The relentless pursuit of profit is killing people, homogenizing human life and destroying our planet. Billions of us consumer citizens being  subjected to a seemingly eternal onslaught of mendacious, managerialistic and euphemistic twaddle…conditioned by Global Murdoch,  PR and additional forms of propaganda. It’s no accident in a way that Edward Bernays, originator of ‘Public Relations’,  was part of the Freud dynasty…Sigmund’s nephew, infact…’Good PR’ – as in effective – is invisible, but the impact, indelible…

20 or so years ago, an ex CEO of Washington-based PR corporation Hill & Knowlton….gave a lecture that was to prove infamous, in which he held in the one hand that morning’s edition of the NY Times, and in the other, a red marker pen, and he said something like…

“OK. This is today’s Times. I’m gonna circle with the marker every piece of editorial content that I know is derived from the PR industry. The paid advertising is already obvious, so I’ll leave that alone…I won’t circle that. …”

He then proceeded to circle what would amount to 70% of all edit content…page after broadsheet page, filled up with those red circles. He then expressed regret over his pivotal role in selling Gulf war One to middle America and beyond…

Under this man’s watch, Hill & Knowlton were hired 1990 by the Kuwaiti Royal Family, and they pioneered the VNR – video news release – as a core communications solution to drumming up public awareness of Kuwait and “them dastardly Iraqis and that baad, baad maaan, Sadaaammm…”

‘…Hello Kuwaiti Royal Family, wanna know how to get right inside the heads of several hundred million Americans who currently have neither knowledge or care of your existence ???’

‘…Errr, well, YES. Yes please…’

Thousands upon thousands of video cassettes were churned out to hundreds, if not thousands of US tv news stations, channels…coast to coast, border to border…far and wide…couriered by new networks like Fed Ex…and this every day, en masse, for more than a year…

One of the first VNRs contained footage of testimony to a US Joint Session of Congress Hearing on alleged Iraqi atrocities…This was the emotive and galvanising testimony by a young woman who addressed the hearing in person, claiming to have been a nurse at Kuwait General hospital…before Congress…under oath…describing babies being taken out of incubators by invading Iraqi forces…this testimony was released on thousands of VNRs…BUT….as Wikipedia and the annals of history remind us…

Nayirah Testimony refers to the controversial testimony given before the non-governmental Congressional Human Rights Caucus on October 10, 1990, by a female who provided only her first name, Nayirah. In her emotional testimony, Nayirah stated 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. Though reporters did not then have access to Kuwait, her testimony was regarded as credible at the time and was widely publicized. It was cited numerous times by United States senators and the president in their rationale to back Kuwait in the Gulf War.

Her story was initially corroborated by Amnesty International^[1] 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.”^[2][3]

In 1992, it was revealed that Nayirah’s last name was al-Ṣabaḥ (Arabic: نيره الصباح‎) and that she was the daughter of Saud bin Nasir 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 Hill & Knowlton for the Kuwaiti government. Following this, al-Sabah’s testimony has largely come to be regarded as wartime propaganda.

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