Threat to the Future of Humanity Became Apparent in 1999 From Advances in Human Brain Sciences

See the previous posts I made regarding the bio-ethical issues of having a BCI (Brian-Computer Interface) and non-consensual human experimentation and brain research here, here, here, here, and here (in the last link, see category 2. under Bioethics on Mind Control, Mind Reading, and Space-Based Weaponry.)

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The advances in some areas of the human brain sciences and the possible threats for the future became apparent to Ellen M. McGee and Gerald Q. Maguire already in 1999. They talked about ear- and eye implants but also about more advanced implants and sensors in the environment able to spy on the human being and to control behavior and the human mind. The same ethical questions arising then are still very important today.

Since 1999, the progress in the implant technology happened very fast. It is possible today to connect a human brain to a computer, creating today’s cyborgs.

Technical innovation, scientists claim, are neither good nor bad, but how it is used and the moral and ethical consequences arising from the use of the technology in unethical ways. Today, the technology and its applications are still completely or partially unregulated. There is really not much for laws that admit to the use of this technology, nor that recognize or regulate how and to what extent human brain functions can or cannot be used, leaving a very open and huge range of possibilities for anyone that has its hands on this technology to use it – even when tested on people with more common place implants, like cochlear implants or pacemakers.

Because the brain chips are such a huge research area right now and because so many different kinds have been developed, it is important that we formulate strategies and directions that might be able to at least diminish some of the consequences of this technology and eliminate abuses. Implanting this technology in the human body without knowledge or consent must be prohibited, and at the absolute least, it must become widespread common knowledge that this is happening to people and law enforcement should have the technological means to be able to deal with it in the proper way.

This technology will become widespread enough to be used in normal medicine in the form of nanotechnology or in vaccinations against viruses of any kind. The human being subjected to this must be informed and humanity must know what the technology is capable of doing.

Paradoxically enough, the brain implant technology is getting too little or no attention or ethical debate. At the same time, the potential of this technology to affect human beings and change them is huge. The threat of the implantation technology is in fact, greater than genetic changes or enhancements.

Genetic changes are very much limited to human biology. Creating human-machine hybrids doesn’t have the same limitations. A computer connected to a human brain can share information at a distance. The potential for computer chips implanted into the human brain to change humanity is far greater.

ELLEN M. McGEE and GERALD Q. MAGUIRE (2007). Becoming Borg to Become Immortal: Regulating Brain Implant Technologies. Cambridge Quarterly of Healthcare Ethics, 16 , pp 291-302 doi:10.1017/S0963180107070326

Original: http://journals.cambridge.org/action/displayAbstract?fromPage=online&aid=1017164

Why Israel Can't Be a 'Jewish State'

The Israeli demand to be recognised as a "Jewish state" by the Palestinians is an inherently problematic concept

by

Sari Nusseibeh

Sari Nusseibeh is professor of philosophy at Al-Quds University in Jerusalem.

The Israeli government's current mantra is that the Palestinians must recognise a "Jewish State". Of course, the Palestinians have clearly and repeatedly recognised the State of Israel as such in the 1993 Oslo Accords (which were based on an Israeli promise to establish a Palestinian state within five years - a promise now shattered) and many times since. Recently, however, Israeli leaders have dramatically and unilaterally moved the goal-posts and are now clamouring that Palestinians must recognise Israel as a "Jewish State".

In 1946, the Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry concluded that the demand for a "Jewish State" was not part of the obligations of the Balfour Declaration or the British Mandate. Even in the First Zionist Congress in Basel in 1897, when Zionists sought to "establish a home for the Jewish people", there was no reference of a "Jewish State". The Zionist Organisation preferred at first to use the description "Jewish homeland" or "Jewish Commonwealth". Many pioneering Zionist leaders, such as Judah Magnes and Martin Buber also avoided the clear and explicit term "Jewish State" for their project of a homeland for Jews, and preferred instead the concept of a democratic bi-national state.

Today, however, demands for a "Jewish State" from Israeli politicians are growing without giving thought to what this might mean, and its supporters claim that it would be as natural as calling France a French State. However, if we consider the subject dispassionately, the idea of a "Jewish State" is logically and morally problematic because of its legal, religious, historical and social implications. The implications of this term therefore need to be spelled out, and we are sure that once they are, most people - and most Israeli citizens, we trust - will not accept these implications.

Many implications

First, let us say that confusion immediately arises here because the term "Jewish" can be applied both to the ancient race of Israelites and their descendants, as well as to those who believe in and practice the religion of Judaism. These generally overlap, but not always. For example, some ethnic Jews are atheists and there are converts to Judaism (leaving aside the question of whether these are accepted as such by Ultra-Orthodox Jews) who are not ethnic Jews.

