The Facts Behind the Volcker Commission’s Interim Report

By Joy Gordon

No 5. February 2005
UNA-USA Policy Brief

Introduction

The media and the critics of the United Nations have made much of the interim report of the Independent Inquiry Committee’s (the “Volcker Commission”) finding that the UN’s Oil-for-Food Programme was “tainted,” going as far as to conclude that the program as a whole—and perhaps the UN itself—is corrupt. In fact, the Commission’s findings are much more limited than that. The interim report does not have much to say about the “big ticket” accusations: that Saddam Hussein was able to get $10 billion (or $21 billion, depending on whose numbers you look at) through illicit means. It does say one thing very clearly about the multi-billion dollar accusations: that they largely have nothing to do with the UN or the Oil-for-Food Programme at all.

By David Smith-Ferri

Given its small population, the rural northern California county where I live is home to an extraordinary number of successful artists. Two of these artists, Jan Hoyman and Doug Browe, also participate in a remarkable organization, Potters for Peace, which began twenty years ago when a group of US potters sought ways to support the work of Nicaraguan potters while simultaneously opposing US aid to the Contras. While this support has grown to involve a wide range of cultural, artistic, and technical exchanges between potters, the organization is increasingly involved in providing the technical expertise to establish ceramic water filtration projects, a “high technique, low technology” system, as Doug puts it, for purifying water.

Last year, as untreated sewage continued to flow into drinking water supplies in Iraq and outbreaks of bacteriological diseases such as cholera and typhoid were reported in Basra, Najaf, Sadr City, and elsewhere, Doug was returning from two months in Thailand, spent in a refugee camp on the Burmese border, assisting residents of the camp in the final stages of a ceramic water filter project. It was his second trip to the refugee camp. During the first trip, he had located a source of accessible local clay, supervised the construction of an adobe kiln, and trained several residents in basic pottery techniques. This second trip focused on the manufacture and firing of the water filters. Ceramic water filters, as Potters for Peace designs them, are essentially urns created from a careful mix of clay and a readily available “fibrous” material – sawdust, rice hulls, straw, etc. – and lined with colloidal silver. The fibrous material, when sized precisely and mixed with the clay in the proper portion, produces a porous urn that will allow the passage of water, but not bacteria – the bacteria are trapped by the fibers in the clay. The colloidal silver, which coats the outside of the urn, provides an additional anti-bacterial barrier. When poured into the filter, water polluted with a bacteriological disease such as e-coli, typhoid, or cholera, emerges bacteriologically clean.

It was my twelve year old daughter who, during a slide-show presentation by Doug of his experiences in Thailand, first suggested the obvious application of ceramic water filtration to Iraq. Clearly, low-tech water filtration is no substitute for reparation of Iraq’s water and sewage treatment systems; but while the US occupation focuses on military goals, and “rebuilding” seems permanently stalled in the planning stages or utterly undermined by corruption and violence, a project which provides clean water to people can prevent illness and save lives, albeit on a small scale. It could also create positive and lasting connections between US and Iraqi citizens. This at least was our thinking. Doug and I met several times to discuss our interest in traveling to Iraq, and the basic raw material and equipment needs of the project, and I began to do some research.

The project, however, has never gotten beyond preliminary inquiries because neither of us can quite imagine leaving our families and traveling to Iraq given the reality of violence and kidnappings. The news coming out of Iraq is unremittingly bad. Two years ago, I visited Iraq in the months leading up to the US invasion. While in Basra, after spending the morning visiting leukemia patients in a hospital and having lunch in our semi-air-conditioned hotel, I waded back out into the sickeningly hot day with two other members of Voices in the Wilderness. Hassan, one of the shoeshine boys who slept on the lawn outside the hotel, flagged us down. He was exultant. “Look what we’ve got,” he said. Inside the box, of all things, lay an injured pigeon, captured with a slingshot. The terrified pigeon lay on its side, struggling to breathe and futilely trying to right itself and escape. “We’ll keep it alive until later,” the boys told us, “and then meat for dinner!”

Journalist, author, and lecturer, David Barsamian is perhaps best known as the founder and director of Alternative Radio, a weekly one-hour public affairs program that began in 1986 and today reaches millions of listeners from on top of an alleyway garage in Boulder, Colorado. Like Dahr’s Dispatches, Alternative Radio is a news medium sustained solely by the support of individuals.

Omar Khan talks with David Barsamian.

Omar Khan: You’ve said of the media that “most of the censorship occurs by omission, not commission.” Can you illustrate this in the case of US news coverage of Iraq?

David Barsamian: There is a structural relationship between media and state power. They are closely linked. Who are the media? Not just in the United States, but around the world, they’re a handful of corporations that dominate what people see, hear, and read. They have been able to manufacture consent, particularly in the United States, for imperialist wars of aggression. That’s exactly what I call Iraq—an illegal, immoral war. I’ll just give you one example: the New York Times, this great liberal newspaper, had 70 editorials between September 11, 2001 and the attack on Iraq, March 20, 2003. In not one of those editorials was the UN Charter, the Nuremberg Tribunal, or any aspect of international law ever mentioned. Now, those guys know that these things exist, and that’s a perfect example of censorship by omission. And so if you were reading the New York Times over that period, during the buildup to the war, you would not have had the sense that the United States was planning on doing something that was a gross violation of international law, and national law for that matter.

Churchill, Saddam, and the horses they rode in on

“Suicide Bombers Kill At Least 35 in Baghdad Area” proclaims a headline in The New York Times today (2/19/05).

By Brian Terrell

While the terrible toll of a growing insurgency on Iraqi civilians, soldiers and police is being reported with a daily tally in the media, the number of Iraqi civilian casualties of American and British military action and the occupation is not so easily available. Studies such as published by the British medical journal Lancet last October that suggest a civilian death toll of more than 100,000 are largely ignored by the media in the United States. American soldiers killed by Iraqis is news, of course, and it seems that Iraqis killed by other Iraqis is news as well. What is not deemed news is when Iraqis are killed by Americans, even when this is done on a massive scale.

By Cathy Breen
Amman, Jordan
Feb. 18th, Friday

It was nighttime in Amman. The setting was a hotel coffee shop where Kathy Kelly, myself and two others were to meet with two doctors (psychiatrists) from Baghdad. They were coming for a workshop on how to deal with traumatized children. They were late in arriving due to shooting on the road from Baghdad to Amman. The project involves the training of primary school teachers, many of whom come from conflict areas outside of Baghdad, to help them alleviate the stress of war for the children.

The shooting incident on the road led to other stories about recent killings of their friends and other civilians by U.S. soldiers on the highways and at the checkpoints in and around Baghdad. Some of the survivors are now in their care as patients.