Dear Editor,
As the investigation into UN Oil-for-Food program kickbacks continues, it may be politically expedient to blame the appalling reports of children dying during the 1990's on Iraqi propaganda, but it is also the worst kind of lazy and irresponsible journalism. The cruel effects of the economic embargo are well documented, from its earliest days when a team of Harvard-sponsored physicians visited Iraq just after the first Gulf War, to the 1999 UNICEF statistical analysis which reported that a half million Iraqi children had died unnecessarily as a direct result of economic sanctions. Add to this the sharp rise in chronic and severe malnutrition among Iraqi children during that time, and the inability of Iraqi hospitals to obtain sufficient antibiotics, childhood cancer drugs, and all manner of other medications and equipment, and a truer picture of the embargo begins to emerge. The legacy of this embargo weighs heavily on Iraqi society today.
The dead and the living in Iraq demand that we tell their story truthfully and intelligently, despite the inconvenient political consequences.
Printable PDF Version - http://vitw.org/pdfs/ltte.pdf
POLAR EXPRESS, VIRTUAL REALITY, AND FOX NEWS
Bert Sacks has written an article about the corporate media's "serious, non-benign fantasy" that is being portrayed to the public concerning the Oil-for-Food program and sanctions. He then gives us ten reasons why the "suffering that we knew we intended to inflict on the Iraqi people... is still fundamentally our responsibility."
Polar Express, virtual reality, and Fox News
by Bert Sacks -- December 2, 2004
The movie Polar Express takes viewers on a fantasy trip to the North Pole. The computer-generated virtual reality that the movie creates is amazing. I saw it Thanksgiving evening.
The next day a friend recorded a 2-minute segment on Fox News Channel about the "scandal" of the U.N.'s oil-for-food program. In its way, it too was an amazing fantasy trip into a virtual reality.
The finale of Polar Express is reaching the North Pole to meet Santa. Santa is important because he has a fantastic bag of toys. But Polar Express is pretty benign compared to the fantasy of Fox.
Fox News Channel's report on the "scandal" of the oil-for-food program concludes that it was the willingness of critics of the US/UN economic sanctions program "before all the facts were in, that partially enabled Saddam Hussein to get away with killing so many of his own people." This is serious, non-benign fantasy.
Four days before this segment aired I spent 45 minutes on camera with the
Seattle-based Fox News Channel reporter who put the story together. From that entire interview, one sentence of mine made it into the story: "The kind of suffering that we knew we intended to inflict on the Iraqi people - and we maintained for all of those years - is still fundamentally our responsibility."
What didn't make it into the story were any of the reasons I gave -- over and over -- why this is the case. Here are ten of them:
The U.N.'s oil-for-food program didn't begin until 1996, more than six years after sanctions began. A "scandal" in a program that didn't yet exist cannot be blamed for six years of Iraqi deaths.
In 1992 The New England Journal of Medicine estimated that 46,900 Iraqi children under five died from January to August 1991. Extrapolating this death rate over the years until the oil-for-food program began - half the period of US/UN economic sanctions - yields a horrible estimate of 400,000 Iraqi children's deaths.
When the oil-for-food program was finally allowed, it permitted $4 billion in oil sales a year for humanitarian needs: this came to $10 per person per month for each Iraqi living in South/Central Iraq.
Of the total amount of oil sales, 30% went immediately for war reparations -- $16 billion to Kuwaiti petroleum -- while the UN reported 960,000 Iraqi children were chronically malnourished.
In 1992 The New England Journal of Medicine stated the major cause of children's deaths in Iraq was water-borne epidemics caused by U.S. Gulf War
bombing of Iraq's civilian infrastructure.
Paul Bremer said it would take $100 billion to repair Iraq's civilian infrastructure. He said Iraq had "neglected its infrastructure for 30 years." He made no mention of the Gulf War destruction. This amount is far beyond any alleged scandal, far beyond smuggled oil money, far beyond $2 billion we say Saddam spent on palaces.
Without electricity we knew what would happen. A Pentagon planner said this in The Washington Post: "People say, 'You didn't recognize that it was going to have an effect on water or sewage,' said the planning officer. Well, what were we trying to do with [United Nations-approved economic] sanctions - help out the Iraqi people? No. What we were doing with the attacks on infrastructure was to accelerate the effect of the sanctions."
