By Edward Curtin
November 17, 2021:
Informationclearinghouse.info
- Since the annual U.S.
Veterans Day holiday honoring military veterans was
just observed on November 11, it seems more than
appropriate to suggest the creation of a U.S.
Victims Day, just as in a similar effort at truth in
labeling, the Defense Department should be renamed
the Offensive War Department.
For the victims of American terrorism far
outnumber the American soldiers who have died in its
wars, although I consider most U.S. veterans to be
victims also, having been propagandized from birth
to buy the glory of war, not the truth that it’s a
racket that serves the interests of the ruling
class.
Such wars, carried out with bombs, drones,
mercenaries, and troops, or by economic embargoes
and sanctions, are by their nature, acts of
terrorism. This is so whether we are talking about
the mass fire bombings of Japanese and German cities
during WW II, the nuclear bombings of Hiroshima and
Nagasaki, the carpet bombings and the agent orange
dropped on Vietnam, the depleted uranium on Iraq,
the use of terrorist surrogates everywhere, the
economic sanctions on Cuba, Iran, Syria, etc. The
list is endless and ongoing. All actions aimed at
causing massive death and damage to civilians.
According to U.S. law (6 USCS § 101), terrorism
is defined as an act that is dangerous to human life
or potentially destructive of critical
infrastructure or key resources; is a violation of
the criminal laws of the United States or of any
State or other subdivision of the United States; and
appears to be intended to intimidate or coerce a
civilian population; to influence the policy of a
government by intimidation or coercion; or to affect
the conduct of a government by mass destruction,
assassination, or kidnapping.
By any reasonable interpretation of the
law, the United Sates is a terrorist state.
Let me tell you about
Bert Sacks. Perhaps you’ve heard of him. His
experiences with the U.S. government regarding
terrorism tell an illuminating story of conscience
and hope. It is a story of how one person can
awaken others to recognize and admit the truth that
the U.S. is guilty of crimes against humanity, even
when one is unable to stop the carnage. It is a
tale of witness, and how such witness is contagious.
In November 1997 Sacks led a delegation to Iraq
to deliver desperately needed medicines ($40,000
worth, all donated) that were denied into the
country because of US/UN economic sanctions. For
such an act of human solidarity, he was later fined
$10,000 by the U.S. Office of Foreign Assets Control
(OFAC). Sacks had refused to ask for a license to
travel to Iraq or to subsequently pay the fine for
compelling reasons connected to his non-violent
Gandhian philosophy, which teaches that
non-cooperation with evil is as much an obligation
as cooperation with good.
For years previously, Sacks had been learning, as
would have anyone who was following the news, that
the American sanctions under George H. W. Bush and
Bill Clinton following the illegal and unjust Gulf
War, had been aimed at crippling the Iraqi
infrastructure upon which all civilian life
depended. Iraq had been devastated by the U.S. war
of aggression, and a great deal of its
infrastructure, especially electricity and therefore
water purification systems, had already been
destroyed. Clinton kept up the sanctions and the
bombing in support of Bush’s war intentions. So much
for differences between Republicans and Democrats!
Regular Iraqis were suffering terribly. All this
was being done in the name of punishing Saddam
Hussein in order to oust him from power, the same
Hussein whom the U. S. had supported in Iraq’s war
with Iran by assisting him with chemical and
biological weapons.
As Sacks later (2011) wrote in his
declaration to the United States District Court
for the Western District of Washington when he sued
OFAC:
Weeks after the end of the Gulf War, on March
22, 1991, I read a New York Times front- page
story covering the UN report by Martti Ahtisaari
on the devastating, ‘near- apocalyptic
conditions’ in Iraq after the Gulf War. The
report said, ‘famine and epidemic [were
imminent] if massive life- supporting needs
are not rapidly met. The long summer… is weeks
away. Time is short.’ The same article explained
U.S. policy this way: ‘[By] making life
uncomfortable for the Iraqi people, [sanctions]
will eventually encourage them to remove
President Saddam Hussein from power.’ This
sentence has stayed with me for twenty years. It
says to me that my government – by inflicting
suffering and death on Iraqi civilians – hoped
to overthrow President Saddam Hussein, and that
we would simply call it “making life
uncomfortable.” [my emphasis]
The years to follow the first war against Iraq
revealed what that Orwellian phrase really meant.
In 1994 Sacks read a survey on health conditions
of Iraqi children in The New England Journal of
Medicine that said:
These results provide strong evidence that
the Gulf War and trade sanctions caused a
threefold increase in mortality among Iraqi
children under five years of age. We estimate
that an excess of more than 46,900 children died
between January and August 1991.
And that was just the beginning. For the number
of dead Iraqi children [and adults] kept piling up
as a result of “making life uncomfortable.”