Second, let us suggest also that having a modern nation-state being defined by one ethnicity or one religion is problematic in itself - if not inherently self-contradictory - because the modern nation-state as such is a temporal and civic institution, and because no state in the world is - or can be in practice - ethnically or religiously homogenous.

Third, recognition of Israel as a "Jewish state" implies that Israel is, or should be, either a theocracy (if we take the word "Jewish" to apply to the religion of Judaism) or an apartheid state (if we take the word "Jewish" to apply to the ethnicity of Jews), or both, and in all of these cases, Israel is then no longer a democracy - something which has rightly been the pride of most Israelis since the country's founding in 1948.

Fourth, at least one in five Israelis - 20 per cent of the population, according to the Israel Central Bureau of Statistics - is ethnically Arab (and are mostly either Muslim, Christian, Druze or Bahai), and recognising Israel as a "Jewish State" as such makes one-fifth of the population of Israel automatically strangers in their own native land and opens the door to legally reducing them, most undemocratically, to second-class citizens (or perhaps even stripping them of their citizenship and other rights) - something that no-one, much less a Palestinian leader, has a right to do.

Fifth, recognising a "Jewish State" as such in Israel would mean legally that while Palestinians no longer have citizens' rights there, any member of world Jewry outside of Israel (up to 10 million people perhaps), should be entitled to full citizens' rights there, no matter wherever they may be in the world today and regardless of their current nationality. Indeed, Israel publicly admits that it does not hold the land for the benefit of its citizens but holds it, in trust, on behalf of the Jews of the world for all time. This is something that happens in practice, but that obviously Palestinians in the occupied territories - including Jerusalem - do not see as fair, especially as they are constantly forcibly evicted off their ancestral homeland by Israel to make way for foreign Jewish settlers, and because Palestinians in their diaspora are denied the same right to come and live.

Sixth, it means, before final status negotiations have even started, that Palestinians would have then given up the rights of about 7 million Palestinians in the diaspora to repatriation or compensation; 7 million Palestinians descended from the Palestinians who in 1900 lived in historical Palestine (ie what is now Israel, the West Bank including Jerusalem, and Gaza) and at that time made up 800,000 of its 840,000 inhabitants; and who were driven off their land through war, violent eviction or fear.

Seventh, recognising a "Jewish state" in Israel - a state which purports to annex the whole of Jerusalem, East and West, and calls Jerusalem its "eternal, undivided capital" (as if the city, or even the world itself, were eternal; as if it were really undivided, and as if it actually were legally recognised by the international community as Israel's capital) - means completely ignoring the fact that Jerusalem is as holy to 2.2 billion Christians and 1.6 billion Muslims, as it is to 15-20 million Jews worldwide.

In other words, this would be to privilege Judaism above the religions of Christianity and Islam, whose adherents together comprise 55 per cent of the world's population. Regrettably this is a narrative propagated even by renowned Jewish author and Nobel laureate Elie Wiesel, who, on April 15, 2010, took out full page ads in The New York Times and The Washington Post and claimed that Jerusalem "is mentioned more than six hundred times in Scripture - and not a single time in the Qur'an". Now we do not propose to speak for native Palestinian Arab Christians - except to say the that Jerusalem is quite obviously the city of Jesus Christ the Messiah - but as Muslims, we believe that Jerusalem is not the "third holiest city of Islam" as is sometimes claimed, but simply one of Islam's three holy cities. And, of course, despite what Mr Wiesel seems to believe, Jerusalem is indeed clearly referred to in the Holy Qur'an in Surat al-Isra' (17:1):

"Glorified be He Who transported His servant by night from the Inviolable Place of Worship to the Aqsa Place of Worship whose precincts We have blessed, that We might show him of Our tokens! Lo! He, only He, is the Hearer, the Seer."

Moreover, Muslims wanting to take a similar, religiously exclusive narrative, could point out that while Jerusalem is mentioned 600 times in the Bible, it is not mentioned once in the Torah as such - a fact that any Biblical Concordance will easily confirm. Of course we do, however, recognise the importance of the land of Israel in the religion of Judaism - this is even mentioned in the Qur'an, 5:21 - we only ask that the Israeli government reciprocate this courtesy and allow Muslims to speak for themselves in expressing what they consider, and have always considered, as holy to them.

