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=> Kathy Kelly's Response

Kathy Kelly's Response
Posted by Jeff (Guest) jeff@attoz.com - Wednesday, February 25 2004, 13:35:26 (EST)
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Re: The Politics of Dying Children by Matt Welch
response by Kathy Kelly
Voices in the Wilderness
2/28/02

A Note from the editor: Matt Welch's analysis of conflicting claims over the effect of sanctions on Iraq, published in Reason magazine, is typical of the "war-blogger" mentality: preening arrogance and pretensions to a strict just-the-facts standard. When he isn't sneering at Noam Chomsky, and otherwise critiquing the politics of sanctions critics, he accuses the anti-sanctions movement of telling "glaring lies" – and then concedes that "the truth is bad enough."

But as Kathy Kelly points out, by underestimating the ancillary effects of the sanctions, Welch's own biases – so prominently on display in his piece – get in the way of truth.

Matt Welch's impressive knowledge of statistics and sources regarding the number of children, under age 5, who have died as a direct result of economic sanctions provides a helpful overview of conflicting claims. Those who agree that the UN shouldn't be instrumental in waging economic warfare against innocent civilians should also agree that the cause of ending economic sanctions against Iraq is best served by using reliable statistics and always providing sources.

Welch rightly points out that the truth is bad enough. But some important points are missing from Welch's article. Welch doesn't present evidence of a deliberate US policy of inflicting great civilian harm in order to coerce a government's compliance with US demands. During the Gulf War, the US deliberately destroyed Iraq's electrical-generating plants, knowing full well what the consequence would be on the water and sewage systems. The US said this was done for "long-term leverage" and to "accelerate the effect of the sanctions." On June 23, 1991, a front page Washington Post article, by Barton Gellman, reported that "the worst civilian suffering, senior [American] officers say, has resulted not from bombs that went astray but from precision-guided weapons that hit exactly where they were aimed – at electrical plants, oil refineries and transportation networks." Gellman quotes a senior defense planning officer who said, "People say, 'You didn't recognize that it was going to have an effect on water or sewage. 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 sanctions." Gellman's interview with Col. John Warden II, deputy director of strategy, doctrine and plans for the US Air Force further clarified the purpose of destroying Iraq's electrical grid. By doing so, said Col. Warden, "you have imposed a long-term problem on the leadership that it has to deal with sometime… Saddam Hussein cannot restore his own electricity," he said. "He needs help. If there are political objectives that the U.N. coalition has, it can say, 'Saddam, when you agree to do these things, we will allow people to come in and fix your electricity.' It gives us long-term leverage."

Welch also overlooks reliable medical data (which Richard Garfield believes is credible) in a September 24, 1992, New England Journal of Medicine survey. This research found an excess of 46,900 children's deaths from January through August, 1991. That comes to 5,862 excess deaths a month. The journal also printed an editorial calling attention to this health care catastrophe.

The New England Journal of Medicine attributes many of these deaths to water-borne diseases due to the lack of electricity and water-processing – i.e., due to the bombing of civilian infrastructure.

Tony Hall echoed these concerns after his visit in 2000 to Iraq. In a letter to Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, Hall said,

"I share UNICEF's concerns about the profound effects of increasing deterioration of Iraq's water supply and sanitation systems on its children's health. The prime killer of children under five years of age – diarrhoeal diseases – has reached epidemic proportions and they now strike four times more often than they did in 1990."

"Holds on contracts for the water and sanitation sector are a prime reason for the increases in sickness and death," Hall wrote in a press release issued June 28, 2000."Of the 18 contracts, all but one hold was placed by the U.S. Government. The contracts were for purification chemicals, chlorinators, chemical dosing pumps, water tankers, and other equipment."

