Denis Halliday, who led the UN’s Iraq Program until he resigned in 1998, stating that the US-led sanctions were “genocidal”, discusses the realities of the so-called Oil for Food Program “scandal”. This December 3, 2004 phone interview with Tom Jackson (producer of Greetings From Missile Street) from Joe Public Films aired December 4, 2004 on “Making Waves”, a news program produced for WSCA-LP, Portsmouth, NH community radio.

Stream the Interview (29:16- 8.4 MB)

or Download (29:16- 8.4 MB) - mp3

American foreign policy is not understood by the vast majority of American people. And that this is due to a media that in this country is suppressed by Washington and by the owners of this media, who often tend to be corporate entities close to the [White House] and very often are arms manufacturers with a vested interest in chaos [in] the Middle East. And as a result Americans do not actually get both sides of the story.

I believe that Americans are basically decent people. If they understood that Iraq is not made up of 22 million Saddam Husseins but made up of 22 million people — of families, of children, of elderly parents, families with dreams and hopes and expectations for their children and themselves — they would be horrified to realize that the current killing of innocent Iraqi civilians by the U.S. Air Force, or what happened in the Gulf War, is being done in their name. Read more…

How much longer can democratically elected governments hope to get away with justifying policies that punish the Iraqi people for something they did not do, through economic sanctions that target them in the hope that those who survive will overthrow the regime? Is international law only applicable to the losers? Does the UN security council only serve the powerful? Read more…

Good evening. I am pleased and yet challenged to be here. I feel somewhat reluctant to speak publicly on Iraq, the Middle-East, Afghanistan or Terrorism since 11 September. I sense many Americans are not ready for a discussion. Not ready for views that may differ from the mass. I sense instead an atmosphere of ‘dead or alive’ justice, intolerance, endangered civil liberties, the unhealthy influence of Christian fundamentalism, militarism, even jingoism. But I also sense a new feeling of American VULNERABILITY and thus I am here tonight! And I was encouraged to do so by your Rabbi Douglas Kranz , who is a risk-taker!

The theme of this Press Conference and the impending fast by Voices in the Wilderness is: BREAKING RANKS. On Hiroshima Day, this is timely, although too late for the million-plus Iraqis already killed by a United Nations Security Council - manipulated by the US and the UK, and supported by the weakness of other member states.