Anton Chekov’s story “Gooseberries” pops into my
mind:
Everything is quiet and peaceful, and nothing
protests but mute statistics: so many people
gone out of their minds, so many gallons of
vodka drunk, so many children dead from
malnutrition. . . . And this order of things is
evidently necessary; evidently the happy man
only feels at ease because the unhappy bear
their burdens in silence, and without that
silence happiness would be impossible. It’s a
case of general hypnotism. There ought to be
behind the door of every happy, contented man
someone standing with a hammer continually
reminding him with a tap that there are unhappy
people; that however happy he may be, life will
show him her laws sooner or later, trouble will
come for him — disease, poverty, losses, and no
one will see or hear, just as now he neither
sees nor hears others.
Sacks has long been that man with a gentle
hammer, far from happy, comfortable, or contented in
what he was learning. In 1996 he watched the
infamous CBS 60 Minutes interview of
Madeleine Albright by Leslie Stahl who had recently
returned from Iraq. Albright was then the U.S.
Ambassador to the United Nations and soon to be the
Secretary of State. Stahl, in reference to how the
sanctions had already killed 500,000 Iraqi children,
asked her, “Is the price worth it?” – Albright
blithely answered, “The price is worth it.”
In April 1997, a New England Journal of Medicine
editorial said that:
Iraq is an even more disastrous example of
war against the public
health . … The destruction of the
country’s power plants had brought its entire
system of water purification and distribution to
a halt, leading to epidemics of cholera, typhoid
fever, and gastroenteritis, particularly among
children. Mortality rates doubled or
tripled among children admitted to
hospitals in Baghdad and Basra… [my emphasis]
The evidence had accumulated since 1991 that the
U.S. had purposely targeted Iraqi civilians and
especially very young children and had therefore
killed them as an act or war. This was clearly
genocide. In its 1999 news release, UNICEF
announced: “if the substantial reduction in child
mortality throughout Iraq 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.”
The British journalist Robert Fisk called this
intentional destruction of Iraq’s infrastructure
“biological warfare”: “The ultimate nature of the
1991 Gulf War for Iraqi civilians now became clear.
Bomb now: die later.” In his declaration to the
court, Sacks wrote that the Centers for Disease
Control, in warning about potential terrorist
biological attacks on the U.S., clearly lists
attacks on water supplies as terrorism and
biological warfare:
Water safety threats (such as Vibrio cholerae
and Cryptosporidium parvum): Cholera is an acute
bacterial disease characterized in its severe
form by sudden onset, profuse painless watery
stools, nausea and vomiting early in the course
of illness, and, in untreated cases, rapid
dehydration, acidosis, circulatory collapse,
hypoglycemia in children, and renal failure.
Transmission occurs through ingestion of food or
water contaminated directly or indirectly with
feces or vomitus of infected persons.
By January 1997, as a result of such statements
and those of U.S. military and government officials
and reports in medical journals and media, Sacks
concluded that the United States government was
guilty of the crime of international terrorism
against the civilian population of Iraq. And being
a man of conscience, he therefore proceeded to lead
a delegation to Iraq to alleviate suffering, even
while knowing it was a drop in the bucket.
It is important to emphasize that the U.S.
government knew full well that its intentional
destruction of Iraq’s infrastructure would result in
massive death and suffering of civilians. Secretary
of Defense Dick Cheney said of such destruction that
“If I had to do it over again, I would do exactly
the same thing.” All the deaths that followed were
done as part of an effort at regime change – to
force Hussein out of office, something finally
accomplished by the George W. Bush administration
with their lies about weapons of mass destruction
and their 2003 war against Iraq that killed between
1-2 million more Iraqis. The recent accolades
heaped on Colin Powell, who as Secretary of State
consciously lied at the UN and who led the first war
against Iraq – two major war crimes – should be a
reminder of how unapologetic U.S. leaders are for
their atrocities. I would go so far as to say they
revel in their ability to commit them. Because he
called them out on this by doing what all
journalists and writers should do, they have pursued
and caged Julian Assange as if he were a wild dog
who walked into their celebratory dinner party.
In this 1991 U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency
document, “Iraq Water Treatment
Vulnerabilities,” you can read how these people
think. And read Thomas Merton’s poem “Chant
to be Used in Processions around a Site With
Furnaces,” and don’t skip its last three lines
and you can grasp the bureaucratic mind at its
finest. Euphemisms like “uncomfortable” and
“collateral damage” are their specialties. Killing
the innocent are always on their menu.
Bert Sacks and his delegation got some brief
media publicity for their voyage of mercy. He
believed that if the American people really knew
what was happening to Iraqi children, they would
demand that it be stopped. This did not happen.
His tap with the hammer of conscience failed to
awaken the hypnotized public who overwhelmingly had
elected Clinton to a second term in 1996 six months
after the 60 Minutes interview. Yes,
“Everything is [was] quiet and peaceful, and nothing
protests but mute statistics.”
Although the evidence was overwhelming that Iraqi
children in the 1990s were dying at the rate of at
least 5,000 per month as a direct result of the
sanctions, very few major media publicized this.
