Re: [casi] Iraq - water - chlorine - sanctions

[bob.steel1@DELETETHISjuno.com]

>As a member of the CASI list from its early days I have >noted recent
exchanges on the subjects of  water, >chlorine and sanctions. I have now
had a quick look at >some of the downloaded CASI postings this subject
over >the years.

>I think it would be fair to say "no" to Ghazwan's >question: quote:
Would you accept that the UN >"frustrated"  the efforts of the Iraqi
government to get >chlorine, imported or donated, to be used in water
>treatment plants?  "frustrated" or "banned" resulted in >the death of
thousands and thousands of people. unquote.

>"The UN" as such cannot be blamed. But certain national >interests could
be blamed at specific periods for >delaying the rehabilitation of water
systems/supplies.

I found the following fragment (in which Tom Nagy is quoted) in my
archive of posts sent to me (this one before I joined this list). None of
this may be new to any of you, but the material illustrates the
intentions of the US to use the destruction of water supplies as a weapon
since 1991. It would seem obvious from this that the US -- using the UN
as a tools at times it would seem -- pursued a quite deliberate policy of
limiting chlorine.


=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=

decreased ability to control disease outbreaks~." The
Defense Intelligence Agency document (from the Pentagon's
Gulflink website), "Disease Information -- Subject:
Effects of Bombing on Disease Occurrence in Baghdad" is
dated 22 January 1991, just six days after the war began.
It itemized the likely outbreaks to include:  "acute
diarrhea" brought on by bacteria such as E.  coli,
shigella, and salmonella, or by protozoa such as giardia,
which will affect "particularly children," or by
rotavirus, which will also affect "particularly children."
And yet the bombing of the water treatment systems
proceeded, and indeed, according to UNICEF figures,
hundreds of thousands of Iraqis, "particularly children,"
died from the effects of dirty water.

=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=

http://www.scn.org/ccpi/infrastructure.html

On destroying civilian infrastructure during the
Gulf War and consequences
for the civilian population.

Document from the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency
(1/91)
Front-page article from the Washington Post (6/91)
Special article from the New England Journal of
Medicine (9/92)
Editorial from the New England Journal of Medicine
(4/97)
Press release from U.S. Rep. Hall's office (6/00)
----------------------------------------------------------

"IRAQ WATER TREATMENT VULNERABILITIES"

U.S.  Defense Intelligence Agency document of 28 key
judgments, from the 2nd day of the Gulf War, available
through the Department of Defense GulfLINK
declassification project.  For the full document, click
here.  For related documents, see
http://www.progressive.org./0801issue/nagy0 901.html.
Excerpts (emphasis added):

FM: DIA WASHINGTON DC
TO: CENTCOM
INFO: CENTAF; UK STRIKE COMMAND; MARCENT; 18 ABC;
NAVCENT; SOCCENT; 7TH
CORPS; ANKARA

SUBJECT: IRAQ WATER TREATMMENT VULNERABILITIES
(U)
         AS OF 18 JAN 91 KEY JUDGMENTS.

1.  IRAO DEPENDS ON IMPORTING-SPECIALIZED EQUIPMENT-AND
SOME CHEMICALS TO PURIFY ITS WATER SUPPLY, MOST OF WHICH
IS HEAVILY MINERALIZED AND FREQUENTLY BRACKISH TO SALINE.

2.  WITH NO DOMESTIC SOURCES OF BOTH WATER TREATMENT
REPLACEMENT PARTS AND SOME ESSENTIAL CHEMICALS, IRAO WILL
CONTINUE ATTEMPTS TO CIRCUMVENT UNITED NATIONS SANCTIONS
TO IMPORT THESE VITAL COMMODITIES.

3.  FAILING TO SECURE SUPPLIES WILL RESULT IN A SHORTAGE
OF PURE DRINKING WATER FOR MUCH OF THE POPULATION.  THIS
COULD LEAD TO INCREASED INCIDENCES, IF NOT EPIDEMICS, OF
DISEASE....  ...

28.  THE ENTIRE IRAOI WATER TREATMENT SYSTEM WILL NOT
COLLAPSE PRECIPITOUSLY....  FULL DEGRADATION OF THE WATER
TREATMENT SYSTEM PROBABLY WILL TAKE AT LEAST ANOTHER 6
MONTHS.  Return to top

----------------------------------------------------------


http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/nationworld/13450655
6_sanctions04.html
Close-up
Running dry: Sanctions hit Iraq's young the hardest

By Greg Barrett
Gannett News Service

The Gulf War and sanctions reportedly have resulted in
more than 1 million Iraqi deaths, half of which were
children younger than 5.  Prohibitions on replacing such
"dual-use" items as water pumps, generators and chlorine
resulted in lethal epidemics.  As U.S.  lawmakers debate
whether the military should again strike at Saddam's
regime or simply tighten the trade embargo, Iraqis brace
for the next round of crossfire.

