The selling of an ideology

DC Media Girl has a great post on just how long the neo-cons have been pitching the war in Iraq. And the dishonest means they've used since the beginning.

"While I was there, I saw the Iraqi soldiers come into the hospital with guns, and go into the room where . . . babies were in incubators. They took the babies out of the incubators, took the incubators, and left the babies on the cold floor to die." [1990]

It turned out that this "witness", whose full name was being kept confidential to prevent the Iraqis from "taking revenge" on her family in occupied Kuwait, was actually the daughter of the Kuwaiti ambassador to the United States. The "group" she was supposed to be representing, the Citizens for a Free Kuwait, was actually a front group created by the public relations firm Hill & Knowlton at the behest of the Emir of Kuwait. Not only had the girl lied before a congressional committee, she had been coached on what to say by Hill & Knowlton’s then-vice president Lauri Fitz-Pegado.

Three months elapsed between "Nayirah’s" testimony and the start of the [Gulf] war.