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MEDIAS : THE QUOTES

by Open-Publishing - Saturday 13 May 2006

Media-Network Democracy Governments History

http://www.doublestandards.org/quotes.html

“There is not one of you who would dare write his honest opinion. The business of Journalism is now to destroy the truth, to lie outright, to pervert, to vilify, fall at the feet of Mammon and sell himself for his daily bread. We are tools, vessels of rich men behind the scenes, we are jumping jacks. They pull the strings; we dance. Our talents, our possibilities and our lives are the properties of these men. We are intellectual prostitutes.”

 John Swainton, of the New York Times, at his retirement party in September 2000.
“Why of course the people don’t want war ... But after all it is the leaders of the country who determine the policy, and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy, or a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship ...Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is to tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger.”

 Hermann Goering, Nazi leader, at the Nuremberg Trials after World War II.
“The President is merely the most important among a large number of public servants. He should be supported or opposed exactly to the degree which is warranted by his good conduct or bad conduct, his efficiency or inefficiency in rendering loyal, able, and disinterested service to the nation as a whole. Therefore it is absolutely necessary that there should be full liberty to tell the truth about his acts, and this means that it is exactly as necessary to blame him when he does wrong as to praise him when he does right. Any other attitude in an American citizen is both base and servile. To announce that there must be no criticism of the President, or that we are to stand by the President, right or wrong, is not only unpatriotic and servile, but is morally treasonable to the American public. Nothing but the truth should be spoken about him or any one else. But it is even more important to tell the truth, pleasant or unpleasant, about him than about any one else.”

 Teddy Roosevelt
“Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.”

 Benjamin Franklin
“Until we go through it ourselves, until our people cower in the shelters of New York, Washington, Chicago, Los Angeles and elsewhere while the buildings collapse overhead and burst into flames, and dead bodies hurtle about and, when it is over for the day or the night, emerge in the rubble to find some of their dear ones mangled, their homes gone, their hospitals, churches, schools demolished - only after that gruesome experience will we realize what we are inflicting on the people of Indochina ...”

 William Shirer, author, 1973
“...a cigarette recognized by eminent medical authorities for its advantages to the nose and throat”

 Philip Morris Official Comment 1939
“The media are a pitiful lot. They don’t give us any history, they don’t give us any analysis, they don’t tell us anything. They don’t raise the most basic questions: Who has the most weapons of mass destruction in the world by far? Who has used weapons of mass destruction more than any other nation? Who has killed more people in this world with weapons of mass destruction than any other nation? The answer: the United States.”

 Howard Zinn
“Perhaps, you have a responsibility to be informed, to know for yourself. To know the truth. And then, perhaps you must decide with your own conscience and your personal energy and your resources what you should do.”

 Isabel Allende, author
“Americans are the best entertained and the least informed people in the world.”

 Neil Postman
“As long as an economic system provides an acceptable degree of security, growing material wealth and opportunity for further increase for the next generation, the average American does not ask who is running things or what goals are being pursued.”

 Daniel R. Fusfeld, Friendly Fascism
“The most esteemed journalists are precisely the most servile. For it is by making themselves useful to the powerful that they gain access to the ’best’ sources.”

 Walter Karp, Harpers magazine
“I have the greatest admiration for your propaganda. Propaganda in the West is carried out by experts who have had the best training in the world - in the field of advertizing - and have mastered the techniques with exceptional proficiency ... Yours are subtle and persuasive; ours are crude and obvious ... I think that the fundamental difference between our worlds, with respect to propaganda, is quite simple. You tend to believe yours ... and we tend to disbelieve ours.”

 Soviet correspondent based five years in the U.S.
“The loud little handful will shout for war. The pulpit will warily and cautiously protest at first.... The great mass of the nation will rub its sleepy eyes, and will try to make out why there should be a war, and they will say earnestly and indignantly: "It is unjust and dishonorable and there is no need for war.

Then the few will shout even louder.... Before long you will see a curious thing: anti-war speakers will be stoned from the platform, and free speech will be strangled by hordes of furious men who still agree with the speakers but dare not admit it...

Next, the statesmen will invent cheap lies...and each man will be glad of these lies and will study them because they soothe his conscience; and thus he will bye and bye convince himself that the war is just and he will thank God for a better sleep he enjoys by his self-deception.”

 Mark Twain - observing how wars that are at first seen as unnecessary by the mass of the people become converted into "just" wars
“The greatest threats to U.S. society are not coming from "terrorists" or "rogue nations" abroad. They are coming from the words and actions of elected officials here at home. Actions of the Department of Justice - emboldened by the USA-Patriot Act passed by Congress last fall - threaten to turn the U.S. into a permanent security state.

Likewise, the greatest threats to global peace - and to human development and security worldwide - are coming from U.S. policymakers carrying out their lawful duties.”

 Friends Committee on National Legislation
“To oppose the policies of a government does not mean you are against the country or the people that the government supposedly represents. Such opposition should be called what it really is: democracy, or democratic dissent, or having a critical perspective about what your leaders are doing. Either we have the right to democratic dissent and criticism of these policies or we all lie down and let the leader, the Fuhrer, do what is best, while we follow uncritically, and obey whatever he commands. That’s just what the Germans did with Hitler, and look where it got them.”

 Michael Parenti, author
“Terrorism has replaced Communism as the rationale for the militarization of the country, for military adventures abroad, and for the suppression of civil liberties at home. It serves the same purpose, serving to create hysteria.”

 Howard Zinn
“The U.S. ranks last among developed countries in the percentage of its GNP (0.11%) given in aid. On average, governments in the European Union contribute three times as much of their GNP (0.33%) in non-military foreign aid.”

 Friends Committee on National Legislation
“Fascism should more appropriately be called Corporatism because it is a merger of State and corporate power.”

 Benito Mussolini (1883-1945), Fascist Dictator of Italy
“You don’t need a totalitarian dictatorship like Hitler’s to get by with murder ... you can do it in a democracy as long as the Congress and the people Congress is supposed to represent don’t give a damn?”

 William Shirer, author, 1973
“Few of us 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.”

 Arthur Miller, playwright
“It would be easy for us, if we do not learn to understand the world and appreciate the rights, privileges and duties of all other countries and peoples, to represent in our power the same danger to the world that Fascism did.”

 Ernest Hemingway
“The corporations of America today effectively oversee the Congress, and the regulatory agencies and indeed the presidency itself.”

 E.L. Doctorow, author
“We are not hated because we practice democracy, value freedom, or uphold human rights. We are hated because our government denies these things to people in Third World countries whose resources are coveted by our multinational corporations. That hatred we have sown has come back to haunt us in the form of terrorism and in the future, nuclear terrorism.”

 Robert Bowman, Vietnam Veteran, bishop of the United Catholic Church in Melbourne Beach, FL.
“Patriotism itself - love of one’s country and one’s people - is a natural and reasonable human feeling. But patriotism which measures one’s country by military superiority over all rivals regardless of consequence is irrational... There is surely a more rational form of patriotism that searches for excellence in social, economic and moral spheres rather than in weapon systems.”

 Thomas Bodenheimer and Robert Gould, Rollback
“The goal of conservative rulers around the world, led by those who occupy the seats of power in Washington, is the systematic rollback of democratic gains, public services, and common living standards around the world.”

 Michael Parenti
“The most unpardonable sin in society is independence of thought.”

 Emma Goldman, American anarchist and feminist, 1869-1940
“Far from being the terrorists of the world, the Islamic peoples have been its victims, principally the victims of U.S. fundamentalism, whose power, in all its forms-military, strategic, and economic-is the greatest source of terrorism on Earth.... People are neither still nor stupid. They see their independence compromised, their resources and land and the lives of their children taken away, and their accusing fingers increasingly point north: to the great enclaves of plunder and privilege. Inevitably, terror breeds terror and more fanaticism. But how patient the oppressed have been. Their distant voices of rage are now heard; the daily horrors in faraway brutalized places have at last come home.”

 John Pilger, author - Hidden Agendas
“There is no doubt that if we lived in a police state, it would be easier to catch terrorists. If we lived in a country where the police were allowed to search your home at any time for any reason; if we lived in a country where the government is entitled to open your mail, eavesdrop on your phone conversations, or intercept your e-mail communications; if we lived in a country where people could be held indefinitely based . . . on mere suspicion that they are up to no good, the government would probably discover and arrest more terrorists, or would-be terrorists.... But that wouldn’t be a country in which we would want to live.”

 Senator Russ Feingold (Sen. Wisconsin)
“The enormous gap between what US leaders do in the world and what Americans think their leaders are doing is one of the great propaganda accomplishments of the dominant political mythology.”

 Michael Parenti
“The United States is no longer the nation its citizens once thought: a place, unlike most others in the world, free from censorship and thought police, where people can say what they want, when they want to, about their government... Until the citizens of this land aggressively defend their First Amendment rights of free speech, there is little hope that the march to censorship will be reversed. The survival of the cornerstone of the Bill of Rights is at stake.”

 Angus Mackenzie, Secrets - CIA’s War at Home
“I believe the profligate waste of our resources on irrelevant weapons systems and the Asian economic meltdown, as well as the continuous trail of military ’accidents’ and of terrorist attacks on American installations and embassies, are all portents of a twenty-first century crisis in America’s empire, an empire based on the projection of military power to every corner of the world and on the use of American capital and markets to force global economic integration on our terms, at whatever costs to others.”

 Chalmers Johnson - Blowback
“America, like Britain before her, is now the great defender of the Status Quo. She has committed herself against revolution and radical change in the underdeveloped world because independent governments would destroy the world economic and political system, which assures the United States its disproportionate share of economic and political power ... America’s preeminent wealth depends upon keeping things in the underdeveloped world much as they are, allowing change and modernization to proceed only in a controlled, orderly, and nonthreatening way.”

 Richard Barnet, Intervention and Revolution
“[True] liberty...means allowing people freely to say things you do not want to hear.”

 George Orwell
“In the 1980s capitalism triumphed over communism. In the l990s it triumphed over democracy. ”

 David Korten, The Post-Corporate World
“The U.S. government leaders ... have created an idol, the military machine. They require the people of this country to sacrifice to this idol. Not only tax dollars, but the lives and futures of the nation’s young people, the health of communities and society, and the well-being of natural resources and the environment are all offered up at the altar of military might.”

 Friends Committee on National Legislation
“To announce that there must be no criticism of the president, or that we are to stand by the president right or wrong, is not only unpatriotic and servile, but is morally treasonable to the American public.”

 Theodore Roosevelt
“The only thing worth globalizing is dissent.”

 Arundhati Roy, author
“Only corporate America enjoys representation by the Congresses and presidents that it pays for in an arrangement where no one is entirely accountable because those who have bought the government also own the media.”

 Gore Vidal, Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace
“The interests of the corporation state are to convert all the riches of the earth into dollars.”

 William O. Douglas, former U.S. Supreme Court Justice, 1969
“The illegal we can do right now; the unconstitutional will take a little longer.”

 Henry Kissinger
“Until we go through it ourselves, until our people cower in the shelters of New York, Washington, Chicago, Los Angeles and elsewhere while the buildings collapse overhead and burst into flames, and dead bodies hurtle about and, when it is over for the day or the night, emerge in the rubble to find some of their dear ones mangled, their homes gone, their hospitals, churches, schools demolished - only after that gruesome experience will we realize what we are inflicting on the people of Indochina ...”

 William Shirer, author, 1973
“They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.”

 Benjamin Franklin, 1759
“The awful scenes of death and suffering we were witnessing on our television screens have been going on in other parts of the world for a long time, and only now can we begin to know what people have gone through, often as a result of our policies.”

 Howard Zinn, after the 9-11 WTC destruction in New York
“The American people ought to know that it is not them, but their government’s policies, that are so hated.”

 Arundhati Roy, author
“The crimes of the U.S. throughout the world have been systematic, constant, clinical, remorseless, and fully documented but nobody talks about them. ”

 Harold Pinter, playwrite
“Rogue states that are internally free - and the U.S. is at the outer limits in this respect - must rely on the willingness of the educated classes to produce accolades and tolerate or deny terrible crimes.”

 Noam Chomsky, Rogue States
“Leaders symbolize what the country stands for. As corruption becomes routine in Washington in both parties, it trickles down as a corrupting influence in everyone’s lives... Democracy is the ultimate casualty, and the sapping of democratic life is the most serious contribution of corporate ascendancy to our spiritual decline. As democracy ebbs, Americans retreat into private cocoons, feeling helpless to make a difference... In a democracy, civic participation and the belief in one’s ability to contribute to the common good is the most important guarantor of public morality. When that belief fades, so too does the vision of the common good itself.”

 Charles Derber, Corporation Nation
“The U. S. stands on the threshold of a permanent state of war and a permanent war economy.”

 Friends Committee on National Legislation
“Multi-billion-dollar multinational corporations view the exploitation of the world’s sick and dying as a sacred duty to their shareholders.”

 John le Carré - author
“No form of government, once in power, can be trusted to limit its own ambition, to extend freedom and to wither away. This means that it is up to the citizenry, those outside of power, to engage in permanent combat with the state, short of violent, escalatory revolution, but beyond the gentility of the ballot-box, to insure justice, freedom and well being.”

 Howard Zinn, on the need for dissent and non-violent protest
“The greatest danger we have now is militarism in America. We have this huge, overpowering, unbelievably expensive military establishment... Seasoned U.S. Ieaders have warned against the threat of a huge military establishment to the liberty of our citizens. I fear that from this we are going to get even more militarism. That is, more and more functions-including domestic police functions-will be transferred from civilian institutions to the military, and the military will have ever greater authority in our society.”

 Chalmers Johnson, author - Blowback, In These Times magazine
“Freedom of the Press is meaningless if nobody asks a question.”

 Ani DiFranco, songwriter/singer, from her song Serpentine
“Our leaders are cruel because only those willing to be inordinately cruel and remorseless can hold positions of leadership in the foreign policy establishment ... People capable of expressing a full human measure of compassion and empathy toward faraway powerless strangers ... do not become president of the United States, or vice president, or secretary of state, or national security adviser or secretary of the treasury. Nor do they want to.”

 William Blum, Rogue State
“The modern conservative is engaged in one of man’s oldest exercises in moral philosophy: that is the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness.”

 John Kenneth Galbraith, economist and author
“Each party [Democratic and Republican] has assumed the mantle of fiscal responsibility while accusing the other of reckless spending. Yet both parties have proposed irresponsibly high levels of military spending at the expense of programs that meet the needs of society’s most vulnerable members.”

 Friends Committee on National Legislation
“The corporation is not a person and it does not live. It is a lifeless bundle of legally protected financial rights and relationships brilliantly designed to serve money and its imperatives. It is money that flows in its veins, not blood. The corporation has neither soul nor conscience.”

 David Korten, The Post-Corporate World
“We now live in a state of permanent war - a global arms industry, apparently the largest single international business, must have its products used up so more can be sold. There must be profits for the capitalists and jobs for the proles... Are we not still in Caligula’s Rome?”

 New Internationalist magazine
“In many respects, we now live in a society that is only formally democratic, as the great mass of citizens have minimal say on the major public issues of the day, and such issues are scarcely debated at all in any meaningful sense in the electoral arena. In our society, corporations and the wealthy enjoy a power every bit as immense as that assumed to have been enjoyed by the lords and royalty of feudal times.”

 Robert W. McChesney, Rich Media, Poor Democracy
“Those in power are blind devotees to private enterprise. They accept that degree of socialism implicit in the vast subsidies to the military-industrial-complex, but not that type of socialism which maintains public projects for the disemployed and the unemployed alike.”

 William O. Douglas, former U.S. Supreme Court Justice, 1969
“Think for yourselves, do not uncritically accept what you are told, and do what you can to make the world a better place, particularly for those who suffer and are oppressed.”

 Noam Chomsky
“Our rulers for more than half a century have made sure that we are never to be told the truth about anything that our government has done to other people.”

 Gore Vidal, Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace
“Today, as in the Gilded Age, we live in a world where a morality of personal responsibility rubs shoulders with a culture of greed and of flagrant social irresponsibility. Now as then, business has shed its collective responsibility for employees - just as government has for its citizens.”

 Charles Derber, Corporation Nation
“If envy were the cause of terrorism, Beverly Hills [and] Fifth Avenue ... would have become targets long ago.”

 Fareed Zakaria, Newsweek
“Political freedom has given way to guilt by association. Due process has given way to detention on the Attorney General’s say-so. Public scrutiny has given way to secret detentions and secret trials. Equal protection under law has given way to ethnic profiling.”

 The Nation magazine - about how Sept.11 attack has allowed the government to take away Americans’ civil liberties
“The greatest crime since World War II has been U.S. foreign policy.”

 Ramsey Clark, former U.S. Attorney General
“A properly functioning system of indoctrination has a variety of tasks. Its primary target are the "stupid and ignorant masses". They must be kept that way; marginalized, and isolated. Ideally, each person should be alone in front of the TV screen watching sports, soap operas, or comedies, deprived of organizational structures that permit individuals lacking resources to discover what they think and believe in, to engage in interaction with others, to formulate their own concerns and programs, and to act to realize them. This hapless multitude are the proper targets of the mass media and a public education system geared to obedience and training in needed skills, including the skill of repeating patriotic slogans on timely occasions.”

 Noam Chomsky
“Our upside down welfare state is "socialism for the rich, free enterprise for the poor." The great welfare scandal of the age concerns the dole we give rich people.”

 William O. Douglas, former U.S. Supreme Court Justice, 1969
“The liberty of a democracy is not safe if the people tolerate the growth of private power to the point where it becomes stronger than the democratic state itself. That in its essence is fascism - ownership of government by an individual, by a group or any controlling private power. ”

 President Franklin Delano Roosevelt - on the threat to democracy by corporate power
“The corporate grip on opinion in the United States is one of the wonders of the Western world. No First World country has ever managed to eliminate so entirely from its media all objectivity - much less dissent.”

 Gore Vidal, novelist and critic
“We pretend not to understand the linkages between our comfortable standard of living and the dictatorships we impose and protect through an international military presence.”

 Jerry Fresia, author of Toward an American Revolution
“If we’d been born where they were born and taught what they were taught, we would believe what they believe.”

 A sign inside a church in Northern Ireland, explaining the origin of intolerance and hate
“The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum - even encourage the more critical and dissident views. That gives people the sense that there’s free thinking going on, while all the time the presuppositions of the system are being reinforced by the limits put on the range of the debate.”

 Noam Chomsky
“Since 1945 this country ... has sought not the delicate balance of power but a position of commanding superiority in weapons technology, in the regulation of the international economy, and in the manipulation of the internal politics of other countries.”

 Richard Barnet, Intervention and Revolution
“The problem in defense is how far you can go [in military spending] without destroying from within what you are trying to defend from without.”

 President Dwight Eisenhower, 1953
“If those in charge of our society - politicians, corporate executives, and owners of press and television - can dominate our ideas, they will be secure in their power. They will not need soldiers patrolling the streets. We will control ourselves.”

 Howard Zinn, historian and author
“U.S. Ieaders commit war crimes as a matter of institutional necessity, as their imperial role calls for keeping subordinate peoples in their proper place and assuring a "favorable climate of investment" everywhere. They do this by using their economic power, but also ... by supporting Diem, Mobutu, Pinochet, Suharto, Savimbi, Marcos, Fujimori, Salinas, and scores of similar leaders. War crimes also come easily because U.S. Ieaders consider themselves to be the vehicles of a higher morality and truth and can operate in violation of law without cost. It is also immensely helpful that their mainstream media agree that their country is above the law and will support and rationalize each and every venture and the commission of war crimes. ”

 Edward Herman, political economist and author
“The United States supports right-wing dictatorships in Latin America, Southeast Asia, and the Middle East ... because these are the rulers who have tied their personal political destiny to the fortunes of the American corporations in their countries... Revolutionary or nationalist leaders have radically different political constituencies and interests. For them creating "a good investment climate" for the United States and developing their own country are fundamentally conflicting goals. Therefore, the United States has a strong economic interest in keeping such men from coming to power or arranging for their removal if they do.”

 Richard Barnet, Intervention and Revolution
“Quite simply, there can be no popular sovereignty without a real belief in the value of government. If government does not assume and carry out public responsibilities, less accountable institutions such as the corporation will do the job in their own self-interest.”

 Charles Derber, Corporation Nation
“The United States is not only number one in military power but also in the effectiveness of its propaganda system.”

 Edward S. Herman, political economist and author
“If democracy is ever to be threatened, it will not be by revolutionary groups burning government offices and occupying the broadcasting and newspaper offices of the world. It will come from disenchantment, cynicism and despair caused by the realization that the New World Order means we are all to be managed and not represented.”

 Tony Benn, British Labour Party Member of Parliament
“Individuals have international duties which transcend the national obligations of obedience ... Therefore [individual citizens] have the duty to violate domestic laws to prevent crimes against peace and humanity from occurring.”

 Nuremberg War Crimes Tribunal, 1950
“If the public knew the truth, the war would end tomorrow. But they don’t know and they can’t know.”

 Former British Prime Minister David Lloyd George, to Manchester Guardian editor C.P. Scott, 1914

As quoted by Philip Knightly in his book ’The First Casualty: From the Crimea to Vietnam - Correspondent as Hero, Propagandist and Myth-maker.’
“The Pentagon recently justified its position on censorship by insisting:
’If we let people see that kind of thing, there would never again be any war.’”

 from ’Military Blunders’ - article by Geoffrey Regan in ’Night and Day’ (Mail on Sunday supplement) 23rd January 2000
“Individuals have international duties which transcend the national obligations of obedience...therefore [individual citizens] have the duty to violate domestic laws to prevent crimes against peace and humanity from occurring.”

 Nuremberg War Crime Tribunal, 1950
“When a long train of abuses and usurpations [...] evinces a design to reduce them [the people] under absolute despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such government.”

 Thomas Jefferson, US Declaration of Independence
“Why of course the people don’t want war. Why should some poor slob on a farm want to risk his life in a war when the best he can get out of it is to come back to his farm in one piece? Naturally the common people don’t want war: neither in Russia, nor in England, nor for that matter in Germany. That is understood. But, after all, it is the leaders of the country who determine the policy and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy, or a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship. Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the peacemakers for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in any country.”

 Hermann Goerring
“Beware the leader who bangs the drums of war in order to whip the citizenry into a patriotic fervor, for patriotism is indeed a double-edged sword. It both emboldens the blood, just as it narrows the mind. And when the drums of war have reached a fever pitch and the blood boils with hate and the mind has closed, the leader will have no need in seizing the rights of the citizenry. Rather, the citizenry, infused with fear and blinded by patriotism, will offer up all of their rights unto the leader and gladly so. How do I know? For this is what I have done. And I am Caesar.”

 Julius Caesar
“What land has not seen Britain’s crimson flag, the meteor of murder, but justice the plea?”

 Song lyric, anonymous, circa. 1820
“We must become the owners, or at any rate the controllers at the source, of at least a proportion of the oil which we require.”

 British Royal Commission, agreeing with Winston Churchill’s policy towards Iraq, 1913 [quote unconfirmed]
“What we want to have in existence, what we ought to have been creating in this time is some administration with Arab institutions which we can safely leave while pulling the strings ourselves; something that won’t cost very much, which the Labour government can swallow consistent with its principles, but under which our economic and political interests will be secure. [.....] If the French remain in Syria we shall have to avoid giving them the excuse of setting up a protectorate. If they go, or if we appear to be reactionary in Mesopotamia, there is always the risk that [King] Faisal will encourage the Americans to take over both, and it should be borne in mind that the Standard Oil company is very anxious to take over Iraq.”

 Sir Arthur Hirtzel, Head of the British government’s ’India Office Political Department.’ 1919 [quote unconfirmed]
“Is there any man, is there any woman, let me say any child here, that does not know that the seed of war in the modern world is industrial and commercial rivalry?”

 Former US President Woodrow Wilson, 1919
“[I advocate] using poisoned gas against uncivilised tribes [and] against recalcitrant Arabs as an experiment. [I do not understand] the squeamishness about the use of gas [...] We cannot in any circumstances acquiesce in the non-utilisation of any weapons which are available to procure a speedy termination of the disorder which prevails on the frontier.”

 Winston Churchill, then Secretary of State at the British War Office, authorising RAF Middle East Command to attack rebelling Iraqis with chemical weapons, 1919
“By no moral right may the ownership and control of the natural and material resources of a territory be regarded as the absolute monopoly of the people who happened to be settled there.”

 Philip Snowden, Labour Party Chancellor, 1921 [quote unconfirmed]
“Give responsibility for the control of Iraq to the Royal Air Force, thus recognising the ability of air power to maintain effective control of a mandated territory with the maximum economy in the deployment of forces.”

 Winston Churchill, Colonial Secretary of the British ’Middle East Department of the Colonial Office’, speaking at the Cairo Conference, 1921
“The United States is the most powerful among the technically advanced countries in the world today. its influence on the shaping of international relations is absolutely incalculable. But America is a large country, and its people have so far not shown much interest in great international problems, among which the problem of disarmament occupies first place today.

This must be changed, if only in America’s own interest. The last war has shown that there are no longer any barriers between the continents and that the destinies of all countries are closely interwoven. The people of this country must realize that they have a great responsibility in the sphere of international politics. The part of passive spectator is unworthy of this country and is bound in the end to lead to disaster all round.”

 Albert Einstein, from an interview in the Nieuwe Rotterdamsche Courant, 1921
“The efficiency of the truly national leader consists mainly of preventing the people’s attention from becoming divided, and of always concentrating it on a single enemy.”

 Adolf Hitler, ’Mein Kampf’ 1924
“Utter, boorish self-centred indifference to every living human struggle is the heart and soul of the imperialist psychology in the Labour [Party] aristocracy, looking on with contemptuous indifference to the curious, incomprehensible inferior races.”

