The
Nayirah testimony was false testimony given before the United States
Congressional Human Rights Caucus on October 10, 1990, by a 15-year-old girl who was publicly identified at the time by her first name, Nayirah. The testimony was widely publicized, and was cited numerous times by United States senators and President
George H. W. Bush in their rationale to support
Kuwait in the
Gulf War.
In 1992, it was revealed that Nayirah's last name was
Al-Ṣabaḥ (
Arabic: نيرة الصباح) and that she was the daughter of
Saud Al-Sabah, the Kuwaiti ambassador to the United States. Furthermore, it was revealed that her testimony was organized as part of the
Citizens for a Free Kuwait public relations campaign, which was run by the American public relations firm
Hill & Knowlton for the
Kuwaiti government.
Following this, al-Sabah's testimony has come to be regarded as a classic example of modern atrocity propaganda.[1][2]
In her testimony, Nayirah claimed that after the
Iraqi invasion of Kuwait she had witnessed Iraqi soldiers take babies out of
incubators in a Kuwaiti hospital, take the incubators, and leave the babies to die.
Her story was initially corroborated by
Amnesty International, a British
NGO, which published several independent reports about the killings
[3] and testimony from evacuees. Following the liberation of
Kuwait, reporters were given access to the country. An ABC report found that "patients, including premature babies, did die, when many of Kuwait's nurses and doctors ... fled" but Iraqi troops "almost certainly had not stolen hospital incubators and left hundreds of Kuwaiti babies to die."
[4] Amnesty International reacted by issuing a correction, with executive director John Healey subsequently accusing the
Bush administration of "opportunistic manipulation of the international human rights movement".
[5]
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