May 15, 2004

Torture

The country has found its conscience

I heard the indignation of officials

The public outcry from all quarters

The resentment at a tarnished image

For a long time I had waited in disbelief

While the country waged its Ashock and awe@ campaign against Iraq

While it used napalm, cluster bombs, land mines and daisy cutters

While it sprayed from the air vicious poison over farms in Columbia

While it ignored the treatment of Afghan women under the Taliban

While it deposed for the second time the elected president of Haiti

While it refused to relinquish its nuclear arsenal, on earth and in space

While it modified fatal biological organisms to make them even deadlier

While it bombed Iraq=s water treatment plants and monitored epidemics

While it denied affordable HIV medicines to millions of Africa=s poor

While it conducted Aopen air@ germ warfare tests on its own population

While it exposed its own armed forces to radioactivity for the fifth time

While one million of its own children were so poor as to lack a home

While its women were losing the right to choose their motherhood

While one of every seven of its people had no insurance for illness

While two million of its citizens were incarcerated, most non-violent

I had despaired of ever finding

Where the country put its limits

If ever and, if so how and when

Its conscience might be stirred

The overt torture of Iraqi civilians did it

The country=s self-concept as the epitome

Of all that is good and noble was struck

The country does have a conscience.

References

AShock and Awe@

Hiro, Dilip, Secrets and Lies: Operation AIraqi Freedom and After B A Prelude to the Fall of U.S. Power in the Middle East? (Nation Book, New York, N.Y.), 2004, pp. 183 and 189.

The United States unleashed its AShock and Awe@ strategy at 8:20 p.m. Iraqi time on Thursday, March 20, 2003, with a series of staggering explosions, most of them in the Republican Presidential Palace Complex, in an Aawesome,@ murderous fireworks display unlike any witnessed before. It seemed as if all of Baghdad, a city of 5.7 million, were ablaze.

Napalm, Cluster Bombs...

Caldicott, Helen, The New Nuclear Danger B George W. Bush=s Military-industrial Complex (The New Press, New York, N.Y.), 2002, pp. x-xi.

Hiro, Dilip, Secrets and Lies: Operation AIraqi Freedom and After B A Prelude to the Fall of U.S. Power in the Middle East? (Nation Book, New York, N.Y.), 2004, pp. 187, 191, 213, 233 and 253.

Columbia

Chomsky, Noam, Hegemony or Survival B America=s Quest for Global Dominance (Metropolitan/Henry Holt, New York, N.Y.), 2003, pp. 59-60.

Chemical warfare, called Afumigation,@ under the guise of a war against drugs, is part of the historical process of driving poor peasants from the land for the benefit of foreign investors and Colombian elites. The land is poisoned, children die, and the uprooted and scattered victims suffer from sickness and injury. The Afumigation@ is increasingly being taken over by Aprivate@ companies consisting of U.S. military officers under contract with the Pentagon B a pattern useful for evading accountability.

The Taliban

Rashid, Ahmed, Taliban - Militant Islam, Oil and Fundamentalism in Central Asia (Yale University Press), 2000, pp. 17, 46, 50 and 65.

The Taliban originated in 1994, around Kandahar, Afghanistan, and took Kabul in 1996. Within 24 hours, they imposed the strictest Islamic system in place anywhere in the world. Women were to cover themselves with head-to-toe veils. They were banned from work B even though one quarter of Kabul=s civil service, the entire elementary educational system and much of the health system were run by women. Girls= schools and colleges were closed, a move which affected more than 70,000 female students. In 1997, the Taliban declared that henceforth, Kabul=s hospitals would be forbidden from treating women alongside men B even though this city of 1.2 million people, had only one women=s hospital.

The Clinton administration was sympathetic to the Taliban, as they were in line with Washington=s anti-Iran policy and were important for the success of any southern oil pipeline from Central Asia not going through Iran.

Haiti

Chomsky, Noam, Rogue States B The Rule of Force in World Affairs (South End, Cambridge, MA), 2000, pp. 145-146.