There is another reason, more serious than all of the seven mentioned above, why Palestinian leaders - and indeed no responsible person - can morally recognise Israel as a "Jewish State" as such. It has to do with the very Covenant of God in the Bible with Ancient Israelites of the promise of a homeland for Jews. God says to Abraham in the Bible:

On the same day the LORD made a covenant with Abram, saying:

"To your descendants I have given this land, from the river of Egypt to the great river, the River Euphrates - the Kenites, the Kenezzites, the Kadmonites, the Hittites, the Perizzites, the Rephaim, the Amorites, the Canaanites, the Girgashites, and the Jebusites." (Genesis, 15:18-21; NKJ)

The ancient Israelites then go on to possess this land in the time of Moses, upon God's command, as follows:

"When the LORD your God brings you into the land which you go to possess, and has cast out many nations before you, the Hittites and the Girgashites and the Amorites and the Canaanites and the Perizzites and the Hivites and the Jebusites, seven nations greater and mightier than you, and when the LORD your God delivers them over to you, you shall conquer them and utterly destroy them. You shall make no covenant with them nor show mercy to them. (Deuteronomy, 7:1-2; NKJ)

"Hear, O Israel: You are to cross over the Jordan today, and go in to dispossess nations greater and mightier than yourself, cities great and fortified up to heaven, a people great and tall, the descendants of the Anakim, whom you know, and of whom you heard it said: 'Who can stand before the descendants of Anak?' Therefore understand today that the LORD your God is He who goes over before you as a consuming fire. He will destroy them and bring them down before you; so you shall drive them out and destroy them quickly, as the LORD has said to you." (Deuteronomy, 9:1-4; NKJ)

The fate of many of the original inhabitants is then as follows:

And they utterly destroyed all that was in the city, both man and woman, young and old, ox and sheep and donkey, with the edge of the sword. (Joshua, 6:21; NKJ)

And this continues even later on in time, as follows:

Samuel also said to Saul: "The LORD sent me to anoint you king over His people, over Israel. Now therefore, heed the voice of the words of the LORD. Thus says the LORD of hosts: 'I will punish Amalek for what he did to Israel, how he ambushed him on the way when he came up from Egypt. Now go and attack Amalek, and utterly destroy all that they have, and do not spare them. But kill both man and woman, infant and nursing child, ox and sheep, camel and donkey.'" (1 Samuel, 15:1-3; NKJ)

Now it is very easy to cherry-pick quotes from scripture permitting or enjoining violence. One could cite, out of context, verses such as the "sword verse" in the Holy Qur'an:

Then, when the sacred months have passed, slay the idolaters wherever you find them, and take them, and confine them, and lie in wait for them at every place of ambush. But if they repent, and establish prayer and pay the alms, then leave their way free. God is Forgiving, Merciful. (Al-Tawbah, 9:5)

One could even cite verses - again out of context - from Jesus Christ's own words in the Gospel, as follows:

"But bring here those enemies of mine, who did not want me to reign over them, and slay them before me.'" (Luke, 19:27; NKJ)


"Do not think that I came to bring peace on earth. I did not come to bring peace but a sword." (Matthew, 10:34; NKJ)

Democracy or a Jewish State?

Nevertheless, it remains true that, in the Old Testament, God commands the Jewish state in the land of Israel to come into being through warfare and violent dispossession of the original inhabitants. Moreover, this command has its roots in the very Covenant of God with Abraham (or rather "Abram" at that time) in the Bible and it thus forms one of the core tenets of Judaism as such, at least as we understand it. No one then can blame Palestinians and descendants of the ancient Canaanites, Jebusites and others who inhabited the land before the Ancient Israelites (as seen in the Bible itself) for a little trepidation as regards what recognising Israel as a "Jewish State" means for them, particularly to certain Orthodox and Ultra-Orthodox Jews. No one then can blame Palestinians for asking if recognising Israel as a "Jewish State" means recognising the legitimacy of offensive warfare or violence against them by Israel to take what remains of Palestine from them.

We need hardly say that this comes against a background where every day the Israeli settler movement is grabbing more land in the West Bank and Jerusalem (there are now 500,000 Israeli settlers in the West Bank alone) - aided, abetted, funded and empowered by the current Israeli government - and throwing or forcing more and more Palestinians out, in so many different ways that it would take volumes to describe. Moreover, there are credible reports that despite the almost universal agreement in Rabbinical texts throughout the ages that the divine command to kill the Amalekites was a unique and isolated historical incident that applied only to the race of the Ancient Amalekites, there are now, in certain religious schools in Israel, people who draw parallels between the Palestinians of today and the ancient Amalekites and their like (this was apparently the opinion of Rabbi Mordechai Eliyahu, a former chief Rabbi of Israel; see also, for example: Shulamit Aloni's article 'Murder Under the Cover of Righteousness', CounterPunch, March, 8-9, 2003).

