McCann: The Fraud Squad

Remember Nayirah Sabah? It’s been more than 20 years since she hit the headlines. On October 10th 1990, Nayirah testified to the Congressional Human Rights Caucus in Washington. Her story led news bulletins around the world for days afterwards.
At the time, George Bush senior was finding it difficult to assemble a Senate majority for military action to drive Iraqi troops out of US client state Kuwait, invaded by Iraq three months previously. Nayirah swung the vote.
She was televised live as she recounted how a squad of Iraqi troops had stormed into the hospital in Kuwait City where she was working as a volunteer, ripped babies from incubators and flung them to the ground where they were “left on the cold floor to die”.
Her eye-witness account shocked the room into silence. Senators then voted by a majority of five to go to war. Nine of them afterwards cited Nayirah’s story as an important factor in determining their vote. Nayirah was a fraud. Her father, Saud al-Sabah, was Kuwaiti ambassador to the US. She lived at the nearby ambassador’s residence. She had never worked at a hospital in Kuwait. Her statement had been drafted by PR firm Hill and Knowlton, hired by the Kuwaiti regime. She had rehearsed her story in advance, her father acting as inquisitor.
The facts came to light after the war when hospital staff in Kuwait unanimously rejected the story as nonsense. Nayirah has never owned up to the lie. No need, war won, job done.
Twelve years later, Secretary of State Colin Powell persuaded half the world to support a second attack on Iraq by producing satellite pictures which, he assured the UN General Assembly, depicted Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction. We now know that this was another fraud designed to smooth a path towards war.
Eight years further on, on April 29th 2011, US ambassador Susan Rice told a meeting of the Security Council that Libyan leader Muammar Gadaffi had issued his troops Viagra in order to facilitate mass rape in towns captured from rebel forces. The ABC network followed up with a story that Gadaffi “has sent his soldiers and mercenaries, armed with Viagra, to rape women as young as 12 in order to humiliate men who opposed him”. Men were being forced to watch wives and daughters being sexually brutalised, ABC reported.
The Mail Online went further, claiming that Libyan troops were raping eight-year olds.
After rebel forces had taken Tripoli and Gadaffi had been captured and killed, Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, both of which had given credence to the Viagra/rape story, carried out interviews in towns which had been controlled by Gadaffi’s forces but could find no evidence of mass rape, Viagrafuelled or not. US military and intelligence officials now told NBC News that there was “no evidence (of) Libyan military forces being given Viagra and engaging in systematic rape against women in rebel areas.”
Amnesty, remarkably, reported that it had not documented a single instance of rape. (This seems implausible. Rape is a constant in war. It may be that victims were reluctant to speak up. But the report would also appear to rule out a series of mass rapes by Gadaffi forces.)
Despite all this, the Viagra/rape story is still cited in discussion of the “humanitarian intervention” in Libya. Ms. Rice has never apologised for misleading the UN. Again, why should she? Job done...
Susan Rice is now Obama’s National Security Adviser and has been one of the most forceful advocates of military action against Syria. Speaking to the New American Foundation on September 8th, she declared that, “Rejecting the limited military action that President Obama strongly supports would raise questions around the world about whether the United States is truly prepared to use the full range of its power.”
Like the tough guy in the playground, the US can’t afford to lose face by refusing a fight.
I see that, not content with the scalp of the nonpareil Sam Smyth, someone has given Shane “Bash the Bankers” Ross the heave-ho from his regular slot at the Sunday Indo.
I am sure that it has nothing whatsoever to do with Denis O’Brien, who became a billionaire after selling off the mobile ‘phone licence, which he won under Michael Lowry’s watch. But someone at the Sindo has apparently taken the hump at Shane giving the bankers a hob-nailed kicking every week. All very strange indeed...
A man has been jailed for six weeks for having sex with a goat in a barn in Wiltshire. Robert Newman, 23, pleaded that his act had resulted from “isolation, not depravity”.
Anna Humphreys, prosecuting, read out a victim impact statement in which the goat’s owners detailed the effect of the assault on the animal.
“I stand before you and say I am sorry. I just want to be back with my family,” said Newman. And why on earth not? What possible harm could come to a goat from intercourse with a human? I’d say the human would be more at risk.
And why isn’t this a matter of public controversy? I feel a “decriminalise bestiality” campaign coming on. A bit of support from TDs wouldn’t go amiss. There must be animal lovers among them.

I described the Braids in the last issue as “British Columbians”. But it turns out they are based in Montreal in Quebec. Workman’s Club, Dublin, December 7th.