Are you concerned about what is happening under the guise of “liberation” and “security” and “freedom?”  If not, go back to your enslaved ways.  It really is a “red pill, blue pill” sort of choice.  It is not easy to escape the matrix and face the gritty reality.

The following “Letter from Iraq” was sent to me by a friend.  There are two major points that struck me, the first one being the claim that the US has been committing genocide by use of a deliberate campaign to degrade the water supply and to prevent Iraq from rebuilding infrastructure for clean water.  The second issue surrounds the use of depleted uranium in ammunition and armor.  When I saw that there was no name attached to the report, I was disappointed, as this does not lend credibility.  However, I do not wear rose-colored glasses with regard to the US, her past actions and present aims and suspected that there is truth to this report.  So, upon some digging, and with help from friend L.P., I was led to some reading that has given me enough evidence to go forward with sharing. 

The additional horror, with regard to the use of depleted Uranium, is finding that nothing is sacred to these monsters, for even their own troops are caught in the malaise that is spread by the use of these WMD’s.  “This is a war even the victors will lose.” (William Thomas, independent journalist who served as part a of a “three-man ‘Gulf Environmental Emergency Response’ team during and immediately following the Gulf War” www.willthomas.net

The truth needs to be spread far and wide.  I am sickened by the lies and thought manipulations of the US government.  Far too many believe the propaganda.  I am not naïve and of course the propaganda games are played on both sides, but just as Uncle Sam is superior in might against Iraq, so are they superior in lies and mind-control.  At the end of this article, I will provide you with enough links that will help you to see for yourself that none of this is lunatic fringe material.  Honest, thinking, professional people of experience in many walks of life and many stations of responsibility have cast their lot on the side of truth.  May the US elite pay for their sins, and they will, for I still believe that, in the end, the truth will prevail.  May the many good people of the USA escape from the judgments that are sure to come upon her shores, not necessarily by armies and terrorists, but by God Himself.  I concur wholly with Anup Shah, independent researcher, who says,

“There is . . . a differentiation to be made between the U.S. political leaders, decision makers in foreign policy, etc. versus the people of America. I often say something like ‘the United States decided to do something’ or some other nation has done something, etc. It should be clarified that this usually means the U.S. government. It is often said this way by journalists as well. Sometimes the American people may not support all the actions of their governments, and sometimes they will, as with most democracies. Hence, the criticisms etc are typically geared towards the U.S. leadership and decision-making/influencing powers.”

The internet has brought about a new era of communication and one day, support for lies will dry up.  In sharing my findings with you, I am doing my part to light a candle rather than curse the darkness.  Please read the article and follow up with a little surfing to the links provided.

"If a man is offered a fact which goes against his instincts, he will scrutinize it closely, and unless the evidence is overwhelming, he will refuse to believe it. If, on the other hand, he is offered something which affords a reason for acting in accordance to his instincts, he will accept it even on the slightest evidence."

Bertrand Russell, in "Roads to Freedom"

============

Letter from Iraq

An American photojournalist's letter home Some of you have written to me with concerns for my safety in Iraq, but this was easily one of the safest assignments I have taken. In all my time in Iraq, in spite of an intense awareness of the threat of an impending attack by the United States, I haven't met a single Iraqi who had a harsh word for me. Iraqis are very good at distinguishing between the U.S. government and a U.S. citizen.

It seems to me that as a photojournalist, Iraq is where I might best play a role in making a small difference. I've done some work in Iraq for Newsweek and Time magazines but that kind of work has really become secondary for me. I do what I can to influence (in admittedly small ways) what kinds of stories those big magazines do, but ultimately their stories are nearly worthless at confronting the inhumanity of American foreign policy in the
Middle East. I will continue to work with Time and Newsweek (and with other corporate media) on stories that I don't find offensive, but the bulk of my efforts are now going into reaching alternative media and in supporting
anti-war groups in the states. I hope I can find some time soon to come to the states for a speaking tour of sorts. There's a lot of talk about whether or not the U.S. will go to war with Iraq. What many people don't realize is that the U.S. is already at war in Iraq. I made two trips last month into the "no-fly zone" created by the U.S. with Britain and France in southern Iraq. Actually it would be better named the "only we fly" zone or the "we bomb" zone. "We" refers to the United States who does almost all of the flying and bombing (France pulled out
years ago, and Britain is largely a nominal participant). There is another no-fly zone in the north, which the U.S. says it maintains to protect the Kurds, but while the U.S. prevents Iraqi aircraft from entering the region,
it does nothing to prevent or even to criticize Turkey (a U.S. ally) from flying into northern Iraq on numerous occasions to bomb Kurdish communities there.

