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December 10, 2001
John Touchie
Isaac's
on Chomsky
December 9, 2001
Jo Dillon
Journalist:
The CIA Wanted
Me Killed
John Chuckman
High-Tech
Puritanism
December 8, 2001
Laurence Tribe
Military Tribunals
Undermine the Constitution
Patrick
Cockburn
The
End of a Strange War
December 7, 2001
John Troyer
Blacklist Me!
Sen. Edwards
v. Ashcroft
Military
Tribunals
George Naggiar
Occupation
as Terrorism
Hugo von
Sponek
and Denis Halliday
Iraq
the Hostage Nation
David Vest
The Coen
Brothers'
Minstrel Show
Alexander
Cockburn
Sharon
or Arafat:
Who's the Terrorist?
December 6, 2001
CounterPunch Wire
Hampshire
College the First
to Condemn the War
Robert
Jensen
University
Teaching After
September 11
Jack McCarthy
Does
Tom Friedman Read
the New York Times?
Sam and
Leila Bahour
The
Psychology of a Suicide Attacker
December 5, 2001
Edward Hammond
The Only
Real Way to
Prevent Biowarfare
Harvey
Wasserman
Atomic
Treason in the House
Carl Estabrook
America's
Israel
Don Williams
Questions
Barbara Walters Didn't Ask George Bush
Cockburn/St. Clair
Liberals
Hail War as
Return of Big Government
Robert
Fisk
The
Last Colonial War?
Bahour/Dahan
It's About
the Occupation
December 4, 2001
Dave Marsh
A
Plea for Byron Parker
Rep. Ron Paul
Keep Your
Eye on the Target
Susan
Herman
Ashcroft
and the Patriot Act
Tariq Ali
The Afghan
King and the Nazis
November 30, 2001
Jordan
Green
Disappeared
in the Southland
Willliam Blum
Rebuilding
Afghanistan?
A Photographic Journal of Life
in an Afghan Refugee Camp
By Judith Mann
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bin Laden and Bush
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Text by Daniel Wolff
The New Intifada:
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December 10,
2001
Iraqi Sanctions'
Gruesome Toll
A Chamber of Horrors Near
the Garden of Eden
By Andy Kershaw
I thought I had a strong stomach--toughened by
the minefields and foul frontline hospitals of Angola, by the
handiwork of the death squads in Haiti and by the wholesale butchery
of Rwanda. But I nearly lost my breakfast last week at the Basrah
Maternity and Children's Hospital in southern Iraq.
Dr Amer, the hospital's director, had
invited me into a room in which were displayed colour photographs
of what, in cold medical language, are called "congenital
anomalies", but what you and I would better understand as
horrific birth deformities. The images of these babies were head-spinningly
grotesque--and thank God they didn't bring out the real thing,
pickled in formaldehyde. At one point I had to grab hold of the
back of a chair to support my legs.
I won't spare you the details. You should
know because--according to the Iraqis and in all likelihood the
World Health Organisation, which is soon to publish its findings
on the spiralling birth defects in southern Iraq--we are responsible
for these obscenities.
During the Gulf war, Britain and the
United States pounded the city and its surroundings with 96,000
depleted-uranium shells. The wretched creatures in the photographs--for
they were scarcely human--are the result, Dr Amer said.
He guided me past pictures of children
born without eyes, without brains. Another had arrived in the
world with only half a head, nothing above the eyes. Then there
was a head with legs, babies without genitalia, a little girl
born with her brain outside her skull and the whatever-it-was
whose eyes were below the level of its nose.
Then the chair-grabbing moment--a photograph
of what I can only describe (inadequately) as a pair of buttocks
with a face and two amphibian arms. Mercifully, none of these
babies survived for long.
Depleted uranium has an incubation period
in humans of five years. In the four years from 1991 (the end
of the Gulf war) until 1994, the Basrah Maternity Hospital saw
11 congenital anomalies. Last year there were 221.