In short, recognition of Israel as a "Jewish State" in Israel is not the same as, say, recognition of Greece today as a "Christian State". It entails, in the Old Testament itself, a Covenant between God and a Chosen People regarding a Promised Land that should be taken by force at the expense of the other inhabitants of the land and of non-Jews. This idea is not present as such in other religions that we know of. Moreover, even secular and progressive voices in Israel, such as former president of the Supreme Court of Israel, Aharon Barak, understand the concept of a "Jewish State" as follows:

"[The] Jewish State is the state of the Jewish people … it is a state in which every Jew has the right to return … a Jewish state derives its values from its religious heritage, the Bible is the basic of its books and Israel's prophets are the basis of its morality … a Jewish state is a state in which the values of Israel, Torah, Jewish heritage and the values of the Jewish halacha [religious law] are the bases of its values." ('A State in Emergency', Ha'aretz, 19 June, 2005.)

So, rather than demand that Palestinians recognise Israel as a "Jewish State" as such - adding "beyond chutzpah" to insult and injury - we offer the suggestion that Israeli leaders ask instead that Palestinians recognise Israel (proper) as a civil, democratic, and pluralistic state whose official religion is Judaism, and whose majority is Jewish. Many states (including Israel's neighbours Jordan and Egypt, and countries such as Greece) have their official religion as Christianity or Islam (but grant equal civil rights to all citizens) and there is no reason why Israeli Jews should not want the religion of their state to be officially Jewish. This is a reasonable demand, and it may allay the fears of Jewish Israelis about becoming a minority in Israel, and at the same time not arouse fears among Palestinians and Arabs about being ethnically cleansed in Palestine. Demanding the recognition of Israel's official religion as Judaism, rather than the recognition of Israel as a "Jewish State", would also mean Israel continuing to be a democracy.

Sari Nusseibeh is a professor of philosophy at Al-Quds University in Jerusalem.

CIA Mind Control Techniques MKULTRA Program Brainwashing

Below you will see a video about project MKULTRA. Here is a quote from about the minute mark into the beginning of the documentary:

"In this anything goes atmosphere, Donavan appointed this man, Stanley Lovell, a Boston industrialist, to break new ground in many scientific and technical fields, Donavan called Lovell his Dr. Moriarty, after the fiendish professor in Sherlock Holmes. Lovell liked the name and posed for this Saturday Evening Post photo. He later wrote of his OSS job, it was quote "to stimulate the Peck's Bad Boy beneath every American scientist, and to say to him, throw all of your normal law-abiding concepts out of the window, here is a chance to raise Merry hell. It was in this atmosphere that the search for mind control began. "

You will see that they mostly only talk about the use of drugs. The truth of the matter is, the real secret of intelligence and the big secret of MKULTRA has always been mind control with electronics. They used to even mention this on Wikipedia's write-up about MKULTRA. They have now taken it down, (after I started talking about it,) but, I put up the old one here.  In any event, you can see that the CIA was involved with drugs right from the beginning. This is why so many drug dealers work with them. The CIA is essentially a protected class of business people and criminals with connections to banking, the universities, the entertainment industry, (Hollywood, music, and porn) the military, and Silicon Valley.  

Another good documentary to watch is this one. It describes more about the Unabomber and the links between the internet, computers, the military, the intelligence community, the universities, and the aerospace industry. See here for more about BBN technologies, which is a division of Raytheon. It might also be beneficial to watch this. It provides information about the potential problems of technology and the connections with the Unabomber. It talks more about a certain philosopher that was a major influence on Ted Kaczynski. I have also provided additional links below the video for further investigation.

1. Dr. Donald Ewen Cameron: The Psychopathic Canadian Psychiatrist Behind "Psychic Driving"

2. Remote MKUltra Patents and Information

3. MKULTRA Scientists and Electromagnetic Weaponry

4. 5 Most Shocking CIA Experiments of Project MKULTRA

5. Transhumanism: From MKULTRA To Google

6. Computers, Artificial Intelligence and the All-Seeing Eye of Surveillance

7. Mind Control and Mind Reading Technology - Is Edward Snowden a Fake?

8. Mind Control and Augmented Cognition: Hooked Up to a Supercomputer with Artificial Intelligence at the NSA and CIA

Mind Wars: Brain Research and National Defense

Brain Research at Stanford: The Law

Israel and the War on Inter-Marriage

Examples of Microsoft HoloLens and How it Can Be Applied For Synthetic Telepathy in Contact Lenses

I have included three new videos to watch below. They touch on the same ideas that I was talking about here, here, here, here, here and here. Also, see this post for a full list of patents and technology to accomplish what is known as full-spectrum dominance and no-touch reality TV torture. Another interesting video to see is this one, it talks about how our eyes emit biophotons. As stated here, with the proper technology, this can be used for synthetic telepathy.

(See here, where the physicist Dr. John Morgan says 2 minutes and 10 seconds into the video, that all natural things emit radio waves. Watch this video with Michael Persinger where he talks about how light and photons can be measured. Also, take notice in this video when the physicist mentions that the brain "radiates" radio.)

