By Chuck Quilty

“Few of us,” wrote the playwright, Arthur Miller, “can easily surrender our belief that society must somehow make sense. The thought that the state has lost its mind and is punishing so many innocent people is intolerable. And so the evidence has to be internally denied.”

The United States is attempting to scapegoat the United Nations for alleged irregularities in the Oil-for-Food program which allowed Saddam Hussein to skirt the sanctions against Iraq and accumulate 1.74 billion in illicit funds according to Charles Duelfer, head of the Iraq Survey Group formed after the invasion to find Iraq’s WMD. The 1.74 billion figure cited by Duelfer is considerably less than the 10.1 billion estimated by the U.S. General Accounting Office of the 21 billion estimated in a Senate subcommittee report. The current accusations raised by Sen. Norm Coleman (R-MN) against the U.N. are hypocritical and cynical beyond belief. They are a disgusting attempt to hide the Bush administration’s failed Iraq policy and the death and suffering it has caused.

From The Institute for Public Accuracy

Denis Halliday, Joy Gordon, Bert Sacks, and Rahul Mahajan talk of the real Oil for Food scandal.

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

Last week we wrote to encourage vigorous refutation of any notions that UN reports about suffering and death in Iraq were corrupt. Below is a 150 word letter to the editor. We ask that you take 5 to 10 minutes to send the follwing letter (or a modified version of it) to two or three papers in your area.

Thanks and sincerely,
Voices in the Wilderness

Bert Sacks has written an article about the corporate media’s “serious, non-benign fantasy” that is being portrayed to the public concerning the Oil-for-Food program and sanctions.

by Bert Sacks — December 2, 2004

The movie Polar Express takes viewers on a fantasy trip to the North Pole. The computer-generated virtual reality that the movie creates is amazing. I saw it Thanksgiving evening.

The next day a friend recorded a 2-minute segment on Fox News Channel about the “scandal” of the U.N.’s oil-for-food program. In its way, it too was an amazing fantasy trip into a virtual reality.

The finale of Polar Express is reaching the North Pole to meet Santa. Santa is important because he has a fantastic bag of toys. But Polar Express is pretty benign compared to the fantasy of Fox.

Fox News Channel’s report on the “scandal” of the oil-for-food program concludes that it was the willingness of critics of the US/UN economic sanctions program “before all the facts were in, that partially enabled Saddam Hussein to get away with killing so many of his own people.” This is serious, non-benign fantasy.