 R. Palme Dutt, Labour Monthly, March 1927 [quote unconfirmed]
“The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of the country. [....] We are governed, our minds are molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of. [....] It is they who pull the wires which control the public mind [....] in its sum total, [propaganda] is regimenting the public mind every bit as much as an army regiments the bodies of its soldiers. [....] If we understand the mechanism and motives of the group mind, is it not possible to control and regiment the masses according to our will, without their knowing it? [....] Ours must be a leadership democracy administered by the intelligent minority who know how to regiment and guide the masses.”

 Extracts from Edward Bernays’ ’Propaganda’, first published 1928
“First, they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out because I was not a socialist. Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out because I was not a trade unionist. Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out because I was not a Jew. Then they came for me, and there was no one left to speak for me.”

 Pastor Martin Niemoller, who was arrested by the Nazis in 1937
“If war aims are stated which seem to be solely concerned with Anglo-American imperialism, they will offer little to people in the rest of the world. The interests of other peoples should be stressed. This would have a better propaganda effect.”

 Private memo from The Council of Foreign Relations to the US State Department, 1941 [quote unconfirmed]
“The enemy aggressor is always pursuing a course of larceny, murder, rapine and barbarism. We are always moving forward with high mission, a destiny imposed by the Deity to regenerate our victims while incidentally capturing their markets, to civilise savage and senile and paranoid peoples while blundering accidentally into their oil wells.”

 John Flynn, 1944
“The government of the world must be entrusted to satisfied nations, who wished nothing more for themselves than what they had. If the world government were in the hands of the hungry nations, there would always be danger. But none of us had any reason to seek for anything more. The peace would be kept by peoples who lived in their own way and were not ambitious. Our power placed us above the rest. We were like rich men dwelling at peace within their habitations.”

 Winston Churchill, as cited by Noam Chomsky in ’Deterring Democracy’
“By hook or by crook the development of primary production of all sorts in the colonial territories and dependent areas in the Commonwealth and throughout the world is a life and death matter for the economy of this country.”

 John Strachey, Labour Party minister for Food, 1947 [quote unconfirmed]
“Our strategic and security interests throughout the world will be best safeguarded by the establishment in suitable spots of ’Police Stations’, fully equipped to deal with emergencies within a large radius. Kuwait is one such spot from which Iraq, South Persia, Saudi Arabia and the Persian Gulf could be controlled. It will be worthwhile to go to considerable trouble and expense to establish and man a ’Police Station’ there.”

 British Foreign Office, policy memo, 1947 [quote unconfirmed]
“It is not Russian military power which is threatening us, it is Russian political power.”

 George Kennan, former Head of the US State Department Policy Planning Staff, October 1947, echoing sentiments held by the majority of post war planners and elected officials
“We have about 50% of the world’s wealth but only 6.3% of its population. This disparity is particularly great as between ourselves and the peoples of Asia. In this situation we cannot fail to be the object of envy and resentment. Our real task in the coming period is to devise a pattern of relationships which will permit us to maintain this position of disparity without positive detriment to our national security. To do so, we will have to dispense with all sentimentality and day-dreaming; and our attention will have to be concentrated everywhere on our immediate national objectives. We need not deceive ourselves that we can afford today the luxury of altruism and world benefaction. [....] We should cease to talk about such vague and - for the far East - unreal objectives as human rights, the raising of living standards and democratisation. The day is not far off when we are going to have to deal in straight power concepts. The less we are then hampered by idealistic slogans, the better.”

 George Kennan, former Head of the US State Department Policy Planning Staff, Document PPS23, 24th February 1948.
“I came to America because of the great, great freedom which I heard existed in this country. I made a mistake in selecting America as a land of freedom, a mistake I cannot repair in the balance of my lifetime.”

 Albert Einstein, 1947
“Guatemala has become an increasing threat to the stability of Honduras and El Salvador. its agrarian reform is a powerful propaganda weapon; its broad social program of aiding the workers and peasants in a victorious struggle against the upper classes and large foreign enterprises has a strong appeal to the populations of Central American neighbours where similar conditions prevail.”

 Unidentified US State Department official, 1954, cited by Noam Chomsky in ’What Uncle Sam Really Wants’.

The US overthrew the Guatemalan government later that year, the first democratic government the country had ever had, and one that was actually modelled on Franklin Roosevelt’s ’New Deal’, and installed a brutal dictatorship, with attendant death squads, ’disappearances’, mass torture and murder, which continue to this day.
“You have to pat them a little bit and make them think that you are fond of them.””

 John Foster Dulles, former US Secretary of State, describing to former President Eisenhower how to keep Latin Americans in line, as cited by Noam Chomsky in ’What Uncle Sam Really Wants’ - quote is undated but in the context of the chapter, estimated as 1955
“The target suffered a terminal illness before a firing squad in Baghdad.”

 CIA officer testifying to US Senate hearing, after bloody CIA aided Ba’th Party coup overthrew Iraqi Prime Minister Abdel Kassem, 1963
“It was an operation where all the t’s were really crossed. It was a great victory.”

 James Critchfield, former head of the CIA’s Middle East Desk, describing their involvement in the Ba’athist coup, 1963, quoted in ’Out of the Ashes’ by Andrew and Patrick Cockburn
“Neither the foreign head of state (the Shah) nor the President nor Dr. Kissinger desired a victory for our clients (the Kurds). They merely hoped to ensure a level of hostilities high enough to sap the resources of the neighbouring state (Iraq). Even in the context of covert action, ours was a cynical enterprise.”

 US Congressional Pike Report, describing President Nixon and US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger’s policy of arming the Kurds, 1972
“Covert operations should not be confused with missionary work.”

 Kissinger describing why US withdrew aid to the Kurds, 1975
“Strikes at population targets (per se) are likely not only to create a counterproductive wave of revulsion abroad and at home, but greatly to increase the risk of enlarging the war with China and the Soviet Union. Destruction of locks and dams, however - if handled right - might offer promise. It should be studied. Such destruction does not kill or drown people. By shallow-flooding the rice, it leads after time to widespread starvation (more than a million) unless food is provided - which we could offer to do ’at the conference table’.”

 John McNaughton, US State Department Vietnam policy, as quoted in ’The Mentality of the Backroom Boys.’ Article by Noam Chomsky, 1973
“They are using damage caused by [US} B-52 strikes as the main theme of their propaganda. This approach has resulted in the successful recruitment of a number of young men. Residents [....] say that the propaganda has been effective with refugees in areas which have been subject to B-52 strikes.”

 Report by the CIA’s Directorate of Operations, describing how Pol Pot used the American bombing of Cambodia as a tool for recruiting people to the Khmer Rouge, May 2nd, 1973, as quoted by John Pilger in ’Heroes’
“The US must carry out some act somewhere in the world which shows its determination to continue to be a world power.”

 Henry Kissinger, post-Vietnam blues, as quoted in The Washington Post, April 1975
“In terms of the bilateral relations between the U.S. and Indonesia, we are more or less condoning the incursion into East Timor. The United States wants to keep its relations with Indonesia close and friendly. We regard Indonesia as a friendly, non-aligned nation - a nation we do a lot of business with.””

 Unidentified US State Department official, quoted in The Australian, 22nd January 1976. One third of the entire population of East Timor, 200,000, was murdered by the Indonesian army, a genocide comparable to, possibly worse, than Pol Pot’s in Cambodia.
“A US commitment to the defence of the oil resources of the gulf, and to political stability in the region constitutes one of the most vital and enduring interests of the United States.”

 Conclusion of US Senator Henry Jackson’s Energy and Natural Resources Committee, 1977
“Though they spoke of terrible human suffering, reality was sealed off by their trite, lifeless vernacular: ’capabilities’, ’objectives’, ’our chips’, ’giveaway’. It was a matter, too, of culture and style. They spoke with the cool, deliberate detachment of men who believe the banishment of feeling renders them wise and, more important, credible to other men. [....] They neither understood the foreign policy they were dealing with, nor were deeply moved by the bloodshed and suffering they administered to their stereotypes.”

 Roger Morris, former US State Department staff member, describing Kissinger et al and their attitude to Vietnam and Cambodia, as quoted by John Pilger in ’Heroes’
“You have a survivability of command in control, survivability of industrial potential, protection of a percentage of your citizens, and you have a capability that inflicts more damage on the opposition than it can inflict on you. That’s the way you can have a winner.”

 George Bush Sr., explaining how to win a nuclear war to Los Angeles Times reporter Robert Scheer, 1980
“To put it in terms of a Chinese dialectic, United States policy is exactly to squeeze Vietnam to rely on the Soviet Union: then Vietnam will find the Soviet Union can not meet all its needs. [....] If Vietnam suffers economic hardships, I think that is just great.”

 Roger Sullivan, US National Security Council, addressing a US delegation who had travelled to the White House with a petition requesting the US Government to allow humanitarian assistance to be sent to Vietnam, as quoted by Anthony Barrett, The New Statesman, August 22nd 1980
“It would not have been possible for a political party to be more committed to a national home for the Jews in Palestine than was Labour.”

 Harold Wilson, former British Labour Party Prime Minister, 1981
“The American system is the most ingenious system of control in world history. With a country so rich in natural resources, talent and labour power the system can afford to distribute just enough wealth to just enough people to limit discontent to a troublesome minority. It is a country so powerful, so big, so pleasing to so many of its citizens that it can afford to give freedom of dissent to the small number who are not pleased. There is no system of control with more openings, apertures, flexibilities, rewards for the chosen. [...] There is none that disperses its control more complexly through the voting system, the work situation, the church, the family, the school, the mass media - none more successful in mollifying opposition with reforms, isolating people from one another, creating patriotic loyalty.”

 Howard Zinn, from ’A People’s History of the United States,’ first published 1981
“One hundred nations in the UN have not agreed with us on just about everything that’s come before them, where we’re involved, and it didn’t upset my breakfast at all.”

 Ronald Reagan, former US President, basking in the triumph that was the US invasion of Grenada, 1983
Q. “Mr. President, have you approved of covert activity to destablise the present government of Nicaragua?”

A. “Well, no, we’re supporting them, the - oh, wait a minute, wait a minute, I’m sorry, I was thinking of El Salvador, because of the previous, when you said Nicaragua. Here again, this is something upon which the national security interests, I just - I will not comment.”

 Ronald Reagan, former US President, Washington press conference, February 13th 1983, as quoted by John Pilger in ’Heroes’
“[George] Kennan applied the same ideas to Latin America in a briefing for Latin American ambassadors in which he explained that one of the main concerns of US policy is the: ’...protection of our raw materials.’

Who must we protect our raw materials from? Well, primarily the domestic populations, the indigenous population, which may have ideas of their own about raising the living standards, democratisation and human rights. And that’s inconsistent with maintaining the disparity. How will we protect our raw materials from the indigenous population. Well, the answer is the following:

’The final answer might be an unpleasant one, but...we should not hesitate before police repression by the local government. This is not shameful, since the communists are essentially traitors. It is better to have a strong regime in power than a liberal government if it is indulgent and relaxed and penetrated by Communists.’

Well, who are the communists? ’Communists’ is a term regularly used in American political theology to refer to people who are committed to the belief that: ’the government has direct responsibility for the welfare of the people.’
I’m quoting the words of a 1949 State Department intelligence report which warned about the spread of this grim and evil doctrine.”

 Noam Chomsky, ’Intervention in Vietnam and Central America: Parallels and Differences’, 1st published 1985
“You Americans, you treat the Third World in the way an Iraqi peasant treats his new bride. Three days of honeymoon, and then it’s off to the fields.”

 Saddam Hussein, at a 1985 meeting with US State Department officials, as later quoted in the Los Angeles Times, February 10th 1991
“After seeing ’RAMBO’ last night, I know what to do the next time this happens.”

 Ronald Reagan, former US President, as reported by Daily Express, July 2nd 1985
“Pictures of dead children don’t go down well in the US.”

 Unidentified US official, in an article describing the Reagan administration’s support for the Contras in Nicaragua, specifically their request that the Contras refrain from using pressure-triggered mines that killed indiscriminately, Time Magazine, November 3rd 1986
“Negotiations are a euphemism for capitulation if the shadow of power is not cast across the bargaining table. [There is no] utopian, legalistic means like outside mediation, the United Nations, and the World Court, while ignoring the power element of the equation.”

 George Schultz, former US Secretary of State, April 14th 1986, as cited in ’Rogue States’, article by Noam Chomsky, 1999
“One of the things we would like to do is that we would like to become actively engaged in ending the [Iran/Iraq] war in such a way that it becomes very evident to everybody that the guy who is causing the problem is Saddam Hussein. If I were to talk to any other Muslim leader, they wouldn’t say Saddam Hussein is the problem. They’d say Iran is the problem......What we’re talking about is a process by which all of the rest of the Arab world comes quickly to realise that Iran is not a threat to them, Iran is not going to overrun Kuwait. Iran is not going to overthrow the government of Saudi Arabia. That the real problem in preventing peace in the region is Saddam Hussein. And we’ll have to take care of that”.

 Colonel Oliver North, US Congressional Iran/Contra Hearings - 1987, North’s personal tape of a conversation with Iran/Contra players Richard Secord, Albert Hakim and an Iranian government official in Frankfurt, 1985. North claimed in the hearings that he was lying to the Iranians.
“One of our few remaining hopes is that democrats and those who cherish values of justice, peace and freedom will voice their concern for the plight of the Kurds.”

 Kurdish Leaders in a letter to Margaret Thatcher following the gassing of Kurds at Halabja, 16th August 1988. A British £340 million export credit deal with Iraq went through on September 5th 1988.
“[Eastern Europeans are] luckier than Central Americans [because] while the Moscow-imposed government in Prague would degrade and huniliate reformers, the Washington-made government in Guatemala would kill them. It still does, in a virtual genocide that has taken more then 150,000 victims. [....] One is tempted to believe that some people in the White House worship Aztec Gods - with the offering of Central American blood.”

 Julio Godoy, former journalist for Guatemalan newspaper ’La Epoca’, writing in 1989, the year after the paper’s offices were blown up by government forces.
“Baghdad should not be expected to deliberately provoke military confrontations with anyone. Its interests are best served now and in the immediate future by peace. Revenues from oil sales could put it in the front ranks of nations economically. A stable Middle East is conducive to selling oil; disruption has a long-range adverse effect on the oil market which would hurt Iraq. Force is only likely if the Iraqis feel seriously threatened. It is our belief that Iraq is basically committed to a non aggressive strategy, and that it will, over the course of the next few years, considerably reduce the size of its military. Economic conditions practically mandate such action. There seems no doubt that Iraq would like to demobilise now that the war [with Iran] has ended. The Ba’ath Party argue that they should be allowed to invest in economic recovery and industrialisation so that they can become productive again and pay off their debts.”

 ’Iraqi Power and US Security in the Middle East’, a study issued in February 1990 by the Strategic Studies Institute of the US Army War College
“Secure supplies of energy are essential to our prosperity and security. The concentration of 65 percent of the world’s known oil reserves in the Persian Gulf means we must continue to ensure reliable access to competitively priced oil and a prompt, adequate response to any major oil supply disruption.”

 from ’National Security Strategy of the United States’, White House publication, March 1990
“Aerosol DU (Depleted Uranium) exposures to soldiers on the battlefield could be significant with potential radiological and toxicological effects. [...] Under combat conditions, the most exposed individuals are probably ground troops that re-enter a battlefield following the exchange of armour-piercing munitions. [...] We are simply highlighting the potential for levels of DU exposure to military personnel during combat that would be unacceptable during peacetime operations. [...DU is..]... a low level alpha radiation emitter which is linked to cancer when exposures are internal, [and] chemical toxicity causing kidney damage. [...] Short term effects of high doses can result in death, while long term effects of low doses have been linked to cancer. [...] Our conclusion regarding the health and environmental acceptability of DU penetrators assume both controlled use and the presence of excellent health physics management practices. Combat conditions will lead to the uncontrolled release of DU. [...] The conditions of the battlefield, and the long term health risks to natives and combat veterans may become issues in the acceptability of the continued use of DU kinetic penetrators for military applications.”

 excerpts from the July 1990 Science and Applications International Corporation report: ’ Kinetic Energy Penetrator Environment and Health Considerations’, as included in Appendix D - US Army Armaments, Munitions and Chemical Command report: ’Kinetic Energy Penetrator Long Term Strategy Study, July 1990’

These documents state clearly and equivocally that the US army was well aware of the radioactive and toxic dangers of Depleted Uranium ammunition long before the first shots of the war were fired.
“We do not have any defence treaties with Kuwait, and there are no special defence or security commitments to Kuwait.”

 Margaret Tutweiller, US State Department spokeswoman, 24th July 1990, nine days before Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait
“President Bush is an intelligent man. He is not going to declare an economic war against Iraq. [...] I admire your extraordinary efforts to rebuild your country. I know you need funds. We understand that, and our opinion is that you should have the opportunity to rebuild your country. But we have no opinion on Arab-Arab conflicts like your border disagreement with Kuwait. James Baker [US Secretary of State] has directed our official spokesmen to emphasise this instruction [...] when we see the Iraqi point of view that the measures taken by the United Arab Emirates and Kuwait are, in the final analysis, tantamount to military aggression against Iraq, then it is reasonable for me to be concerned.”

 April Glaspie, US Ambassador to Iraq, in conversation with Saddam Hussein, US State Department transcripts, 25th July 1990, eight days before the invasion
HAMILTON: “Do we have a commitment to our friends in the Gulf in the event that they are engaged in oil or territorial disputes with their neighbours?”

KELLY:“As I said, Mr. Chairman, we have no defence treaty relationships with any of the countries. We have historically avoided taking a position on border disputes or on internal OPEC deliberations, but we certainly, as have all administrations, resoundingly called for the peaceful settlement of disputes and differences in the area.”

HAMILTON: “If Iraq, for example, charged across the border into Kuwait, for whatever reason, what would be our position with regard to the use of US forces?”

KELLY:“That, Mr. Chairman, is a hypothetical or a contingency, the kind of which I can’t get into. Suffice it to say, we would be extremely concerned, but I can not get into the realm of ’what if...’ answers.”

HAMILTON: “In that circumstance, is it correct to say, however, that we do not have a treaty commitment which would obligate us to engage US forces?”

KELLY: “That is correct.”

 Question and answer session between US Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern Affairs John Kelly and Representative Lee Hamilton, July 31st 1990, two days before the invasion. French researcher Pierre Salinger claimed in his 1991 book ’Secret Dossier - The Hidden Agenda behind the Gulf War’ that this exchange was broadcast on the BBC World Service and heard in Iraq.
“Obviously, I didn’t think, and nobody else did, that the Iraqis were going to take ALL of Kuwait.”

 April Glaspie, accidentally revealing US compicity, interview with The New York Times, 20th September 1990, seven weeks after the invasion
“Just watch. Everything...everything.”

 George Bush, in response to press enquiry if US enforcement of sanctions would include food and essentials, 14th August 1990
“We agreed with the American side that it was important to take advantage of the deteriorating economic situation in Iraq in order to put pressure on that country’s government to delineate our common border. The CIA gave us its view of appropriate means of pressure, saying that broad co-operation should be initiated between us, on condition that such activities are co-ordinated at a high level.”

 Memo submitted by Iraq to the UN in late August 1990, after their invasion of Kuwait. Dated 22nd November 1989, it was a record of a meeting between William Webster, Director of the CIA, and Kuwaiti officials. The CIA disputed the memo’s authenticity, but many experts have since vouched that it was genuine.
“That’s a nice list of targets, but that’s not enough. [...] [It is also important to target] ...what is unique about Iraqi culture, that they put very high value on, that psychologically would make an impact on the population and regime. [....] If push came to shove, the cutting edge would be downtown Baghdad. If I want to hurt you, it would be at home, not out in the woods someplace.”

 General Michael Dugan, US Airforce Chief of Staff , as quoted in The Washington Post, 15th September 1990. He was removed from his post shortly afterwards by US Secretary of Defence Dick Cheney, describing Dugan’s comments as ’...inappropriate...’
“We’re dealing with Hitler revisited.””

 Former US President George Bush, describing Saddam Hussein, October 15th, 1990. Bush later retracted the statement under criticism that it belittled the Holocaust.
“That was the most expensive ’no’ vote you ever cast.”

 US Ambassador Pickering to Yemeni Ambassador Abdallah Saleh al-Ashtol, after Yemen voted against Resolution 678, 29th November 1990. The US $70 million aid package to Yemen was cancelled the following day. 900,000 Yemeni migrant workers were later expelled from Saudi Arabia and Kuwait. Yemen’s economy was devastated as a result.
“We have only friendship for the people in Iraq.”

 George Bush, November 1990
“Every Iraqi soldier bleeding from every orifice.....”

 General Norman Schwarzkopf, describing his war aims, November 1990
“We didn’t see anything to indicate an Iraqi force in Kuwait of even 20% the size the administration claimed.”

 Peter Zimmerman, formerly of the US Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, and an unidentified Defence Intelligence Agency analyst, examining Soviet Satellite photos of the allegedly huge Iraqi troop build up, article by Jean Heller ’Public doesn’t get the picture with satellite photos’, The St. Petersburg Times, 6th January 1991
“It is said by some that you do not understand just how isolated Iraq is and what Iraq faces as a result......but unless you withdraw from Kuwait completely and without condition, you will lose more than Kuwait......the choice is yours to make. What is at stake demands that no opportunity be lost to avoid a certain calamity for the people of Iraq [....] Iraq is already feeling the sanctions mandated by the UN. Should war come, it would be a far greater tragedy for you and your country [....] I write this letter not to threaten, but to inform.”

 George Bush’s letter to Saddam Hussein, 9th January 1991
“I would like to tell you in all sincerity and seriousness that we would have no problems implementing legitimacy and the rules of justice and fairness if these principles were to be honoured with regard to all regional conflicts. [....] However, we do not want to see these principles implemented with regard to a single issue....this would mean double standards were at work. If you are willing to work to achieve peace, justice, stability and security in the whole region, then you would find us at the forefront of those willing to co-operate with you in this regard.”

 Tariq Aziz, Iraqi Foreign minister, in conversation with US Secretary of State James Baker in Geneva, 9th January 1991. Baker announced at the press conference afterwards: “The conclusion is clear. Saddam Hussein continues to reject a diplomatic solution.”
“If Kuwait grew carrots, we wouldn’t give a damn.”

 Lawrence Korb, former US Assistant Secretary of Defence, January 1991
“I venture to say that if Kuwait produced bananas, instead of oil, we would not have 400,000 American troops there today.”

 US Congressman Stokes (Ohio), 12th January 1991
“[Bombing missions were a] turkey shoot...it’s almost like you flipped on the light in the kitchen at night and the cockroaches start scurrying, and we’re killing them.”

 US Pilot Colonel Richard White, quoted in The Independent, 6th February 1991
“It wasn’t really a war. A war is when TWO armies are fighting.”

 Bill Hicks, American comedian, from the album ’RELENTLESS’, released in 1992
“It’s a paradox that the UN, who authorised the use of force in the Gulf, are totally unable to stop it.”

The American military machine is in full flood....diplomacy has gone out of the window. The Americans have got the ability, with the British, to drag this out at the United Nations. They’ve got the ability to interpret United Nations Resolutions as they want, until they are satisfied that they have destroyed the Iraqi military machine. And it’s quite clear, from talking to UN delegates here that that’s absolutely what they intend to do.”

I’m up at the United Nations at the moment, which is due to go into session fifteen minutes ago and hasn’t. Quite frankly the United Nations doesn’t matter anymore. Somebody said to me a couple of hours ago, perhaps they should sell the building for the time being to the Japanese, and they can turn it into a pizza parlour. And they were serious.”

 Keith Graves, UN correspondent for the BBC, three separate reports for BBC television news, February 27th-29th 1991
“There has been and continues to be a concern regarding the impact of DU on the environment. Therefore, if no-one makes a case for the effectiveness of DU on the battlefield, DU rounds may become politically unacceptable and thus be deleted from the arsenal. I believe we should keep this sensitive issue in mind when action reports are written.”

 Lt. Col. M.V. Ziehmn, Los Alamos National Laboratory memorandum, 1st March 1991
“Political meetings with them would not be appropriate for our policy at this time.”

 Richard Boucher, US State Department spokesman, 14th March 1991, in reference to the US refusal to even meet with the Iraqi democratic opposition leaders whilst the Iraqi rebellion was brutally crushed in the South of the country
“This is a new kind of war which understands and takes advantage of technological advances. The situation is deteriorating rapidly and it will get worse in the months ahead.”

 Save The Children ’Iraq Situation Report,’ March 1991
“You asked me to travel, as a matter of urgency, to Iraq. It should be said at once that nothing we had seen or read had quite prepared us for this particular form of devastation which has now befallen the country. [...] Most means of modern life have been destroyed. [...] The authorities are as yet scarcely able to measure the dimensions of the calamity, much less respond to its consequences. The recent conflict has wrought near apocalyptic results; Iraq has been relegated to a pre-industrial age.

All electrically operated installations have ceased to function. Food can not be preserved, water can not be purified, sewage can not be pumped away. Nine thousand homes are destroyed or damaged beyond repair. The flow of food through the private sector has been reduced to a trickle; many food prices are already beyond the purchasing power of most Iraqi families. The mission recommends that sanctions in respect of food supplies should be immediately removed.

Drastic international measures are most urgent. The Iraqi people face further catastrophe, epidemic and famine, if massive life supporting needs are not met. The long summer is only weeks away. Time is short.”

 Martti Ahtisaari, UN Under Secretary for Administration and Management, March 20th 1991. Ahtisaari was the first UN official to visit post-war Iraq.
“The time of reconstruction and recovery should not be the occasion for vengeful actions against a nation forced to war as a result of a dictator’s ambition.”

 James Baker, US Secretary of State, addressing US Congress, March 1991
“That’s not really a number I’m terribly interested in.”

