The Sunday Times -

While preparations were under way for the United States to lead an international force to liberate Kuwait in 1990, a 15-year-old girl appeared before the United States Congress in October 1990 with all major US television channels focusing their cameras on her.

The girl identifying herself as Nurse Nayirah told Congress that she was a refugee doing voluntary work in the maternity ward of Al Adan hospital in Kuwait and that while she was at work, the invading Iraqi troops entered the hospital and dumped babies out of the incubators onto the cold floor to die, before they got away with the machines.

Nayirah's account was given wide coverage in the US media and President George H. W. Bush, father of the present US president, cited her story more than six times during the build-up to the First Gulf War.

Actually, the story had no basis in fact and investigative journalists in the US knew this. But they preferred to keep mum as the administration tried to whip up support for the United States' war efforts. Even without Nayirah's accounts, the US could have got the support of Congress as the invasion of Kuwait had drawn worldwide condemnation. Yet a lie was created and repeated to achieve a political end.

Nayirah was actually the daughter of Kuwait's ambassador in the United States at the time. The Kuwaiti government in exile hired the services of public relations firm Hill and Knowlton which coached the teenager to lie for her country with the backing of such US top officials as Lauri Fitz-Pegado who later became Assistant Commerce Secretary. Todate, no charges have been brought against the teenager or the PR firm for lying before Congress.

However, some US television stations, especially those controlled by neocons and Zionists continued to present Nayirah's story. It was only in 2002 that Home Box Office (HBO) added a one-liner saying the "allegations were never substantiated."

Though Nayirah's story which had no foundation has crumbled, the edifice of lies continues to stand tall in the US media and diplomacy. One can understand politicians and diplomats lying for their country. It is part of their job. But the media resorting to deception is as deplorable as Israel's war of attrition on Lebanon.

While Israel's disproportionate attack on Lebanon has drawn condemnation from the United Nations Secretary General and the UN High Commissioner on Human Rights, the deception the western media practice in covering the conflict in West Asia, in general, and the war on Lebanon, in particular, goes largely unnoticed by their gullible audiences.

Blinded by patriotism, the Western media, especially the US-based groups, abandoned the hallowed journalistic principle of objectivity and got embedded with an invading army which is now an occupying force in Iraq. Whatever the meaning of the word embedded is in the English lexicon, in media terms it may mean prostituting journalism and producing bastardized news. CNN journalists were under strict order during the invasion of Iraq that all their dispatches should be vetted by a special panel so that their reports would not hinder US war plans. So much for objective journalism of the West.

In the case of the current crisis, the charge is that CNN, ABC, Fox, HBO, NBC and even BBC do not give equal weight to views expressed by all sides involved in the conflict, or in their coverage of the human cost of the war.

The time allocated for Israeli leaders and experts to express their views in comparison to what is given to Hezbollah or Lebanese leaders is as disproportionate as Israel's attacks on a country that is incapable of defending itself. However, when Hezbollah attacks on Israeli towns are mentioned the radical Shiite group's rockets are projected to be as powerful as the bunker buster bombs which Israel has rained down on Lebanon for the past eleven days. The attack on Haifa and the civilian deaths on Israeli side are given more prominence than the civilian casualties and suffering on the Lebanese side. When they give the death toll on the Israeli side, very often they say "29 people have been killed", giving the impression that all those who have been killed are civilians. Seldom do they say that at least 14 of them were Israeli soldiers killed in action. They harp on the fact that Hezbollah is funded and armed by Iran and Syria, but they don't say Israel is armed and helped by the United States.

The language, words, scenes and interviewees are carefully picked and weighed to justify Israel's disproportionate attacks but at the same time they try to give an impression that both sides of the conflict are covered. We see on Western television channels images of Israeli suffering, deaths and wounded, but do we see any of the 17 children killed while fleeing in a van to Syria to escape from Israeli bombs? We only see concrete rubble. Let alone showing such pictures - only a few internet users have seen these horrific pictures of bodies of the Lebanese children - there is no mention of the number of Lebanese children killed in the attacks since July 12. The media groups may say that they do not show dead children as a policy. But one wonders whether the western media groups are under strict orders not to highlight such pictures which may turn world opinion against Israel and which may push the UN High Commission on Human Rights to file war crime charges against Ehud Olmert.

A crude estimate puts the Lebanese civilian deaths at 300 — one fourth of them children. An Associate Press photograph, which The Sunday Times' sister paper Daily Mirror carried on Friday with an appropriate caption "from children of Israel to children of Lebanon" shows Israeli girls writing war messages and insults on shells Israeli soldiers were preparing to fire at Lebanon.

Just as the attacks by both Israel and Hezbollah on civilian targets are deplorable, discrimination in coverage on racial and political grounds is also deplorable.