Then there is the alarming increase in
cases of leukaemia among Basrah babies lucky enough to have been
born with the full complement of limbs and features in the right
place. The hospital treated 15 children with leukemia in 1993.
In 2000 it was 60. By the end of this year that figure again
will be topped. And so it will go on. Forever.
(Depleted uranium has a half-life of
4.1 billion years. Total disintegration occurs after 25 billion
years, the age of the earth.)
In any other country, in which the vital
drugs are available, 95 per cent of these infant leukaemia cases
would be treated successfully. In Basrah, the figure is 20 per
cent. Most heartbreakingly, many children on the road to recovery
go into relapse part way through treatment when the sporadic
and meagre supply of drugs runs out. And then they die.
By the United Nations' own admission
5,000 Iraqi children die every month because of a shortage of
medicines created by sanctions imposed by ... the United Nations.
Tony Blair, on numerous occasions, has
misled Parliament and the country (perhaps unwittingly) by saying
that Saddam Hussein is free to buy all the medicines Iraq needs
under the oil-for-food programme. This is not true. Oil for food
amounts to just 60 cents (40p) per Iraqi per day and everything--food,
education, health care and rebuilding of infrastructure--has
to come out of that. There simply is not enough to go around.
And has Mr Blair heard of the UN Security
Council 661 Committee? If he has, then he keeps quiet about it.
The committee was certainly unknown to me until I toured the
shabby hospitals of Basrah.
This committee, which meets in secret
in New York and does not publish minutes, supervises sanctions
on Iraq. President Saddam is not free to buy Iraq's non-military
needs on the world market. The country's requirements have to
be submitted to 661 and, often after bureaucratic delay, a judgement
is handed down on what Iraq can and cannot buy. I have obtained
a copy of recent 661 rulings and some of the decisions seem daft
if not peevish. "Dual use" is the most common reason
to refuse a purchase, meaning the item requested could be put
to military use.
So how does the 661 committee expect
Saddam Hussein to wage war with "beef extract powder and
broth"? Does 661 expect him to turn on the Kurds again by
spraying them with "malt extract"? Or to send his presidential
guard back into Kuwait armed to the teeth with "pencils"?
Pencils, you see, according to 661, contain graphite and therefore
could be put to military use. (Tough on the eager schoolchildren
of Basrah who have little with which to write).
Across town at the Basrah Teaching Hospital,
the whimsical rulings of 661 are not so comical. Dr Jawad Al-Ali,
the director of oncology, trained in the UK and a member of the
Royal College of Physicians, talked of an "epidemic"
of cancers in southern Iraq. "The number of cancer cases
is doubling every year. So is the severity of the cancers, and
there has been a big increase in cancer among the young,"
he said.
Last week he was struggling to treat
20 cancer patients with "a huge shortage of chemotherapy
drugs" and just two days supply of morphine. "We are
crippled," he said, "by Committee 661." The doctor
applied for, but was denied, life-saving machinery--deep X-ray
equipment, blood component separators, even needles for biopsies.
All, said 661, could have military use.
Tell that to Mofidah Sabah, the mother
of four-year-old Yahia. The little boy has both leukaemia in
relapse and neuroblastoma, a cancer behind the eye that has bulged
and twisted his left eyeball in its socket. Ms Sabah travels
miles every day to sit and cuddle her son on his grubby bed.
If Yahia lived in Birmingham, his chances of survival would not
be in much doubt. But not in Basrah. "I'm afraid he will
not live very long," Dr Amer whispered.
Ms Sabah said: "I will leave everything
to God, but I want God to revenge those who attacked us."
Yahia's illness is not her first brush with tragedy. She lost
12 members of her family during an Allied bombing in 1991. Her
husband, a soldier, fought in the Gulf war. He is still in the
Iraqi army and has just been reposted, to Qurna, 50 miles north
of Basra and among the contaminated former battlefields. Qurna,
according to legend, was the site of the Garden of Eden.
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