 General Colin Powell, Chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, on being asked his assessment of Iraqi military and civilian casualties, April 1991
“In every city we visited, we documented severe damage to homes, electrical plants, fuel storage facilities, civilian factories, hospitals, churches, civilian airports, vehicles, transportation facilities, food storage and food testing laboratories, grain silos, animal vaccination centres, schools, communication towers, civilian government office buildings, and stores. Almost all facilities we saw had been bombed two or three times, ensuring that they could not be repaired. Most of the bridges we saw had been bombed from both ends.”

 Adeeb Abed and Gavrielle Gemma, Independent Commission of Inquiry staff members, fact find finding trip to Iraq, April 3rd-14th 1991
“All possible sanctions will be maintained until Saddam Hussein is gone.”

 Marlin Fitzwater, White House Press Spokesman, May 1991
“Iraqis will be made to pay the price while Saddam Hussein is in power. Any easing of sanctions will be considered only when there is a new government.”

 Robert Gates, US National Security Advisor, Los Angeles Times, 9th May 1991
“[Britain will veto any UN attempt to weaken sanctions] for so long as Saddam Hussein remains in power.”

 John Major, British Prime Minister, 10th May 1991
“Gulf lesson one is the value of air power...[....]...it was right on target from day one. The Gulf war taught us that we must retain combat superiority in the skies. [....] Our air strikes were the most effective, yet humane, in the history of warfare.”

 George Bush, 29th May 1991
“Many of the targets were chosen only secondarily to contribute to the military defeat of Iraq. [...] Military planners hoped the bombing would amplify the economic and psychological impact of international sanctions on Iraqi society. [....] Because of these goals, damage to civilian structures and interests, invariably described by briefers during the war as ’collateral’ and unintended, were sometimes neither. [....] They deliberately did great harm to Iraq’s ability to support itself as an industrial society.”

 from ’Allied Air War Struck Broadly in Iraq; Officials Acknowledge Strategy Went Beyond Purely Military Targets’ Article by Barton Gellman, The Washington Post, 23rd June 1991
“Saddam Hussein cannot restore his own electricity. He needs help. If there are political objectives that the UN coalition has, it can say: ’Saddam, when you agree to do these things, we will allow people to come in and fix your electricity.’ It gives us long-term leverage.”

 US Colonel John A. Warden III, as quoted in Gellman’s article, The Washington Post, 23rd June 1991
“What were we trying to do with the sanctions? Help out the Iraqi people? No, what we were doing with the attacks on the infrastructure was to accelerate the effect of sanctions.”

 Unidentified Pentagon planner, as quoted in Gellman’s article, The Washington Post, 23rd June 1991
“There is a clear and undeniable humanitarian need in Iraq. It is absurd and indefensible for the UN to pay for these needs when numerous other urgent crises and disasters, from Bangladesh to the Horn of Africa, cry out for our attention. Iraq has considerable oil reserves and should pay to meet these needs itself.”

 UN field study of water and sanitation, food, health and energy; submitted by the Secretary General to the Sanctions Committee, 22nd July 1991
“Sooner or later, Mr. Bush argued, sanctions would force Mr. Hussein’s generals to bring him down, and then Washington would have the best of all worlds: an iron-fisted Iraqi junta without Saddam Hussein. [A return to the days when Saddam’s] iron fist held Iraq together, much to the satisfaction of the American allies Turkey and Saudi Arabia.”

 Thomas Friedman, article in The New York Times, July 1991. Two years later, in a rare moment of brutal honesty, Friedman wrote : “It has always been American policy that the iron-fisted Mr. Hussein plays a useful role in holding Iraq together.”
“[Iraq is like a medieval city under siege]....cut off from outside assistance; its population deprived of adequate food, water, medical care and the means to produce for its subsistence, is condemned to perish. It is only a matter of time.”

 Warren J. Hamerman, International Progress Organisation, in testimony before the UN Organisation on Prevention of Discrimination and Protection of Minorities’ 43rd session, 13th August 1991
“Unless sanctions are eased quickly, Iraq will face malnutrition, disease and a food emergency unprecedented in modern times.”

 Michael Priestly, UN official, quoted in The Independent, 3rd September 1991
“Is it your aim to destroy Iraqi industry or implement resolution 687? If your aim is to carry out 687, then you have our approval. But if your objective is to annihilate Iraqi industry and deny Iraq the chance of becoming a prosperous industrial country, that would be a different matter.”

 Tariq Aziz, Deputy Iraqi Prime Minster, statement published in Baghdad newspapers in response to continued US threats of new attacks if Iraq fails to comply with weapons disclosure, October 1991
“In the most lackadaisical and morally laid back way, we are killing people.....small, brown children beyond the reach of our shrivelled imaginations.”

 Edward Pearce, Journalist, article in ’The Guardian’ entitled ’Death and Indecency in a time of Cholera,’ 25th October 1991
“Millions of innocent people are suffering and that is intolerable. They are the last in the nutcracker. They have not been able to influence events, but my God they are being squeezed. [...] There is no way the infrastructural problems can be solved by the agencies alone.”

 Lord Judd, director of OXFAM, 20th November 1991
“The US has always regarded international laws as an annoying encumbrance, unless they can be used to advantage against an enemy.”

 Professor Noam Chomsky, Author, ’Deterring Democracy’ 1991
“What has been destroyed is through the peaceful means of inspection. It is that way to destroy weapons, and not through bombing and attacks.”

 Rolf Ekeus, UNSCOM Weapons Inspectors Chairman, March 1992
“[The need for the agreement of every member of the Committee]....makes the work much more difficult......you could not necessarily respond very efficiently to the needs of the population.”

 Peter Hohenfeller, Former Chairman of the Sanctions Committee, May 20th 1992
“Unborn children of the region [are] being asked to pay the highest price, the integrity of their DNA.”

 Ross B. Mirkarimi, The Arms Control Research Centre, from his report: ’The Environmental and Human Health Impacts of the Gulf Region with Special Reference to Iraq.’ May 1992
“The results of our study contradict this claim [that use of precision weapons had produced limited damage to the civilian population] and confirm that the casualties of war extend far beyond those caused directly by warfare.”

 Dr. Eric Hoskins, Harvard University health specialist, in his report ’Children, War and Sanctions,’ June 1992
“The situation which the Iraqi people is suffering is extremely tragic.....all the medical contributions of humanitarian organisations and bodies meet only a small proportion of the actual needs of drugs and medical services. [...] It appears that the work of the Sanctions Committee and the way it performs the tasks entrusted to it under the provision of SCR 661 are orientated towards the obstruction or rejection of any request by Iraq that enters into the area of essential civilian needs of a humanitarian nature, which has led to the increasing danger faced by vulnerable categories.”

 Iraqi UN Ambassador Abd al-Amir al-Anbari, report to the UN Secretary General of a study prepared by the Iraqi Ministry of Foreign Affairs on the workings of the Sanctions Committee, July 1992
“[There is]...nothing to prevent the Iraqi government using its own resources to pay for humanitarian supplies.”

 Douglas Hogg, Minister of State at the British Foreign Office, February 1993. Hogg does not mention that all Iraqi exports are still prohibited and all assets still frozen.
“The measures taken by the world community are not aimed at the Iraqi people. Iraq may import, and indeed does, foodstuffs, medicines and essential civilian consumer goods.”

 Ronald Newman, head of the Northern Gulf Bureau of the US State Department, February 1993
“Three years of sanctions have created circumstances in Iraq where the majority of the civilian population are now living in poverty. The greatest threat to the health and well-being of the Iraqi people remains the difficult economic conditions created by internationally mandated sanctions and by the infrastructural damage wrought in the 1991 military conflict. [...] One fundamental contradiction remains: that politically motivated sanctions (which by definition are imposed to create hardship) can not be implemented in a manner which spares the vulnerable.”

 Dr. Eric Hoskins, UNICEF commissioned report, later shelved, February 1993
“It is inconceivable that Saddam Hussein could remain in power if he complied with all UN resolutions.”

 Dee Dee Myers, White House spokeswoman, March 1993
“[To swallow the US case]...as it stands requires a leap of faith and a complete suspension of political cynicism.”

 The New York Times, commenting on Madeleine Albright’s attempts to justify the latest Cruise missile attacks, June 27th 1993
“We will not hesitate to use force if necessary.....[but the West]...has no quarrel with the Iraqi people. They have suffered enough.”

 Douglas Hurd, British Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs, June 1993
“It is a country whose economy has been devastated....above all by the continued sanctions....which have virtually paralysed the whole economy and generated persistent deprivation, chronic hunger, endemic under-nutrition, massive unemployment and widespread human suffering. A vast majority of the Iraqi population is living under the most deplorable conditions and is simply engaged in a struggle for survival. A grave humanitarian tragedy is unfolding....the nutritional status of the population continues to deteriorate at an alarming rate. Large numbers of Iraqis now have food intakes lower than those populations in the disaster stricken African countries.”

 Food and Agriculture Organisation / World Food Programme report ’Food Supply Situation and Crop Outlook in Iraq’, July 1993
“[Iraq is]...18.8 million people in a refugee camp, one third of which are children - of whom at least 100,000 are now dead, not from war but from hunger.”

 Health expert Dr. Salman Rawaf, July 1993
“We do not believe that an independent Kurdistan is possible.”

 Douglas Hurd, on Turkish television, January 1994
“Our interests lie in reverting to Soviet alliances [with Iraq] because that’s where the money is.”

 Unidentified Russian diplomat, January 1994, quoted in ’The Scourging of Iraq’ by Geoff Simons.
“The claim by the Western governments that food and drugs flow freely into Iraq is not true. I have seen telexes and documents that showed clearly that the British and the American government interfered with the flow of crucial drugs into Iraq. That is unquestionable. [.....The sanctions] would not be lifted even if Iraq satisfies the UN Security Council on every single sanction report....the Americans are making it clear that the sanctions are not going to be lifted under any circumstances.”

 Tim Llewellyn, BBC Middle East correspondent speaking at a meeting of the Council for the Advancement of Arab-British Understanding, 16th February 1994
“The Iraqi government complies with UN resolutions not because they have seen the error of their ways, but because they are in such desperate straits.”

 Unidentified Western diplomat, March 1994, quoted in ’The Scourging of Iraq’ by Geoff Simons
“The stakes are too high to give Mr. Hussein the benefit of the doubt, or to let our policy be dictated by commercial interests or simple fatigue. [Compliance with UN resolutions is] a cynical tactic.”

 Warren Christopher, US Secretary of State, 29th April 1994
“Working in paediatric departments in Iraq has become a daily nightmare. Hospitals depend entirely on irregular and spasmodic donations brought in by charities which are like a drop of water on parched earth. In the diabetic clinic we have to divide four small bottles of insulin between 20 or 30 children while trying to clam their parents’ terror. For children with leukaemia to begin treatment, parents are forced to send money to buy drugs from Jordan. Parents sell their belongings and even their homes, and after bringing in the drugs the children are dying from uncontrolled infection.”

 Dr. Harvey Marcovitch, British physician, in a letter to The Times: ’Saddam’s atrocity...or ours?’ and quoting an Iraqi doctor, May 31st 1994
“The difficulty with cut-off points is that all the Iraqis have to do is sit back and be good boys.’

 Unidentified British official, September 13th 1994, quoted in ’The Scourging of Iraq’ by Geoff Simons after Rolf Ekeus of UNSCOM announces his intention to commence a six month weapons monitoring period, after a which a recommendation for lifting sanctions could be made.
“We do want Iraq to see light at the end of the tunnel......without progress Iraq can conclude it is not worth co-operating.”

 Rolf Ekeus, UNSCOM, September 1994
“Before any individual or company can talk to an Iraqi buyer, they must apply for a licence to negotiate. Licences to negotiate can take three to four weeks to issue. Only when the licence is issued can you start talking without breaking the law. Once the buyer and seller agree [a price] the seller must then apply for a supply licence, which can take up to twenty weeks to issue. In the meantime the Iraqi Dinar is suffering daily devaluation and inflation beyond control. Twenty weeks later the seller receives the supply licence by which time the buyer’s situation has changed. This forces the buyer to cancel the order, or, at best, reduce the quality or quantity of the goods in order to raise the hard currency needed to finance the purchase. But [the Sanctions Committee insist that] any change to the application means that the entire process must start again.”

 Unidentified British businessman describes the tortuous process of attempting to send medical supplies to Iraq, October 1994, quoted in ’The Scourging of Iraq’ by Geoff Simons
“We will not allow Saddam Hussein to defy the will of the US and the international community.”

 Bill Clinton, 6th October 1994
“They [the Iraqis] have done an excellent job. Our commission is convinced it’s all over. It is watertight. We have faith in the work we have done.”

 Jaako Ylitalo, Chief UNSCOM field officer in Baghdad, 13th October 1994
“[There would still be an] ...Iraqi threat when British and American soldiers have gone home.....Saddam’s mailed fist will still be over Kuwait and her neighbours.”

 Douglas Hurd, in response to Iraq’s official recognition of Kuwait as a sovereign state, 15th October 1994
“There is no occasion for doing Saddam Hussein any favours at the present time.”

 Warren Christopher, whilst the US threatens Iraq with fresh air attacks, 16th October 1994
“We recognise this area as vital to US interests and we will behave, with others, multilaterally when we can and unilaterally when we must.”

 Madeleine Albright, US Ambassador to the UN, describing unauthorised bombing and air patrols of Iraq by US aircraft to the UN Security Council, 21st October 1994
“Sanctions will never be lifted because the US and Britain do not trust Saddam not to pose a threat.”

“[Sanctions cannot be lifted] ...whatever the degree of Iraqi compliance with UN resolutions as long as President Saddam remains in power.”

“Washington is determined to maintain sanctions and avoid discussion of the underlying issues.”

 Two articles in The Guardian and one from ’Gulf Newsletter’, November 1994
“A severe deterioration is detectable in all the hospitals visited by MAI. The team had not expected to see such an extreme reduction of resources, given the desperate situation of the hospitals in April; further deterioration had been hard to imagine. Basic medicines are absent, routine surgery impossible, and more and more equipment is breaking down and put out of use because of the unavailability of spare parts. Children are referred to Baghdad because treatment is unavailable at their local hospital, but the Baghdad hospitals can not provide for them either.”

 Medical Aid For Iraq report, December 1994
“[Not]...a timely action....neither helpful nor constructive...”

 Christine Shelley, US State Department spokeswoman, rebuking a French initiative to lift sanctions, 6th January 1995
“This is a leopard that has not changed its spots. Pressure has got us to where we are now and it needs to be maintained.”

 Unidentified British Foreign Office official, in response to French initiative, 24th February 1995
“Any modification of the sanctions regime that ameliorates the pressure that Saddam Hussein must feel is not at this time warranted.”

 Mike McCurry, White House Spokesman, March 1995
“We are determined to ensure that the whole of Iraq’s biological capability is detected and destroyed before there can be any question of adjustment to the sanctions regime....we shall continue with good reason to approach sanctions rigorously in the interest of Iraq’s peoples.”

 John Major, British Prime Minister, March 1995
“Being in casualty is like living in a nightmare. The severe shortage of drugs means we can do very little to help. Children die in front of me. The parents ask why and I can not answer them. Each night I pray for the embargo to be lifted.”

 Dr. Tariq Abbas Hady, quoted in an article in The Sunday Times, 12th March 1995
“[There is no point in adopting a resolution merely as].....a public relations tool enabling the US and Britain to continue blaming Iraq for hardships caused by sanctions.”

 Unidentified French and Russian diplomats describe Resolution 986 (The Oil-For-Food Programme), quoted in The Independent, 14th April 1995
“Our conclusion, and what we will present to the Security Council, is that we feel confident that, with the exception of the biological area, Iraq will not be able to develop any weapons of mass destruction or long range missiles without being detected by the international controls.”

 Rolf Ekeus, May 1995
“Soldiers may be incidentally exposed to DU from dust and smoke on the battlefield. The Army Surgeon General has determined that it is unlikely that these soldiers will receive a significant internal DU exposure. Medical follow-up is not warranted for soldiers who experience incidental exposure from dust or smoke.”

“Since DU weapons are openly available on the world arms market, DU weapons will be used in future conflicts. The number of DU patients on future battlefields probably will be significantly higher because other countries will use systems containing DU.”

“DU is a low-level radioactive waste, and, therefore, must be disposed of in a licensed repository.”

“No international law, treaty, regulation, or custom requires the United States to remediate the Persian Gulf war battlefields.”

 Bewildering and contradictory excerpts from the SAME report by the US Army Environmental Policy Institute: ’Health and Consequences of Depleted Uranium use in the US army’, June 1995
“This is a matter that we do not contemplate because we are with the people of Iraq as much as we can until the long night of their suffering ends.”

 King Hussein of Jordan, in response to US pressure to close his border with Iraq, 18th August 1995
“The Iraqi leadership declared to me that its policy from now on is 100% implementation of the cease-fire arrangements. [SCR 687] So, with that, the Security Council, all members without exception, should have no choice about lifting the embargo.”

 Rolf Ekeus, quoted in The Times, 24th August 1995
“I am filled with shame and anger at myself, at my cowardice, my silence, my complicity with those, who, despite their claims to the contrary, have killed hundreds of thousands of civilians, without incurring the wrath of the [war crimes] tribunal of The Hague, implacably going about their dirty, evil work.”

 Yves Bonnet, Deputy French Prime Minister, describing a recent visit to Iraq, 25th August 1995
“Alarming food shortages are causing irreparable damage to an entire generation of Iraqi children. After 24 years in the field, mostly in Africa starting with Biafra, I didn’t think anything could shock me, but this was comparable to the worst scenarios I have ever seen.”

 Dieter Hannusch, Chief Emergency Support Officer, World Food Programme, WFP news update 26th September 1995
“There are actually more than four million people, a fifth of Iraq’s population, at severe nutritional risk. That number includes 2.4 million children under five, about 600,000 pregnant/nursing women and destitute women heads of households, as well as hundreds of thousands of elderly without anyone to help them. 70% of the population has little or no access to food.....nearly everyone seems to be emaciated. We are at the point of no return in Iraq. The social fabric of the nation is disintegrating. People have exhausted their ability to cope.”

 Mona Hamman, WFP Regional Manager, WFP news update, 26th September 1995
“We simply do not know if he is testing us, planning an attack on Kuwait or planning to murder more of his own people. Any action by him is madness, but then he’s mad, so who knows?”

 Unidentified Pentagon official, September 1995, as quoted in ’The Scourging of Iraq’ by Geoff Simons
“Believe me, it contains very sophisticated technology.”

 Unidentified Washington spokesman describing a corroded ’gadget’ that was fished out of the Tigris river, Baghdad, 11th October 1995, as quoted in ’The Scourging of Iraq’ by Geoff Simons
“It is generally agreed that Iraq has already destroyed all of its weapons of mass destruction, either under UN supervision, or in anticipation of allied bombing raids.”

 Article in The Guardian, 4th October 1995
“Our policy is to keep Iraq in its box.”

 Unidentified Western diplomat, article in The Guardian, 18th October 1995, as quoted in ’The Scourging of Iraq’ by Geoff Simons
“What’s the point of having this superb military that you’re always talking about if we can’t use it?”

 Madeleine Albright, to General Colin Powell who, strangely, was arguing that to deploy US troops required a political objective, as quoted in Powell’s book ’My American Journey’, 1995.
“[Deliberate destruction of public service infrastructure, notably electrical-power generation and distribution facilities, so as to] .........degrade the will of the civilian population.”

 ’Cruise Missiles: Proven Capability Should Affect Aircraft and Force Structure Requirements’ - Document 95-116. Washington, DC: General Accounting Office, 1995
“The solution lies in adequate food supplies in the country, restoring the viability of the local currency, and creating conditions for the people to acquire adequate purchasing power. But these conditions can only be fulfilled if the economy can be put back in proper shape enabling it to draw on its own resources, and that clearly can not occur as long as the embargo remains in force.”

 UN Food and Agricultural Organisation, 1995
“’The United States shifted its deterrent strategy from the defunct Soviet Union to so-called ’rogue states’ such as Iraq, Libya, Cuba and North Korea.’ AP reported. The study advocated that the US exploit its nuclear arsenal to portray itself as”...irrational and vindictive if its vital interests are attacked. [That] should be part of the national persona we project to all adversaries. [...] It hurts to portray ourselves as too fully rational and cool headed. [...] The fact that some elements [of the US government] may appear to be potentially out of control can be beneficial to creating and reinforcing fears and doubts within the minds of an adversary’s decision makers.”

 Excerpt from US Strategic Command report ’ Essentials of Post Cold War Deterrence,’ 1995, as reported by Associated Press and later cited in ’Rogue States’, article by Noam Chomsky, 1999. The report resurrected former US President Richard Nixon’s ’Mad-Man’ theory of the 1970’s, designed to prevent the Soviets from interfering in US policy.
“Depleted Uranium is more of a problem than we thought when it was developed. But it was developed according to standards and was thought through very carefully. It turned out perhaps to be wrong.”

 Brent Scowcroft, former US National Security Advisor, ’Riding The Storm’ - Channel 4 documentary, 3rd January 1996
“The level of malnutrition is on a par with famine ravaged countries like Sudan.”

 John English, British Red Cross, 29th January 1996
“The only people who are told what is going on are the Americans and the British. We have asked them for a copy of the draft agreement and a copy of the 20 conditions they have set, but we have not been given anything.”

 Unidentified member of the Sanctions Committee, describing US and UK insistence on new conditions for Resolution 986, article in The Guardian, April 1996
Stahl: “The question is, are they [sanctions] missing the mark? ....We have heard that half a million children have died. I mean, this is more children than died in Hiroshima. Is the price worth it?”

“This is a very hard choice, but the price....we think the price is worth it.”

 Interviewer Leslie Stahl questions Madeleine Albright, CBS Television ’60 Minutes’, 12th May 1996
“It would be hard to imagine sanctions being lifted whilst Saddam Hussein is still in power.”

 Malcolm Rifkind, British Foreign Secretary, quoted in The Guardian, 21st May 1996
“Ministers deliberately misled Parliament, but did not intend to mislead Parliament.”

 Conclusion of Lord Chief Justice Scott’s ’British Arms to Iraq’ Inquiry, June 1996
“[It was]..the rigorous implementation of a flexible interpretation.”

 Michael Heseltine, former British MP, on being asked during the Scott inquiry why Britain was exporting ’dual-use’ items to Iraq in breach of the government’s own ban on military sales.
“One of the charges at the time was that in some way, because I had been Foreign Secretary, Chancellor of the Exchequer, Prime Minister, I must have known what was going on.”

 John Major, in response to Lord Chief Justice Scott’s ’ British Arms to Iraq’ enquiry, 1992
“Iraqis are congenital liars.”

 Article in The Observer, 9th June 1996
“[Iraq is trying ] ...to turn this humanitarian exception into a partial lifting of sanctions.”

 James Rubin, US spokesman at the UN, justifying the US rejection of Iraq’s plans for food distribution under Resolution 986
“Limited but clear objectives...to make Saddam pay a price for the latest act of brutality, reducing his ability to threaten his neighbours and America’s interests.”

 Bill Clinton, justifying renewed US air strikes, 3rd September 1996
“It’s all very helpful for oil prices, and with the winter coming and low stocks, the price strength will remain.”

 Irene Himona, oil analyst with Societe Generale Strauss Turnbull, quoted in The Independent, 3rd September 1996
“Sanctions, as is generally recognised, are a blunt instrument. They raise the ethical question of whether suffering inflicted on vulnerable groups in the target country is a legitimate means of exerting pressure on political leaders whose behaviour is unlikely to be affected by the plight of their subjects.”

 Nizar Hamdoon, Iraqi Ambassador to the UN, addressing the Security Council, and quoting the UN Secretary General’s observation made in 1995, 29th September 1996
“By so grudgingly acquiescing in it [implementing Resolution 986] the US in effect concedes what others have long proclaimed: prolonged sanctions do not punish President Saddam, only his people.....The US has floundered about without any discernible plan for the future of Iraq. As long as that is so, sanctions will come under the increasing assault of moral imperatives.”

 Nizar Hamdoon, Iraqi Ambassador to the UN, addressing the Security Council, 29th September 1996
“The majority of the population are living below the poverty line and malnutrition is rampant with over 50% of women and children receiving half their calorific needs.

It is hard to think of a more grave breach of child rights in modern history than the suffering and death of hundreds of thousands of children under the age of five caused by a political dispute between ’their’ government and the international community. The [UN] Security Council shoulders a large measure of responsibility for these violations by maintaining sanctions without taking strong measures to prevent this suffering.”

 Centre For Social and Economic Rights (New York), 1996
“The full ramifications...specifically the time lag between the initial flow of oil and the actual delivery of foodstuffs, are only now becoming clear. I have had strong concerns about the pace at which the provisions of SCR 986 are being implemented. [...] The amount actually available for operational and administrative expenses has been very limited. Several agencies have used their own funds to meet these costs. It appears unlikely that all the humanitarian goods in the distribution plan will be delivered and distributed within the initial 180 days established by the resolution.”

 Kofi Annan, UN Secretary General, 10th March 1997
“We do not agree with those nations who argue that if Iraq complies with its obligations concerning weapons of mass destruction, sanctions should be lifted.”

 Madeleine Albright, addressing a symposium on Iraq at Georgetown University, USA, 26th March 1997
“Children will continue to die after the agreement, since it does not correspond to the minimum needs of the civilian population. It is a temporary and feeble measure, and it should not be characterised as otherwise.”

 Iraqi Minister for Foreign Affairs Al-Sahaf describing Resolution 986 to the UN Sub-commission on Prevention of Discrimination and Protection of Minorities, 25th April 1997
“We are not saying Saddam is totally respectful of human rights, but he is the one who is supporting us. Saddam is better than the UN and he is much better than Turkey.”

 Ahmet Vurgun, Kurdish refugee crossing to the border from Turkey into Iraq to seek sanctuary, as witnessed by the UN High Commissioner for Refugess, May 1997
“Saddam Hussein is the reason God created Cruise Missiles. Cruise Missiles are simply the only way to deal with him. [...] If and when Saddam pushes beyond the brink, and we get that one good shot, let’s make sure it’s a head shot.”