CRAY - NSA Supercomputer From the 90's

The Trials Of Henry Kissinger

Here is a previous post about the war criminal and liar named Henry Kissinger.

Fog Of War: Lessons From The Life Of Robert S. Mcnamara

Are Brain Waves as Unique as Fingerprints?

See this previous article on a similar topic. Also, see this video about the "Neuro" Revolution and Brain Finger Printing.

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When children enter adolescence their brains begin to undergo a series of rapid changes – actually a sort of neural overhaul – shedding what was needed in childhood and adding functions and abilities that are critical in adulthood.

Despite these considerable and ongoing changes, when something in the brain remains so steadily unaltered, neuroscientists take notice.

In a study co-authored by Dr. Mary Carskadon, professor of psychiatry at the Warren Alpert Medical School of Brown University and director of the Sleep Research Laboratory at E.P. Bradley Hospital, researchers have found that most of their teenage study subjects maintained a unique and consistent pattern of underlying brain oscillations.

This observation appears to support an idea, already observed in adults, that people produce a kind of unique brain wave “fingerprint.”

Israel's Crimes Against Ethiopians

In addition to watching the videos below, see this video, this video, and this video For even more information, see here, here, here, here, here and here.  

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

Part 4

IRAQI SANCTIONS AND AMERICAN INTENTIONS: BLAMELESS CARNAGE? PART 2

See here for the previous article in this series. Plus, here and here for other additional articles about Iraq. 

by James Bovard

While Pentagon officials bluntly admitted in 1991 that sanctions aimed to punish the Iraqi people, candor evaporated as the death toll rose. The State Department’s website announced in June 1999,

Sanctions are not intended to harm the people of Iraq. That is why the sanctions regime has always specifically exempted food and medicine.

This was false. Banning exports of oil effectively also banned imports of food, medicine, and other humanitarian goods. Some of the worst impacts of the sanctions dissipated after the oil-for-food program was launched, but by that time, hundreds of thousands of Iraqis may have already perished.

Denis Halliday, the UN administrator of the oil-for-food program, resigned in 1998 to protest the ravages the sanctions were continuing to inflict on Iraqis. Halliday complained, “We are in the process of destroying an entire country” and denounced the sanctions as “nothing less than genocide.” Hans von Sponeck, his replacement, served two years before resigning in protest in early 2000, denouncing the sanctions as a “criminal policy.”

The International Committee of the Red Cross warned in a report in December 1999 that the oil-for-food program “has not halted the collapse of the health system and the deterioration of water supplies, which together pose one of the gravest threats to the health and well-being of the civilian population.” Seventy members of Congress sent a letter to President Clinton in early 2000 denouncing the sanctions as “infanticide masquerading as policy.”

While sanctions were maintained after the Gulf War allegedly to compel Iraq to disarm, the U.S. government long pursued a different goal. Secretary of State James Baker declared in May 1991, “We are not interested in seeking a relaxation of sanctions as long as Saddam Hussein is in power.” President Clinton decreed in November 1997 that “sanctions will be there until the end of time, or as long as he [Saddam Hussein] lasts.” At the end of the Clinton era, Defense Secretary William Cohen bragged,

We have been successful, through the sanctions regime, to really shut off most of the revenue that will be going to rebuild [Saddam Hussein’s] military.

Joy Gordon, professor of philosophy at Fairfield University, spent three years researching the effects of the UN sanctions programs on Iraq. Gordon obtained many confidential UN documents that showed that

the United States has fought aggressively throughout the last decade to purposefully minimize the humanitarian goods that enter the country,

as she reported in a November 2002 Harper’s article.

After the first Gulf War, the UN Security Council set up a committee to administer sanctions on Iraq. The U.S. government vigorously exploited its veto power on the committee by placing holds on contracts. The Economist declared in early 2000 that Americans and British on the sanctions committee were “abusing their power to block suspicious imports.” The United States blocked the importing of ambulances, tires, and soap. Imports of children’s pencils were restricted “because lead could have a military use.” The United States vetoed allowing car batteries and forklifts to be included on a list of humanitarian goods that could automatically be sent into Iraq. The Associated Press summarized controversies around U.S. vetoes of imports:

Most of the disputed contracts are for equipment to improve Iraq’s dilapidated oil industry, power grid and water sanitation infrastructure.

The U.S. government routinely and perennially vetoed delivery of goods that UN weapons inspectors had certified as posing no military benefit to Saddam. As of September 2001, the United States was blocking “nearly one-third of water and sanitation and one quarter of electricity and educational — supply contracts were on hold.” Gordon noted, “As of September 2001, nearly a billion dollars’ worth of medical-equipment contracts — for which all the information sought had been provided — was still on hold.”