President Bush and USAID brag that Iraq has more electricity than "before the war." But they fail to mention which war! Iraq had over 9,000 mwatts of capacity before the Gulf War, now it's 4,500.
A colonel writes in a US Air Force magazine that destroying Iraq's electrical generating facilities caused "perhaps as many as 100,000 civilian deaths" but argues that the US Air Force should do this because of the benefit of "indirectly targeting civilian morale."
The New York Times gave away the real reason for all this cruelty and death. In March 1991, its front-page story said, "[B]y making lif uncomfortable for the Iraqi people we would encourage them to remove President Saddam Hussein from power."
Now a virtual reality is being maintained -- in the face of these unreported or long-forgotten facts - by Fox's repeating what has become our four-word national mantra: "It's all Saddam's fault."
But who in the world - except millions of Fox viewers - believe it? Sadly, it's tens of millions of consumers of US news who haven't heard these facts and, unless they look, also won't know any better.
One basic question remains: Will we leave this virtual reality and recognize what we have done to the Iraqi people from 1991 on?
http://vitw.org/archives/726
A FEW RELEVANT LINKS
* UNsanctioned Suffering:
A Human Rights Assessment of United Nations Sanctions on Iraq - http://cesr.org/node/view/393
* Health and Welfare in Iraq After the Gulf Crisis: An In-Depth Assessment - http://cesr.org/node/view/517
* The Ahtisaari Report, 20 March 1991 -
http://www.casi.org.uk/info/undocs/s22366.html
* The Economic Sanctions section on our website -
http://vitw.org/economic_sanctions/
* Archvied email pertain Oil-for-Food from December 8th -
http://vitw.org/dec8th/
Please pass this information on to others.
You can visit our e-mail archive at http://vitw.org/dadaarchives/
VitW's Main Pages
Our Home Page http://vitw.org
Letters from Iraq http://vitw.org/voices_from_iraq/
About Us http://vitw.org/who_we_are/
Donate http://vitw.org/donate/
Recent Updates Summaries http://vitw.org/updates/
RSS Feeds http://vitw.org/sitefeeds/
Electronic Iraq http://electroniciraq.net/news/
Voices in The Wilderness http://vitw.org
Please also see:
Oil for Food: What's the Real Scandal?
Interviews Available at the Institute for Public Accuracy
DENIS HALLIDAY, djhalliday@msn.com,
http://www.kurdmedia.com/news.asp?id=5771
Former head of the U.N. Oil for Food Program in Iraq and assistant secretary general of the U.N., Halliday resigned in protest in 1998. Currently in New York City, he is available for a limited number of interviews. Halliday said today: "The Oil for Food 'scandal' is not a scandal of the United Nations, but rather of the member states, particularly of Washington and London."
JOY GORDON, jgordon@fair1.fairfield.edu
Author of the article in the current issue of Harper's magazine, "The U.N. is Us: Exposing Saddam Hussein's Silent Partner," Gordon said today: "What is being consistently overlooked is a distinction of enormous significance: the U.N. is being attacked for the policies and failures of particular member nations. The Oil for Food Program was not some concoction of KofiAnnan's. It was created by a vote of the members of the Security Council. And every aspect of how the program ran -- what goods were allowed, the monitoring procedures, the transfer of funds, everything -- was explicitly established by the members of the Security Council. Kofi Annan did not have a vote; but the U.S. and Britain did, and they approved every resolution and decision that determined how the Oil for Food Program worked."
BERT SACKS, bert@connectexpress.com,
http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/opinion/202902_berts09.html
Sacks was involved in repeated efforts to get humanitarian relief into Iraq
during the 1990s. In 2002 he was fined by the U.S. government for a 1997 trip which helped bring $40,000 in medicine to children in Iraq in violation of U.S. sanctions. Sacks said today: "The U.N.'s Oil for Food Program didn't begin until 1996, more than six years after sanctions began. A 'scandal' in a program that didn't yet exist cannot be blamed for six years of Iraqi deaths. When the Oil for Food Program was finally allowed, it permitted $4 billion in oil sales a year for humanitarian needs: this came to $10 per person per month for each Iraqi living in South/Central Iraq. Of the total amount of oil sales, 30 percent went immediately for war reparations -- $16 billion to Kuwaiti Petroleum -- while the U.N. reported 960,000 Iraqi children were chronically malnourished."