Chomsky, Noam, AHistorical Notes,@ Speech, University of Massachusetts, 02/24/04. Broadcast on Democracy Now!, WBAI, New York. N.Y., 03/17/04.

The democratically elected president of Haiti, President Jean-Bertrand Aristide, was deposed twice B from 1991 to 1994, and again from 2004 to the present B both time the U.S. government supporting the coup d=etat and the terrorist regime replacing him. During the 1991-1994 period, the ruling military junta, through paramilitaries, was responsible for the death of 4000 to 5000 people.

Nuclear Arsenal

Dumas, Lloyd, Lethal Arrogance B Human Fallibility and Dangerous Technologies (St. Martin=s, New York. N.Y.), 1999, pp. 17 and 63.

At the end of 1998, the U.S. had an estimated 15,500 nuclear warheads. Assuming that each warhead contained a typical 4.5 kilograms of plutonium (the explosive yield of 18. 06 Hiroshima bombs), these 15,500 warheads represented an explosive yield of about 280,000 Hiroshima bombs.

Biological Organisms

Dumas, Lloyd, Lethal Arrogance B Human Fallibility and Dangerous Technologies (St. Martin=s, New York. N.Y.), 1999, pp. 22 and 310.

On a weight basis, biological weapons have much more killing power than even the most deadly chemicals. Inhalation of a hundredth of a millionth of a gram (0.000,000,010 gram, about eight thousand spores) of anthrax bacillus causes illness that is almost 100 percent fatal within five days. (The lethal dose of the nerve gas sarin, is 0.001 grams).

Beyond this, when living organisms are released into the environment, they may mutate or otherwise behave in unpredictable ways, particularly if they are novel, genetically engineered life forms.

The U.S. offensive biological weapons program was officially canceled in the 1970's, but Adefensive@ research continues. It is, of course, hard to develop a good defense without knowing what form, of which organism, might be used in an attack B and this requires offensive research.

Iraq=s Water Treatment Plants

Hiro, Dilip, Iraq in the Eye of the Storm (Thunder=s Mouth/Nation Books, New York, N.Y.), 2002, pp. 9-11.

Mahajan, Rahul, The New Crusade B America=s War on Terrorism (Monthly Review Press, New York, N.Y.), 2002, pp. 106-107.

Pellett, Peter, ASanctions, Food, Nutrition and Health in Iraq, in Anthony Arnove, Ed., Iraq under Siege B The Deadly Impact of Sanctions and War (South End, Cambridge, MA), 2000, pp. 160-161.

Pilger, John, ACollateral Damage,@ in Anthony Arnove, Ed., Iraq under Siege B The Deadly Impact of Sanctions and War (South End, Cambridge, MA), 2000, pp. 60-61.

Solomon, Norman and Reese Erlich, Target Iraq B What the News Media didn=t tell You (Context Books, New York, N.Y.), 2003, pp. 92-95.

Declassified documents suggest that the United States= bombing of water treatment plants in 1991, and then the restriction of chlorine and other water treatment supplies during the twelve years of sanctions, were done with full knowledge of the explosion of water-borne diseases that would result. Arms inspectors destroyed vaccine-producing facilities, and until the summer of 2001, most vaccines for common infectious diseases were essentially banned from entering Iraq.

Typhoid and dysentery reached epidemic proportions. UNICEF estimates that some 500,000 excess deaths of children under five years may have occurred during the period from 1991 to 1998 B their mortality rate rising from 5 percent in 1990 to 13 percent in 1998.

HIV Medicines...

Huffington, Arianna, Pigs at the Trough B How Corporate Greed and Political Corruption are undermining America (Crown, New York, N.Y.), 2003, p. 137.

Mahajan, Rahul, The New Crusade B America=s War on Terrorism (Monthly Review Press, New York, N.Y.), 2002, pp. 107-109.

