The Hyping of Hawke 4

Finally, in my series, The Hyping of Hawke, it is sobering to reflect on the fact that what is often referred to today as fake news played a crucial role in the erosion of Labor Party opposition to Hawke's obscene rush to join in the US-led war in the Gulf. It is equally sobering to note just how few questioning journalists there were back then - just like today!

Thankfully, there was one back then, the Reporters without Borders representative in Australia, Max Watts:

"In January 1991, the Australian parliament took a vote on whether to join the United States and go to war with Iraq. A journalist, Max Watts, asked one of the Australian [Labor] senators, the late Olive Zakharov, which way she intended to vote. Through her assistant, Max was informed she planned to vote for going to war. Max asked, Why? He was told that Iraqi soldiers had gone into a hospital in Kuwait, taken 306 babies out of their incubators and left them to die. Max, with his decades of experience in identifying inconsistencies in suspect stories, thought it rather odd that the number should be so precise. Who has time to count to 306 in a war zone?

"Max asked a friend, Dr Rosie Kubb... how many incubators are there in Melbourne? The population of Melbourne is about four million people. Dr Kubb checked it out. There were about 80 incubators for the city of Melbourne, which has a population three times that of the whole of Kuwait.

"The life of a lie may be short, but this lie was believed by enough people for long enough to enable George Bush Sr. to execute Gulf War I. The truth about the Kuwaiti Babies story was not exposed until eleven months later, after the war was over and thousands of innocent people had been killed. The story had been fabricated by a United States public relations company, Hill and Knowlton, to 'sell' the war. The company had dressed the daughter of the Kuwaiti Ambassador to the United States as a nurse, and had her filmed telling the story. She was presented on television as a Kuwaiti nurse who had counted the babies, even though she was in the United States at the time the incident was alleged to have taken place." (Invasion of Iraq: An Eyewitness Account, Waratah Rose Gillespie, 2004, p 13)