In early 2002, the United States blocked contracts for the delivery of “dialysis, dental, and fire-fighting equipment, water tankers, milk and yogurt production equipment, printing equipment for schools.” Gordon reported,

Since August 1991 the United States has blocked most purchases of materials necessary for Iraq to generate electricity…. Often restrictions have hinged on the withholding of a single essential element, rendering many approved items useless. For example, Iraq was allowed to purchase a sewage-treatment plant but was blocked from buying the generator necessary to run it; this in a country that has been pouring 300,000 tons of raw sewage daily into its rivers.

Sanctions and political games

Gordon observed that the U.S. government “has sometimes given a reason for its refusal to approve humanitarian goods, sometimes given no reason at all, and sometimes changed its reason three or four times, in each instance causing a delay of months.” She noted,

The United States found many ways to slow approval of contracts. Although it insisted on reviewing every contract carefully, for years it didn’t assign enough staff to do this without causing enormous delays.”

Large shipments of humanitarian aid were delayed “simply because of U.S. disinterest in spending the money necessary to review them.”

The U.S. government played politics with its holds, turning Iraq into a pork barrel for wheeling and dealing on the UN Security Council. In 2001, the United States proposed a reform called “smart sanctions” that would have automatically slowed down many more imports into Iraq — while removing the United States from culpability for blocking the relief. Secretary of State Colin Powell said that the U.S. government was confident that the revised sanctions system would be

able to keep the box as tightly closed as we have the last 10 years, without receiving on our shoulders all the baggage that goes with it.

When Russia refused to support “smart sanctions,” the United States responded by slapping holds on almost all the contracts that Russian companies had to deliver goods to Iraq. After Russia agreed to support a revised sanctions reform in April 2002, U.S. government holds on three-quarters of a billion dollars in Russian contracts for Iraq suddenly vanished in what one diplomat told the Financial Times was “the boldest move yet by the U.S. to use the holds to buy political agreement.”

Gordon concluded that “U.S. policy consistently opposed any form of economic development within Iraq.” As of mid 2002, the importation of almost $5 billion in humanitarian goods was blocked — almost entirely because of holds imposed by the U.S. and British governments.

Blaming Saddam

President Bush sought to blame all the suffering of the Iraqi people on Saddam’s lust for weapons. In an October 7, 2002, speech Bush declared,

The world has also tried economic sanctions and watched Iraq use billions of dollars in illegal oil revenues to fund more weapons purchases, rather than providing for the needs of the Iraqi people.

While Saddam did use some of the revenue from “illegal” (i.e., not authorized by the UN) oil sales to Syria and elsewhere to purchase weapons, the United States never presented any evidence that such purchases amounted to “billions of dollars.” The U.S. position appeared to be that as long as Saddam spent a single cent on weapons, the United States was blameless for the devastation from its “siege warfare” tactics.

After human-rights advocates had harshly condemned sanctions on Iraq for almost a decade, the sanctions suddenly morphed into a causus belli. At a March 27, 2003, joint press conference for Bush and Britian’s prime minister, Tony Blair, Blair declared,

Over the past five years, 400,000 Iraqi children under the age of five died of malnutrition and disease, preventively, but died because of the nature of the regime under which they are living. Now, that is why we’re acting.

Progressive editor Matthew Rothschild observed that Bush and Blair “refuse to acknowledge any responsibility for those deaths and instead seize upon them simply to justify their war of aggression.”

After the war started, the suffering caused by sanctions became further proof of Saddam’s depravity. In a March 25, 2003, press conference announcing plans for humanitarian aid after the Iraq War, Andrew Natsios, administrator for the Agency for International Development, declared,

There has been a water issue, and I am not sure everybody entirely understands this. It predates the war. Water and sanitation are the principal reasons children have died at higher rates than they should have for a middle-income country…. It is a function of a deliberate decision by the regime not to repair the water system or replace old equipment with new equipment, so in many cases people are basically drinking untreated sewer water in their homes and have been for some years.

In reality, the United States government perennially blocked the importation of the necessary equipment and supplies to repair the water system — as if it were a “dual use” because of the possibility that Iraqi soldiers would get glasses of water from the repaired systems.

From 1991 through the end of 2002, 8,924 people were killed in attacks by international terrorists, according to the U.S. State Department. The sanctions on Iraq may have killed more than 50 times as many civilians as did terrorists during a time when terrorism was supposedly one of the gravest threats to humanity.

During the 2000 election campaign, Bush criticized the Clinton administration for failing to keep sanctions as tight as possible. In the lead-up to the war, he frequently relished recounting the details of Saddam’s brutality, especially the alleged gas attacks against Kurdish villages that, according to Bush, “killed or injured at least 20,000 people, more than six times the number of people who died in the attacks of September the 11th.” (It is unclear whether it was the Iraqis or the Iranians who actually carried out the gas attacks.)