Turkey's bombing in Iraq is dwarfed by that of the U.S. The U.S. has been bombing Iraq on a weekly and sometimes daily basis for the past 12 years. There were seven civilians killed in these bombings about two weeks ago, and I'm told more civilians last week, but I'm sure that didn't get much or perhaps any press in the U.S. It is estimated that U.S. bombing has killed 500 Iraqis just since 1999.  Actually I believe that number to be higher if you take into account the effects of the massive use of depleted uranium (DU) in the bombing. The U.S. has dropped well in excess of 300 tons of this radioactive material in Iraq (30 times the amount dropped in Kosovo) since 1991. Some of the DU is further contaminated with other radioactive particles including Neptunium and Plutonium 239, perhaps the most carcinogenic of all radioactive materials, and these particles are now beginning to show up in ground water samples.

I spent a lot of time in overcrowded cancer wards in Iraqi hospitals. Since U.S. bombing began in Iraq, cancer rates have increased nearly six fold in the south, where U.S. bombing and consequent levels of DU are most severe. The most pronounced increases are in leukaemia and lung, kidney, and thyroid cancers associated with poisoning by heavy metals (such as DU).

But the most lethal weapon in Iraq is the intense sanctions regime. The toll of the sanctions is one of the most under-reported stories of the past decade in the U.S. press. I have seen a few references to the sanctions
recently in the U.S. press, but invariably they will subtly discredit humanitarian concerns by relying on Iraqi government statements rather than on the statistics of international agencies.

My careless colleague at Time magazine, for example, recently reported that "the Iraqi government blames the sanctions for the deaths of thousands of children under the age of five". That's simply not true. The Iraqi government, in fact, blames the sanctions for the deaths of *more than a million* children under the age of five.  But let's put that figure aside, for there's no need to rely solely on the Iraqi government, and let's refer instead to UNICEF and WHO reports which blame the sanctions directly for the excess deaths of approximately 500,000
children under the age of five, and nearly a million Iraqis of all ages. We all have an idea of the grief borne by the United States after the September 11 attacks. Employing the crude mathematics of casualty figures, multiply that grief by 300 and place it on the hearts of a country with one tenth the population of the United States and perhaps we can get a crude idea of what kind of suffering has already been inflicted on the Iraqi people in the past decade.

The greatest killer of young children in Iraq is dehydration from diarrhea caused by water-borne illnesses which are amplified by the intentional destruction of water treatment and sanitation facilities by the United States. The U.S. plan for destroying water treatment facilities and suppressing their rehabilitation was outlined just before the American entry into the 1991 Gulf War. The January, 1991, Dept. of Defense document, "Iraq Water Treatment Vulnerabilities," goes into great detail about how the destruction of water treatment facilities and their subsequent impairment by the sanctions regime will lead to increased incidences, if not epidemics, of disease." I can report from my time in Iraq that all is going to plan. Cholera, hepatitis, and typhoid (previously almost unheard of in Iraq) are now quite common. Malaria and, of course, dysentery are rampant, and immunities to all types of disease are extremely low. Even those lucky children who manage to get a sufficient daily caloric intake risk losing it all to diarrhoea. Around 4,000 children die every month from starvation and preventable disease in Iraq - a six-fold increase since pre-sanctions measurements.

Treatment of illnesses in Iraq is complicated by the inability of hospitals to get the drugs they need through the wall of sanctions. In a hospital in Baghdad I encountered a mother with a very sick one-year-old child. After
the boy's circumcision ceremony, the child was found to have a congenital disease which inhibits his blood's ability to clot, which results in excessive bleeding. The child encountered further complications when he took
a fall and sustained a head injury which was slowly drowning his brain in his own blood. In any other country the boy would simply take regular doses of a drug called Factor 8, and he could then lead a relatively normal life.
But an order for Factor 8 was put on hold by the United States (prohibited for import), so the doctor, the mother, and I could only watch the child die.

Much is made of Iraq's alleged possession of weapons of mass destruction, but it is the sanctions, the use of depleted uranium, and the destruction of Iraq's health and sanitation infrastructure that are the weapons of greatest mass destruction in Iraq.

