The following Seattle Times article features Bert Sacks who traveled with Voices in the Wilderness to Iraq. It is a good overview of the court case. Following the article is a Letter to the Editor by Sacks correcting “one important error in the story.”

Sunday, July 12, 2005
Seattle Times
Local B5
BY MARCEL HONORE

Medill News Service

WASHINGTON - Whether at home in Washington state or away in Washington, D.C., Bert Sacks can’t seem to get the federal government to see things his way.

Sacks, an outspoken Seattle antiwar activist, took nine trips to deliver medicine to Iraqi children between 1996 and 2002 in defiance of U.N. sanctions. Last week, he faced new legal hurdles from the Office of Foreign Asset Control (OFAC), the Treasury Department agency that enforces economic and trade sanctions.

Jubilee Iraq updates us with new info on UNCC overcharging and a lack of compensation for Iraq victims.

Iraq says Volker investigation is uncovering “gross mismanagement” in UNCC

In January UN internal audits revealed that the UNCC may have overstated reparation awards by $5bn. Today Iraq’s Deputy UN ambassador Fesial al-Istrabadi told the AP that the the Volker Investigation into Oil-For-Food believes that some of the allegations were legitimate, particularly in how the commission handled currency exchange rates with the Iraqi dinar. “There appear to have been some irregularities that are at the very least gross mismanagement at the level of currency exchange.” The executive director of the investigation, Reid Morden, refused to confirm al-Istrabadi’s claim but said investigators had long wanted to scrutinize the U.N. Compensation Commission: “It’s a program which so far has submitted itself to very little in the way of transparency.”

The following is the transcript of Milan Rai’s recent interview on Democracy Now! If you would like to listen to this segment please visit Democracy Now!

Wednesday, July 13th, 2005
Before London Bombing, Leaked UK Memo Warned Iraq War a Key Cause for Growth of “Extremism” in Britain

by Tom Fox
Christian Peacemaker Teams

Spending three days in the Baghdad airport waiting to see if the sand and dust would let up enough to allow flights to arrive (and then allow me to leave) was more stressful that I imagined. Of course, six trips on the airport road may have been a factor in increasing my stress level.

There were a number of internationals in the same predicament I was in. Many were people I’ve had very little contact with in my time in Iraq. Some were private security contractors who work for the large international firms like Dyncorp and KBR and are paid substantial sums (many 1,000 dollars a day) to protect international facilities and personnel. Others worked for NGO’s and organizations that were business related, such as a firm that did management training for Iraqi entrepreneurs. I took the opportunity of being stuck there to try and get to know a number of them.

By Milan Rai, Justice Not Vengeance

13 July 2005: The Bombers Identified, The Report Censored

1) Censoring Crucial Information

Now that the police have identified at least three of the four bombers who struck London last Thursday as young British Muslim men, the question of how British Muslims could become so alienated as to carry out such a horrific attack has come to the centre of political and public attention.

In this context, it is absolutely extraordinary that the most authoritative source of information about this crisis, the joint Home Office and Foreign Office report, ‘Young Muslims and Extremism’, which was leaked to the Sunday Times and published with a front-page headline three days ago, has been entirely censored from today’s coverage and commentary in the serious British newspapers.