 Thomas Friedman, New York Times columnist, from his article ’Head Shot,’ 6th Novermber 1997
“Sanctions will be there until the end of time, or as long as he [Hussein] lasts.”

 Former US President Bill Clinton, quoted in The New York Times, 23rd November 1997
“The Arab Monetary Fund has estimated the value of destroyed infrastructure and economic assets attributable to the 1991 Gulf war at $232 billion.”

 Dr. Eric Hoskins, in his report ’Political Gain and Civilian Pain’, December 1997
“Britain has been a major force in world affairs for several centuries. No British Patriot should be willing to give up that status.”

 Tony Blair, British Prime Minister, 1997
“[I advocate] bombing Iraq over and over and over again.”

 Thomas Friedman, New York Times columnist, from his article ’America’s Multiple Choice Quiz,’ 31st January 1998
“The United States did want Saddam Hussein to go, they just didn’t want the Iraqi people to take over.”

 Peter Jennings, ABC News, 7th February 1998
“I am willing to make a bet to anyone here that we care more about the Iraqi people than Saddam Hussein does.”

 Madeleine Albright, open meeting in Town Hall, Columbus, Ohio, 18th February 1998. Over a million Iraqis had died from sanctions and bombing at the time of her statement.
“If we have to use force it is because we are America! We are the indispensible nation. We stand tall, and we see further into the future.”

 Madeleine Albright, NBC Television ’Today’ show, 19th February 1998
“The new Oil-For-Food deal could solve the humanitarian crisis. It could pay for the food and medicines that the Iraqi people need so badly...could restore clean water and proper sanitation to hundreds and thousands of Iraqis, restore electricity to their homes and help the farmers increase their output.”

 Robin Cook, British Foreign Secretary, article in The Guardian, entitled ’Saddam is to Blame,’ 20th February 1998 (Cook does not mention the other 21.5 million strong population.)
“The US has to make clear to Iraq and US allies that [....] America will use force, without negotiation, hesitation or UN approval.”

 Thomas Friedman, New York Times columnist, from his article ’Craziness Pays,’ 24th February 1998
“We wish him well, and when he comes back we will see what he has brought and how it fits with our national interest.”

 Madeleine Albright, describing UN Secretary General Kofi Annan’s diplomatic mission to Iraq, February 1998. On Annan’s return, having reached an agreement with the government of Iraq, Albright re-iterated:”It is possible he will come with something we don’t like, in which case we will pursue our national interest.”
“To say they [UNSCOM] have found enough weapons to kill the world several times over is equivalent to the statement that a man who produces a million sperm a day can thus produce a million babies a day. The problem in both cases is one of delivery systems.”

 Dr. Julian Perry Robinson, Science Policy Research Unit, rebuffing British prime Minister Tony Blair’s assertions about the threat of Iraqi weapons, article in The Independent, 7th March 1998
“Gas masks are not required [...] and are not distributed to Embassy staff. [The Embassy is]....not even interested in finding a source for gas masks... [due to UNSCOM’s presence in Iraq and]...the fact that biological and chemical warheads are very ineffective.”

 Jim Larocco, US Ambassador to Kuwait, briefing US businessmen visiting Kuwait, as quoted in The Independent, 7th March 1998
“Saddam Hussein already has the resources to enable the Iraqi health service to function properly. The government shares your concerns about the humanitarian situation in Iraq and has sympathy for the people of Iraq. Sanctions are aimed at the Iraq regime and not at them.”

 Middle East Department of the British Foreign Office, responding to a letter from an anti-sanctions campaigner, 18th May 1998
“The truth of the matter is that the government of Iraq has no role, however small, which allows it to respond to the allegations contained in claims. It is unable to give its legal and objective opinion on claims, even when those are exaggerated. The Compensation Commission decides which claims should be settled, who is authorised to submit a claim, what should be considered direct losses, and what constitutes sufficient proof. [...] These measures create a legal screen which conceals the systematic subjugation of the Iraqi people. There are no reasonable grounds for this collective punishment of the Iraqi people. If this is not done [the verification of claims in accordance with international law and the rules of justice and equity] the compensation process will become simply an organised operation to strip the Iraqi people of their property, which they desperately need in order to rebuild their society and economy.”

 Tariq Aziz, Iraqi Deputy Prime Minister expressing concerns about reparations / compensations being paid to Kuwait from the proceeds of Resolution 986, in a letter to Secretary General Kofi Annan, 27th May 1998
“We are looking at ways now, together with the Americans, of the possibility of removing Saddam Hussein altogether.”

 Tony Blair, addressing the House of Commons, July 1998
“It is important to note the order of magnitude of the weapons retained by Iraq; two thirds of the operational missile force [and] more than one half of the chemical weapons.”

 Richard Butler, Chairman of UNSCOM, article in The Guardian quoting a comment made by him in June, 5th August 1998
“If this were a five lap race, we were halfway into the fifth lap. Why stop the race when you’re getting toward the finishing line? [I am]...mystified by Baghdad’s action when resolution of several issues was near. The inspectors were apparently close, in the areas of missiles and chemical weapons, to being able to declare Iraq had complied with UN resolutions.’”

 Richard Butler, in an extraordinary about-face, quoted in The Independent, 6th August 1998
“If Iraq does not honour its agreements then it would be profoundly wrong for the international community to reward its intransigence by lifting sanctions regardless.”

 Robin Cook, article in The Times, 8th August 1998
“The discussions were certainly long winded, alternately chilling or tedious in their subject matter: exactly how many Iraqi warheads were filled with Anthrax spores before they were destroyed in 1992? Was a donkey, used in a biological experiment, tethered to a car or not? How many punctures were there in the tyres of an Iraqi convoy taking weapons to destruction pits seven years ago?”

 Article in The Independent describing the UNSCOM / Iraq negotiations, 9th August 1998
“Saddam Hussein has wrestled himself to the ground. He is stuck in a box and he has thrown away the key.”

 Madeleine Albright, quoted in the Financial Times, 10th August 1998
“I’m somebody who doesn’t support the continuation of sanctions....I think they’re a horrible tool.....sanctions only punish the people of Iraq, they don’t punish this [Iraqi] regime.”

 Scott Ritter, former team leader UNSCOM, who resigned in protest of the”...US and UK interference in my work...” BBC Radio 4, 29th September 1998
“We are in the process of destroying an entire society. It is as simple and as terrifying as that. It is illegal and immoral.”

 Denis Halliday, former UN Humanitarian Aid Co-Ordinator, in his resignation speech, 30th September 1998
“4000 to 5000 children are dying every month due to the impact of sanctions because of the breakdown of water and sanitation, inadequate diet, and the bad internal health situation.”

 Denis Halliday, 14th October 1998
“Sanctions are inhuman and what we are doing can not redress that inhumanity.”

 Margaret Hassan, CARE International Baghdad, quoted in The Independent, 15th October 1998
“I personally believe, as I think a lot of security Council members believe with 100% certainty, that Iraq being fully disarmed is never going to be possible. At the end of the day the Security Council must decide whether Iraq is disarmed to the extent that it is not a threat to its neighbours, that it has no weapons of mass destruction, and that it has no capacity to make weapons of mass destruction.”

 Kofi Annan, quoted in the International Herald Tribune, 19th October 1998
“[This figure would only have] ...helped in preventing further deterioration of the humanitarian situation.”

 Kofi Annan, report to the Security Council describing the lack of revenue available under the Oil-For-Food programme, 19th November 1998
“The most I can say is that in a number of key areas the [oil-for-food] program has stopped the situation from getting worse. In other areas it has slowed down the rate of deterioration.””

 Benon Sevan, Executive Director of the Office of the Iraq Program in the U.N. Secretariat, November 1998
“We have allowed Saddam to sell oil to buy as much food and medicine for the Iraqi people as necessary.”

 Tony Blair, November 1998
“A strong, sustained series of air strikes [....] to attack Iraq’s nuclear, chemical and biological weapons programs. Their purpose is to protect the national interest of the United States, and indeed the interests of people throughout the Middle East and around the world.”

 Bill Clinton, describing ’Operation Desert Fox’, 17th December 1998. Tony Blair, live on television, stood in front of a Christmas tree to make his statement that Britain was attacking Iraq
“[There is]...No question...[that ’Desert Fox’ was unlawful] ... It is illegal to attack with bombs targets in a sovereign country without direct authorisation from the Security Council.”

 Lord Dennis Healey, Former British Foreign Secretary, quoted in the Daily Telegraph, 21st December 1998
“World-wide, poverty is the main determinant of malnutrition and child mortality. Hence it is not surprising that artificially induced poverty by economic embargo produces the same results. Deprivation and excess deaths are real in Iraq, and I can personally attest to the devastating effects of the embargo on ordinary life from having been a member of three UN food and nutrition missions. Sanctions are not the humane alternative to war that they are purported to be, and if there were justice in this world these actions promoted by the US and Britain in the name of the UN would be seen as the crime against humanity that they are.”

 Dr. Peter Pellet, Professor of Nutrition at the University of Massachusetts, quoted in The Guardian Weekly, 10th January 1999
“[They were] surely intended and understood to be a message of contempt for the Security Council. This action is in fact a call for a lawless world in which the powerful will rule. The powerful happen to be the United States and Britain, which is by now a pathetic puppy dog that has abandoned any pretence of being an independent state.”

 Professor Noam Chomsky, article in ’Frontline’ magazine, 13th January 1999
“Since Iraq can not meet even the existing UN oil sales quotas because of the low price of crude, the practical effect would be small. But the political effect would be huge: Britain would be free of claims that it is punishing the Iraqi people.”

 Article in The Times, describing the gesture of lifting the cap on Iraqi oil sales under Resolution 986, and Britain’s support for it, 14th January 1999
“To keep pumping and exporting its oil, Iraq must upgrade and update its entire production sector. But Washington has refused to entertain such a possibility, just as it has rejected efforts to bring new fields into production.”

 Article in The Irish Times, describing US pressure on Iraq, 14th January 1999
“With Saddam rattled, now is the time to really rattle his cage. Turn up the volume on ’Radio Free Iraq’ to extra loud and call for his ouster twenty four hours a day: ”All Saddam, all the time.” Take steps to have Saddam declared a war criminal by the UN. Blow up a different power station in Iraq every week, so no-one knows when the lights will go off or who’s in charge. Offer a reward for removing Saddam from office. Use every provocation by Saddam to blow up another Iraqi general’s home

 Thomas Friedman, New York Times columnist, from his article ’Rattling the Rattler,’ 24th February 1998
“This month US policy will kill 4,500 children under the age of five in Iraq, according to UN studies. This is not foreign policy - it is state sanctioned mass murder that is nearing holocaust proportions.”

 Professor Noam Chomsky, Edward Hermann, Edward Said and Howard Zinn, letter to The Independent, 21st January 1999
“The US regrets any civilian casualties, but has no independent evidence that any Iraqis were killed.”

 Ken Bacon, US Pentagon spokesman describing US missiles that struck the al-Jumhuriya residential district of Basra, and ’unidentified’ missiles hitting the village of Abu-Khasib, January 25th 1999. The UN reported that 17 people had been killed, approx. 100 injured and approx. 45 houses damaged or destroyed.
“We have to continue making these air strikes in order to carry on with our humanitarian work.”

 George Robertson, British Minister of Defence (later to become the head of NATO), BBC Television, 28th January 1999
“The continual TV images of the West’s high-technology systems causing death and destruction to people in the Third World will not be tolerated forever by civilised people.”

 General Michael Rose, former UN Force Commander in Bosnia condemning ’Desert Fox’ and the ongoing air offensive, January 1999
“We bought seven years and that’s not bad....the longer we can fool around in the [Security] Council and keep things static the better.”

 Unidentified US official with ’..responsibility for Iraq...’, as quoted in The Washington Post, 28th January 1999
“We simply can not let two [UN] member states continue to pervert the UN into a weapon of mass destruction.”

 Denis Halliday, quoted in The Seattle Post Intelligencer, 12th February 1999
“The gravity of the situation is indisputable and can not be overstated. The magnitude of the humanitarian needs is such that they can not be met within the context of the parameters set forth in SCR 986 and succeeding SCR 1153.....nor was the programme intended to meet all the needs of the Iraqi people. [....] Given the present state of infrastructure, the revenue required for its rehabilitation is far above the funding level available under SCRs 986 and 1153. [....] Under current conditions the outlook will remain bleak and become more serious with time. The humanitarian situation will continue to be a dire one in the absence of a sustained revival of the Iraqi economy.”

 Conclusion of the UN humanitarian panel set up in late January to additionally assess needs of the 986 program, March 1999
“For a force supposedly protecting civilians, the American and British jets controlling the skies above Iraq go about their task in a peculiar manner. Their near daily attacks on the "perceived danger" of Iraqi air defences have disrupted the distribution of food and medicine, cut off the flow of oil that pays for those supplies and, on occasion, killed the people they are supposed to be protecting.”

 Article in The Economist, 6th March 1999
“[It is] a mini undeclared war.” - Unnamed US State Department official

”It’s a strategy we fell into....it’s not one we originally planned, but it’s working very, very well for us.” - Unnamed military official

 Article in The Washington Post describing new US guidelines that allow almost daily bombing, and govern how planners select Iraqi targets and how pilots responded to Iraqi actions, 7th March 1999
“Imagine the official (and thereby mainstream media) reaction if the following sentence were to appear in a prominently placed article in an Iraqi daily:
’Iraqi officials admit they have little idea what’s going on inside the United States, and attempts to organise American dissidents into an effective anti-Clinton fighting force have been disastrously unsuccessful.’
Or maybe: ’But if Iraq lets up the pressure on him, Iraqi officials say, Clinton would soon be out bullying his way around the Americas, perhaps armed with nuclear or biological weapons.’
Or possibly: ’Occasionally, as in the United States, pinprick air attacks may be needed to keep opponents in line.’
Or this whopper: ’The hundreds of Iraqi airstrikes on the United States since the zones were established are made in self-defence or occasionally in retaliation for U.S. flight violations of the zones, Iraqi officials are careful to emphasise.’”

 Eddy Tews, EAT THE STATE web site editorial, 1999
“In a confidential paper sent to the UN with the authority of the British Foreign Office Minister Derek Fatchett, the government admits "....the needs of the Iraqi people are not being met by the Oil-For-Food programme."”

 Article in The Observer, 28th March 1999
“There is adequate provision, under the Oil-For-Food deal for food and medical supplies to reach those in need.”

 Derek Fatchett, responding to anti-sanctions campaign letter, March 1999
“Despite revenue under Oil-For-Food being less than we had hoped, it still ought to be sufficient to meet the immediate needs of the Iraqi people.”

 Carol Hinchley, British Foreign Office staff member, responding to anti-sanctions campaign letter, March 1999
“If you assume lets say for the sake of argument, 2 billion dollars twice a year for 22 million people, then you are getting a per capita figure per year of 180, just under 180 dollars. Now I ask you, 180 dollars per year? That’s not a per capita income figure, that is the figure out of which everything has to be financed: from electrical services to water and sewerage, to food, to health, the lot. Now if you have 180 dollars and then the press ask me: ’...do you consider that adequate for survival...?’ I can say at the very best, that the nose is just above the water, so that you are not drowning, but over the course of years, the nose is increasingly touching that water and many people are already drowning. So it is not a figure that we can really take lightly or accept as adequate.”

 Hans Von Sponeck, Humanitarian Aid Co-ordinator for Iraq, presentation to members of the Washington Physicians for Social Responsibility delegation, Baghdad, 2nd April 1999
“Saddam now hoards vast quantities of medical supplies rather than distributing them to his people.”

 George Robertson, British Minister of Defence, 6th March 1999
“You have heard, I’m sure about the so-called overstocking [of medicine]. If you get from someone a mono-causal explanation, then start getting suspicious. It is not, I repeat not, and you can check this with my colleagues, a pre-meditated act of withholding medicines from those who should have it. It is much, much, more complex than that.”

 Hans Von Sponeck, Humanitarian Aid Co-ordinator for Iraq, presentation to members of the Washington Physicians for Social Responsibility delegation, Baghdad, 2nd April 1999
“Right now we are setting the stage for depriving another generation of the opportunity to become responsible national and international citizens of tomorrow, and that might be the most serious aspect of it all.”

 Hans Von Sponeck, Humanitarian Aid Co-ordinator for Iraq, presentation to members of the Washington Physicians for Social Responsibility delegation, Baghdad, 2nd April 1999
“I have no doubt at all that we will win. This is a battle over the values of civilisation.”

 Tony Blair, justifying the bombing of the former Yugoslavia, April 1999
“I hold the member states [of the Security Council] responsible for the sanctions regime on Iraq. I hold them responsible for the genocide that is now existing in Iraq. I hold them responsible for resolutions and implementing resolutions that undermine the spirit and the content of the UN Charter, which undermine the Declaration of Human Rights, which undermine the Convention of the Rights of the Child, and other provisions of international law which provide for economic and social well-being, and so on. I mean we have the ironic situation where Saddam Hussein himself has undermined the human rights, political rights of his own people. We in the UN and the Security Council have taken away many of the remaining rights, such as food, housing, education, opportunities, employment, well being. That’s what we’ve done. It’s a tremendous irony that the UN itself is taking away the rights of the Iraqi people.”

 Denis Halliday, in an interview with Miriam Ryle and Grant Wakefield, London, 17th April 1999
“We must teach our children to resolve their conflicts with words, not weapons.”

 Bill Clinton, utter hypocrisy and public relations spiel after the shootings at the Columbine High School, Denver, USA, 17th April 1999.
“The complexity of the humanitarian situation in Iraq poses major challenges, as there is little experience with the type of problems encountered when the whole spectrum of basic services starts to fail, as is happening in Iraq. The slow collapse of the electricity infrastructure has consequences that are rippling through every aspect of life in Iraq, and provides a good example of how weaknesses in one sector can affect all other sectors. The erratic quality of supply and increasingly frequent unscheduled power outages [....] leads to the spoilage and waste of medicines and vaccines [....] [to] losses in rice and other crops requiring continuous irrigation where farmers were dependent on electrical pumps. Water treatment plants are unable to maintain output of treated water, and the reduction in pressure of water mains brings greater risk of cross-contamination to water in the distribution network.”

 UN Secretary General’s review of ’Oil-for-Food’, 28th April 1999
“We have changed neither our policy nor our attitude in any way whatsoever.”

 James Foley, US State Department spokesman, 17th June 1999
“There are two steps in the economic rehabilitation of Iraq and the Iraqi people. One is the lifting of sanctions and the second is the reconstitution of the economy. The economy cannot be reconstituted from the outside, it has to be reconstituted from within. The Iraqi government and the Iraqi people have to take control of their economy and their way forward. This resolution [1194] gives no hope for that.

I just wish people would see the transparency of this effort. It’s not serious arms control; it’s not serious anything. This is hypocrisy at the highest levels and I am disturbed by it.

[In] having Congress pass the Iraq Liberation Act they have politicised this. They have taken it out of the realm of reality and put it in the realm of politics, tying the administration’s hands. How can you pursue a policy of arm’s control and disarmament in Iraq under the blanket of international law when your policy of regime removal is the exact opposite of that?

What I am worried about is the fact that our policies are just continuing the suffering of innocent people and actually bringing the Middle East to the brink of yet another war. From an American’s perspective it’s going to cost American lives. And that’s something I think the American people have no clue about. They are sitting here thinking Saddam and anti-Saddam thoughts, the evil of the Iraqi tyranny, etc. They don’t understand that our policies are killing six-thousand kids a month. Every time I speak and bring that fact up people are like:”What?” They are just totally divorced from the reality of what is happening in Iraq.

Our job was to disarm Iraq as quickly as possible. My job was to find weapons - we undertook an intensive intelligence campaign to gather information on where these weapons were. Then we needed to send inspections teams to Iraq to find these weapons. The US didn’t like that. Simply put: they didn’t want that kind of resolution because if you disarm Iraq you lift the sanctions. The last thing the US wanted to do was lift sanctions. Sanctions are a vehicle of containment.”

 Scott Ritter, Former UNSCOM Chief Inspector in an interview by members of the ’Fellowship of Reconciliation’ Nicholas Arons, Doug Hostetter, Clayton Ramey, and Seattle ’FOR’ member Bert Sacks, June 25th 1999
“Never happen. We’d never get it through the Security Council.”

 Ewan Buchanon, former UNSCOM inspector, in response to Grant Wakefield’s telephone question: ’If global disarmament is the genuine policy of organisations such as UNSCOM, why are you not inspecting the weapons of mass destruction possessed by the United States?’, June 1999.
“I won’t talk about ’Gateway’.....it’s not something I’m prepared to talk about in public.”

 Richard Butler, former UNSCOM Chairman, refusing to elaborate about the US supplied building in Bahrain, code-named ’Gateway’ where UNSCOM short burst transmissions were beamed to a satellite, splitting into two transmissions, one for the US National Security Agency at Fort Meade, and one for the UN in New York. BBC Panorama investigation, July 1999
“The very concern that UNSCOM always had about eavesdropping was that somehow that eavesdropping would be used in an illegitimate way, and when push came to shove that is exactly what happened. You can have all the satellite photographs in the world, but there’s nothing like being on the ground, and UNSCOM had access on the ground, and everyone needed UNSCOM to do their bidding. The very facilities that the concealment team were most interested in were the facilities that were bombed [during ’Desert Fox’]. Those facilities, many of which the US didn’t even know about in 1991, were only collected as a result of UNSCOM’s access on the ground.”

 William Arkin, Special Advisor to the UN, BBC Panorama investigation, July 1999
“Large amounts of food and medicine arriving in Iraq are sub-standard, damaged or unusable.”

 Benon Sevan, UN Exceutive Director, quoted by Associated Press, 6th August 1999
“[According to administration officials] the United States has seen no indication that Baghdad has resumed its chemical and biological weapons programs.”

 The Washington Post, 15th July 1999
“My question would be...what for? Is that humanitarian needs? Or are we getting into suggestions about rebuilding the Iraqi economy, which is a very different question for the Security Council.”

 Peter Burleigh, US Ambassador to the UN, responding to the news that the $5.2 billion Iraqi oil cap is to be lifted, 22nd July 1999
“President Saddam Hussein has been caught red handed smuggling vital supplies of baby milk and medical supplies meant for Iraqi children.”

 The Sunday Telegraph, 22nd August 1999.

[The story actually had been reported by a Kuwaiti official to Associated Press on August 17th. A ship bound for Dubai had been intercepted and the Kuwaitis found ’....75 cartons of talcum powder, 25 cartons of baby bottles and 25 tons of cotton seed for livestock.’ The condition of the goods was not reported. Within 5 days the talcum powder, according to the ’Sunday Telegraph’, had mysteriously transformed into baby milk, itself a peculiar irony as UNICEF had just recommended to the Iraqi government that they remove baby milk substitutes from the ration and promote exclusive breast feeding.]
“I think it’s the end of war myself. I think they’ve gotten to the point where they’re killing their own people, which is ridiculous. Any kind of intelligent animal would stop at a point like that.”

 Dr. Rosalie Bertell, anti-DU campaigner and uranium expert, Tonight with Trevor McDonald - Investigation into Depleted Uranium ammunition, ITV, 26th August 1999
“If they turn on the radars we’re going to blow up their goddamn SAMs [surface-to-air missiles]. They know we own their country. We own their airspace... We dictate the way they live and talk. And that’s what’s great about America right now. It’s a good thing, especially when there is a lot of oil out there we need.”

 Air Force Brigadier General William Looney, head of the US Central Command’s Airborne Expeditionary Force, Washington Post, 30th August 1999
“Information on Depleted Uranium did not come from Iraqis, did not come from a foreign government, but the hazards, the known problems came from the United States own army team assigned to clean it up in Iraq. What we found can be explained in three words: OH MY GOD.”

 Dr. Doug Rokke, former Pentagon DU expert, as quoted in ’Paying the Price’ - a film by John Pilger, ITV, 1999
“Payback...[for Iraqi]...provocations...’ (meaning the Iraqis have seen the planes on radar) ’...usually comes hours later and miles away, and may be delivered by a different aircraft. ’On many days the attack planes go directly to a target and drop bombs as a response to a perceived provocation earlier in the day, or even the day before.’ ”

 Article in The Washington Post, describing US bombing rationales and quoting an unnamed Pentagon official, 30th August 1999
“Please remove the humanitarian discussions from the rest in order to really end a silent human tragedy. [...] Don’t play the battle on the backs of the civilian population by letting them wait until the more complex issues are resolved.”

 Hans von Sponek, The United Nations news service, 21st September 1999
“[The US is] ....disrupting the Oil-For-Food programme upon which millions of people depend for their survival.”

 Kofi Annan, quoted in The Washington Post, 25th October 1999
“Killing the innocent does not defeat terror; it feeds terror. You are making new enemies when what you need are friends.”

 Madeleine Albright, in a stunning display of hypocrisy, addressing leaders of the American Muslim community at a special ’Iftaar’ Dinner, New York, 21st December 1999
“Our policy is to get rid of Saddam, not his regime.”

 Richard Haas, former Director of Middle East Affairs on the National Security Council, as quoted in ’Out of The Ashes : The Resurrection of Saddam Hussein’ by Andrew and Patrick Cockburn, 1999
“A common current pretense is that Saddam’s crimes were unknown, so we are now properly shocked at the discovery. [...] This posture is a cynical fraud. UN reports of 1986 and 1987 condemned Iraq’s use of chemical weapons. US Embassy staffers in Turkey interviewed Kurdish survivors of chemical warfare attacks, and the CIA reported them to the State Department. Human rights groups reported the attrocities at Halabja and elsewhere at once. Secretary of State George Schultz conceded that the US had evidence on this matter. An investigative team sent by the Senate Foreign Realtions Committee in 1988 found ’...overwhelming evidence of the extensive use of chemical weapons against civilians...’ charging that Western acquiesence in Iraqi use of such weapons against Iran had emboldened Saddam Hussein to believe - correctly - that he could use them against his own people with impunity - actually against Kurds, hardly ’the people’ of this tribal based thug.