The 60 Minutes show, with its shocking
statement by Albright, was an exception and was seen
by millions of Americans. After that show aired, to
claim you didn’t know was no longer believable. And
although most mainstream media buried the truth, it
was still available to those who cared. There were
some conscience-stricken officials, however. In his
declaration to the court, Sacks wrote:
The first two heads of the “Oil-for-Food”
program – Denis Halliday and Hans von Sponeck –
each resigned a position as UN Assistant
Secretary General to protest the consequences of
the U.S. imposed sanctions policy on Iraq. Mr.
Halliday said, ‘We are in the process of
destroying an entire society. It is as simple
and terrifying as that.’ He called it genocide.
There were also doctors, politicians, independent
writers, and Nobel Peace Laureates who called the
policy genocide and said, “Sanctions are the
economic nuclear bomb.” Sacks told the court that
“Finally, this list includes a 32-year career,
retired U.S. diplomat – Deputy Director of the
Reagan White House Cabinet Task Force on Terrorism –
who says: ‘you can think of a number of countries
that have been involved in [terrorist] activities.
Ours is one of them.’”
Military planners, moreover, wrote in military
publications that it was desirable to kill Iraqi
civilians; that it was an essential part – if not
the major part – of war strategy. They called it
“dual-use targeting” and called themselves
“operational artists.”
Sacks was able to reach a few officials and
journalists who realized this was not art but
massive war crimes. This showed that it is not
impossible to change people, hard as it is. The
judge in his court case, James L. Robart, while
agreeing that OFAC had not exceeded its authority in
fining him, acknowledged that the court had to
accept as true that the deaths of 500,000 Iraqi
children as reported by UNICEF had come to
constitute genocide, but [my
emphasis] U.S. law prohibited the bringing of any
consideration of genocide into a legal proceeding,
which allows the U.S. government to commit this
crime while barring any other party from raising the
issue legally.
In other words, the U.S. government can accuse
others of committing genocide, but no one can
legally accuse it. It is above all laws.
Ten months before his 1997 trip to Iraq, Sacks
met with Kate Pflaumer, the U.S. Attorney for the
Western District of Washington. He says:
We met in her office and I asked her for the
legal definition of terrorism pursuant to the
laws of the United States. She asked what could
she do for me. I said “Prosecute me for
violating U.S. Iraq sanctions by bringing
medicine there.” She said, “I won’t do that for
you! Can I help in any other way?” I asked for
the U.S. legal definition of terrorism. She
pulled out a law book, had her secretary copy
the page for me, and didn’t forget my request.
When she left office, she wrote the op-ed on
June 21, 2001 …calling U.S. Iraq policy
terrorism! The two main elements relevant to the
issue here are: (1) it is an act dangerous to
human life; and (2) done apparently to coerce or
intimidate a civilian population or a
government (see 18 U.S.C. § 2331).
On June 21, 2001, Ms. Pflaumer, then the former
U.S. Attorney, wrote in the Seattle
Post-Intelligencer the following:
The reality on the ground in Iraq is not
contested. Thousands of innocent children and
adult civilians die every month as a direct
result of the 1991 bombing of civilian
infrastructure: sewage treatment plants,
electrical generating plants, water purification
facilities. Allied bombing targets included
eight multipurpose dams, repeatedly hit, which
simultaneously wrecked flood control, municipal
and industrial water storage, irrigation and
hydroelectric power. [Four of seven major
pumping stations were destroyed, as were 31
municipal water and sewerage facilities. Water
purification plants were incapacitated
throughout Iraq. We did this for “long term
leverage.” These military decisions were
sanctioned by then Secretary of Defense Dick
Cheney.]
In May 1996, Secretary of State Madeleine
Albright reaffirmed that the “price” of 500,000 dead
Iraqi children was “worth it. ”
Article 54 of the Geneva Convention states:
It is prohibited to attack, destroy or render
useless objects indispensable to the survival of
the civilian population” and includes
foodstuffs, livestock and “drinking water
supplies and irrigation works.
Title 18 U.S. Code Section 2331 defines
international terrorism as acts dangerous to human
life that would violate our criminal laws if done in
the United States when those acts are intended to
intimidate or coerce a civilian population or to
influence the policy of a government by intimidation
or coercion.
Thus did Kate Pflaumer, in an act of conscience
and upholding her legal obligation as an attorney,
call the U.S a terrorist state. This probably never
would have happened without the non-violent hammer
of Bert Sacks, who over the years has made nine
trips to Iraq with other brave and determined souls
who are a credit to humanity. Messengers of love,
truth, and compassion.
Despite their witness, such U.S. terrorism
continues as usual.
We cannot let “nothing protest but mute
statistics.” The first lesson in U.S. Terrorism 101
is to become people with hammers, and hammer out
truth and justice for the world to hear. Bert Sacks
has done this. We must follow suit.
Therein lies our only hope.
Edward Curtin, educated in the
classics, philosophy, literature, theology, and
sociology, Teaches sociology at Massachusetts
College of Liberal Arts.
http://edwardcurtin.com/
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