But far more Iraqi children were killed by sanctions after Bush’s inauguration on Janu ary 20, 2001, than Saddam killed in his alleged gas attacks on the Kurds. If the estimate of 500,000 dead as a result of sanctions is correct, that would be the equivalent of snuffing out the lives of all the babies and young children in Montana, Wyoming, South Dakota, and North Dakota.

The fact that bin Laden greatly exaggerated the sanctions death toll does not absolve the U.S. government. Within a year or two after the end of the Gulf War, it should have been obvious that sanctions would neither turn Saddam into a Boy Scout nor bring him to his knees. The U.S. government knew the sanctions were scourging the Iraqi people. Three U.S. presidents escaped any liability for the Iraqi deaths caused by U.S. policy. The people who worked in the World Trade Center may not have been so lucky.

Rather than continue to pirouette on the world stage as a great benefactor, the Bush administration should open the files and let everyone learn what the U.S. government knew — and when it knew it — about the devastation sanctions wreaked upon Iraq. This information could provide a healthy antidote against future salvation manias by American presidents.

IRAQI SANCTIONS AND AMERICAN INTENTIONS: BLAMELESS CARNAGE? PART 1

Please see here and here for additional articles.


by James Bovard

President Bush’s advisers assured Americans that U.S. troops would be greeted as liberators — with flowers and hugs — when the United States invaded Iraq. That promise turned out to be one of the biggest frauds of the Iraqi debacle.

One major reason for the animosity to U.S. troops is the lingering impact and bitter memories of the UN sanctions imposed on the Iraqis for 13 years, largely at the behest of the U.S. government. It is impossible to understand the current situation in Iraq without examining the sanctions and their toll.

President Bush, in the months before attacking Iraq, portrayed the sufferings and deprivation of the Iraqi people as resulting from the evil of Saddam Hussein. Bush’s comments were intended as an antidote to the charge by Osama bin Laden a month after 9/11 that “a million innocent children are dying at this time as we speak, killed in Iraq without any guilt.” Bin Laden listed the economic sanctions against Iraq as one of the three main reasons for his holy war against the United States.

Most Western experts believe that bin Laden sharply overstated the death toll. A United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) report in 1999 concluded that half a million Iraqi children had died in the previous eight years because of the sanctions. Columbia University professor Richard Garfield, an epidemiologist and an expert on the effects of sanctions, estimated in 2003 that the sanctions had resulted in infant and young-child fatalities numbering between 343,900 and 529,000.

Regardless of the precise number of fatalities (which will never be known), the sanctions were a key factor in inflaming Arab anger against the United States. The sanctions were initially imposed to punish Iraq for invading Kuwait and then were kept in place after the Gulf War supposedly in order to pressure Saddam to disarm.

Sanctions wreaked havoc on the Iraqi people, in part because the Pentagon intentionally destroyed Iraq’s water-treatment systems during the first U.S.-Iraq war:

• A January 22, 1991, Defence Intelligence Agency report titled “Iraq Water Treatment Vulnerabilities” noted,

Iraq depends on importing specialised equipment and some chemicals to purify its water supply, most of which is heavily mineralized and frequently brackish to saline…. Failing to secure supplies will result in a shortage of pure drinking water for much of the population. This could lead to increased incidences, if not epidemics, of disease…. Unless the water is purified with chlorine, epidemics of such diseases as cholera, hepatitis, and typhoid could occur.

• The U.S. Defence Intelligence Agency estimated in early 1991 that “it probably will take at least six months (to June 1991) before the [Iraqi water treatment] system is fully degraded” from the bombing during the Gulf War and the UN sanctions.

• A May 1991 Pentagon analysis entitled “Status of Disease at Refugee Camps,” noted,

Cholera and measles have emerged at refugee camps. Further infectious diseases will spread due to inadequate water treatment and poor sanitation.

• A June 1991 Pentagon analysis noted that infectious disease rates had increased since the Gulf War and warned, “The Iraqi regime will continue to exploit disease incidence data for its own political purposes.”

George Washington University professor Thomas Nagy, who marshalled the preceding reports in an analysis in the September 2001 issue of The Progressive, concluded, The United States knew it had the capacity to devastate the water treatment system of Iraq. It knew what the consequences would be: increased outbreaks of disease and high rates of child mortality. And it was more concerned about the public relations nightmare for Washington than the actual nightmare that the sanctions created for innocent Iraqis.

Pentagon intent

A Washington Post analysis published on June 23, 1991, noted that Pentagon officials admitted that, rather than concentrating solely on military targets, the U.S. bombing campaign “sought to achieve some of their military objectives in the Persian Gulf War by disabling Iraqi society at large” and “deliberately did great harm to Iraq’s ability to support itself as an industrial society.”