The chair of the committee, Claiborne Pell, introduced the Prevention of Genocide Act of 1988, denouncing silence "...while people are gassed..." as "...complicity," much as when "...the world was silent as Hitler began a campaign that culminated in the near extermination of Europe’s Jews." [...] We can not be silent to genocide again.”

The Reagan administration strongly opposed sanctions and insisted that the matter be silenced, while extending its support for the mass murderer. In the Arab world "...the Kuwaiti press was amongst the most enthusiastic of the Arab media in supporting Baghdad’s crusade against the Kurds..."; journalist Adel Darwish reports.

Saddam was also called upon to perform the usual services of a client state: for example, to train several hundred Libyans sent to Iraq by the US so they could overthrow the Qaddafi government, former Reagan White House aide Howard Teicher revealed.” ’

 as cited in ’Rogue States’, article by Noam Chomsky, 1999
“The attack on Yugoslavia constitutes the most brazen international aggression since the Nazis attacked Poland to prevent `Polish atrocities’ against Germans.”

 Walter Rockler, former prosecutor at the post World War II Nuremberg trial of Nazis, as cited by the International Action Centre, 1999
“I asked myself why should any, but especially children under five, suffer so much and die in such numbers?”

 Margarita Skinner, UNICEF, January 2000
“Economic sanctions imposed on rogue states are imperfect weapons that require constant evaluation but are still legitimate tools to fight oppressive regimes. [...] We must continue to assess and reassess the tools we have available to respond and to ensure that sanctions, when used, are used in the best possible way for the best possible results. [...] Our effort to improve the effectiveness of sanctions on behalf of peace and respect for human rights remains a work in progress. [...] We cannot be satisfied as long as innocent populations are suffering as a result of repressive or lawless leaders. [...] Saddam Hussein has repeatedly failed to take advantage of the UN "oil-for-food" program designed to provide income to purchase humanitarian supplies. [...] The case for continued sanctions against Saddam Hussein is overwhelming. There is no greater enemy to public health in Iraq than he.”

 Madeleine Albright, article in Annals of International Medicine, published by the American College of Physicians, 16th January 2000 (Shortly before being promoted to US Secretary of State, Albright had stated: ”Sanctions remain one of the most powerful weapons in our armoury.”)
“I’m delighted that I’ve been invited out here today to salute you, who, in my view, are doing the Lord’s work.”

 former US President George Bush Sr., addressing US air crews of the 332nd Air Expeditionary Group stationed at Ahmad al-Jaber air base in Kuwait who conduct over flights and bombing missions on Iraq, as reported by Agence France Press, 19th January 2000
“The most important problem in our view is the increasingly precarious situation of the public infrastructure.”

 Beat Schweizer, International Committee of The Red Cross, Agence France Press, 23rd January 2000
“An impasse over [weapons] inspections is actually the best realistic outcome for the United States. [....] [The] most dangerous scenario is the possibility that Hussein will co-operate [....which could...] spell the end of sanctions.”

 Daniel Byman, RAND Corporation analyst, as quoted in Foreign Affairs, Jan/Feb issue, 2000
“Yesterday morning, on C-Span (1), David Leavey, chief spokesperson for the National Security Council, headed by Sandy Berger, justified our actions against Austria by saying that where a country has ’...values...’ different from those of the United States, we have a right to act against them.

In a meeting sponsored by the Brookings Institution in Washington, D.C., officials said that NATO should be expanded to go beyond its original geographical boundaries and go beyond limited purposes of defense. He said that if, for example, a country were to deny us access to its ’...natural resources...’ that should be sufficient reason for NATO to proceed against that country.”

 C-SPAN, 9th February 2000
“As a UN official, I should not be expected to be silent to that which I recognize as a true human tragedy that needs to be ended. How long [should] the civilian population, which is totally innocent on all this, be exposed to such punishment for something they have never done? The very title that I hold as a humanitarian coordinator suggests that I cannot be silent over that which we see here. [The Oil-for-Food] program does not guarantee the minimum that a human being requires, which is clearly defined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. My support, my commitment is for the Iraqi people as a group of deprived people whose tragedy should end.”

 Hans Von Sponeck, former UN Humanitarian Aid Co-ordinator for Iraq, in his resignation speech, The Jordan Times, 13th February 2000
“Good. I think an article in the Iraqi press praising his approach to his work is ample evidence of his unsuitability of this post. His job is to work on behalf of Iraqi people and not the regime and we look forward to an able manager who will maximize the benefits of the oil-for-food programme.”

 James Rubin, U.S. State Department spokesman, geefully describing Von Sponeck’s departure, 13th February 2000
“Infanticide masquerading as policy.”

 Minority Whip David E. Bonior, Democrat - Michigan, describing sanctions, as quoted by Associated Press, 16th February 2000.
“It’s not the bulls we have a problem with, it’s the vaccine that goes with them.”

 James Rubin, US State Department spokesman, justifying the US block on Iraq’s attempt to import breeding bulls as the accompanying vaccines could, Rubin claimed, be used to make weapons of mass destruction, March 2000
“Once sanctions are lifted, Iraq will have to undertake a reconstruction effort conservatively estimated at $50 - $100 billion just for essential infrastructural utilities, from a GDP base, which, even including the ’grey’ and ’black’ economies is less than $13 billion in nominal terms. Improvements to the ’Oil-for-Food’ formula should benefit the Iraqi economy. [....] However, this will only help to bolster a basic safety welfare net, rather than herald a return to normality. To achieve the latter, sanctions will have to come to an end.”

 Economist Intelligence Unit, 8th March 2000
“[The oil-for-food programme] has not halted the collapse of the health system and the deterioration of water supplies, which together pose one of the gravest threats to the health and well being of the civilian population. Aid can be no substitute for a country’s entire economy. It can never meet all the basic needs of 22 million people nor ensure the maintenance of a whole country’s crumbling infrastructure.”

 ’Iraq - A Decade of Sanctions’ - report by the International Committee of the Red Cross, 14th March 2000
“I think the targeting of innocent civilians is the worst thing about modern conflicts today. And the extent to which more and more people seem to believe it is legitimate to target innocent civilians to reach their larger political goals, I think that’s something that has to be resisted at every turn.”

 Bill Clinton, hypocrisy of the highest level, speaking about the ongoing tensions between India and Pakistan, Hyderabad House - New Delhi, India, 21st March 2000
“Human rights principles have been consistently subordinated to political considerations in the [UN Security] Council’s approach to Iraq. [A] radical re-design of the sanctions regime [is required].”

 Global Policy Forum, Human Rights Watch, Menonite Central Committee, Save the Children (UK), and others in a letter to the Security Council, 22nd March 2000
“We are in danger of losing the argument, or the propaganda war - if we haven’t already lost it - about who is responsible for this situation in Iraq: President Saddam Hussein, or the United Nations.”

 Kofi Annan, UN Secretary General, in a statement to the Security Council, 24th March 2000
“I am very angry that it takes such a long time for failed policy to be rectified.”

 Hans Von Sponeck, former UN Humanitarian Aid Cordinator for Iraq, as quoted by Agence France Press, 27th March 2000
“[Iraq is] the only instance of a sustained increase in mortality in a stable population of more then 2 million in the last 200 years.”

 Professor Richard Garfield, Epidemiologist, April 2000
“Slowly, inoxerably, a generation is being crushed in Iraq. Thousands are dying, thousands more are living stunted lives, and storing up bitter hatreds for the future. If, year in and year out, the UN were systematically killing Iraqi children by air strikes, Western governments would declare it intolerable, no matter how noble the intention. They should find their existing policy just as unacceptable. In democracies, the end does not justify the means.”

 The Economist, editorial ’All wrong in Iraq’, 8th April 2000
“The eyes of the world aren’t on [....] Iraq. The RAF and the US air force can bomb whatever they like, and no one will listen when Saddam’s officials say that civilians have been killed. As for the people dying of malnutrition and disease, that is an attested fact. We dig deep into our pockets at the thought that Ethiopians might soon start dying again of hunger, but Iraqis....? It’s because we don’t see them. Our governments pour contempt and scorn on those who call attention to these things. If people could hear and see what is being done in their names in Iraq, they would be outraged. But they don’t, so it continues.”

 John Simpson, BBC World Affairs Editor, article in The Sunday Telegraph ’Inhumane war that puts us all to shame,’ 30th April 2000
“When I was in Boston a few days ago to meet with the Editor of the Boston Globe, I was told not to refer, even, to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights or to the UN Charter because it has no meaning in that newspaper. Well....how terrible, how frightening when one is warned not to refer to something which is meant to protect us and to give us a better life.”

 Hans Von Sponeck, former UN Humanitarian Aid Co-ordinator for Iraq, describing US media control, May 6th 2000
“I deeply believe that sanctions as now applied to Iraq have been utterly counterproductive for this disarmament purpose.”

 Richard Butler, former UNSCOM chairman, BBC radio ’Talking Point’, 4th June 2000
“I thought it was possible to meet the minimum needs of Iraqis even with sanctions in place. I was wrong. [....] Some 167 Iraqi children are dying every day. Maybe the sanctions were once defensible as a temporary measure, but after nine years they are violating international law. [About the Oil-For- program]..Instead of being about saving children’s lives, it’s about saving face. In all my years at the UN, I had never been exposed to the kind of political manoeuvring and pressure that I saw at work in this program. We’re treating Iraq as if it were made up of 23 million Saddam Husseins, which is rubbish.”

 Hans Von Sponeck, former Humanitarian Aid Co-ordinator for Iraq, interviewed by Stephen Handleman in The Toronto Star, 25th June 2000
“The prime killer of children under five years of age - diarrhoeal diseases - has reached epidemic proportions. [....] Holds on contracts for the water and sanitation sector are a prime reason for the increases in sicknesses and death.”

 US Congressman Tony Hall, letter to US Secretary of State Albright, 28th June 2000 (17 of 18 contracts for this sector were being blocked by Washington at the time of Hall’s letter)
“The outlook for Iraq is pretty awful. It will take virtually all of the 21st century for Iraq to re-emerge as a regional power. You can rebuild the infrastructure in 20 years or so, but not the people.”

 Professor Anoush Ehteshami, Dir. of Middle East Studies, Durham University, Agence France Press report, 25th July 2000
“Sanctions haven’t exactly crippled Saddam, but they’ve put the Iraqi people through hell. Sanctions do not a policy make; they are a holding pattern.”

 Tony Karon, Time.com - Time Magazine website - 25th July 2000
“[Economic sanctions] simply aren’t working other than to harm the ordinary Iraqi people.”

 Richard Butler, former UNSCOM chairman, UPI report, 2nd August 2000
“Ten years on, Iraq’s people still suffer grievously from sanctions which the US and Britain alone try to justify.”

 Editorial from The Guardian, 2nd August 2000
“Economic sanctions on Iraq are] cruel, ineffective and dangerous. They are cruel because they punish exclusively the Iraqi people and the weakest among them. They are ineffective because they don’t touch the regime, which is not encouraged to co-operate, and they are dangerous because they accentuate the disintegration of Iraqi society.”

 Hubert Vedrine, French Foreign Minister, reported by Reuters, 2nd August 2000
“Short term emergency assistance is no longer appropriate to the scale of this crisis. Additional far-reaching steps are desperately needed in order to comply with human rights and humanitarian principles. The deterioration in Iraq’s civilian infrastructure is so far-reaching that it can only be reversed with extensive investment and development efforts.”

 Human Rights Watch, Save the Children (UK) and four other NGOs in a letter to the UN Security Counci, 4th August 200l
“Iraq has taken [on] an autistic stance and the US is fine with the actual sanctions. There are important factors at play that keep the issue deadlocked in the mid and maybe long term.”

 ’A Western diplomat who spoke on condition of anonymity’, Christian Science Monitor, 14th August 2000
“[Sanctions are] a humanitarian disaster comparable to the worst catastrophes of the past decades [and are] unequivocally illegal [under international law].”

 Marc Bossuyt, Belgian Professor of Law, in a report to the UN Subcommission on Human Rights, as quoted by Associated Press, 16th August 2000
“[The UN Sub Commission on the Promotion and Protection of Human Rights says economic sanctions on Iraq have] condemned an innocent people to hunger, disease, ignorance and even death.”

 Report by Reuters, 18th August 2000
“Failing to secure supplies will result in a shortage of pure drinking water for much of the population. This could lead to increased incidents, if not epidemics, of disease and certain pure-water dependent industries becoming incapacitated [...] Full degradation of the water treatment system probably will take at least another six months.”

 Extracts from ’Iraq Water Treatment Vulnerabilities’ - a seven-page document prepared by the US Defence Intelligence Agency, issued the day after the war started and circulated to all major allied Commands.

It stated that Iraq had gone to considerable trouble to provide a supply of pure water to its population. It had to depend on importing specialised equipment and purification chemicals, since water is "...[...] heavily mineralised and frequently brackish.
“During allied bombing campaigns on Iraq the country’s eight multi-purpose dams had been repeatedly hit, simultaneously wrecking flood control, municipal and industrial water storage, irrigation and hydroelectric power. Four of seven major pumping stations were destroyed, as were 31 municipal water and sewerage facilities - 20 in Baghdad, resulting in sewage pouring into the Tigris. Water purification plants were incapacitated throughout Iraq.”

 Document acquired by Professor Thomas J Nagy, Professor of Expert Systems at George Washington University, article published September 17th, 2000 in the Sunday Herald (Scotland)
“It should now become the policy of the British government that sanctions other than those directly relevant to military or military related equipment should be lifted. The removal of non-military sanctions will not prejudice the policy of containment.”

 Menzies Campbell, Foreign Affairs spokesperson, Liberal Democrat Conference, 18th September 2000
“Malnutrition, especially child malnutrition, is often caused by factors other than those related to food. Poor water supply both in quality and quantity as well as inadequate sanitation are keys causative factors of frequent and repeated infection resulting in infant and child malnutrition throughout the country. Other important factors include the lack of general nutrition and health education, overcrowding and poverty. Siginificant improvement in the health and nutrition status of the vulnerable population, and of children and mothers from these households in particular, can not be achieved without improving these contributing factors.”

 UN Food and Agriculture Organisation, September 2000
“You can not dictate government policy by blockades. That can’t be right.”

 Prime Minister Tony Blair, speaking without any trace of irony about the ongoing fuel price protests in the UK, BBC news, 3rd November 2000
“A politician is an acrobat. He keeps his balance by saying the opposite of what he does.”

 Maurice Barres
“Sanctions are having little effect on the regime; the only people suffering are the poorest. After 10 years sanctions have failed to produce the desired result. It is time they were lifted. Whatever the options are, they have to be better than the current stalemate.”

 John Nicol, former RAF pilot who was shot down over Iraq in 1991 and tortured by the regime, quoted in The Observer, 19th November 2000
“Whilst the amount of food that is being provided to every man, woman and child may be sufficient, the sad fact is that the average poor Iraqi household has become so poor that they can’t afford to eat all the food they get for free. [....] For many of these people, the food rations they get on a monthly basis represent the major part of their household income. [....] So they can’t just eat it - because they have other needs, as we all know. [....] [Such as] clothes, travel...”

 Tun Myat, UN Humanitarian Aid Coordinator for Iraq, in an interview with VOICES UK, describing how civilians have to barter their food ration for other goods and services, 13th January 2001
“I have some reservations on the so-called ’oil-for-food’. I would like it to read ’oil-for-food, democracy and freedom’ [for the Iraqi people]. Why do we treat the Iraqi people as vegetables? We are not treating them like human beings. Humans need not only food. They are not cattle, they are a nation, we would like to hear the voice of the Iraqi people.”

 Suleiman al-Shaheen, Kuwaiti Minister of State for Foreign Affairs, 16th January 2001
“The sanctions are humanly catastrophic, morally indefensible and politically ineffective. They are a failed policy and must be changed.”

 Julian Filochowski, Director of CAFOD, launching a report by leading European Catholic aid agencies, 6th February 2001
“We have succeeded, because we stopped the talking about Iraqi children, and instead are taking about weapons of mass destruction, not sanctions to hurt civilians.”

 US Secretary of State Colin Powell, describing his plans for new ’smart sanctions’, House International Relations Committee, 7th February 2001
“A senior UN official in the Middle East has accused the United States of imposing unnecessary suffering on the Iraqi people for its own political ends. Voicing a sense of anger and disillusionment that the UN’s humanitarian programme has been undermined, the official said that he could not think of a single success in the policy "...except in killing children...." and believed that the only reason sanctions were still in force in their present form was because no-one could be seen to back down.”

 ’UN officials round on Americans as "real villains"’ , article in The Times, 21st February 2001
“To recover from its eleven years under the sanctions battering ram - which has crushed the country’s industrial and agricultural infrastructure - Iraq needs the freedom, and overseas investment, of a huge reconstruction effort. [....] The British proposal of ’smart sanctions’ offers an aspirin where surgery is called for.”

 The Economist magazine, 24th February 2001
“The maintenance of a comprehensive embargo on Iraq is a disproportionate act in international law when the deleterious effect on the civilian population and children is so clear. A whole generation of young people have ’lost’ their childhood and prospects for the future.”

 Save The Children Fund, 28th February 2001
“My first reaction to the ’smart sanctions’ proposals is that they reflect a growing awareness, even in Whitehall, that business as usual is not acceptable. Real ’smart sanctions’ are not just about reducing holds - which have reached an all time high. Both the social and the economic engines must be re-started, not by tinkering with the edges. The Foreign Office will say that there should be no return to financial management by Baghdad. I don’t think one can allow the re-starting of the economy, and at the same time have a rigid control through a bank account managed from outside. There can be no progress without risk. One must have some courage.

The smartest approach would be the immediate lifting of economic sanctions, a return to dialogue with Iraq, and thoughts about how the arms control agenda can be tackled realistically - dealing with sellers as well as buyers.”

 Hans Von Sponeck, former UN Humanitarian Aid Co-ordinator for Iraq, phone message February 2001, as quoted by VOICES UK newsletter, April 2001
“I say that Kuwait has no objection to the launching of a call to lift the economic sanctions from Iraq.”

 Sheikh Sabah al-Ahmad al-Sabah, Kuwaiti Foreign Minister, as quoted by Reuters, 20th March 2001
“It’s a balance of terror.”

 John Prescott, Deputy UK Prime Minister, responding to VOICES UK activist Tim Buckley’s statement that UN reports clearly showed that hundreds of thousands of children had been killed by sanctions, as quoted in VOICES April 2001 newsletter. Prescott asked Buckley if he wanted sanctions lifted, which Buckley affirmed. Prescott responded: ’Jesus Christ!’
“Iraq will be free to meet all of its civilian needs without impediment.”

 Unidentified UK official, describing the US / UK proposed ’smart sanctions’, as quoted in The Guardian, 17th May 2001
“Although the country would be able to import more, it would still be denied the free movement of labour and capital that it desperately needs if it is at last to start picking itself up. Iraq needs massive investment to rebuild its industry, its power grids and its schools, and needs cash in hand to pay its engineers, doctors and teachers. None of this looks likely to happen under ’smart sanctions’.”

 The Economist magazine, 26th May 2001
“The US plan [of ’smart sanctions’] will not revive Iraq’s devastated economy while control over Iraq’s oil revenues remains in the hands on the UN, and foreign investment and credits are still prohibited.”

 Financial Times, 28th May 2001
“In reality, this is a change of perceptions.”

 Unidentified US official, as quoted by The Financial Times, 28th May 2001
“The proposals the UK has made to the UN Security Council will, as presently forseen, not lead at all to a betterment of the human condition in Iraq. What is proposed at this point in fact amounts to a tightening of the rope around the neck of the average Iraqi citizen. US and UK representatives at the UN Security Council argue that their proposals are tantamount to lifiting most, if not all, restrictions on the import of civilian goods. Consequently, any continued suffering by the Iraq people will be on account of the government in Baghdad. This is not only false but malicious. A genuine international contribution to ending the tragedy in Iraq will only come when economic sanctions are lifted.”

 Denis Halliday and Hans Von Sponeck, former UN Humanitarian Aid Co-ordinators forn Iraq, in a joint statement on ’smart sanctions’, 29th May 2001
“’It won’t improve life for the ordinary Iraqi. It will be a dole, a hand-out to Iraq as whole,’ said an officer with a high profile aid agency who requested anonimity. ’It will do nothing to tackle the real issue - how to stimulate the internal economy and allow civil society to come back.’”

 Financial Times, in an article describing ’smart sanctions’, 1st June 2001
“People ought to read the resolution before they comment on a weakening [of sanctions]”

 Colin Powell, US Secretary of State, Agence France Press, 3rd June 2001
“There can be little doubt that the resumption of normal economic activity would benefit the Iraqi people, but this can not happen while the Iraqi regime continues to defy UN resolutions.”

 Brian Wilson, British Foreign Office minister, responding to an enquiry from British MP Paul Keeton, 4th June 2001
“’We’ll work with the Russians,’ US National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice said. ’I’m sure that we’ll come to some resolution there, because it is important to restructure these sanctions to something that work.’

The CIA reported earlier this year that the Iraqi leader was more secure than ever in power, despite the destruction of his forces in the war, the suffering of his people and the decade of sanctions. Ms. Rice said this was not a failure of US policy: ’This has been a successful period, but obviously we would like to increase pressure on him and we’re going to go about doing that.’”

 Article in The Australian, revealing that the US administration was undeniably aware of the immense suffering caused to civilians by sanctions, even describing them as ’successful’ whilst conceding they hadn’t worked to destabilise the Ba’ath regime, July 31st 2001
“[Sanctions were] systematically destroying Iraqi society”.

 French President Jacques Chirac, November 12th 2001, as quoted by Agence France Press, November 20th 2001
“The Security Council began to streamline its vetting procedures in March 2000, when the total value of blocked contracts stood at about 1.7 billion dollars. In his letter, [Executive Director of the Oil-For-Food program] Benon Sevan said a total of 1,854 contracts were now on hold, worth a total 4.956 billion dollars. They included orders for 4.28 billion dollars worth of humanitarian supplies and for 676 million dollars worth of oil industry equipment.”

 From ’UN alarmed by contract blocking of Iraq oil-for-food programme’, reported by Agence France Press, 9th January 2002
“The time has come to get rid of a sanctions system that doesn’t work, to put in place a system that restricts military goods only, and which might then oblige Saddam Hussein to re-admit arms control inspectors into his country. [....] Because of the large black market that he’s running, the sanctions are having little impact on Saddam. But they are still affecting the ordinary people.”

 Richard Butler, former UNSCOM chairman, article in The Australian, 10th January 2002
“In 30 years in Washington I’ve never seen anything quite like it. They’re being treated like enemies because of a policy disagreement.”

 Richard Perle, US Defense Policy Board Chairman, describing the US State Department decision to suspend funding to the Iraqi National Congress [in opposition to Saddam Hussein] citing financial irregularities. Article in The Wall Street Journal, 10th January 2002

The INC had been pledged $97 million and were given a January 15th deadline to produce accounts. The State Department announcement came 10 days ahead of schedule. The INC informed them that undercover sources in Iraq would be compromised by full disclosure.
“By March 1995, Chalabi, al-Samurrai and the Kurds were ready to launch a coup attempt and an uprising. But when the appointed day arrived, they received a cable from the then national-security adviser Tony Lake telling them they couldn’t expect backing from Washington. Bob Baer, the CIA agent on the ground with them, says in a forthcoming book that even when their offensive racked up stunning results over the next few days, the NSC [National Security Council] and CIA just didn’t want to know about it. After that, the Iraqi opposition’s faith in American backing largely evaporated.”

 Article in Newsweek, detailing one of the Iraqi opposition’s attempts to overthrow Saddam Hussein, 21st January 2002
“None of this is to defend Saddam, but frankly, the problem the Americans have with Saddam is not that he’s a sick, murdering, inhumane bastard with an appalling human rights record and a callous indifference to the suffering of his own people and a passionate interest in the suffering of other people, but that he’s not THEIR sick, murdering, inhumane bastard with an appalling human rights record and a callous indifference to the suffering of his own people and a passionate interest in the suffering of other people.”

 Justin Moran on ’redbrick.dcu.ie’ debate, 7th August 2002
“WHITE HOUSE REJECTS WEAPONS INSPECTIONS.”

 Headline in The Independent, 3rd September 2002, describing a decision which prompted almost no discussion of what the past 11 years of sanctions, which, according to hundreds and hundreds of statements by various US administrations, had been all about.
“White House spokesman Ari Fleischer, [...] said the war must go ahead because ’Saddam has not lived up to his promise to allow inspectors into the country’. He was then asked if the war would still go ahead if Saddam did allow them into the country, and Fleischer answered: ’The policy of the US is regime change, with or without inspectors.’”

 from ’Don’t look now - Saddam is drowning kittens,’ article by Mark Steel, 5th September 2002, succinctly laying down the actual bottom line
“It is not the threat of weapons of mass destruction and the capacity to coerce that disturbs us; rather, it is important that it be wielded by the proper hands: ours or our client’s.”

 Noam Chomsky, from ’Deterring Democracy’, 1991
“We the people of the United Nations determine to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war, which twice in our lifetime has brought untold sorrow to mankind, and to reaffirm faith in fundamental human rights, in the dignity and worth of the human person, in the equal rights of men and women, and of nations large and small, and to establish conditions under which justice and respect for the obligations arising from treaties and other sources of international law can be maintained, and to promote social progress and better standards of life in larger freedom.”

 Article 1, Charter of the United Nations
“A nation that is boycotted is a nation that is in sight of surrender. Apply this economic, peaceful, silent, deadly remedy and there will be no need for force. It is a terrible remedy. It does not cost a life outside the nation boycotted, but it brings pressure upon the nation which, in my judgement, no modern nation could resist.”

