[A-List] UK state: trade unions & Iraq

["Keaney Michael" <Michael.Keaney@xxxxxx>]

Private Eye

No. 1063, 20 September-3 October 2002

Good to see the Eye's old friend Roger "Currant Bun" Lyons loyally going
before his recalcitrant TUC brothers to defend the prime minister's line
against Iraq.

Listing the crimes for which the Iraqi government should be held
culpable, the Amicus general-secretary rounded off with this clinching
indictment: "And no one can forget the babies thrown out of the
incubators in Kuwait, so the equipment could be taken back to Iraq."

No one who followed the Gulf War could indeed forget the story, since it
was just that -- a story. After the war ended it emerged that "Nayirah",
the tearful 15-year-old girl who had gone before the US congress to
testify to this alleged war crime, was none other than the daughter of
the Kuwaiti ambassador to the US, and had in fact been in Washington at
the time she supposedly witnessed babies being thrown out of incubators.

Coaxed and coached by PR agency Hill & Knowlton, the lucky recipients of
a $10m contract from Citizens for a Free Kuwait (financed by the Kuwaiti
government in exile), her heart-tugging fabrication duly had the desired
effect of hardening Washington's belief in military intervention in the
Gulf. In the senate, where the pro-war motion was passed by just five
votes, seven senators said it was Nayirah's testimony that had swayed
them.

None of this is likely to bother "Currant Bun" -- who, as Eye readers
will be all too aware, seldom allows awkward facts to interfere with his
public pronouncements, especially when Brownie points with No 10 are up
for grabs. Can a peerage be far behind?