasion. Many months later American stealth fighters dropped two laser-guided smart bombs (bunker busters) into an air raid shelter housing 400 civilians - mostly elderly, women and children. The bunker buster penetrated deep and detonated. The heat from the blast was so intense that a journalist later wrote that “bodies [were] fused together so that they formed entire blocks of flesh”. It was also reported that not all of the occupants died immediately, as blackened flesh-infused handprints were discovered on the concrete ceiling of the shelter.
Returning to Nayirah, it was later revealed that her testimony before the congressional committee was not truthful. She was not a nurse in Kuwait, nor did she witness Iraqi soldiers removing babies from incubators and leaving them to die on the “cold floor”. In reality, Nayirah was the daughter of Kuwait's ambassador to the United States and a member of the country’s ruling family — he was also seated just four chairs away from her during the hearing. The entire story had been made up with the help of an American public relations firm and was designed to help drum up popular support for an invasion. Treacherous, huh?
I should finish by saying that Nayirah’s testimony wasn’t technically perjury because it wasn’t given under oath - the Human Rights Caucus which presided over her hearing didn’t require witnesses to testify under oath. Even so, seems like something a person (and others who aided and abetted) should be punished for doing.
Okay no more politics.