 Former US President Woodrow Wilson, speaking on economic sanctions in Versailles in 1919
“The process of creating and entrenching highly selective, reshaped or completely fabricated memories of the past is what we call ’indoctrination’; or ’propaganda’ when it is conducted by official enemies, and ’education,’ ’moral instruction’ or ’character building,’ when we do it ourselves. It is a valuable mechanism of control, since it effectively blocks any understanding of what is happening in the world. One crucial goal of successful education is to deflect attention elsewhere - say, to Vietnam, or Central America, or the Middle East, where our problems allegedly lie - and away from our own institutions and their systematic functioning and behaviour, the real source of a great deal of the violence and suffering in the world. It is crucially important to prevent understanding and to divert attention from the sources of our own conduct, so that elite groups can act without popular constraints to achieve their goals - which are called ’The National Interest’”

 Noam Chomsky
“With numbing regularity good people were seen to knuckle under the demands of authority and perform actions that were callous and severe. Men who are in everyday life responsible and decent were seduced by the trappings of authority, by the control of their perceptions, and by the uncritical acceptance of the experimenter’s definition of the situation, into performing harsh acts. A substantial proportion of people do what they are told to do, irrespective of the content of the act and without limitations of conscience, so long as they perceive that the command comes from a legitimate authority”

 Stanley Milgram, 1965

Milgram was a psychologist who performed a series of experiments that proved conclusively that obedience to authority was so ingrained in the average US citizen they were prepared to cause lethal harm to others when instructed by authority figures to do so. More than 90% ’electrocuted’ participants in his experiments, only discovering their true nature after the fact. They were unable to see the other participants but were able to hear their screams, which were in fact performed by actors.

All those who took part were first asked if they would be capable of killing or inflicting severe pain on their fellow human beings. 100% replied categorically ’no’.
“[He is] our kind of guy.”

 Unidentified Clinton administration official describing General Suharto of Indonesia,

who killed at least 10,000 Indonesians during the 1980’s, and an estimated 1 million in the 1960’s following his military coup against former leader General Sukarno. Suharto even personally testified that: ’...the corpses were left lying around as a form of shock therapy.’ - as cited in ’Rogue States’, article by Noam Chomsky, 1999
“In his memoirs, [former] US Ambassador to the UN, Daniel Patrick Moynihan takes pride in rendering the UN [powerless]: ’The United States wished things to turn out as they did and worked to bring this about. The Department of State desired that the United Nations prove utterly ineffective in whatever measures it undertook. This task was given to me, and I carried it forward with no inconsiderable success.’”

 as cited in ’Rogue States’, by Noam Chomsky, 1999, describing the US complicity, support and deliberate muzzling of the UN during the Indonesian invasion of East Timor which killed 250,000, one third of the entire population.
“When ABC TV correspondent Charles Glass revealed the site of one of Saddam Hussein’s biological warfare programmes ten months after [the gassing at] Halabja, the US State Department denied the facts, and the story died. The Department ’...now issues briefings on the same site....’ Glass observes.”

 as cited in ’Rogue States’, article by Noam Chomsky, 1999
“’The Senate Banking Committee reported in 1994 that the US Commerce Department had traced shipments of ’biological materials’ identical to those later found and destroyed by UN [weapons] inspectors. These shipments continued at least until November 1989. A month later George Bush authorised new loans for his friend Saddam, to achieve the... goal of increasing US exports and put us in a better position to deal with Iraq regarding its human rights record....’ the State Department announced with a straight face, facing no criticism in the mainstream, or even report.

In a February 28th review of Western sales of materials usable for germ warfare and other weapons of mass destruction, the Times [newspaper] mentions one example of US sales in the 1980’s, including ’...deadly pathogens...’ with government approval, some from the Army’s Center for Germ Research in Fort Detrick.’”

 as cited in ’Rogue States’, article by Noam Chomsky, 1999
“What does it matter to the dead, the orphans, and the homeless whether the mad destruction is wrought under the name of totalitarianism or the holy name of liberty or democracy?”

 Mahatma Gandhi
“Politics is the art of preventing people from taking part in affairs which properly concern them all.”

 Paul Valery
“Big Brother isn’t watching you....so much as Big Brother is you, watching.”

 Mark Crispin Miller
“One man’s death is a tragedy; a million is a statistic.”

 Josef Stalin
“The world is indeed comic, but the joke is on mankind.”

 H.P. Lovecraft
“History would be an excellent thing if only it were true.”

 Leo Tolstoy
“An editor is one who separates the wheat from the chaff and prints the chaff.”

 Adlai Stevenson, US politician (1900-65)
“If large numbers of people believe in freedom of speech, there will be freedom of speech even if the law forbids it. But if public opinion is sluggish, inconvenient minorities will be persecuted, even if laws exist to protect them.”

 George Orwell
“Education is a better safeguard of liberty than a standing army.”

 Edward Everett
“We will have to repent in this generation not merely for the hateful words and actions of the bad people but for the appalling silence of the good people.”

 Martin Luther King, Jr.
“The spirit of democracy cannot be established in the midst of terrorism, whether governmental or popular.”

 Mohandas Gandhi
“If liberty and democracy are to be truly saved, they will only be by non-violent resistance no less brave, no less glorious, than violent resistance. And it will be infinitely braver and more glorious because it will give life without taking any.”

 Mohandas Gandhi
“Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will. Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than outright rejection.”

 Martin Luther King, Jr.
“If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor.”

 Archbishop Desmond Tutu
“Power cedes nothing without a demand.”

 Harriet Tubman and Frederic Douglas
“The reform of consciousness consists entirely in making the world aware of its own consciousness, in arousing it from its dream of itself, in explaining its own actions to it.”

 Karl Marx
“For those who stubbornly seek freedom, there can be no more urgent task than to come to understand the mechanisms and practices of indoctrination. These are easy to perceive in the totalitarian societies, much less so in the system of ’brainwashing under freedom’ to which we are subjected and in which all too often we serve as unwilling instruments.”

 Noam Chomsky
“The Great masses of the people will more easily fall victim to a great lie than to a small one”

 Adolf Hitler
“The propagandist’s purpose is to make one set of people forget that certain other sets of people are human.”

 Aldous Huxley
“Those who can convince us to believe absurdities can convince us to commit atrocities.”

 Voltaire
“The greatest purveyor of violence in the world today - my own government.”

 Martin Luther King Jr., April 4th 1967, exactly one year before he was assassinated
“It takes two to speak the truth - one to speak, and another to hear.”

 Henry David Thoreau
“Our scientific power has outrun our spiritual power. We have guided missiles and misguided men.”

 Martin Luther King Jr.
“Suppose you were an idiot, and suppose you were a member of Congress; but I repeat myself.”

 Mark Twain
“Civil disobedience is not our problem. Our problem is civil obedience. Our problem is that numbers of people all over the world have obeyed the dictates of the leaders of their government and have gone to war, and millions have been killed because of this obedience. Our problem is that people are obedient all over the world in the face of poverty and starvation and stupidity, and war, and cruelty. Our problem is that people are obedient while the jails are full of petty thieves, and all the while the grand thieves are running and robbing the country. That’s our problem.”

 Howard Zinn, from ’Failure to Quit’
“Even a once-for-all loss of an eighth per cent of GDP does matter. But it is still a small price to pay for the stopping of the sale of limb-destroying mines or long range guns to odious dictators. There are two aspects to moving out of the unedifying parts of the arms trade. The first would be for the government to stop encouraging it, whether by export credit subsidies, bodies like the MOD’s Defence Export Sales Organisation, or the soft soap of royal and minsterial visits. The second would be much tighter controls on such sales.

Is it so impossible to strengthen present understandings among ’western’ nations to support such a tightening? How about Russia and China? Compliance should be made a condition of aid from the IMF and other multilateral bodies. But stricter embargoes, even excluding those countries, would still be worth having.”

 Samuel Brittan, ’There is no need to sell arms to odious regimes,’ article in Financial Times, 9th December 1999
“They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.”

 Benjamin Franklin, Historical Review of Pennsylvania, 1759
“Of all the enemies to public liberty, war is, perhaps, the most to be dreaded, because it comprises and develops the germ of every other. War is the parent of armies; from these proceed debts and taxes; and armies, and debts, and taxes are the known instruments for bringing the many under the domination of the few.”

 James Madison
“Patriotism is a kind of religion; it is the egg from which wars are hatched.”

 Guy de Maupassant
“Important signs of drug use in children: ...excessive preoccupation with social causes, race relations, environmental issues, etc.....”

 From ’How Parents Can Help Children Live Drug Free’, published by Gerald Smith, director of the criminology program at the University of Utah, and others (with a foreword by Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Orrin G. Hatch (R-Utah), as noted in the Washington Post, October 7th 1998
“All who are not lunatics are agreed about certain things. That it is better to be alive than dead, better to be adequately fed than starved, better to be free than a slave. Many people desire those things only for themselves and their friends; they are quite content that their enemies should suffer. These people can be refuted by science: Humankind has become so much one family that we cannot insure our own prosperity except by insuring that of everyone else. If you wish to be happy yourself, you must resign yourself to seeing others also happy.”

 Bertrand Russell
“It is enough that the people know there was an election. The people who cast the votes decide nothing. The people who count the votes decide everything.”

 Josef Stalin
“It is insane that under the rules governing worldwide trade today you can take action against a company for pirating a Madonna videotape, but you can take no action against a company for employing children, or using forced labor, or violating workers’ fundamental rights, or poisoning the environment.”

 AFL-CIO President John J. Sweeney
“The most superficial look at history shows that no social advance rolls in on the wheels of inevitability. It comes through the tireless efforts and persistent work of dedicated individuals.”

 Martin Luther King Jr.
“The hottest fires in hell are reserved for those who remain neutral in times of moral crisis””

 Edmund Burke
“Give me the liberty to know, to utter, and to argue freely according to conscience, above all liberties.”

 John Milton
“In times of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act.”

 George Orwell
“To be hopeful in bad times is not just foolishly romantic. It is based on the fact that human history is a history not only of cruelty, but also of compassion, sacrifice, courage, kindness. What we choose to emphasize in this complex history will determine our lives. If we see only the worst, it destroys our capacity to do something.

If we remember those times and places - and there are so many - where people have behaved magnificently, this gives us the energy to act, and at least the possibility of sending this spinning top of a world in a different direction.

And if we do act, in however small a way, we don’t have to wait for some grand utopian future. The future is an infinite succession of presents, and to live now as we think human beings should live, in defiance of all that is bad around us, is itself a marvellous victory.”

 Howard Zinn, from his book ’You Can’t Be Neutral on a Moving Train: A personal history of our times’
“Aboriginality is about being a human being. Does that sound trite? I hope not. You see, I like the Aboriginal people. They have taught me that people are much more important than any product of people, that a motor car, no matter how much it costs, is something you should never cry about, but you should always go to your uncle’s funeral; you should always look after your brother’s children when they’re crook; you should forsake your job to go and attend to an ailing relative.

There is another thing they have taught me. I’ve seen in traditional law and the Aborigines themselves a truly non-neurotic people. If an arms works, whether it causes you pain or not, it is of no consequence. Pain and apprehension about any part of your body only come in when it fails to function. Then there is their attitude toward other people. They don’t consider other people according to their class, rank, dress, demeanour. Other people, to them, have an existence that’s just warranted by their very existence.

Then there’s their attitude toward children. They don’t think of children as being special or little models; children are just children and there’s none of that special hu-ha and absurd indulgence that tends to occur in the small white family.

That is what they’ve taught me; and what they have goes beyond this country. It is something that can be universally applied; it is the skill and confidence of living in peace.”

 Professor Fred Hollows, anti-trachoma specialist, describing his respect for Australian Aborigines, as quoted by John Pilger in ’Heroes’
“There is only one thing in this world, and that is to keep acquiring money and more money, power and more power. All the rest is meaningless.”

 Napoleon Bonaparte
“If there ever was in the history of humanity an enemy who was truly universal, an enemy whose acts and moves trouble the entire world, threaten the entire world, attack the entire world in any way or another, that real and really universal enemy is precisely Yankee imperialism.”

 Fidel Castro Cuban leader and Communism supporter
“The best argument against democracy is a five-minute conversation with the average voter.”

 Winston Churchill
“He who allows oppression, shares the crime.”

 Erasmus Darwin
“The more corrupt the state, the more numerous the laws.”

 Tacitus
“All national institutions of Churches appear to me no other than human inventions, set up to terrify and enslave mankind, and to monopolise power and profit. Now some will say are we to have no word of God, no revelation? I answer, yes, there is a word of God, there is a revelation, the word of God is in the creation we behold, and it is in this word, which no human invention can counterfeit or alter, that God, speaketh, universally to man.”

 Thomas Paine, The Age of Reason, 1794
“I implore you to recognize the Church as a lady and in the name of the Pope take the King as lord of this land and obey his mandates. If you do not do it, I tell you that with the help of God I will enter powerfully against you all. I will make war everywhere and every way that I can. I will take your women and children and make them slaves....The deaths and injuries you will receive from here on will be your own fault and not that of his majesty nor of the gentlemen that accompany me.”

 ’The Requirement’, read by Spaniards to native tribes they encountered in the New World
“Israel may have the right to put others on trial, but certainly no one has the right to put the Jewish people and the State of Israel on trial.”

 Ariel Sharon
“I want to tell you something very clear, don’t worry about American pressure on Israel, we, the Jewish people control America, and the Americans know it.”

 Ariel Sharon to Shimon Peres, October 3rd, 2001, as reported on Kol Yisrael radio.
“No free man shall ever be de-barred the use of arms. The strongest reason for the people to retain their right to keep and bear arms is as a last resort to protect themselves against tyranny in government.”

 Thomas Jefferson
“The state.... must see the sword as the main if not the only, instrument with which to keep its morale high and to retain its moral tension. Toward this end it may no it MUST invent dangers, and to do this it must adopt the method of provocation and revenge.... And above all, let us hope for a new war with the Arab countries so that we may finally get rid of our troubles and acquire our space.”

 Diary of Moshe Sharett, Israeli’s first Foreign Minister from 1948-1956, and Prime Minister from 1954-1956.
“If the American people ever allow private banks to control the issue of their money, first by inflation and then by deflation, the banks and corporations that will grow up around them (around the banks), will deprive the people of their property until their children will wake up homeless on the continent their fathers conquered.”

 Thomas Jefferson
“There is nothing more difficult to plan, more doubtful of success, nor more dangerous to manage than the creation of a new system. For the initiator has the enmity of all who would profit by the preservation of the old system and merely lukewarm defenders in those who would gain by the new one.”

 Niccolo Machiavelli, The Prince, 1513
“Man is the missing link between apes and human beings.”

 Konrad Lorenz, Nobel Laureate
“A man’s work is nothing but this slow trek to rediscover, through the detours of art, those two or three great and simple images in whose presence his heart first opened.”

 Albert Camus
“We are unconcerned but not indifferent.”

 Inscription on Man Ray’s gravestone
“Every time anyone says that Israel is our only friend in the Middle East, I can’t help but think that before Israel, we had no enemies in the Middle East.”

 John Sheehan, S.J. (a Jesuit priest)
“We have a political system that awards office to the most ruthless, cunning, and selfish of mortals, then act surprised when those those willing to do anything to win power are equally willing to do anything with it.”

 Michael Rivero
“An elective despotism was not the government we fought for.”

 Thomas Jefferson
“Degrees do not matter... one does not bargain about inches of evil.”

 -Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged
“Mundus Vult Decepi - The World Wants to be Deceived "We can have a democratic society or we can have the concentration of great wealth in the hands of the few. We cannot have both.”

 Louis Brandeis, Supreme Court Justice from 1916-1939
“I wonder when the lies will stop and truth begin, even as grim as the truth may be. And then I remember that for 70 years, the reign of terror in Russia called itself ’the people’s government.’ We have so far to fall, yet we are falling fast and Hell yawns to receive us.”

 Jim McMichael
“We fight not for glory nor for wealth nor honour, but only and alone we fight for freedom which no good man surrenders but with his life.”

 Robert the Bruce (Brus), King of Scots, 24 June 1314.
“None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free.”

 Johann W. von Goethe
“A public that hears only praise and no criticism will predictably answer "yes" to pollsters who ask whether the President is doing a good job.”

 Mark Weisbrot , co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research in Washington D.C.
“If I were reincarnated, I would wish to be returned to earth as a killer virus to lower the human population levels..”

 Prince Phillip of Great Britain, World Wildlife Fund
“If the truth is that ugly - which it is - then we do have to be careful about the way that we tell the truth. But to somehow say that telling the truth should be avoided because people may respond badly to the truth seems bizarre to me.”

 Chuck Skoro, Deacon, St. Paul’s Catholic Church
“Let us pray in this hour that nothing can divide us, and that God will help us against the Devil! Almighty Lord, bless our fight!”

 Adolf Hitler to the SA in 1930.
“The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic and/or military consequences of the lie. It thus becomes vitally important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth becomes the greatest enemy of the State.”

 Dr. Joseph M. Goebbels
“The great masses of people will more easily fall victims to a big lie than to a small one. Especially if it is repeated over and over.”

 Adolf Hitler
“Oh Mortal Man, is there nothing you cannot be made to believe?”

 Adam Weishaupt - Co-founder Of The New World Order
“Don’t be deceived when they tell you things are better now. Even if there’s no poverty to be seen because the poverty’s been hidden. Even if you ever got more wages and could afford to buy more of these new and useless goods which industries foist on you and even if it seems to you that you never had so much, that is only the slogan of those who still have much more than you. Don’t be taken in when they paternally pat you on the shoulder and say that there’s no inequality worth speaking of and no more reason to fight because if you believe them they will be completely in charge in their marble homes and granite banks from which they rob the people of the world under the pretence of bringing them culture. Watch out, for as soon as it pleases them they’ll send you out to protect their gold in wars whose weapons, rapidly developed by servile scientists, will become more and more deadly until they can with a flick of the finger tear a million of you to pieces.”

 Jean Paul Marat, 18th Century French Visionary (and revolutionary), murdered in his bathtub by Royalist Charlotte Corday
“It is my conviction that killing under the cloak of war is nothing but an act of murder.”

 Albert Einstein
“Find out just what the people will submit to, and you have found out the exact amount of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them; and these will continue until they are resisted with either words or blows, or with both. The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress.”

 Frederick Douglas (1857)
“The [government] must put the most modern medical means in the service of this knowledge.... Those who are physically and mentally unhealthy and unworthy must not perpetuate their suffering in the body of their children.... The prevention of the faculty and opportunity to procreate on the part of the physically degenerate and mentally sick, over a period of only 600 years, would ... free humanity from an immeasurable misfortune.”

 Adolf Hitler
“Whenever the legislators endeavor to take away and destroy the property of the people, or to reduce them to slavery under arbitrary power, they put themselves into a state of war with the people, who are thereupon absolved from any further obedience...”

 John Locke 1690 2nd Treatise on Government Chapter 19 paragraph 222
“If this were a dictatorship, it’d be a heck of a lot easier, just so long as I’m the dictator.”

 President G. W. Bush
“If Blair and Bush are up for the peace prize Giuliani, Bin Laden, Kissinger & Sharon can’t be far behind. I wish they’d change the name of the award to something like "merchants of death prize" or "best mass murders award" or "guy that made the most bucks for killing the most poor people, most cruelly prize" Then everybody would start cheering for their favorite. How about "best liar who says, "What Me Murder? " It’s a shame Hitler is not still alive (though he probably wouldn’t win).”

 William Putney
“He who establishes his argument by noise and command shows that his reason is weak.”

 Michel de Montaigne
“...not all of us Third World countries dwellers sleep our nights away dreaming to become AMERICA. We would do much better if her and her friends kept their hands out of the cookie jar.”

 Letter from reader
“Few of us 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.”

 Arthur Miller playwright
“If you cannot tell the difference between divine intervention and random stupidity, then there is for all intents and purposes no divine intervention.”

 Michael Rivero
“I never would have agreed to the formulation of the Central Intelligence Agency back in ’47, if I had known it would become the American Gestapo.”

 Harry S Truman (1961)
“Since Jesus, Moses and Abraham (peace be upon them all) were not European, would they be escorted off planes if alive today.”

 Imam Abdul Malik on the subject of racial profiling.
“He has affected to render the Military independent of and superior to the Civil power:

He has combined with others to subject us to a jurisdiction foreign to our constitution, and unacknowledged by our laws; giving his Assent to their Acts of pretended Legislation::

For depriving us in many cases of the benefits of Trial by Jury:”

 Declaration Of Independence: Thomas Jefferson
“There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one who is striking at the root.”

 Henry David Thoreau
“Do not fear the enemy, for your enemy can only take your life. It is far better that you fear the media, for they will steal your HONOR. That awful power, the public opinion of a nation, is created in America by a horde of ignorant, self-complacent simpletons who failed at ditching and shoemaking and fetched up in journalism on their way to the poorhouse.”

 Mark Twain.
“It is the duty of the patriot to protect his country from its government.”

 Thomas Paine
“The interests behind the Bush Administration, such as the CFR, The Trilateral Commission - founded by Brzezinski for David Rockefeller - and the Bilderberger Group, have prepared for and are now moving to implement open world dictatorship within the next five years. They are not fighting against terrorists. They are fighting against citizens.”

 Dr. Johannes B. Koeppl, Ph.D., former German defense ministry official and advisor to former NATO Secretary General Manfred Werner
“Let us never tolerate outrageous conspiracy theories concerning the attacks of September the 11th..”

 President Bush, speaking to the United Nations.
“Knowledge makes a man unfit to be a slave.”

 Frederick Douglass
“They don’t ... deserve the same guarantees and safeguards that would be used for an American citizen going through the normal judicial process.”

 Vice President Dick Cheney
“Your failure to be informed, does not make me a wacko.”

 John Loeffler
“The honest man must be a perpetual renegade, the life of an honest man a perpetual infidelity. For the man who wishes to remain faithful to truth must make himself perpetually unfaithful to all the continual, successive, indefatigable renascent errors.”

 Charles Peguy
“Let the Jews, who claim to be the chosen race, prove their title by choosing the way of non-violence for vindicating their position on earth.”

 Mahatma Gandhi, Nov. 26, 1938
“There’s no way to rule innocent men. The only power any government has is the power to crack down on criminals. Well, when there aren’t enough criminals, one makes them. One declares so many things to be a crime that it becomes impossible for men to live without breaking laws.”

 Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged, Ch. III, ’White Blackmail’
“’A woman is confronted by a big, strong, stranger. She doesn’t know what he’s planning, and she’s cautious. Getting away from him is not possible. They’re in a room and he’s standing in front of the only way out, or she’s in a wheelchair - whatever. Leaving the area is not an option.

’So now he starts to do things she doesn’t like. He asks her for money. She can try to talk him out of it, just like we argue for lower taxes, and maybe it will work. If it doesn’t, and she gets outvoted, she’ll probably choose to give to give it to him instead of getting into a fight to the death over ten dollars. You would probably choose to pay your taxes rather than have the police arrive to throw you in jail.

’Maybe this big man demands some other things, other minor assaults on this women’s dignity. When should she claw at his eyes or shove her ballpoint pen in his throat? When he tries to force her to kiss him? Tries to force her to let him touch her? Tries to force her to have sex with him?’ Henry took a deep breath and shrugged.

’Those are questions that each woman has to answer for herself. There is one situation, though, where I tell women to fight to the death. That’s when the man pulls out a pair of handcuffs and says, "Come on, I promise I won’t hurt you, this is just so you won’t flail around and hurt either of us by accident. Come on, I just want to talk, get in the van and let me handcuff you to this eyebolt here, and I promise I won’t touch you. I’m not asking you to put on a gag or anything, and since you can still scream for help, you know you’ll be safe. Come on, I got a full bar in here, and color TV, and air-conditioning, great stereo, come on, just put on the cuffs."

’I tell women that if that ever happens, maybe the man is telling the truth, and maybe after talking to her for a while he’ll let her go and she will have had a good time drinking champagne and listening to music. But if she gets in the van and puts her wrists in the handcuffs, she has just given up her future ability to fight, and now it is too late.’ Henry realized he had been making eye contact with all the other people in the lecture hall, just as he did when he taught a course. Now he looked directly at the professor.

’How do you spot the precise point where a society is standing at the back of the van and the State has the handcuffs out?’

’Trust me’, sayeth the government.”

 John Ross Unintended Consequences pages 337 and 338
“The first rule is to keep an untroubled spirit. The second is to look things in the face and know them for what they are.”

 Marcus Aurelius
“Necessity is the plea of every infringement of human freedom. It is the argument of tyrants; it is the creed of slaves.”

 William Pitt
“Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?" "Who watches the watchmen?”

 Juvenal, Satires, VI, 347
“No question that an admission of making false statements to government officials and interfering with the FBI is an impeachable offense.”

 Bill Clinton, ARKANSAS GAZETTE, August 8, 1974, page 7-A.
“Vulgas vult decepi - the (common) people wish to be deceived.”

 Phaedrus
“I did not have sex with that woman [Monica Lewinsky].”

 Bill Clinton.
“The United States is not nearly so concerned that its acts be kept secret from its intended victims as it is that the American people not know of them.”

 U.S. Attorney General Ramsey Clark
“Authoritarian government required to speak, is silent...Representative government required to speak, LIES with impunity”.

 Napoleon Bonaparte
“The seizing or detaining, and threatening to kill, injure, or continue to detain, another individual in order to compel a third person (including a governmental organization) to do or abstain from doing any act as an explicit or implicit condition for the release of the individual seized or detained.” or “A violent attack upon an internationally protected person (as defined in section 1116(b)(4) of title 18, United States Code) or upon the liberty of such a person.”