RAHUL MAHAJAN, rahul@empirenotes.org,
http://www.empirenotes.org
Mahajan is author of the book "Full Spectrum Dominance: U.S. Power in Iraq and Beyond." He said today: "The recent resurgence of the Oil for Food 'scandal,' through Sen. Norm Coleman and others, very conveniently gives the U.S. government a way to keep Kofi Annan on the defensive so he criticizes neither the U.S. assault on Fallujah nor anything around the severely flawed prospective Iraqi elections. For all the talk of a lack of U.N. accountability, consider that after the August 2003 bombing of the U.N. in Iraq there was a full investigation and several people, some high up, were fired or demoted. Now there's an investigation into Oil for Food, which has reached as high as Benon Sevan, Director of the Office of the Iraq Program. Compare this to the total lack of accountability in the U.S. government following 9/11, administration stonewalling over the 9/11 commission's creation, and the minimal investigation of corruption in the Coalition Provisional Authority, which has not involved any high officials."
For more information, contact Sam Husseini or David Zupan at the
Institute for Public Accuracy
915 National Press Building, Washington, D.C. 20045
(202) 347-0020 * http://www.accuracy.org * ipa@accuracy.org
AND
Gulf War Profiteering – Victors and Victims,
by Christiane Martens and Paul V. Rafferty 2002-08-20
http://www.unobserver.com/index.php?pagina=layout5.php&id=313&blz=1
UN Panel Approves $2.27 Billion in Compensation for Iraq's Invasion of Kuwait
2003-06-27
http://www.unobserver.com/index.php?pagina=layout5.php&id=949&blz=1
Audit finds all UN Oil-for-Food money was properly transferred to new Iraq fund http://www.un.org/apps/news/story.asp?NewsID=12806&Cr=iraq&Cr1=
Annan intends to increase number of staff in Iraq, orders security review
http://www.un.org/apps/news/story.asp?NewsID=12820&Cr=Iraq&Cr1=
As the investigation into UN Oil-for-Food program kickbacks continues, it may be politically expedient to blame the appalling reports of children dying during the 1990's on Iraqi propaganda, but it is also the worst kind of lazy and irresponsible journalism. The cruel effects of the economic embargo are well documented, from its earliest days when a team of Harvard-sponsored physicians visited Iraq just after the first Gulf War, to the 1999 UNICEF statistical analysis which reported that a half million Iraqi children had died unnecessarily as a direct result of economic sanctions. Add to this the sharp rise in chronic and severe malnutrition among Iraqi children during that time, and the inability of Iraqi hospitals to obtain sufficient antibiotics, childhood cancer drugs, and all manner of other medications and equipment, and a truer picture of the embargo begins to emerge. The legacy of this embargo weighs heavily on Iraqi society today.
The dead and the living in Iraq demand that we tell their story truthfully and intelligently, despite the inconvenient political consequences.
Printable PDF Version - http://vitw.org/pdfs/ltte.pdf
POLAR EXPRESS, VIRTUAL REALITY, AND FOX NEWS
Bert Sacks has written an article about the corporate media's "serious, non-benign fantasy" that is being portrayed to the public concerning the Oil-for-Food program and sanctions. He then gives us ten reasons why the "suffering that we knew we intended to inflict on the Iraqi people... is still fundamentally our responsibility."
Polar Express, virtual reality, and Fox News
by Bert Sacks -- December 2, 2004
The movie Polar Express takes viewers on a fantasy trip to the North Pole. The computer-generated virtual reality that the movie creates is amazing. I saw it Thanksgiving evening.
The next day a friend recorded a 2-minute segment on Fox News Channel about the "scandal" of the U.N.'s oil-for-food program. In its way, it too was an amazing fantasy trip into a virtual reality.
The finale of Polar Express is reaching the North Pole to meet Santa. Santa is important because he has a fantastic bag of toys. But Polar Express is pretty benign compared to the fantasy of Fox.
Fox News Channel's report on the "scandal" of the oil-for-food program concludes that it was the willingness of critics of the US/UN economic sanctions program "before all the facts were in, that partially enabled Saddam Hussein to get away with killing so many of his own people." This is serious, non-benign fantasy.