When the UN offered Iraq a deal to alleviate the humanitarian crisis, the UN limited Iraq's oil sales to $2 billion every six months. 30 per cent of this sum was immediately directed to pay reparations to individuals and groups who were harmed by the Gulf War, to finance UN controlled humanitarian distribution in the north of Iraq, and to pay for all UN programs, including UNSCOM inspection teams, throughout Iraq. The remaining amount available for distribution throughout the center and south of Iraq amounted to about $10 a month for each Iraqi citizen. This paltry sum was intended to cover all of the needs of the people in a country which the UN knew had been devastated. Why did the UN limit how much Iraq could spend of its own money under these conditions?

On the 5th of December, 2000, the US Ambassador to the UN Security Council told the Security Council that the US government was satisfied that the oil for food program meets the needs of the Iraqi people.

Hans von Sponeck, the former UN coordinator of humanitarian concerns in Iraq who resigned his post in order to speak more freely about the punitive effects of sanctions, regards the oil for food program as completely inadequate. He denounces it as a moral smokescreen which covers over the fact that UN statistics from December '96 to July 2001 indicate that the amount of money available per capita in Iraq through oil for food sales is $119.70.

Von Sponeck points out that the entire oil revenue from the 4½ year period came to $44.4 billion. Speaking in Seattle in November 2001, Hans von Sponeck unpacks what he calls the $119.70 scandal.

"For the humanitarian side, for the oil for food program, $26.3 billion became available….Now, that amount of $26.3 billion, if it had been entirely spent on humanitarian supplies, would have meant – quite a sobering figure, I think – $220 US per person per year in humanitarian supplies. That's all. But what actually, what actually had arrived during that period from December '96 to July 2001 is half of it: $13.5 billion. And that translates into a per capita figure of – and I call this, and you understand why, the $119.70 scandal. Because it is clearly a scandal! $119.70 is the entire amount that Iraqi civilians got as benefits under the oil for food program per year per person. And that is for what? That is not an amount in the pocket. This is for food, for medicines, for water, for sanitation, for agriculture, for electricity, and for education. That is nothing."

On December 10 2001, Mr. Denis Halliday sent a statement in support of a Voices in the Wilderness press conference and vigil held at a Baghdad electrical power plant. Summing up his opposition to economic sanctions, Halliday wrote,

"Children die in Iraq today under the UN embargo, linked to Gulf War damage, in numbers and in the full knowledge of the member states of the UN Security Council. With this knowledge, determining to sustain the economic embargo preventing improvements constitutes genocide under the provision of the UN Convention on Genocide. The shortages in Iraq today of electric power and the resulting absence of clean drinking water and sanitation for much of the civilian populace constitute an ongoing crime against humanity. A crime committed in our name by the US-driven United Nations."

I will look forward to Mr. Welch's response to the viewpoints offered by Mr. Halliday and Mr. Von Sponeck. If such a dialogue develops, Mr. Welch may want to leave the caustic language behind.

The writer is a the director of Voices in the Wilderness, a non-profit making group opposed to the sanctions on Iraq.

P.S.

Kathy Kelly is in Jail.

January 28, 2004 Iraq Activist Kathy Kelly Sentenced to Federal Prison
by Kathy Kelly
Voices in the Wilderness

Yesterday in Columbus, Georgia, Kathy Kelly, co-founder of Voices in the Wilderness and three-time Nobel Peace Prize nominee, was sentenced to three months in federal prison for enacting her habit of bearing witness against US military violence, this time by crossing onto the property of Ft. Benning military base in November of 2003, as a form of protest against the School of the Americas/Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation (SOA/WHISC). You can read "Hogtied and Abused at Fort Benning," her account of the inhumane treatment that she received by her arresting officers.

By visiting the SOA Watch website, you can find more information about the SOA/WHISC, which has trained many of the military dictators and soldiers who have massacred hundreds of thousands of people of Central and South America, especially indigenous people. You can also learn about other ways to support the project of closing the SOA/WHISC. Just as the US occupation in Iraq fails to provide for the security of ordinary Iraqis, the SOA/WHISC has, at the very least, failed in its stated task of 'security' for Latin America and, in actuality, created more insecurity and fear for millions of people in the Global South. Kathy's act of crossing the line with 27 other witnesses for peace, including VitW friend Rev. Jerry Zawada, O.F.M., is a sign of the commitment to nonviolent direct action which Voices in the Wilderness clings to as a hopeful road to peace and social justice in our world.