By 1997, U.S. and European drug companies had pegged the price of the AIDS cocktail at $10-20,000 per year B far beyond the means of almost any Third World nation. In that year, South Africa estimated that 20-25 percent of its population was infected. Thirty-nine pharmaceutical corporations, backed by the U.S. government, sued to keep South Africa from applying its own law which allowed it to obtain the drugs at lower prices through either compulsory licensing or parallel importing.

AOpen Air@ Germ Warfare Tests

Dumas, Lloyd, Lethal Arrogance B Human Fallibility and Dangerous Technologies (St. Martin=s, New York. N.Y.), 1999, p. 94.

In 1975 and 1976, the U.S. Army admitted that from 1945 through the 1960's, it had conducted 239 secret Aopen air@ germ warfare tests in or near major American cities. In one of these tests, live germs were released into the New York City subway tunnels.

Exposed its Own Armed Forces to Radioactivity

Fisk, Robert, AThe Hidden War,@ in Anthony Arnove, Ed., Iraq under Siege B The Deadly Impact of Sanctions and War (South End, Cambridge, MA), 2000, pp. 93-103.

Solomon, Norman and Reese Erlich, Target Iraq B What the News Media Didn=t tell You (Context Books, New York, N.Y.), 2003, pp. 57-66.

The United States has used depleted uranium (uranium-238, DU) in its last five wars B The Gulf war (1991), Bosnia (1994-1995), Kosovo (1999), Afghanistan (2001) and Iraq (2003).

Some 40,000 American servicemen may have been exposed to DU dust during the Gulf War. Soldiers now returning from the Iraq War are testing positive for radioactivity.

One Million of its Own Children so Poor...

Huffington, Arianna, Pigs at the Trough B How Corporate Greed and Political Corruption are undermining America (Crown, New York, N.Y.), 2003, p. 74.

Its Women losing the Right to choose

Garbus, Martin, Courting Disaster B The Supreme Court and the Unmaking of American Law (Henry Holt, New York), 2002, pp. 96, 98 and 284-285.

Abortion for all hangs on by a slender thread:

One more conservative judge on the Supreme Court could reverse Roe v. Wade (1973). Stenberg v. Carhart (2000), the last important reproductive rights case, reaffirmed Roe in a 5-4 decision. The case was about medical procedures used in first and occasionally second trimester abortions B procedures dubbed by conservatives Apartial-birth@ abortions. However, Justices Sandra Day O=Connor and John Paul Stevens are near retirement, having served, respectively, 22 and 27 years on the Court. (The median length of service on the Supreme Court is 15 years).

Should George W. Bush be re-elected, he is certain to appoint anti-abortion judges who will first reverse Stenberg and then Roe. If these newly-appointed judges are in their thirties and early forties, abortion rights will be lost not only now but also for the next 30-40 years B the reproductive lifetime of a girl now ten years old.

At present, seven of the twelve circuits courts of appeals are anti-abortion and abortions have been effectively banned for many impoverished women living in those jurisdictions.

The Hyde amendment bars federal Medicaid funds from being used for abortion.

Legislation is pending which would establish that the egg once entered by the sperm (conception), has rights that are different and perhaps superior to the rights of the mother.

No Insurance for Illness

Huffington, Arianna, Pigs at the Trough B How Corporate Greed and Political Corruption are undermining America (Crown, New York, N.Y.), 2003, p. 138.

United Nations Human Development Programme, Human Development Report 2003 B Millennium Development Goals, A Compact among Nations to end Human Poverty, (Oxford University Press, New York, N.Y.), 2003, p. 250.

In 2001, the U.S., with a population of 288 million inhabitants, had more than 41 million people medically uninsured (more than 14 percent of its population uninsured).

Two Million of its Citizens incarcerated

Parenti, Christian, Lockdown America -- Police and Prisons in the Age of Crisis (Verso, New York, N.Y.), 1999, front paper cover flap and p. 242.

In 1999, the U.S. had over 1.7 million of its citizens in prison, a 300 percent increase since 1980. Two-thirds of those entering prison were sentenced for non-violent offenses.

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