 Official US Department of State definition of a terrorist.
“A government that neither trusts nor respects its own people cannot trust or respect other nations. What is the domestic policy of enslavement today must be the foreign policy of conquest tomorrow.”

 Michael Rivero
“Such as it is, the press has become the greatest power within the Western World, more powerful than the legislature, the executive and judiciary. One would like to ask: by whom has it been elected, and to whom is it responsible?”

 Alexander Solzhenitsyn
“The real advantage which truth has, consists in this, that when an opinion is true, it may be extinguished once, twice, or many times, but in the course of ages there will generally be found persons to rediscover it, until some one of its reappearances falls on a time when from favorable circumstances it escapes persecution until it has made such head as to withstand all subsequent attempts to suppress it.”

 John Stuart Mill, On Liberty (1859)
“If ye love wealth greater than liberty, the tranquility of servitude greater than the animating contest for freedom, go home from us in peace. We seek not your counsel nor your arms. Crouch down and lick the hand that feeds you. May your chains set lightly upon you; and may posterity forget that ye were our countrymen.”

 Samuel Adams
“Scerrorism: Terrorism of a population by the media, carried out by reporting acts of terror that might happen but never actually do.”

 Bonny Stilwell
“There is a principle which is a bar against all information, which is proof against all arguments and which can not fail to keep a man in everlasting ignorance - that principle is contempt prior to investigation.”

 Herbert Spencer
“I’m not sure we can ever satisfy the federal government’s insatiable appetite for more power.”

 REP. ROBERT L. BARR JR. (R-GA.)
“A little sunlight is the best disinfectant.”

 U.S. Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis
“Ye shall know the Truth, And the Truth shall make you angry!”

 Aldous Huxley
“Liberty cannot be preserved without a general knowledge among the people, who have a right and a desire to know; but besides this, they have a right, an indisputable, unalienable, indefeasible, divine right to know that most dreaded and envied kind of knowledge, I mean of the characters and conduct of their rulers.”

 John Adams
“Let me now warn you in the most solemn manner. Observe good faith and justice toward all nations. Cultivate peace and harmony with all. The Nation which indulges toward another an habitual hatred or an habitual fondness is in some degree a slave. It is a slave to its animosity or to its affection, either of which is sufficient to lead it astray from its duty and its interest.”

 President George Washington, Farewell Address, 1796
“Enlighten the people generally, and tyranny and oppressions of body and mind will vanish like evil spirits at the dawn of day.”

 Thomas Jefferson
“Violence does not and cannot exist by itself; it is invariably intertwined with the lie.”

 Alexander Solzhenitsyn, convicted for writing, accepting Nobel Prize.

He survived Stalinist genocide that massacred tens of millions of Russians (USA’s ally with Pakistan’s military dictatorship for invading Afghanistan and establishing a coup d’etat against the US CIA freedom fighters of Osama bin Laden and Taliban, for benefit of King Shah in October 2001).
“The US Vice-President, Dick Cheney, revealed in a television interview over the weekend that President George Bush had given an order last Tuesday for the military to shoot down any civilian aircraft that disregarded instructions from air traffic control and appeared to be a threat. The fourth hijacked plane, United Airlines Flight 93 from Newark to San Francisco, was thought to be on its way to Washington but crashed in rural Pennsylvania following some kind of altercation between the hijackers and a group of passengers determined to thwart their plans. The rumors that this plane was shot down are based on the fact that debris was found up to eight miles from the crash site, that one of the passengers talking on a mobile phone reported hearing an explosion and seeing a plume of white smoke in the cabin, and that eyewitnesses saw a second aircraft in the sky at the time of the crash.”

 The Independent, London, England, September 20, 2001
“The President, Vice-President, and all civil officers of the United States, shall be removed from office on impeachment for, and conviction of, treason, bribery, or other high crimes and misdemeanors.”

 Constitution of the United States
“It is not the case as the naive might think that indoctrination is inconsistent with democracy, rather . . . it’s the essence of democracy. The point is that in a military state or a feudal state or what we would now call a totalitarian state, it doesn’t much matter because you’ve got a bludgeon over their heads and you can control what they do. But when the state loses the bludgeon, when you can’t control people by force, and when the voice of the people can be heard you have this problem. - it may make people so curious and so arrogant that they don’t have the humility to submit to a civil rule, and therefore you have to control what people think. And the standard way to do this is to resort to what in more honest days used to be called propaganda, manufacture of consent, creation of necessary illusion. Various ways of either marginalizing the public or reducing them to apathy in some fashion.”

 Dr. Noam Chomsky, from Manufacturing Consent, censored ex parte from WUTK radio’s Alternative Nation, Summer 2001.

In another example of the ever-growing censorship in the United States, readers are reporting that Noam Chomsky’s new book, "9/11" is being pulled from book store shelves.
“These sectors of the doctrinal system serve to divert the unwashed masses and reinforce basic social values: passivity, submissiveness to authority, the overriding virtue of greed and personal gain, lack of concern for others, fear of real or imagined enemies, etc. The goal is to keep the bewildered herd bewildered.”

 Dr. Noam Chomsky, from What Uncle Sam Really Wants, censored ex parte from WUTK radio’s Alternative Nation, Summer 2001
“We stare at TV screens and try to comprehend the suffering in the aftermath of terrorism. At the same time, we’re witnessing an onslaught of media deception. Silence, rigorously selective, pervades the media coverage of recent days. ABC News analyst Vincent Cannistraro helped to put it all in perspective for millions of TV viewers. Cannistraro was in charge of the CIA’s covert aid to Afghan guerrillas. In other words, Cannistraro has a long history of assisting terrorists - first, Contra soldiers who routinely killed Nicaraguan civilians; then, mujahedeen rebels in Afghanistan ... like Osama bin Laden. How can a longtime associate of terrorists now be credibly denouncing "terrorism?" It’s easy. All that’s required is for media coverage to remain in a kind of history-free zone that has no use for any facets of reality.”

 Norman Solomon, Creators Syndicate, September 13, 2001
“We are on the verge of a global transformation. All we need is the right major crisis and the nations will accept the New World Order.”

 David Rockefeller
“The citizen who sees his society’s democratic clothes being worn out and does not cry it out, is not a patriot, but a traitor.”

 Mark Twain
“The legal right of an individual to decrease or ALTOGETHER AVOID his/her taxes by means which the law permits cannot be doubted”.

 Gregory v. Helvering, 293 U.S. 465
“It does not require a majority to prevail, but rather an irate, tireless minority keen to set brush fires in people’s minds.”

 Samuel Adams
“I believe that banking institutions are more dangerous to our liberties than standing armies... if the American people ever allow private banks to control the issue of currency...the banks and corporations that will grow up around them will deprive the people of all property until their children will wake up homeless on the continent that their fathers conquered.”

 Thomas Jefferson
“The individual is handicapped by coming face to face with a conspiracy so monstrous he cannot believe it exists.”

 J. Edgar Hoover
“The biggest conspiracy of all is the claim that there are no conspiracies!”

 Michael Rivero
“War is the public agenda for the hidden desires of a private elite”

 Bodazey
“If the New World Order agenda is not realized by the terrorist attacks on America and if American’s don’t agree to give up their weapons and relinquish their sovereignty to the New World Order, the next attack will be the use of chemical, biological and/or atomic warfare against the American people. The architects of the New World Order will not hesitate to use as a last resort an atomic or hydrogen bomb in a major American city.”

 Reference Op Ed page of the New York Times 9/24/01
“No matter what political reasons are given for war, the underlying reason is ALWAYS economic.”

 A.J.P.Taylor, British Historian
“You see, when a nation threatens another nation the people of the latter forget their factionalism, their local antagonisms, their political differences, their suspicions of each other, their religious hostilities, and band together as one unit. Leaders know that, and that is why so many of them whip up wars during periods of national crisis, or when the people become discontented and angry. The leaders stigmatize the enemy with every vice they can think of, every evil and human depravity. They stimulate their people’s natural fear of all other men by channeling it into a defined fear of just certain men, or nations. Attacking another nation, then, acts as a sort of catharsis, temporarily, on men’s fear of their immediate neighbors. This is the explanation of all wars, all racial and religious hatreds, all massacres, and all attempts at genocide.”

 Taylor Caldwell, "The Devil’s Advocate" (1952) - pg. 299
“Freedom, once so embedded in the hearts of all Americans, was surrendered by Americans who believed the sinister men who were determined to enslave them. It was to be for a limited time only, we were assured. But tyrants never relinquish the powers they have gained; they incorporate them into perpetual law. It was done so quietly, so skillfully. A nation will fight when its full liberty is threatened, and the full plot exposed. But if liberties are subdued, little by little, no provocation for a nationwide revolt is given. Like thieves in the night, who move stealthily and without sound, so did the evil men move in your former free government, robbing away the heart and the body of your liberty, denuding your homes of its treasures, slowly stifling your tongues, imperceptibly silencing your press. They invaded the schoolrooms of your children, poisoning and debasing their minds, twisting them to their purposes so that future generations would know nothing of honor or pride and the might of free men. But you were not guiltless.

Do not believe that this was just a plot in America. It started far back in history, in 1917, with the Bolshevik revolution. Like the black plague of the soul, it seeped into Germany, into Scandinavia, into Britain, into France, into South America and Asia and Africa. It was a nightmare and deathly disease with many names. It was called Fascism and Communism, People’s Democracies and Socialism, the Welfare State and totalitarianism and authoritarianism. In America, it was called Progressive Democracy. (NOTE: The most recent book I’ve read i.e., 1990 - calls it Democratic Socialism.) But it was the same foul disease that blinded and sickened a whole world, and made the whole world slave. It was the same abominable illness of the spirit, the same madness, that plunged an entire planet into endless wars and degradation and despair. It had for its object the unlimited power of a few men, working together in every nation even while they were ostensibly enemies, and even while their respective nations were engaged in combat against each other.

There was no quarrel among these arch-devils of death and ruin; there was only complete understanding. They knew that man cannot be enslaved in a peaceful society, prosperous and full of ambition and hope. So they plotted wars with each other; they blew away the natural resources of the earth, for their wars, which were not against each other, but against their own people. They outlawed God, for a people staunch in their faith will not renounce their liberties and they will not engage in wars. But you, the people of America, were not guiltless of all this.

We, in America, were not guiltless. For decades, we saw the disease spreading in Europe and Asia, and many of us knew when the infection had reached our own country. But too many of us were greedy; we saw opportunities for individual gain and profit if we supported the emerging tyrants in Washington. Tyrants are so full of pleasant promises; they are so skillful in false suspicions, false hatreds, false envies, and natural human greed. When we Americans should have stood together, defying with our votes and our voices and our anger each tyrant as he appeared, we turned our innate and instinctive jealousies and dislikes upon our neighbors. We betrayed each other. The disease entered our souls, and we sold our honor for a handful of silver, whether we were workingmen or capitalists, farmers or bankers, bureaucrats or clerks, industrialists or shopkeepers.

...In the first years of this century (now the last century) Americans were free and prideful and independent. We were an ambitious people, and any social injustices were being slowly but steadily eliminated. We were a kind and generous people, guardful of our liberties. But, after 1917, the black plague spread over Europe, and we were infected long before 1939, when a new and deliberately plotted war broke out. We were infected in the very halls of Congress, in the very inmost chambers of Washington. The disease was already in our flesh, and its foul breath was already in the mouths of our children, and its cries were ringing in every schoolroom, every college, decades before we were plunged into this series of wars which have lasted over twenty years. We were a diseased nation long before we were slaves. We were impotent before we knew we were impotent.

God has had mercy upon us, though we have committed monstrous sins against each other as well as against the world. God has brought us to this day, [in the story, America has just re-won its freedom after a long dictatorship] though we are not worthy of it. For many years, He has stimulated the hearts and the souls of a few free and just men, who have worked among you, unknown to you. He gave them a lash with which to arouse you. He gave them words to awaken you. He gave them courage to deliver up their lives for you, though you were not worthy of it. You betrayed them to your oppressors and your tyrants, but still they loved you. You called them ’traitors’ and ’subversives,’ when they cried out to you that the walls of your nation were tumbling into the seas of tyranny and death. When they warned you on the day religion was turned against religion, and race against race, in America, you laughed at them and denounced them as ’dividers of the country.’ When they cried to you that States Rights were being abrogated, you shouted ’Unity!’ at them, and beat them down, and silenced them. When they exposed the causes of wars to you, and the plot against you in those wars, you jeered at them with such epithets as ’isolationists’ or ’pacifists.’ While you still had a measure of liberty and could vote vile tyrants and corrupt men out of office, you listened, instead, to the promises of those men, and you voted honorable and decent men out of office.

But still, God had mercy on you, and did not abandon you. He gave you the Minute Men of the United States of America. They were your neighbors, and you did not know it. They spoke to you furtively, and you did not know who they were. You lifted yourselves in your chains, and heard the words of life and liberty and saw the glimmer of the sun again. You did not know who called to you in your despair and your agony. And you would not have listened had you not been reduced to hopeless slaves...

...I would not have you deceive yourselves. The battle is not entirely won. At least half of the Armed Forces are with us, and a portion of the Picked Guards. But the others will resist you. ’Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered.’ Your courage and your faith must sustain you for many months. Attempts will be made to delude you, to lead you again into slavery, to confuse and divide you. Your enemies are still alive, and still full of hate for you. They have been momentarily silenced, at your command. They will speak again.

We are a free nation, tonight, and in the name of our freedom we cannot silence our enemies. The very opportunity we are giving them will damn them in your own ears. They will betray themselves to you with their own voices. Or, if they choose not to speak in this hour of peril for themselves, they will withdraw to plot against you again. But you are armed. You know who your enemies are.

Working together, we can restore this nation, and restore the peace and the liberties of all other nations. A whole world listens to us tonight. With patience and with justice, with mercy and with knowledge, we must work slowly and with enlightenment, for there is so much to be done.

...Tonight there will be issued by me a directive to the commanders of our Armed Forces on all battlefields to call an immediate truce, and to negotiate an armistice. Within a few hours all fighting will stop, and the guns will be silenced, and the war planes will retire. Your sons shall be returned to you as speedily as possible, and there shall be no more war.

As of tonight, all work on war orders shall cease. Plans will be made to convert all war plants to the making of civilian goods. All conscripted labor laws are abrogated at once. During the period of reconversion from war to peace your former employers will pay you full wages. When work is resumed, hours of labor shall not exceed forty hours a week, under any circumstances, unless by consent of the employed. All rationing ceases as of midnight...

All confiscated private property shall be restored to the former owners, and those who confiscated that property, with or without the consent of the State, shall pay back rentals for the periods the property has been at their disposal.

All labor camps shall be disbanded tomorrow, the inmates furnished with food and with transportation to their former homes. All children shall be returned to their parents. All political prisoners everywhere shall be freed.

Orders are being prepared at this moment to wrest power from the Military and return it to civilian authority. The Military, at midnight, shall be recalled from private homes where they have been quartered and payments shall be later adjudicated to those who gave the Military involuntary hospitality.

As of tonight, the Military has no authority whatsoever, no powers, no directives...Any officer or soldier attempting violence against the people of America shall be judged insubordinate, and shall be punished...I, the Commander-in-Chief of all the Armed Forces, now call upon all officers and all soldiers and all military men of any designation to retire to their barracks and lay down their arms...

We have so much work to do, my dear friends, my dear fellow-countrymen. The ruin of decades cannot be cleared away in a day, a month, a year, or years. It will be a long and slow and sometimes bitter progress and sometimes disheartening. But, we can do it. We can rebuild our cities and restore our streets and prepare good homes for all of us. This will take much time, and we shall need all the patience and faith we can summon up...

...You, the people of the United States of America are in command of your nation. Take that command. Restore your cities and your churches. Speak of God again, freely, and teach your children, and your children’s children, of His mercy. Never let them forget this day of their deliverance, and never let them forget the men who died and worked that they might be free, that peace might live with them again, and the promise of the centuries might be fulfilled in them.

Teach your children to be brave. This century of ours has been marked most conspicuously by cowardice of the people everywhere. It was by our cowardice that we were betrayed into the hands of corrupt men who promised to make life ’safe’ for us and devoid of hazard, and robbed the adventurousness by which the spirits of men are strengthened. It was by our poltroonery that we lost our liberties. It was by our fears that we almost died. A brave people never become slaves.

If we, the people of the United States of America, again lose our freedom it will be by our own lack of courage and faith and manhood.

Tonight States’ Rights are restored. Guard those rights as you would guard your lives. They were intended for just that purpose. A centralized government is a centralized evil.

On the day when you again allow abominable men to confiscate your freedom, your money, your lives, your private property, your manhood and your sacred honor, in the name of ’security’ or ’national emergency’ you will die, and never again shall you be free. If plotters again destroy your Republic, they will do it by your greedy and ignorant assent, by your disregard of your neighbors’ rights, by your apathy and your stupidity. We were brought to the brink of universal death and darkness because we had become that most contemptible of people - an angerless one. Keep alive and vivid all your righteous anger against traitors, against those who would abrogate your Constitution, against those who would lead you to wars with false slogans and cunning appeals to your patriotism.

For, remember, if you die in prison, you will have built that prison. If your sons are again conscripted, you will have penned the writ. If a company of malignant men again assumes control of your lives, you will have given them that control...

Always, the people are responsible for wicked lawmakers, oppressors, exploiters, criminals in government, tyrants in power, thieves, liars, malefactors and murderers in the capitals of the world. You, the man in the street, the man in the factory and in the shop, the man on the farm, the man in the office, you, the man everywhere, are guilty of the creatures whose crimes against you have been so monstrous, and will be again, by your own consent - if you give it...

...A wise man distrusts his neighbor. A wiser man distrust both his neighbor and himself. The wisest man of all distrusts his government. Therefore, be watchful and sleepless; be brave, be strong; be without fear. This is not the end. Villains will try, again and again and again, to enslave you, until the end of time. It is in your hands to defeat them and to destroy them, whenever or however they appear.

If you do not, then may God have mercy on your souls!”

 Taylor Caldwell, "The Devil’s Advocate" (1952) - pgs. 332 - 338
“It’s really not a number I’m terribly interested in.”

 General Colin Powell

When asked about the number of Iraqi people who were slaughtered by Americans in the 1991 "Desert Storm" terror campaign (200,000 people!).
“I will never apologize for the United States of America - I don’t care what the facts are.”

 President George Bush 1988

Bush was demonstrating his patriotism by excusing an act of cold-blooded mass-murder by the U.S. Navy. On July 3, 1988 the U.S. Navy warship Vincennes shot down an Iranian commercial airliner. All 290 civilian people in the aircraft were killed. The plane was on a routine flight in a commercial corridor in Iranian airspace. The targeting of it by the U.S. Navy was blatantly illegal. That it was grossly immoral is also obvious. Except to a patriot.
“To maintain this position of disparity (U.S. economic-military supremacy)... we will have to dispense with all sentimentality and day-dreaming.... We should cease to talk about vague and... unreal objectives such as human rights, the raising of the living standard and democratization. The day is not far off when we are going to have to deal in straight power concepts.... The less we are then hampered by idealistic slogans, the better.”

 George Kennan [Director of Policy Planning U.S. State Department 1948]
“If they turn on the radars we’re going to blow up their goddamn SAMs (surface-to-air missiles). They know we own their country. We own their airspace... We dictate the way they live and talk. And that’s what’s great about America right now. It’s a good thing, especially when there’s a lot of oil out there we need.”

 U.S. Brig. General William Looney (Interview Washington Post, August 30, 1999) [Referring, in reality, to the brutal mass-murder of hundreds of civilian Iraqi men, women and children during 10,000 sorties by American/British war criminals in the first eight months of 1999]
“The greatest crime since World War II has been U.S. foreign policy.”

 Ramsey Clark [Former U.S. Attorney General under President Lyndon Johnson]
“We have no honorable intentions in Vietnam. Our minimal expectation is to occupy it as an American colony and maintain social stability for our investments. This tells why American helicopters are being used against guerrillas in Colombia and Peru. Increasingly the role our nation has taken is the role of those who refuse to give up the privileges and pleasures that come from the immense profits of overseas investment.”

 Martin Luther King, Jr. ["A Time to Break the Silence" speech given at Riverside Church New York City April 4, 1967]
“Death squads have been created and used by the CIA around the world - particularly the Third World - since the late 1940s, a fact ignored by the elite-owned media.”

 Ralph McGehee [Former CIA analyst & Author] CIABASE; The Crisis of Democracy Deadly Deceits: My 25 years in the CIA
“The U.S.A. has supplied arms, security equipment and training to governments and armed groups that have committed torture, political killings and other human rights abuses in countries around the world.”

 Amnesty International ["United States of America - Rights for All" October 1998]
“We have come to be one of the worst ruled, one of the most completely controlled and dominated Governments in the world - no longer a Government of free opinion, no longer a Government by conviction and vote of the majority, but a Government by the opinion and duress of small groups of dominant men.”

 Woodrow Wilson [U.S. President during World War I]
“We must become the owners, or at any rate the controllers at the source, of at least a proportion of the oil which we require.”

 British Royal Commission, agreeing with Winston Churchill’s policy towards Iraq, 1913
“Every time we do something you tell me America will do this and will do that . . . I want to tell you something very clear: Don’t worry about American pressure on Israel. We, the Jewish people, control America, and the Americans know it.”

 Israeli Prime Minister, Ariel Sharon, October 3, 2001.
“Israel controls the United States Senate.”

 Sen. William Fulbright
“If war aims are stated which seem to be solely concerned with Anglo-American imperialism, they will offer little to people in the rest of the world. The interests of other peoples should be stressed. This would have a better propaganda effect.”

 Private memo from The Council of Foreign Relations to the US State Department, 1941
“’We have about 60% of the world’s wealth but only 6.3% of its’ population. In this situation we cannot fail to be the object of envy and resentment. Our real task in the coming period is to devise a pattern of relationships which will permit us to maintain this position of disparity. We need not deceive ourselves that we can afford today the luxury of altruism and world benefaction. We should cease to talk about such vague and unreal objectives as human rights, the raising of living standards and democratization. The day is not far off when we are going to have to deal in straight power concepts. The less we are then hampered by idealistic slogans, the better.”

 George Kennan, former Head of the US State Department Policy Planning Staff, Document PPS23, 24th February 1948
“I came to America because of the great, great freedom which I heard existed in this country. I made a mistake in selecting America as a land of freedom, a mistake I cannot repair in the balance of my lifetime.”

 Albert Einstein, 1947
“Q. "Mr. President, have you approved of covert activity to destabilize the present government of Nicaragua?"

A. "Well, no, we’re supporting them, the - oh, wait a minute, wait a minute, I’m sorry, I was thinking of El Salvador, because of the previous, when you said Nicaragua. Here again, this is something upon which the national security interests, I just - I will not comment.”

 Ronald Reagan, former US President, Washington press conference, February 13th, 1983, as quoted by John Pilger in ’Heroes’
“After seeing ’RAMBO’ last night, I know what to do the next time this happens.”

 Ronald Reagan, former US President, as reported by Daily Express, July 2nd, 1985
“The more individuals capable of watching the world theater calmly and critically, the less danger of monumental mass stupidities - first of all, wars.”

 Hermann Hesse: Author (1877-1962)
“Just because you do not take an interest in politics doesn’t mean politics won’t take an interest in you.”

 Pericles, 430 BC
“If one acknowledges a group or a nation willing to commit atrocities, then one must also acknowledges the existence of a nation willing to commit atrocities to blame on the first nation.”

 Michael Rivero
“War doesn’t fall out of the clear sky. Like every other human undertaking, it requires preparation; to make it a possibility and then a reality, the care and cooperation of many are needed. It is desired, prepared for, and proposed by those men and powers who stand to gain by it. Either it brings them direct cash profit, as in the case of armaments industry (and as soon as war breaks out, how many previously harmless industries become war industries, and how automatically money flows their way!), or it brings them advantage in the form of prestige, respect, and power, as in the case of unemployed generals and colonels.”

 Hermann Hesse: Author (1877-1962)
“Once a government resorts to terror against its own population to get what it wants, it must keep using terror against its own population to get what it wants. A government that terrorizes its own people can never stop. If such a government ever lets the fear subside and rational thought return to the populace, that government is finished.”

 Michael Rivero
“My instinct as an individualist and artist has always warned me most urgently against this capacity of men for becoming drunk on collective suffering, collective pride, collective hatred, and collective honor. When this morbid exaltation becomes perceptible in a room, a hall, a village, a city, or a country, I grow cold and distrustful; a shudder comes over me, for already, while most of my fellow men are still weeping with rapture and enthusiasm, still cheering and venting protestations of brotherhood, I see blood flowing and cities going up in flames.”

 Hermann Hesse: Author (1877-1962)
“Others [terrorists] are engaging even in an eco-type of terrorism whereby they can alter the climate, set off earthquakes, volcanos remotely through the use of electromagnetic waves... So there are plenty of ingenious minds out there that are at work finding ways in which they can wreak terror upon other nations...It’s real, and that’s the reason why we have to intensify our [counterterrorism] efforts.”

 Secretary of Defense William Cohen at an April 1997 counterterrorism conference sponsored by former Senator Sam Nunn
“We have come to recognize that there are potentially desirable limits to economic growth. There are also potentially desirable limits to the indefinite extension of political democracy...A government which lacks authority ...will have little ability, short of cataclysmic crisis, to impose on its people the sacrifices which may be necessary..”

 1975 Trilateral Commission Report on the Governability of Democracies
“There is a systematic plan to use the concepts of war to rearrange the chess pieces on the world playing board. It has to do with the New World Order, Globlism and the attack on national sovereignty we are seeing. Occasionally, the globalists who want One World Government have to turn to war to accelerate things.”

 Joel Skousen
“News is what someone wants to suppress. Everything else is advertising”.

 former NBC news prez Rubin Frank
“Our job is to give people not what they want, but what we decide they ought to have.”