Four days before this segment aired I spent 45 minutes on camera with the
Seattle-based Fox News Channel reporter who put the story together. From that entire interview, one sentence of mine made it into the story: "The kind of suffering that we knew we intended to inflict on the Iraqi people - and we maintained for all of those years - is still fundamentally our responsibility."
What didn't make it into the story were any of the reasons I gave -- over and over -- why this is the case. Here are ten of them:
The U.N.'s oil-for-food program didn't begin until 1996, more than six years after sanctions began. A "scandal" in a program that didn't yet exist cannot be blamed for six years of Iraqi deaths.
In 1992 The New England Journal of Medicine estimated that 46,900 Iraqi children under five died from January to August 1991. Extrapolating this death rate over the years until the oil-for-food program began - half the period of US/UN economic sanctions - yields a horrible estimate of 400,000 Iraqi children's deaths.
When the oil-for-food program was finally allowed, it permitted $4 billion in oil sales a year for humanitarian needs: this came to $10 per person per month for each Iraqi living in South/Central Iraq.
Of the total amount of oil sales, 30% went immediately for war reparations -- $16 billion to Kuwaiti petroleum -- while the UN reported 960,000 Iraqi children were chronically malnourished.
In 1992 The New England Journal of Medicine stated the major cause of children's deaths in Iraq was water-borne epidemics caused by U.S. Gulf War
bombing of Iraq's civilian infrastructure.
Paul Bremer said it would take $100 billion to repair Iraq's civilian infrastructure. He said Iraq had "neglected its infrastructure for 30 years." He made no mention of the Gulf War destruction. This amount is far beyond any alleged scandal, far beyond smuggled oil money, far beyond $2 billion we say Saddam spent on palaces.
Without electricity we knew what would happen. A Pentagon planner said this in The Washington Post: "People say, 'You didn't recognize that it was going to have an effect on water or sewage,' said the planning officer. Well, what were we trying to do with [United Nations-approved economic] sanctions - help out the Iraqi people? No. What we were doing with the attacks on infrastructure was to accelerate the effect of the sanctions."
President Bush and USAID brag that Iraq has more electricity than "before the war." But they fail to mention which war! Iraq had over 9,000 mwatts of capacity before the Gulf War, now it's 4,500.
A colonel writes in a US Air Force magazine that destroying Iraq's electrical generating facilities caused "perhaps as many as 100,000 civilian deaths" but argues that the US Air Force should do this because of the benefit of "indirectly targeting civilian morale."
The New York Times gave away the real reason for all this cruelty and death. In March 1991, its front-page story said, "[B]y making lif uncomfortable for the Iraqi people we would encourage them to remove President Saddam Hussein from power."
Now a virtual reality is being maintained -- in the face of these unreported or long-forgotten facts - by Fox's repeating what has become our four-word national mantra: "It's all Saddam's fault."
But who in the world - except millions of Fox viewers - believe it? Sadly, it's tens of millions of consumers of US news who haven't heard these facts and, unless they look, also won't know any better.
One basic question remains: Will we leave this virtual reality and recognize what we have done to the Iraqi people from 1991 on?
http://vitw.org/archives/726
A FEW RELEVANT LINKS
* UNsanctioned Suffering:
A Human Rights Assessment of United Nations Sanctions on Iraq - http://cesr.org/node/view/393
* Health and Welfare in Iraq After the Gulf Crisis: An In-Depth Assessment - http://cesr.org/node/view/517
* The Ahtisaari Report, 20 March 1991 -
http://www.casi.org.uk/info/undocs/s22366.html
* The Economic Sanctions section on our website -
http://vitw.org/economic_sanctions/
* Archvied email pertain Oil-for-Food from December 8th -
http://vitw.org/dec8th/
Please pass this information on to others.
You can visit our e-mail archive at http://vitw.org/dadaarchives/
VitW's Main Pages
Our Home Page http://vitw.org
Letters from Iraq http://vitw.org/voices_from_iraq/
About Us http://vitw.org/who_we_are/
Donate http://vitw.org/donate/
Recent Updates Summaries http://vitw.org/updates/
RSS Feeds http://vitw.org/sitefeeds/
Electronic Iraq http://electroniciraq.net/news/
Voices in The Wilderness http://vitw.org
Please also see:
Oil for Food: What's the Real Scandal?