The situation is so bad that Dennis Halliday, the former Humanitarian Coordinator for the UN in Iraq, took the dramatic step of resigning his position in protest at the sanctions. "We are in the process of destroying
an entire society", Halliday wrote. "It is as simple and terrifying as that." "It is illegal and immoral." And Halliday isn't alone. His successor, Hans Von Sponeck, also resigned in protest and went so far as to describe the sanctions as genocide. These are not left-wing radicals. These are career bureaucrats who chose to throw away their careers at the UN rather than give tacit support to unethical policies driven by the United States. Being in Iraq showed me the utter devastation U.S. policy (war and sanctions) has wrought there and has given me a vision of what horror a new war would bring. And, of course, an attack on Iraq would be just the beginning of a terrifying chain of reactions throughout the Middle East and the rest of the world. Having worked in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Israel and Palestine in the past year, I am intensely aware of how the fragile politics and powers outside Iraq can be dramatically unsettled by a U.S. Invasion
within Iraq.

It's easy to imagine an impending tragedy of enormous proportion before us, and I ask myself who must step up and take responsibility for stopping it. Clearly the U.S. government is the most powerful actor, but it is equally
clear that we cannot turn aside and realistically expect the U.S. government to suddenly reverse the momentum it has created for war. So I feel the weight of responsibility on me, on U.S. citizens, to do whatever we can with
our individually small but collectively powerful means to change the course of our government's policy. I try to picture myself 10 or 20 years in the future, and I don't want to be in the position where I reflect on the enormous tragedies of the beginning of the 21st century and admit that I did nothing at all to recognize or prevent them.

I don't know how this letter will sound to my friends and family who are living in the U.S., in a media environment which does very little to effectively question U.S. policy and almost nothing to encourage ordinary people to participate in making a change. I imagine this letter may sound like the political rant of some kind of extremist or anti-American dissident. But that's not how it feels to me. This doesn't feel like a political issue to me so much as it feels like a personal issue. I am appalled on a very human level at the suffering which U.S. policy is already
inflicting and I am terrified by the prospects for an even more chaotic and violent future.

And let's be honest about U.S. policy aims. Those in the U.S. government pushing for war say they are doing so to promote democracy, to protect the rights of minorities, and to rid the region of weapons of mass destruction.
But is the U.S. threatening to attack Saudi Arabia or a host of other U.S. allies which have similarly un-democratic regimes? How many of us would advocate going to war with Turkey over the brutal repression of its Kurdish minority and of the Kurds in Iraq? And do we expect the U.S. to bomb Israel or Pakistan which each have hundreds of nuclear weapons? Let's remember that leaders in the previous weapons inspection team in Iraq had declared that 95% of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction capabilities were destroyed. And let's not forget that in the 1980s, when Iraq was actually using chemical weapons against the Kurds and the Iranian army, the U.S. had nothing to say about it. On the contrary, at that time President Reagan sent a U.S. envoy to Iraq to normalize diplomatic relations, to support its war with Iran, and to offer subsidies for preferential trade with Iraq. That envoy arrived in Baghdad on the very day that the UN confirmed Iraq's use of chemical weapons, and he said absolutely nothing about it. That envoy, by the way, was Donald Rumsfeld.

While Iraq probably has very little weaponry to actually threaten the United States, they do have oil. According to a recent survey of the West Qurna and Majnoon oil fields in southern Iraq, they may even have the world's largest oil reserves, surpassing those of Saudi Arabia. Let's be honest about U.S. policy aims and ask ourselves if we can, in good conscience, support continued destruction of Iraq in order to control its oil.

I believe that most Americans - Republicans, Democrats, Greens, Purples or whatever - would be similarly horrified by the effects of sanctions on the civilian population of Iraq if they could simply see the place, as I have,
up close in its human dimensions; if they could see Iraq as a nation of 22 million mothers, sons, daughters, teachers, doctors, mechanics, and window washers, and not simply as a single cartoonish villain.

I genuinely believe that my view of Iraq is a view that would sit comfortably in mainstream America if most Americans could see Iraq with their own eyes and not simply through the eyes of a media establishment which has simply gotten used to ignoring the death and destruction which perpetuates American foreign policy aims. While the American media fixates on the evils of the "repressive regime" of Saddam Hussein, both real and wildly exaggerated, how often are we reminded of the horrors of the last Gulf War, when more than 150,000 were killed (former U.S. Navy Secretary, John Lehman, estimated 200,000). I simply don't believe that most Americans could come face-to-face with the Iraqi people and say from their hearts that they deserve another war.