WASHINGTON ~ Massive new irrigation systems stretching
across the breadbasket regions of rural Iraq would
normally be cause for celebration.  In a nation where
nearly a quarter of the children suffer chronic
malnutrition, abundant crops of wheat and barley would
signify hope and progress.

But when Hans von Sponeck, former assistant secretary
general of the United Nations, visited Iraq last month he
found neither:  The spigots were turned off.  Although the
sophisticated sprinkler systems had survived the
exhaustive screening of U.N.  trade sanctions, the water
pumps had not.

"The danger is these pumps could be used by the (Iraqi)
military for other purposes," said von Sponeck, a 32-year
veteran of the United Nations who resigned two years ago
to protest the sanctions.  "Anything that has a
sophisticated pumping mechanism can be used for propelling
weapons of mass destruction, I guess."

Such is life in Iraq a dozen years after the international
trade sanctions of Aug.  6, 1990, attempted to peacefully
push Iraqi President Saddam Hussein back from Kuwait, and
11 years after the allied forces of the Persian Gulf War
rained bombs on Baghdad.

The ongoing collateral damage of the war and sanctions on
Iraqi civilians has totaled more than 1 million deaths,
half of which are children younger than 5, according to
UNICEF and World Health Organization reports.

As U.S.  lawmakers this summer debate whether the military
should again strike at Saddam's regime or simply tighten
the trade embargo, Iraqi civilians live in dread of the
inevitable crossfire.  More than 700 targets were bombed
in 1991 to cripple Saddam ~ bridges, roads and electrical
grids that powered 1,410 water-treatment plants for Iraq's
22 million people.

Coupled with the U.N.  sanctions that blocked or rationed
dual-use imports such as the water pumps, electric
generators and chlorine ~ that also can be used in the
making of mustard gas ~ epidemics ensued.  Iraqi children
died from dehydration and waterborne illnesses such as
cholera, diarrhea and other intestinal diseases.

At his confirmation hearing last year, Secretary of State
Colin Powell laid the blame at Saddam's feet.

"No one cares for children more than I do," Powell said.
"And I understand that a nuclear, biological or chemical
weapon of a Saddam Hussein threatens not only the children
of Iraq but the entire region far more than tightened
sanctions."

At the freshly painted Al-Mansour Children's Hospital in
Baghdad, pediatrician Qusay Al-Rahim said the nation that
once was among the most industrialized in the Middle East
has made some progress in the past decade.  Electricity is
again reliable.  More than half the pharmaceutical drugs
his patients need are available.  Hospital elevators work
and colostomy bags no longer have to be washed and reused.

The sanctions ~ which have been maintained because Saddam
refuses to comply with U.N.  resolutions for arms
inspections ~ do not prevent the import of food and most
medicines.

But, Al-Rahim said, infants and children still die from a
lack of common equipment and supplies that were readily
available before Saddam's stubborn stand against the West.

"For example, we have a shortage of Vitamin K," he said of
the coagulant used to prevent hemorrhaging in newborns.

In an independent study published 19 months after the
six-week Gulf War, The New England Journal of Medicine
reported a trend that foretold Iraq's future.

During the first eight months of 1991, nearly 47,000 more
children than normal died in Iraq, and the country's
infant- and child-mortality rates more than doubled, to
92.7 and 128.5 per 1,000 live births respectively.

A 1999 UNICEF study showed a continuing trend:  In 1998,
the infant- and child-mortality rates were 103 and 125 per
1,000, respectively.

The U.N.  oil-for-food program was created five years ago
to generate some sense of normalcy for Iraqis.  Yet as of
Tuesday, it was still withholding more than 1,450 import
contracts worth $4.6 billion in humanitarian supplies for
Iraq.  A U.N.  pledge in May to regenerate and expedite
the contracts, so far, has produced only a trickle of
change ~ 14 humanitarian supply contracts worth $7.6
million.

The United States, concerned with Saddam's potential for
developing weapons of mass destruction, initiated roughly
90 percent of the blocks on humanitarian supplies by the
U.N.  Security Council.

In Amman, Jordan, this summer, Jordanian Minister of Water
Munther Haddadin addressed the plight of Iraqi children,
who, for example, suffered almost a fourfold increase in
low birth weights (4.5 percent to 21.1 percent) between
1990 and 1994.  The rate remains steady today at 25
percent.