Alongside Kathy, Fr. Jerry Zawada, an Iraq Peace Team member and recent VitW delegate to Iraq, was sentenced to six months in federal prison (he was convicted of trespassing at the SOA/WHISC last year as well), Faith Fippinger, a former Human Shield in Iraq, was sentenced to three months in prison, and Scott Diehl, a CPT member who was in Iraq during the 2003 invasion, was also sentenced to three months in prison. May we all begin to draw the connections between the destruction caused by surging US militarism in Iraq and its effects elsewhere, wherever that may be. Here in the United States, military recruiters continue to steal the lives of students in our poorest schools and US police officers (such as those in Miami during the recent FTAA protests) are being ordered to beat down and trample their fellow US citizens who nonviolently protest the architects of social injustice.

Below, please read Kathy Kelly's statement before Judge Faircloth.

If you'd like to find new ways to resist the militarism of our time, go to the "What We Can Do" section on the VitW website.

Voices in the Wilderness is still facing a lawsuit of its own from the federal government; we'll keep you updated on the proceedings of that case (http://vitw.us/summons). If you haven't already, please sign our petition to John Ashcroft and the Justice Department.

In the meantime, Kathy and Jerry wish to extend their gratitude for the support of the VitW community at this time. They are going into this prison witness with a confidence that such witness brings us all closer to those who suffer injustice and, in essence, closer to true peace.

In peace and with hope for social justice, Voices in the Wilderness Chicago

Please find us at http://www.vitw.org, where you can also read Kathy's statement and other new entries from friends of VitW in Iraq. Thank you!

Statement before Judge G. Mallon Faircloth, who sentenced me to 3 months in federal prison after I pled not guilty but stipulated to the facts of a charge for a November 22, 2003 entry onto Fort Benning, an open US military base in Columbus, GA.

by Kathy Kelly Columbus, GA January 26, 2004

I'm fortunate to have been influenced by the life and witness of some extraordinary individuals, many of whom have appeared before you in court, several of whom are now co-defendants.

Their witness in this court has been valuable, constituting a rich and sad drama.

It's important to continue bringing before this court testimony from or about those who can't appear, people whom we've met when visiting places directly affected by US expenditures on military training and military solutions. Quite often these solutions are based on threat and force, rather than considerations of mercy and compassion.

A report in the London Observer yesterday quotes US Armed forces medical personnel warning that 20 percent of the veterans returning from Iraq will suffer post traumatic stress disorders -already 22 soldiers have committed suicide.

Families of these soldiers, whose arms will ache emptily for loved ones that will never return, can, I believe, find understanding in the families of others far away from the US who similarly feel bereaved.

In 1985, very aware of Joe Mulligan's and Bernie Survil's work, I traveled to San Juan de Limay, in the north of Nicaragua. Children there were radiant and friendly, many of them too young to understand that during the previous week US funded contras had kidnapped and murdered 25 people in their village. Later that summer, I fasted with Nicaraguan's Foreign Minister, himself a Maryknoll priest, and listened to stories pour forth as many hundreds of Nicaraguan peasant pilgrims vigiled and fasted in the Mon senor Lezcano church to show solidarity with the priest-minister's desire to nonviolently resist contra terrorism. Rev. Miguel D'Escoto urged us to find nonviolent actions commensurate to the crimes being committed. This experience gave me reason to believe that the US could have used negotiation and diplomacy to resolve disputes with Nicaragua.

The Christian Peacemaker Teams maintained a steady presence in Jeremie, in the southern finger of Haiti, throughout the time when the US had determined it was too dangerous for US soldiers to be there. In 1995, I was there for the three months just before the US troops returned. Throughout this stretch of history, the US spent more money on troop movements, equipping troops, training troops, – than it spent on meeting human needs. The Commandant of the region, Colonel Rigobert Jean, commented publicly that he was "ashamed and embarrassed that it was left to the 'blans' (Creole for foreigners) on the hill to preserve peace and security in the region." He was referring to our five person team. Again, I had reason to believe that unarmed peacemakers could be relied on to create greater security in areas of conflict.