I believe in the fundamental values of democracy - the protection of the most powerless among us from the whims of the most powerful. I believe in the ideals of the United Nations as a forum for solving international
conflicts non-violently. These are mainstream values, and they are exactly the values that are most imperilled by present U.S. policy. That's why, as a citizen of the United States and as a member of humanity, I can't rest
easily so long as I think there is something, anything, that I can do to make a difference.

(The family asked for the author's name to be suppressed.)

David Depner
e-mail: drdepner@hscis.net
Office: 509-529-9931

èAn article on the US destruction of the Iraqi water supply along with a link to a government site with back up documents

The Secret Behind the Sanctions
How the U.S. Intentionally Destroyed Iraq's Water Supply

by Thomas J. Nagy

 http://www.progressive.org/0801issue/nagy0901.html

èAn analysis by Thomas Nagy of the "Iraq Water Treatment Vulnerabilities" document, “The Role of ‘Iraq Water Treatment Vulnerabilities’ in Halting One Genocide and Preventing Others.”

 http://www.endiraqsanctions.net/resources/nagy010612.pdf

èSunday, Sept. 17, 2000, article in the “Sunday Herald,” Scotland.

 èNumerous depleted Uranium links found here, on the site “International Action Center,” founded by Ramsey Clark, former U.S. Attorney General www.iacenter.org

 http://www.iacenter.org/depleted/du.htm

èThis article from “Lifeboat News” http://www.island.net/~lbnews/ will Shock and Stun you.

 Subject:  [du-list] INVADING HIROSHIMA: Depleted Uranium Shock and Stun in Iraq
 Date:   Fri, 14 Feb 2003 17:11:02 -0800

INVADING HIROSHIMA
by William Thomas

http://www.xs4all.nl/~stgvisie/VISIE/DU-Hiroshima.html

 èMore links than you ever wanted, on the use of Depleted Uranium.

BURNING 'DEPLETED' URANIUM: AN  E T E R N A L  MEDICAL  DISASTER
Issues on the Use and Effects of Depleted Uranium Weapons

http://www.xs4all.nl/~stgvisie/VISIE/ud_main.html

 OTHER LINKS

èFor endless reading on global issues, this site is a great resource, by Anup Shah, an independent researcher who is concerned about media bias and manipulation and provides us with a plethora of documentation and information from “charity and non-government organizations like Oxfam, Amnesty International, etc. to multinational bodies like the United Nations.”  Anup is a balanced and careful thinker and does not seem to have any particular political axe to grind, except being agains systems and policies that hurt people.

http://www.globalissues.org/

If you scroll to the bottom of the link given above, you can read more from the author by clicking “About this Site”

In particular, see: http://www.globalissues.org/Geopolitics/MiddleEast/Iraq.asp

"There is now no Iraqi threat
worthy of the deaths
of American servicemen"

“By the time he was finished, Ritter was sure that he and his UNSCOM investigators had stripped Iraq of 90-95 percent of all their weapons of mass destruction.

What of the missing 10 percent? Is this not still a threat? Ritter believes that the ravages of the Gulf War accounted for a great deal of the missing material, as did the governmental chaos caused by sanctions. The Iraqis' policy of full disclosure, also, was of a curious nature that deserved all of Ritter's mistrust. Fearing a U.S. attack, Iraq instituted a policy of destroying whatever Ritter's people had not yet found, and then pretended it never existed in the first place. Often, the dodge failed to fool UNSCOM.“

See http://www.bigmagic.com/pages/blackj/column76f.html

èUSA found guilty of war crimes by NGO tribunal.  This is not something to ignore.

“A panel of 16 judges from 11 countries at a people’s tribunal meeting in New York June 10 before 500 people found U.S. and NATO political and military leaders guilty of war crimes against Yugoslavia in the March 24-June 10, 1999 assault on that country.”

http://www.iacenter.org/warcrime/wct2000.htm

èAt last, I would be remiss if I did not leave you with a link where you can find G. Edward Griffin’s book, “The Creature from Jekyll Island,” which will give you a close look at the big picture with regard to what this world is about and who is in control.  Mr. Edwards is educated, articulate, and knows his stuff.  It’s about the money and those who own it and charge us dearly for its use.  If you never read any other book on these sorts of topics, THIS is the one to take out the time to read.  I spent six months completing it and the education I received was worth every hour.

www.realityzone.com