This is a pertinent story. It has been buried by the military/industrial/media machine that runs this country, so I am going to blow the dust off and throw it back out. Bush lied us into war - not this horrible mess we are in now, but the first one, Desert Storm.
Nine days after Saddam Hussein invaded oil rich Kuwait, the Emir formed an American lobbying group called Citizens for a Free Kuwait, who then contracted the world's largest Public Relations firm, Hill and Knowlton to represent them. Hill and Knowlton's purpose was twofold. One was to hide the fact that they were funded by the Kuwaiti government, and second, they were to work in collusion with the Bush administration to sell the war to the American public.
Operating as a front group, Hill and Knowlton utilized many varied opinion forming techniques and products. These ranged from full-scale press conferences to the distribution of tens of thousands of "Free Kuwait" t-shirts. One of the most effective techniques was their use of the video news release or VNR. This is carefully crafted propaganda is made to look like real news journalism. These phony news reports were shown on TV stations all over the US and the world. We are still subject to these today.
The most damning piece of PR that stuck in Americans minds was the testimony of a teenage Kuwaiti girl before the congressional Human Rights Caucus. Her emotionally charged account of Iraqi soldiers entering a hospital and removing babies from incubators and left on the floor to die may have been all it took to convince enough Senators to vote to go to war. It turns out that the girl was coached by Hill and Knowlton's Vice-President Lauri Fitz-Pegado. The girl was the daughter of the Kuwaiti ambassador to the US. The story was repeated by the President and recited as fact in congressional testimony.
Public opinion was not in favor of that war, not at first. We, the people, were skillfully manipulated. As late as December 1990, a New York Times/CBS News poll found that 48 percent of the American people wanted Bush to wait before taking any action if Iraq failed to withdraw from Kuwait by Bush's January 15 deadline. Even after one of the most massive public relations campaigns in our history the President only won approval to go to war by five votes.
Now we are being worked by PR groups like Lincoln and Rendon in the form of fake news from Iraq. We are being fed sensationalism and hype about al-Qaeda right into our living rooms through the use of video news releases. On CNN two nights ago a video showed a squad of Marines in a fire-fight. The word "al-Qaeda" in large, bold, white letters was from side to side on the screen. The narrator spoke of the injured marine and the circumstance of the fire fight. There was no audible mention of identification of the faction(s) firing upon the soldiers. The scene shifted to interviews of soldiers and their commander. There was not one mention of al-Qaeda, yet the word "al-Qaeda" never left the screen. This was pure propaganda, and possibly a video news release.