Indelibly marked in my memory from that summer are the Creole words that children could no longer suppress as evenings drew to a close and they longed for adequate meals. "M'gen grangou," I'm hungry.

More recently, in Iraq, during the US bombing in March and April of 2003, I saw how children suffer when nations decide to put their resources into weapons and warfare rather than meeting human needs. All of us learned to adopt a poker face, hoping not to frighten the children, whenever there were ear-splitting blasts and gut wrenching thuds. During every day and night of the bombing, I would hold little Miladhah and Zainab in my arms. That's how I learned of their fear: they were grinding their teeth, morning, noon and night. But they were far more fortunate than the children who were survivors of direct hits, children whose brothers and sisters and parents were maimed and killed.

Judge Faircloth, we have experienced and seen the deadly effect of US military policy on mothers and children, on families. We have held the children and tried to comfort them under bombs.

It is because of these experiences that we feel so strongly. And this is why I'm willing to go into the US prison system and experience again, as we have before, the suffering of all of these women who are being separated from their families in the American prisons. It's important to hear the voices of women trying to comfort their own children over the telephone, children they won't see be able to hug and cuddle, – I remember my friend Gloria, in the prison telephone room: "Momma's gonna tickle your feets, oh baby, momma's gonna tickle your feet, you momma's baby." Gloria and many thousands of other mothers locked up in a world of imprisoned beauty would never tickle their baby's feet, because they'd been sentenced to mandatory five year minimums.

Sometimes I think we face a wilderness of compassion in this country. But when I think of the many voices that have tried, in this court, to clamor for the works of mercy rather than the works of war, I feel at home, I feel grateful, and I feel a deep urge to be silent and listen to the cries of those most afflicted, – their cries are often hard to hear – but when we hear them, we're called, all of us, to be like voices in the wilderness, raising their laments and finding ourselves motivated to build a better world.

For more information about Voices in the Wilderness, please visit the website at www.vitw.org. Thanks!


