William Rivers Pitt recently published an article on the Truthout website taking the US media to task for their failure to report the most disturbing story of the Iraq war: the imprisonment and torture of Iraqi children by the US Military. We should applaud the courage of journalists like Pitt and Seymour Hersh, not to mention whistleblowers such as Spec. Joseph Darby and Sgt. Samuel Provance who have faced military intimidation and litigation because of their efforts to expose the cover-up. Pitt writes:

“Seymour Hersh, the New Yorker reporter who first broke the story of torture at Abu Ghraib, recently spoke at an ACLU convention. He has seen the pictures and the videotapes the American media has not yet shown. ‘The boys were sodomized with the cameras rolling, and the worst part is the soundtrack, of the boys shrieking,’ said Hersh. ‘And this is your government at war.’”

Hersh is correct that the sound of children screaming is indeed the sound of our government, nay, ANY government at war. War brings death and terror to the most vulnerable people in the world (such as children), who have no Kevlar vests, helmets, or protective plating for their Humvees to keep them safe from the horrors of unbridled violence.

Let us not forget, however, that the most unreported story of the war against Iraq is still the thirteen-year war of destruction wrought by the nefarious campaign of infrastructure-bombing and economic sanctions, which condemned over 550,000 Iraqi children under the age of five to endure slow deaths from water-borne diseases and lack of basic medications. While the UNICEF studies, which documented these deaths, collect dust on the shelves of media and government officials everywhere, some analysts are busy rewriting the tale of this atrocity, claiming now that sanctions had been effective in containing Saddam.

The Iraqi children’s cries have not yet been heard, and if the political forces of the US State “Sanction and War” Departments of the Bush/Clinton/Bush regimes have anything to say about it, they never will be heard. We cannot continue to ignore the screams and the barely audible, dying sighs of these children. These sounds of war come to us on the frequency of our war tax dollars, our choice of political leaders and our culture’s complacent, hyper consumption of oil. Iraqis and others around the world are watching to see how average US citizens will confront the policies that have led to so much suffering of innocents. We urgently need actions to dramatize our nonviolent resistance, including war tax refusal, civil disobedience and sustainable living campaigns. Those children still have something to say to us; we must not allow their cries to be drowned out by the sound of silence.

John Farrell Co-coordinator, Voices in the Wilderness

By Jo Wilding
July 18th

So the Butler Report came out. This, for the benefit of those who may have missed it, is the report of the committee convened to decide whether the Prime Minister, the intelligence services, the Joint Intelligence Committee or anyone else lied about the evidence relating to Iraq’s alleged weapons which were, in case anyone forgot, the alleged reason for the all-too-real bombardment and invasion of Iraq.

Not too complex a brief, one might suggest. Still, to make sure that only the finest minds were applied to the task, Tony Blair himself handpicked the committee. I’m sure that, as with the Hutton Report on whether the government, the BBC, the deceased’s immediate superiors, the tooth fairy or anyone else bore any responsibility for the death of weapons expert David Kelly, someone will send me an explanation of who Lord Butler is and how close and cosy are his ties to the Prime Minister.

By Joy Gordon
Middle East Report

Joy Gordon, author of numerous articles about sanctions on Iraq, teaches at Fairfield University.

Rep. Ralph Hall opened a set of Congressional hearings on July 8 with a dramatic flourish, denouncing “the deaths of thousands of Iraqis through malnutrition and lack of appropriate medical supplies.” “We have a name for that in the United States,” the Texas Republican told a subcommittee of the House Energy and Commerce Committee. “It’s called murder.”

The target of Hall’s accusation was not the UN economic sanctions that, according to a 1999 UNICEF study, had helped to double the rate of mortality among children under five in central and southern Iraq over the preceding decade. Rather, the Congressman was introducing yet more hearings to air broad allegations of incompetence, manipulation and personal corruption in the so-called Oil for Food program established by the UN Security Council in 1995 to ameliorate the humanitarian emergency in Iraq. According to these allegations, UN mismanagement allowed Saddam Hussein to pocket billions of dollars in oil sales at the expense of the Iraqi people. Benon Sevan, former head of the Office of Iraq Program, which housed the now dissolved Oil for Food program, has been named as one UN official who purportedly took what amount to bribes to look the other way.

By Anna Bachmann
Voices in the Wilderness

Friday, July 16, 2004

The morning promised to be a hot one and I was already having problems. People were having couldn’t find the drop off location. It’d spent two months trying to get this boat trip on the Tigris River ready and no one could find where it started. So I went up on the bridge and stood around like some hopelessly lost Westerner, a stranger in a strange land. Everyone gaped at me and honked their horns but it was better then any signed that read “Tigris River Project, Turn here!”

Finally everyone (or nearly everyone) had arrived. I had three staff from the Ministry of Environment’s Baghdad Office ready to take their first samples of Tigris River water since the war. I had representatives from three different Iraqi Environmental NGOs (aka. Non-Government Organizations): The Iraqi Green Peace Organization, the Iraqi Human Rights Association and the Green Iraq Organization. And I had reporters, photographers, and camera operators from major Arabic and Western Press who had come to document the first environmental survey of the river (there had been a previous attempt in March, which had ended badly with the Ministry engineers being shot at, dragged ashore, hooded and cuffed, interrogated, with their work of three days destroyed).

The goals of the trip were to help the Ministry conduct its survey; give the Iraqi Environmental groups some much needed exposure, and allow Iraqis a chance to travel down their own river (hopefully) unmolested. But there were a whole host of problems with this idea. First off the river is dotted with American/Coalition obstacles … Adhamiyah Palace military base, the Green Zone and the 14th of July Bridge. Special permission would be needed to travel past them. Secondly there was the problem of approaching sensitive installations like Water Treatment facilities to take samples … I faces hassles with security guards at numerous sites on all of the pre-surveys I had done prior to the final trip (usually these ended amicably but once there was a few particularly tense moments when I could hear quite clearly hear bullets being loaded into chambers). Then there was the resistance to consider, particularly on the lower river, which is filled with farms and has an isolated feel to it … a perfect place for insurgents to hide and strike from.

The Iraqi Landscape is littered with live munitions, waiting to explode.

The boy lay crouched on his side in the bed of a pickup truck. A small crowd gathered around him. About 70 feet away, an American soldier climbed hesitantly out of a humvee, gripping an M-16. “Is the kid in danger of dying?” he asked a middle-aged Iraqi man who had come toward him. The man looked confused. “His legs lost a lot of blood,” he replied. “His legs are injured very badly.”

“Unless he looks like he’s gonna die, we can’t do anything,” the soldier said. The man’s confusion dissolved into disappointment. “I’m not a doctor,” the Iraqi said, “but he’s hurt very seriously.” The young soldier climbed into the Humvee, having resolved his internal debate. “Stop hanging around,” he ordered, “and take the kid to the hospital.”