Interviews Available at the Institute for Public Accuracy
DENIS HALLIDAY, djhalliday@msn.com,
http://www.kurdmedia.com/news.asp?id=5771
Former head of the U.N. Oil for Food Program in Iraq and assistant secretary general of the U.N., Halliday resigned in protest in 1998. Currently in New York City, he is available for a limited number of interviews. Halliday said today: "The Oil for Food 'scandal' is not a scandal of the United Nations, but rather of the member states, particularly of Washington and London."
JOY GORDON, jgordon@fair1.fairfield.edu
Author of the article in the current issue of Harper's magazine, "The U.N. is Us: Exposing Saddam Hussein's Silent Partner," Gordon said today: "What is being consistently overlooked is a distinction of enormous significance: the U.N. is being attacked for the policies and failures of particular member nations. The Oil for Food Program was not some concoction of KofiAnnan's. It was created by a vote of the members of the Security Council. And every aspect of how the program ran -- what goods were allowed, the monitoring procedures, the transfer of funds, everything -- was explicitly established by the members of the Security Council. Kofi Annan did not have a vote; but the U.S. and Britain did, and they approved every resolution and decision that determined how the Oil for Food Program worked."
BERT SACKS, bert@connectexpress.com,
http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/opinion/202902_berts09.html
Sacks was involved in repeated efforts to get humanitarian relief into Iraq
during the 1990s. In 2002 he was fined by the U.S. government for a 1997 trip which helped bring $40,000 in medicine to children in Iraq in violation of U.S. sanctions. Sacks said today: "The U.N.'s Oil for Food Program didn't begin until 1996, more than six years after sanctions began. A 'scandal' in a program that didn't yet exist cannot be blamed for six years of Iraqi deaths. When the Oil for Food Program was finally allowed, it permitted $4 billion in oil sales a year for humanitarian needs: this came to $10 per person per month for each Iraqi living in South/Central Iraq. Of the total amount of oil sales, 30 percent went immediately for war reparations -- $16 billion to Kuwaiti Petroleum -- while the U.N. reported 960,000 Iraqi children were chronically malnourished."
RAHUL MAHAJAN, rahul@empirenotes.org,
http://www.empirenotes.org
Mahajan is author of the book "Full Spectrum Dominance: U.S. Power in Iraq and Beyond." He said today: "The recent resurgence of the Oil for Food 'scandal,' through Sen. Norm Coleman and others, very conveniently gives the U.S. government a way to keep Kofi Annan on the defensive so he criticizes neither the U.S. assault on Fallujah nor anything around the severely flawed prospective Iraqi elections. For all the talk of a lack of U.N. accountability, consider that after the August 2003 bombing of the U.N. in Iraq there was a full investigation and several people, some high up, were fired or demoted. Now there's an investigation into Oil for Food, which has reached as high as Benon Sevan, Director of the Office of the Iraq Program. Compare this to the total lack of accountability in the U.S. government following 9/11, administration stonewalling over the 9/11 commission's creation, and the minimal investigation of corruption in the Coalition Provisional Authority, which has not involved any high officials."
For more information, contact Sam Husseini or David Zupan at the
Institute for Public Accuracy
915 National Press Building, Washington, D.C. 20045
(202) 347-0020 * http://www.accuracy.org * ipa@accuracy.org
AND
Gulf War Profiteering – Victors and Victims,
by Christiane Martens and Paul V. Rafferty 2002-08-20
http://www.unobserver.com/index.php?pagina=layout5.php&id=313&blz=1
UN Panel Approves $2.27 Billion in Compensation for Iraq's Invasion of Kuwait
2003-06-27
http://www.unobserver.com/index.php?pagina=layout5.php&id=949&blz=1
Audit finds all UN Oil-for-Food money was properly transferred to new Iraq fund http://www.un.org/apps/news/story.asp?NewsID=12806&Cr=iraq&Cr1=
Annan intends to increase number of staff in Iraq, orders security review
http://www.un.org/apps/news/story.asp?NewsID=12820&Cr=Iraq&Cr1=