Jeff wrote:
>Found this at his WEB SITE:
>
>http://mattwelch.com/FreelanceSave/StarBabies.htm
>Beruit Daily Star - September 3, 2003
>
>
>The Iraqi babies scam is still alive
>
>On Aug. 26, the widely published America-critic Tariq Ali repeated one of the most persistent myths of recent Middle Eastern history. Writing in the Sydney Morning Herald, Ali asserted that United Nations sanctions against Iraq from 1990-2003 were, “according to UNICEF figures… directly responsible for the deaths of half a million Iraqi children.”
>This has never been true, no matter how many thousands of times it’s been cited by partisans on either side of the international debate over sanctions policy toward Iraq. Now that the end of the second Gulf war has brought forth a torrent of new and better information about humanitarian cause and effect under the former Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein, sifting through it accurately is the best method for evaluating whether sanctions should remain in the diplomatic toolbox.
>First, the myth. In 1999, UNICEF published a study, based on interviews with 40,000 Iraqi households, which concluded: “If the substantial reduction in the under-five mortality rate during the 1980s had continued through the 1990s, there would have been half a million fewer deaths of children under-five in the country as a whole during the eight year period 1991 to 1998.”
>Doesn’t that prove that Ali and others are right? No. First, the assumption is based on mortality rates continuing their same historic decline as during the 1980s; if the expectation benchmark was fixed to 1989 levels, the “excess death” number would be closer to 400,000. Second, UNICEF found that under-five mortality actually decreased in the autonomous north, while doubling in Saddam-controlled regions, giving pro-sanctions (and pro-war) advocates evidence that the Iraqi dictator was largely to blame. (It is also true that the north received far more international aid.)
>Thirdly, and most importantly, the UNICEF study never once assigned anything like 100 percent of the blame to UN resolutions. “It’s very important not to just say that everything rests on sanctions,” UNICEF executive director Carol Bellamy said in an interview at the time. “It is also the result of wars and the reduction in investment in resources for primary healthcare.”
>The study was so often cited after the Sept. 11, 2001 massacres as evidence for the “blowback” interpretation of the air attacks, that UNICEF had to rush out another clarifying press release.
>“The surveys were never intended to provide an absolute figure of how many children have died in Iraq as a result of sanctions,” the statement read. Rather, they show that “if there hadn’t been two wars, if sanctions hadn’t been introduced and if investment in social services had been maintained ­ there would have been 500,000 fewer deaths of children under five.”
>Others who have studied the numbers in detail shoot lower. Richard Garfield, a Columbia University nursing professor whose sanctions work has earned high praise, came up with a range of between 106,000 and 227,000 excess deaths from August 1991 to March 1998. Recently he cited the figures 345,000-530,000 for the entire 1990-2002 period. This would mean that the rate actually accelerated during the “oil-for-food” program, which brought a whopping $28 billion worth of humanitarian supplies into Iraq between March 1997 and March 2003.
>Since the US military defeat of the Baathist regime, anecdotal evidence has piled up suggesting that Saddam milked the humanitarian tragedy for all it was worth. In May, doctors at Baghdad hospitals told reporters from the BBC, Newsday and other media that they were forced to save each and every dead baby’s corpse ­ regardless of cause of death ­ to display in made-for-Al-Jazeera protests against the murderous sanctions.
>The doctors also explained how medical supplies delivered by the oil-for-food program would be deliberately diverted or damaged. “We would get a shipment from the Ministry of Health of vaccines provided by the World Health Organization,” one doctor told journalist David Rieff, who wrote a long and critical article on sanctions for the July 27 issue of the New York Times Magazine. “But then we would be instructed not to use them until they had reached or even exceeded their sell-by date. Then the television cameras would come, and we would be told to lie and tell the public how the UN made ordinary Iraqis suffer.”
>The US Defense Department claimed in July that the Baath regime spent a microscopic $13 million on healthcare for the Iraqi people in 2002. “That’s less than $1 per person per year,” Assistant Secretary of Defense for Health Affairs Dr. William Winkenwerder told reporters on July 25: “Yet, Saddam and his sons continued to spend the money of Iraq and its resources in their palaces, and in their security apparatus and in their effort to pursue weapons of mass destruction. It is almost unbelievable. One has to be there to believe it and to see it.”
>Ultimately, it is still too early to assign precise blame for Iraq’s humanitarian catastrophe between the two Gulf wars. Certainly, the effects of sanctions could have easily been avoided had Saddam complied with UN resolutions by more readily paying reparations to Kuwait, as well as disarming and discontinuing weapons programs (he even rejected the oil-for-food offer for nearly two years), and allowing UN inspectors to verify this. What’s clear is that the Iraqi dictator recognized sanctions as one of his only effective propaganda tools, which gave him material incentive to exaggerate and worsen their impact.
>Which is an excellent reason to question their continued infliction upon countries such as Cuba, Libya and Myanmar. With the very notable exception of South Africa, the sanction tool’s track record in changing dictatorial behavior (or triggering regime change, which is often the real motivation) has been poor. Surely there must be some option between all-out war and a slap on the wrist, preferably one that doesn’t contribute to thousands of needless deaths.
>
>Matt Welch debunked the figures for dead Iraqi babies in the March 2002 issue of Reason magazine, where he is an associate editor. He wrote this commentary for THE DAILY STAR
>
>
>
>
>parhad wrote:
>>it's easy to say all of this...we have said numerous things about the missing WMDs and no one has even bothered to explain them away...except to say Saddam would have "liked to" have made them...though how we know that is beyond proof.
>>
>>I'll bet you that if any number of challenges to this guy came in with several offers for an open and public debate...he would say..."I haven't the time to waste...read my lips".



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