The bombing campaign targeted Iraq’s electrical power system, thereby destroying the country’s ability to operate its water-treatment plants. One Pentagon official who helped plan the bombing campaign observed,

People say, “You didn’t recognise that it was going to have an effect on water or sewage.” Well, what were we trying to do with sanctions — help out the Iraqi people? No. What we were doing with the attacks on infrastructure was to accelerate the effect of the sanctions.

Col. John Warden III, deputy director of strategy for the Air Force, observed,

Saddam Hussein cannot restore his own electricity. He needs help. If there are political objectives that the UN 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.

Another Air Force planner observed,

We wanted to let people know, “Get rid of this guy and we’ll be more than happy to assist in rebuilding. We’re not going to tolerate Saddam Hussein or his regime. Fix that, and we’ll fix your electricity.”

The Post explained the Pentagon’s rationale for punishing the Iraqi people:

Among the justifications offered now, particularly by the Air Force in recent briefings, is that Iraqi civilians were not blameless for Saddam’s invasion of Kuwait. “The definition of innocents gets to be a little bit unclear,” said a senior Air Force officer, noting that many Iraqis supported the invasion of Kuwait. “They do live there, and ultimately the people have some control over what goes on in their country.”

A Harvard School of Public Health team visited Iraq in the months after the war and found epidemic levels of typhoid and cholera as well as pervasive acute malnutrition. The Post noted,

In an estimate not substantively disputed by the Pentagon, the [Harvard] team projected that “at least 170,000 children under five years of age will die in the coming year from the delayed effects” of the bombing.

The U.S. military understood the havoc the 1991 bombing unleashed. A 1995 article entitled “The Enemy as a System” by John Warden, published in the Air Force’s Airpower Journal,discussed the benefits of bombing “dual-use targets” and noted,

A key example of such dual-use targeting was the destruction of Iraqi electrical power facilities in Desert Storm…. [Destruction] of these facilities shut down water purification and sewage treatment plants. As a result, epidemics of gastroenteritis, cholera, and typhoid broke out, leading to perhaps as many as 100,000 civilian deaths and a doubling of the infant mortality rate.

The article concluded that the U.S. Air Force has a “vested interest in attacking dual-use targets” that undermine “civilian morale.”

Infant mortality rates

In 1995, a team of doctors (including a representative of the Harvard School of Public Health) visited Iraq under the auspices of the UN Food and Agricultural Organization to examine the nutritional status and mortality rates of young children in Baghdad. They concluded that the sanctions had resulted in the deaths of 567,000 children in the previous five years. (Most subsequent studies implicitly concluded that this study sharply overestimated the mortality toll in the first years of the sanctions.)

CBS correspondent Lesley Stahl relied on this estimate in 1996 when she asked U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Madeleine Albright,

We have heard that a half million children have died. I mean, that is more children than died in Hiroshima. And, you know, is the price worth it?

Albright answered,

I think this is a very hard choice, but the price, we think the price is worth it.

Albright’s words echoed like thunder through the Arab world in the following years.

At the behest of the United States and Britain, the United Nations maintained a de facto embargo on Iraq through 1996, when an “oil for food” program was approved. Saddam and the UN had wrangled for five years over the conditions under which Iraq would be permitted to resume oil exports. The “oil for food” program gave the UN Security Council veto power over how every cent of Iraqi oil revenues would be spent. The de facto blockade on the Iraqi people made many common illnesses far more lethal.

The Detroit News noted, “Many diseases — including cancer — cannot be treated in Iraq.” TheWashington Post noted in December 2002, shortly after the Bush administration proposed new restrictions on antibiotic imports by Iraq,

As a practical matter, the most modern and effective medicines already are hard to come by here, even some of those used to treat routine illness.

One Baghdad pharmacist groused that he “cannot get atropine or inhalers for asthmatics or insulin for diabetics.”

The infant/young-child mortality rate in Iraq rose from 50 per 1,000 live births in 1990 to 133 per 1,000 in 2001 (meaning that more than 13 percent of Iraqi children die before the age of five). Iraq had by far the sharpest rise in infant/young-child mortality of any nation in the world during that period, according to UNICEF. Professor Garfield declared,

It is the only instance of a sustained increase in mortality in a stable population of more than 2 million in the last 200 years.

Sanctions advocates claimed that the punitive policy would spur discontent and eventually undermine Saddam’s rule. However, a Harvard International Review analysis noted,

Sanctions seem to have bolstered Saddam’s domestic popularity. He uses the sanctions to demonize the West and to rally support for his leadership; they have been a convenient scapegoat for internal problems. The rations system he has established in response to the sanctions has tightened his control of Iraqi citizens’ everyday lives, making them totally dependent on the government for mere survival and less likely to challenge his authority for fear of starvation.