 Richard Salent, Former President CBS News.
“Stopping terrorism is simple. Just quit screwing around with other people’s countries and the terrorists will go home. But the government of the United States wants to go on screwing around with other people’s countries, refuses to stop, indeed views it as Manifest Destiny for the United States Government to persist in screwing around with other people’s countries, and views the inconvenience, increased tax burden, loss of civil liberties, and even deaths among the American people as just another cost of doing business.”

 Michael Rivero
“By way of deception, thou shalt do war.”

 Motto of the Mossad, the Israeli secret service
“The [government] must put the most modern medical means in the service of this knowledge.... Those who are physically and mentally unhealthy and unworthy must not perpetuate their suffering in the body of their children.... The prevention of the faculty and opportunity to procreate on the part of the physically degenerate and mentally sick, over a period of only 600 years, would ... free humanity from an immeasurable misfortune.’’

 Adolf Hitler
“The per capita income gap between the developed and the developing countries is increasing, in large part the result of higher birth rates in the poorer countries.... Famine in India, unwanted babies in the United States, poverty that seemed to form an unbreakable chain for millions of people - how should we tackle these problems?.... It is quite clear that one of the major challenges of the 1970s ... will be to curb the world’s fertility.’”

 George H. W. Bush
“HISTORY is just new people making old mistakes...”

 Sigmund Freud
“One cannot wage war under present conditions without the support of public opinion, which is tremendously molded by the press and other forms of propaganda.”

 General Douglas MacArthur
“Politics is the womb in which war develops.”

 Carl von Clausewitz
“If you give a man the correct information for seven years, he may believe the incorrect information on the first day of the eighth year when it is necessary, from your point of view, that he should do so. Your first job is to build the credibility and the authenticity of your propaganda, and persuade the enemy to trust you although you are his enemy.”

 A Psychological Warfare Casebook Operations Research Office Johns Hopkins University Baltimore (1958)
“Public sentiment is everything. With public sentiment nothing can fail. Without it nothing can succeed. He who molds opinion is greater than he who enacts laws.”

 Abraham Lincoln
“The first casualty of war is truth.”

 Rudyard Kipling
“All warfare is based on deception.”

 Sun Tzu: The Art Of War
“Just as every dead soldier marks the eternal repetition of an error, so truth must eternally be repeated in a thousand forms.”

 Hermann Hesse - Author (1877-1962)
“Most people prefer to believe their leaders are just and fair even in the face of evidence to the contrary, because once a citizen acknowledges that the government under which they live is lying and corrupt, the citizen has to choose what he or she will do about it. To take action in the face of a corrupt government entails risks of harm to life and loved ones. To choose to do nothing is to surrender one’s self-image of standing for principles. Most people do not have the courage to face that choice. Hence, most propaganda is not designed to fool the critical thinker but only to give moral cowards an excuse not to think at all.”

 Michael Rivero
“Great military peoples have conquered their known world time and time again through the centuries, only to die out in the inevitable ashes of their fire. Well over two thousand years ago, the Chinese philosopher, Lao Tzu, concluded that:

"Weapons often turn upon the wielder, An army’s harvest is a waste of thorns."”

 Excerpted from Of Flight and Life, 1948
“We may have to resort to arms in the future, as we have in the past. We may have to use them to prevent atomic war from being launched against us. But let us have the wisdom to realize that the use of force is a sign of weakness on a higher plane, and that a policy based primarily on recourse to arms will sooner or later fail.”

 Charles Lindbergh, Of Flight and Life, 1948
“The history of war is the history of powerful individuals willing to sacrifice thousands upon thousands of other people’s lives for personal gains”

 Michael Rivero
“Today Americans would be outraged if U.N. troops entered Los Angeles to restore order; tomorrow they will be grateful. This is especially true if they were told there was an outside threat from beyond, whether real or promulgated, that threatened our very existence. It is then that all peoples of the world will plead with world leaders to deliver them from this evil. The one thing every man fears is the unknown. When presented with this scenario, individual rights will be willingly relinquished for the guarantee of their well being granted to them by their world government.”

 Henry Kissinger speaking at Evian, France, May 21, 1992 Bilderburgers meeting. Unbeknownst to Kissinger, his speech was taped by a Swiss delegate to the meeting.
“We tell the people what they need to know, what they want to know.”

 Frank Sesno, CNN "News”
“We need a common enemy to unite us.”

 Condoleeza Rice, March 2000
“Our government has kept us in a perpetual state of fear-kept us in a continuous stampede of patriotic fervor-with the cry of grave national emergency. Always there has been some terrible evil at home or some monstrous foreign power that was going to gobble us up if we did not blindly rally behind it ...”

 General Douglas MacArthur, 1957
“History is a joke played by the victors on the vanquished in front of an audience that dares not laugh.”

 Michael Rivero
“I am strongly in favor of using poisoned gas against uncivilized tribes. The moral effect should be good...and it would spread a lively terror....”

 Winston Churchill commenting on the British use of poison gas against the Iraqis after World War I
“... somehow we find it hard to sell our values, namely that the rich should plunder the poor.”

 former Secretary of State John Foster Dulles
“The crimes of the U.S. throughout the world have been systematic, constant, clinical, remorseless, and fully documented but nobody talks about them.”

 Harold Pinter
“If there has to be a blood-bath [of our own youth], let’s get it over with.”

 Ronald Reagan, Governor of California during the Vietnam War
“History is the history of war - of leaders of countries finding reasons and rationales to send the young people off to fight.”

 John Stockwell, former CIA official and author
“Former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Adm. William J. Crowe Jr. was part of the crew that sold Saddam Hussein the deadly means to wage war with anthrax germs. That’s when the United States wanted the ’Butcher of Baghdad’ to use anthrax on Iran.”

 Air Force Major Glenn MacDonald, explaining HOW anthrax came to be the biological weapon of choice in the world.

Adm. William J. Crowe Jr. owns 13% of BioPort Corporation, the only source for Anthrax Vaccine.
“There exists a shadowy Government with its own Air Force, its own Navy, its own fundraising mechanism, and the ability to pursue its own ideas of national interest, free from all checks and balances, and free from the law itself.”

 Senator Daniel K. Inouye - Iran Contra Hearings
“I like to think of myself as a patriot, but even more so as a man. Where the two disagree, I say the man is right.”

 Hermann Hesse - Author (1877-1962)
“Confused? Having difficulty telling the good guys from the bad guys? Use this handy guide to differences between Terrorists and the U.S. Government:

TERRORISTS: Supposed leader is the spoiled son of a powerful politician, from extremely wealthy oil family

US GOVERNMENT: Supposed leader is the spoiled son of a powerful politician, from extremely wealthy oil family

TERRORISTS: Leader has declared a holy war (’Jihad’) against his ’enemies’; believes any nation not with him is against him; believes god is on his side, and that any means are justified.

US GOVERNMENT: Leader has declared a holy war (’Crusade’) against his ’enemies’; believes any nation not with him is against him; believes god is on his side, and that any means are justified.

TERRORISTS: Supported by extreme fundamentalist religious leaders who preach hatred, intolerance, subjugation of women, and persecution of non-believers

US GOVERNMENT: Supported by extreme fundamentalist religious leaders who preach hatred, intolerance, subjugation of women, and persecution of non-believers

TERRORISTS: Leadership was not elected by a majority of the people in a free and fair democratic election

US GOVERNMENT: Leadership was not elected by a majority of the people in a free and fair democratic election

TERRORISTS: Kills thousands of innocent civilians, some of them children, in cold blooded bombings

US GOVERNMENT: Kills thousands of innocent civilians, some of them children, in cold blooded bombings

TERRORISTS: Operates through clandestine organization (al Qaeda) with agents in many countries; uses bombing, assassination, other terrorist tactics

US GOVERNMENT: Operates through clandestine organization (CIA) with agents in many countries; uses bombing, assassination, other terrorist tactics

TERRORISTS: Supposed leader has extensive financial ties to Supposed leader of US GOVERNMENT

US GOVERNMENT: Supposed leader has extensive financial ties to Supposed leader of TERRORIST

TERRORISTS: Supposed leader invested heavily in US bio-chemical companies

US GOVERNMENT: Supposed leader invested heavily in US bio-chemical companies

TERRORISTS: Using war as pretext to clamp down on dissent and undermine civil liberties

US GOVERNMENT: Using war as pretext to clamp down on dissent and undermine civil liberties

 arrived in an email
“Americans don’t need to lie to themselves. That’s what the government is for!”

 Michael Rivero
“We [the U.S.] has over 200 incidents in which we have put our troops into other countries to force them to our will.”

 John Stockwell, former CIA official and author
“Religion is an invention useful to persuade men to murder each other for conveniently located lands without having to pay them what the job is worth.”

 Michael Rivero
“Just who are these goddamn reds, anyway? A goddamn red is anyone who wants 30 cents when I am paying 25.”

 John Steinbeck, ’The Grapes of Wrath’
“The American oligarchy increasingly has less in common with the American people than it does with the equivalent oligarchies in Germany or Mexico or Japan.”

 Lewis Lapham, editor of Harpers
“I can make careful use of the intelligence at Israel’s disposal to identify, locate and kill...with minimal loss of innocent life, by such means as booby-trapping their telephones, rocketing their cars and offices, etc. In a word, assassinate them. Sounds good to me.

...hold a trial with the help of witnesses similarly abducted from the Palestinian territories. If necessary it (Israel) should apply physical pressure to these witnesses...”

 Israeli columnist Hillel Halkin, writing in the Wall Street Journal, August 28, 2001, p. A14. The term ’physical pressure’ means use of torture.
“If the world operates as one big market, every employee will compete with every person anywhere in the world who is capable of doing the same job. There are lots of them and many of them are hungry.”

 Andrew Grove, president of Intel Corp., in his book "High Output Management"
“[Nationalism is] a set of beliefs taught to each generation in which the Motherland or the Fatherland is an object of veneration and becomes a burning cause for which one becomes willing to kill the children of other Motherlands or Fatherlands.”

 Howard Zinn, historian
“Terrorists are just Freedom Fighters pointed back at us.”

 Michael Rivero
“The agony and moral anguish that ought to accompany an act of mass killing - yes, even in a war [the Gulf War against Iraq in 1991] - seemed wholly absent from American culture.”

 Ruth Rosen, history professor
“Indonesia plays a key role in maintaining regional stability. It is a leader in ASEAN and is a fundamental force for peace and prosperity ... We did not have a discussion about East Timor.”

 Secretary of Defense William Cohen at a press conference, January 1998

(after meeting with Indonesian President Suharto who is responsible for the deaths of 500,00 - 1,000,000 following his US-sanctioned coup against Indonesian President Sukarno in 1965, and the deaths of 200,000 during Indonesia’s US-sanctioned invasion and occupation of East Timor in 1975)
“Scare the hell out of the American people.”

 Senator Arthur Vandenburg, telling President Truman what the he needed to do in order to tax the American people to pay for the weapons and covert activities of the US National Security State that was being planned, to destroy the Russian Communist State
“The men who possess real power in this country have no intention of ending the cold war.”

 Albert Einstein
“The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed and hence, clamorous to be led to safety - by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary”

 H.L. Mencken
“Everyone likes to say Hitler did this" and "Hitler did that". But the truth is Hitler did very little. He was a world class asshole, but the evil actually done, from the death camps to WW2 was all done by citizens who were afraid to question if what they were told by their government was the truth or not, and who because they did not want to admit to themselves that they were afraid to question the government, refused to see the truth behind the Reichstag Fire, refused to see the invasion by Poland was a staged fake, and followed Hitler into national disaster.

It’s easy to look back and realize what a jerk Hitler was. But at the time, Hitler looked pretty good to the world, with the help of the media. He was TIME Magazine’s Man Of The Year in 1938. Stalin was TIME Man Of The Year for 1939 and 1942. The lesson is that it isn’t easy to spot a genocidal tyrant when you live with one, especially one whom the press supports and promotes. Tyrants become obvious only when looking back, after what they have done becomes known.

It is the very nature of power that it attracts the very sort of people who should not have it. The United States, as the world’s last superpower, is a prize that attracts men and women willing to do anything to win that power, and hence are willing to do anything with it once they have it. It is racist to assume that tyrants appear only in other nations and that somehow America is immune simply because we’re Americans. America has escaped the clutches of a dictatorship only through the efforts of those citizens who, unlike the Germans and Russians of the 1930s, have the moral courage to stand up and point out where the government is lying to the people.”

 Michael Rivero
“The rich love nobody better than those who make them richer still.

 Michael Rivero
“No triumph of peace can equal the armed triumph of war. In strict confidence ...I should welcome almost any war, for I think this country needs one.”

 Theodore Roosevelt
“There is no regime to reactionary for us provided it stands in Russia’s expansionist path. There is no country too remote to serve as the scene of a contest which may widen until it becomes a world war.”

 Henry Wallace, Vice-President under Franklin Roosevelt 1941-1945
“The only way to abolish war is to make peace heroic.”

 John Dewey
“War is a quarrel between two thieves too cowardly to fight their own battle; therefore they take boys from one village and another village, stick them into uniforms, equip them with guns, and let them loose like wild beasts against each other.”

 Thomas Carlyle
“Any dictator would admire the uniformity and obedience of the (U.S.) media.”

 Noam Chomsky
“The U.S. will not permit constructive programs in its own domains, so it must ensure that they are destroyed elsewhere to terminate " the threat of a good example”.

 Noam Chomsky
“Patriotism is the last resort of scoundrels.”

 Samuel Johnson
“Patriotism is the principle that will justify the training of wholesale murderers.”

 Leo Tolstoy
“We Americans claim to be a peace-loving people. We hate bloodshed; we are opposed to violence. Yet we go into spasms of joy over the possibility of projecting dynamite bombs from flying machines upon helpless citizens.

Conceit, arrogance, and egotism are the essentials of patriotism. When a child has reached manhood, he is thoroughly saturated with the belief that he is chosen by the Lord himself to defend his country against the attack or invasion of any foreigner. It is for that purpose that we are clamoring for a greater army and navy, more battleships and ammunition.

The people are urged to be patriotic ... by sacrificing their own children. Patriotism requires allegiance to the flag, which means obedience and readiness to kill father, mother, brother, sister.

The experience of every-day life fully proves that the armed individual is invariably anxious to try his strength. The same is historically true of governments. Really peaceful countries do not waste life and energy in war preparations, with the result that peace is maintained.

The powers know that the people at large are like children whose despair, sorrow, and tears can be turned into joy with a little toy. ... An army and navy represents the people’s toys.”

 Emma Goldman
“... the operative principles dictating U.S. support and hostility in the Third World have been business criteria first, military convenience second, and any humanistic considerations third and thus effectively irrelevant. In fact, they are less than irrelevant - they are in conflict with the first two criteria, and therefore ... humanizing forces [become] "threats".

The immiseration of the majority is an integral part of the Free World package for the Third World, the unsavory aspects of the package - the terror, the direct spoilation of people and resources, and western complicity - must be rationalized and, as far as possible, kept under the rug.”

... there is a system of terroristic states - the real terror network - that has spread throughout Latin America and elsewhere over the past several decades, and which is deeply rooted in the corporate interest and sustaining political-military-financial propaganda mechanisms of the United States and its allies in the Free World.”

 Edward Herman
“What history truly records is the inherent irresponsibility of all despotisms and the almost inevitable corruption of all forms of government that are not subject to the control of the people ...”

 Brazilian church statement
“The economy is doing fine, but the people aren’t.”

 General Emelio Medici, head-of-state of Brazil, 1971
“We enjoy the economic stability that the Armed Forces guarantee us. This [economic] plan can be fulfilled despite its lack of popular support. It has sufficient political support .. that provided by the Armed Forces.”

 Martinez de Hoz, financial minister of the Argentina military government, 1976
“For four months I was heavily tortured by the Army in Rio de Janeiro, and then in the Naval Information Center.... Near death, I was taken to the hospital for the sixth time. The beatings had been so severe that my body was one big bruise. The blood clotted under my skin and all the hair on my body fell out. They pulled out all my fingernails. They poked needles through my sexual organs and used a rope to drag me across the floor by my testicles. Right afterwards they hung me upside down. They hung me handcuffed from a grating, removed my artificial leg, and tied my penis so l could not urinate. They forced me to stand on my one leg for three days without food or drink. They gave me so many drugs that my eardrums burst and I am impotent. They nailed my penis to a table for 24 hours. They tied me up like a pig and threw me into a pool so that I nearly drowned. They put me in a completely dark cell where I remained for 30 days urinating and defecating in the same place where I had to sleep. They fed me only bread soaked in water. They put me in a rubber box and turned on a siren. For three days I neither ate nor slept and I nearly went mad....”

 Manuel de Conceicao, peasant leader in Brazil

He was arrested in 1972 and brought before Brazilian security police who had been schooled at US army bases in the latest methods of counterinsurgency and interrogation. He was tortured by Brazilian army units trained and equipped by US military-aid programs.
“My name is Rigoberta Menchu Tum. I am a representative of the "Vincente Menchu" [her father] Revolutionary Christians ... On 9 December 1979, my 16-year-old brother Patrocino was captured and tortured for several days and then taken with twenty other young men to the square in Chajul ... An officer of [President] Lucas Garcia’s army of murderers ordered the prisoners to be paraded in a line. Then he started to insult and threaten the inhabitants of the village who were forced to come out of their houses to witness the event. I was with my mother, and we saw Patrocino; he had had his tongue cut out and his toes cut off. The officer jackal made a speech. Every time he paused the soldiers beat the Indian prisoners. When he finished his ranting, the bodies of my brother and the other prisoners were swollen bloody, unrecognizable. It was monstrous, but they were still alive. They were thrown on the ground and drenched with gasoline. The soldiers set fire to the wretched bodies with torches and the captain laughed like a hyena and forced the inhabitants of Chajul to watch. This was his objective - that they should be terrified and witness the punishment given to the "guerrillas”.

 Rigoberta Menchu Tum, awarded the 1992 Nobel Peace Prize
“Four men came in, bearing a cot with a sheet-covered figure. "Sit down," one ordered. "You’re going to see a performance by a bad actor, an actor who has forgotten his part. Help him remember it." They uncovered a body entirely purple, missing a foot. "Come closer," another ordered. "Look at him. You’ll know him." And she did. It was 27-year-old "El Gordo" Toledo, with whom she had been 20 days before. He could hardly speak, or scream, any more. When Elba maintained that she did not know him, they said, "Let’s see"-they pulled out his nails, cut off his remaining ear, cut out his tongue, gouged out his eyes, and killed him slowly as she watched, thinking, "He could be my son." Then they brought another "actor," 26-year-old Eduard Munoz. It took them five hours to kill him, under her eyes. It was worse than any pain they could have inflicted on her, she said. Later she was forced to watch while her cellmates-aged 16, 17, and 40, nude and drugged, were directed to perform an erotic dance before they were raped. Another girl, back from a dreaded torture center, and pregnant, was so crazy that each time she awoke she screamed that her only desire was for her child to be born so she could kill it.”

 Elba Vergara, secretary to President Allende (himself murdered by the Chilean generals),
“Rosa had her breasts cut off. Then they cut into her chest and took out her heart. The men had their arms broken, their testicles cut off, and their eyes poked out They were killed by slitting their throats and pulling the tongue out through the slit.”

 A survivor of a raid by US-backed Contras in Nicaragua in the 1980s
“In the course of preparing myself...I realized afresh that I hate Churchill and all of his kind. I hate them virulently. They have stalked down the corridors of endless power all through history.... What man of sanity would say on hearing of the atrocities committed by the Japanese against British and Anzac prisoners of war, ’We shall wipe them out, everyone of them, men, women, and children. There shall not be a Japanese left on the face of the earth? Such simple-minded cravings for revenge leave me with a horrified but reluctant awe for such single-minded and merciless ferocity.”

 the actor Richard Burton in an article for the New York Times about his experience playing the role of Winston Churchill in a television drama
“May the Holy Name visit retribution on the Arab heads, and cause their seed to be lost, and annihilate them.

It is forbidden to have pity on them. We must give them missiles with relish, annihilate them. Evil ones, damnable ones.”

 Israeli Rabbi Ovadia Yosef , quoted in Ha’aretz April 12, 2001
“... in pursuit of political objectives in the Nigerian Civil War, a number of great and small nations, including Britain and the United States, worked to prevent supplies of food and medicine from reaching the starving children of rebel Biafra. ”

 A United Nations official
“All around me, bitter tears are being shed over the fate of Holland, Belgium, France and England. I must confess to being a little dry around the eyes. I hear people shaking with shudders at the thought of Germany collecting taxes in Holland. I have not heard a word against Holland collecting one twelfth of poor people’s wages in Asia. Hitler’s crime is that he is actually doing a thing like that to his own kind...

As I see it, the doctrines of democracy deal with the aspirations of men’s souls, but the application deals with things. One hand in somebody else’s pocket and one on your gun, and you are highly civilized.... Desire enough for your own use only, and you are a heathen. Civilized people have things to show to their neighbors.”

 Black writer Zora Neale Hurston at the start of World War II.
“I am amazed at the complacency of Negro press and public. Truman is a monster. l can think of him as nothing else but the Butcher of Asia. Of his grin of triumph on giving the order to drop the Atom bombs on Japan. Of his maintaining troops in China who are shooting the starving Chinese for stealing a handful of food.”

 Black writer Zora Neale Hurston, 1946
“Whether the mask is labeled Fascism, Democracy, or Dictatorship or the Proletariat, our great adversary remains the Apparatus - the bureaucracy, the police, the military.... No matter what the circumstances, the worst betrayal will always be to subordinate ourselves to this Apparatus, and to trample underfoot, in its service, all human values in ourselves and in others.”

 The French worker philosopher Simone Weil,1945
“It was a useless war, as every war is.... How gaddamn foolish it is, the war. They’s no war in the world that’s worth fighting for, I don’t care where it is. They can’t tell me any different. Money, money is the thing that causes it all. I wouldn’t be a bit surprised that the people that start wars and promote ’em are the men that make the money, make the ammunition, make the clothing and so forth. Just think of the poor kids that are starvin’ to death in Asia and so forth that could be fed with how much you make one big shell out of.”

 Former GI Tommy Bridges
“I had been in thirteen battle engagements, had sunk a submarine, and was the first man ashore in the landing at Roi. In that four years, I thought, What a hell of a waste of a man’s life. I lost a lot of friends. I had the task of telling my roommate’s parents about our last days together. You lose limbs, sight, part of your life-for what? Old men send young men to war. Flag, banners, and patriotic sayings...

We’ve institutionalized militarism. This came out of World War Two... It gave us the National Security Council. It gave us the CIA, that is able to spy on you and me this very moment. For the first time in the history of man, a country has divided up the world into military districts.... You could argue World War Two had to be fought. Hitler had to be stopped. Unfortunately, we translate it unchanged to the situation today...

I hate it when they say, "He gave his life for his country." Nobody gives their life for anything. We steal the lives of these kids. We take it away from them. They don’t die for the honor and glory of their country. We kill them.”

 Admiral Gene LaRocque
“Ten military advisers are attached to the Sonsonate armed forces... The episode contains all the unchanging elements of the Salvadoran tragedy- uncontrolled military violence against civilians, the apparent ability of the wealthy to procure official violence...and the presence of United States military advisers, working with the Salvadoran military responsible for these monstrous practices... after 30,000 unpunished murders by security and military forces and over 10,000 "disappearances" of civilians in custody, the root causes of the killings remain in place, and the killing goes on.”

 Two Americans who visited El Salvador in 1983 for the New York City Bar Association described for the New York Times a massacre of eighteen peasants by local troops in Sonsonate province
“Strike against war, for without you no battles can be fought! Strike against manufacturing shrapnel and gas bombs and all other tools of murder! Strike against preparedness that means death and misery to millions of human beings! Be not dumb, obedient slaves in an army of destruction! Be heroes in an army of construction.”

 Helen Keller, 1940
“Problems cannot be solved at the same level of awareness that created them.”

 Albert Einstein (1879 - 1955)
“The loud little handful will shout for war. The pulpit will warily and cautiously protest at first.... The great mass of the nation will rub its sleepy eyes, and will try to make out why there should be a war, and they will say earnestly and indignantly: "It is unjust and dishonorable and there is no need for war.

Then the few will shout even louder.... Before long you will see a curious thing: anti-war speakers will be stoned from the platform, and free speech will be strangled by hordes of furious men who still agree with the speakers but dare not admit it...

Next, the statesmen will invent cheap lies...and each man will be glad of these lies and will study them because they soothe his conscience; and thus he will bye and bye convince himself that the war is just and he will thank God for a better sleep he enjoys by his self-deception.”

 Mark Twain
“The U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey, which interviewed 700 Japanese military and political officials after the war came to this conclusion: "Based on a detailed investigation of all the facts and supported by the testimony of the surviving Japanese leaders involved, it is the Survey’s opinion that certainly prior to 31 December 1945, and in all probability prior to I November 1945, Japan would have surrendered even if the atomic bombs had not been dropped, even if Russia had not entered the war, and even if no invasion had been planned or contemplated.”

 The conclusion of the U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey, which interviewed 700 Japanese military and political officials after the war
“We have regularly played.a determining role in making and in unmaking governments, and we have defined what we have considered to be the acceptable behavior of governments. ... Right-wing governments will have to be given steady outside support, even, if necessary, by sending in American forces.”

 Robert W. Tucker, political scientist, 1980
“The great object of American foreign policy ought to be the restoration of a more normal political world, a world in which those states possessing the elements of great power once again play the role their power entitles them to play.”

 Robert W. Tucker, political scientist, 1980
“There is nothing more wicked, more disastrous, more widely destructive, more deeply tenacious, more loathsome. He said this was repugnant to nature: "Whoever heard of a hundred thousand animals rushing together to butcher each other, as men do everywhere? . . . once war has been declared, then all the affairs of the State are at the mercy of the appetites of a few.”

 Erasmus
“Many more people in the world are concerned about sports than human rights.”

 Samuel P. Huntington