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Originally Posted by Ustwo
ANY starvation and ummm radiation induced cancer (where did you pull that one out of) was NOT due to the sanctions but due to Iraq's corruption of the oil for food program and the willing accomplaces in the UN.
And 'food and medical' sanctions? Ummm I don't think we had sanctions on medicine and food.
I think you need to do a bit of reading beyond left wing propaganda sites if you think the above it true. I won't host this with a bunch of cut and paste links but I'd recommend google.
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Left-wing propaganda? The film is derived from a trip that Ramsey Clarke made to Iraq. You know, the guy who was the Attorney General under Lyndon B. Johnston? The film has traveled all over the world, I'm suprised you've never heard of it.
This information
has been verified by the United Nations.
Here's an excerpt, which echoes the same information I have already provided.
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As of June 1997, the United Nations had verified that more than 1.2 million people in Iraq, including 750,000 children below the age of five, have died because of the scarcity of food and medicine caused by the economic sanctions that have been in place since August 6, 1990.
Since then, the conditions for the Iraqi people have certainly not improved. In 1998 UNICEF, the United Nations Children’s Fund, reported that since the imposition of economic sanctions on Iraq, the mortality rate among children under the age of five has increased by more than 40,000 deaths per year, due primarily to preventable causes such as diarrhea, pneumonia ,and malnutrition.
In addition, chronic malnutrition among children under five had reached 27.5 percent by this time. The report also stated that the mortality rate among children over the age of five has increased by more than 50,000 deaths per year due mainly to causes such as heart disease, hypertension, diabetes, cancer, liver, and kidney disease.
At the time of this report, approximately 250 people were dying every day in Iraq due to the effects of the economic sanctions. The UN Department of Humanitarian Affairs and the World Health Organization report that basic public health services are near total collapse in Iraq due to a desperate shortage of basic medicines, life-saving drugs, and other essential medical supplies. They also stated that up to fifty percent of the rural population has no access to clean water and that the waste water treatment facilities have stopped functioning in most urban areas, dramatically increasing the spread of disease.
From these reports, and many more I have not mentioned, it is clear that the UN sanctions against Iraq are in blatant violation of the Geneva Protocol 1, Article 54, which states that the starvation of civilians as a method of warfare is strictly prohibited.
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They were dying in droves, Ustwo.
That is categorically undeniable.
Statement of the National Conference of Catholic Bishops, issued by Bishop Joseph A. Fiorenza of Galveston-Houston and signed by 265 bishops, 1999: "The comprehensive sanctions against Iraq have long since ceased to be a moral tool of diplomacy, because they have inflicted indiscriminate and unacceptable suffering on the Iraqi people. … Political and military sanctions remain acceptable; comprehensive economic sanctions are not. … We cannot turn a deaf ear to the suffering of the Iraqi people or a blind eye to the moral obtuseness of current U.S. policy."
New England Journal of Medicine editorial, April 24, 1997: "The Cuban and Iraqi instances make it abundantly clear that economic sanctions are, at their core, a war against public health. Our professional ethic demands the defense of public health. Thus, as physicians, we have a moral imperative to call for the end of sanctions. Having found the cause, we must act to remove it. Continuing to allow our reason to sleep will produce more monsters."
Protocol 1 Additional to the Geneva Conventions (1977):
(1) Starvation of civilians as a method of warfare is prohibited.
(2) It is prohibited to attack, destroy, remove, or render useless objects indispensable to the agricultural areas for the production of foodstuffs, crops, livestock, drinking water installations and supplies, and irrigation works, for the specific purpose of denying them for their sustenance value to the civilian population or to the adverse Party, whatever the motive, whether in order to starve out civilians, to cause them to move away, or for any other motive.
There's plenty more where that came from. All you need is a search engine.
I recommend Google.