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OPENING STATEMENT OF SENATOR LAUCH FAIRCLOTH
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The Commerce Department has a lot of questions to answer about its role leading up to the Gulf War. It is also time that we in the Banking Committee revisit a current Commerce Department nominee—Lauri Fitz-Pegado, who played a crucial role in shaping public opinion toward U.S. involvement, and she did it by personally orchestrating perjured testimony before Congress.Mr. Chairman, in 1990, after the Iraqi invasion of their country, the Kuwaiti government in exile formed Citizens for a Free Kuwait. They hired the lobbying firm of Hill and Knowlton to influence public opinion in this country toward entering the conflict. Lauri Fitz-Pegado was in charge of the effort.
Her strategy was to use alleged witnesses to atrocities, to tell stories of human rights violations in occupied Kuwait. Using their testimony, she orchestrated what has come to be known as the Baby Incubator Fraud.
She first coached a 15-year-old Kuwaiti girl, identified only at the time as Naira, to testify before Congress that she had seen Iraqi soldiers remove Kuwaiti babies from hospital respirators. Naira claimed to be a refugee who had been working as a volunteer in a Kuwaiti hospital throughout the first few weeks of the Iraqi occupation. She said that she bad seen them take babies out of the incubators, take the incubators, and leave the babies "on the cold floor to die."
Naira's emotional testimony riveted human rights organizations, the news mediums, and the Nation. That incident was cited by six Members of the U.S. Senate as reasons to go to war with Iraq.
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http://www.gulflink.osd.mil/medsearch/FocusAreas/riegle_report/hearing/hearing_s04.htm>
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From Corporate Watch:
Hill & Knowlton
...3.2 Governmental Links
Involvement with the CIA
From the mid 1950s onward H&K began to open offices all around the world. According to Susan Trento, author of “The Power House”, a biography of Hill and Knowlton exec Robert Keith Gray, they opened many overseas offices “on the advice of friends, including then CIA director Allen W Dulles.” Gray also used to brag about checking major decisions personally with CIA director William Casey, whom he considered a close personal friend. “Hill and Knowlton’s overseas offices were perfect cover for the ever-expanding CIA. Unlike other cover jobs, being a public relations specialist did not require technical training for CIA officers,” revealed Robert T Crowley, a CIA official. George Worden, another H&K executive commented that he “used to kid at Hill and Knowlton about our office in Kuala Lumpur, because nobody would tell me what it did, and I swore it had to be a CIA front.”
Lauri Fitz-Pegado from 1977 to 1982, worked at the United States Information Agency, first in the personnel department, then as a foreign service officer. In 1982 she joined Gray & Co which was purchased by H&K in 1986<26>.
She headed H&K’s Kuwait account in 1991 and in 1994 she moved back to the White House as Assistant Secretary and Director General of the United States Foreign and Commercial Service under President Clinton.
http://www.corporatewatch.org.uk/profiles/hk/hk3.htm
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