"You wonder why there are terrorists?" Haddadin asked,
according to writer Jane McBee, who toured the Middle East
with members of the Physicians for Social Responsibility.
"What do you think these children will be in 10 years?  Do
you think they'll join the Peace Corps?"

Less than a month after the Gulf War, U.N.  Secretary
General Javier Perez de Cuellar told the U.N.  Security
Council the conflict had "wrought near-apocalyptic results
upon the economic infrastructure of what had been, until
January 1991, a rather highly urbanized and mechanized
society."

In a letter to the council dated March 20, 1991, de
Cuellar wrote:  "Iraq has, for some time to come, been
relegated to a pre-industrial age, but with all the
disabilities of post-industrial dependency on an intensive
use of energy and technology."

It was a result the United States predicted even as allied
forces bombed Iraq's civilian infrastructure.

In a January 1991 document titled "Iraq Water Treatment
Vulnerabilities," the U.S.  Defense Intelligence Agency
said the bombing of Iraq coupled with an embargo of
chemicals and supplies could fully degrade Iraq's civilian
water supply.

"Unless the water is purified with chlorine, epidemics of
such diseases as cholera, hepatitis, and typhoid could
occur," read declassified portions of the report.

George Washington University professor Thomas Nagy
stumbled across the document in 1998 during online
research about depleted uranium.  The subject line of the
Pentagon paper read:  "Effects of Bombing on Disease
Occurrence in Baghdad."

Its analysis, as Nagy said, was blunt:  "Increased
incidence of diseases will be attributable to degradation
of normal preventive medicine, waste disposal, water
purification-distribution, electricity and decreased
ability to control disease outbreaks."

"Imagine if the document had read, 'U.S.  Water Treatment
Vulnerabilities,' " and it described in detail how to
spread epidemic to the U.S.  civilian population.  "It
would be called terrorism," Nagy said.  "Or worse.
Genocide."

The Pentagon, meanwhile, dismissed the document.  Defense
Intelligence Agency spokesman Lt.  Cmdr.  Jim Brooks
called it an assessment written for U.S.  policy-makers
but said he didn't know who had requested it or for what
purpose.

"If you have this report, the best thing to do is to then
look at what policies went into place.  ...  There are no
sanctions that prevent (Saddam) from sustaining the
water-treatment program" and caring for his people, Brooks
said.

But Saddam has delivered on his part of the U.N.
oil-for-food program, according to the United Nations,
which has 158 observers in Iraq monitoring the movement of
supplies.  Since the relief effort began in 1997, he has
never been cited for diverting or hoarding supplies, said
program spokeswoman Hasmik Egian.

Meanwhile, Rep.  Tony Hall, D-Ohio, complained in the
spring of 2000 about U.S.  efforts to block crucial water
and sanitation supplies.  Following a five-day tour of
hospitals, schools, clinics and water-treatment plants
from Baghdad to Babylon, Hall wrote to then-Secretary of
State Madeleine Albright:  "Holds on contracts for the
water and sanitation sector are a prime reason for the
increases in sickness and death."

Hall cited 19 supply contracts for dual-use items such as
water-purification chemicals, chlorinators, chemical
dosing pumps and water tankers, and said the United States
was responsible for blocking 18 of them.

When Albright was U.S.  ambassador to the United Nations
in 1996, Lesley Stahl of CBS' news program "60 Minutes"
asked her about the sanctions and the deaths of Iraqi
children.

Albright said it was America's responsibility to make sure
the Gulf War did not have to be fought again.  "I think it
is a very hard choice," she told Stahl.  "But the price,
we think the price is worth it."

U.S.  Air Force Col.  John Warden, who devised the Desert
Storm Air Campaign's pinpoint strategy in 1991, said he
had never heard of the Defense Intelligence Agency
document outlining Iraq's water-treatm ent
vulnerabilities.

He regrets the death of children, he said, but the United
States is not to blame:  "It bothers me from the
standpoint that here is an evil guy ...  who was willing
to stand around and see that kind of thing happen.  If you
put someone in a hopeless position and keep grinding your
heel into them, that is one thing.  But we did not do
that.  The blame 100 percent goes to a guy named Saddam
Hussein."

Warden, now retired and living in Georgia, believes
another strike at Iraq would ~ or should ~ follow his Gulf
War blueprint.

"When we went to war, our objective was to reduce Iraq's
capability to be strategic," he said.  "In order to make
that happen, the last thing you want to do is focus your
efforts solely on the military ~ that is where you get
your least results.  ...  We shut down the electrical
system within the first hours of war.  ...  We shut down
the internal flow of oil by knocking out the refineries.
We also knocked out the communications.

"In my view, it was extraordinarily successful.  ...  Wars
are devastating on civilians.  Always have been."

Copyright ~ 2002 The Seattle Times Company





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