Durka-Durka-Muhammed-Jihad!!
Haven't heard much from the 'children are DYING because of the UN sanctions!!!' crowd about this:
Ex-U.N. officer pleads guiltyIsn't it interesting that before Operation Iraqi Freedom there was no end in sight of the shrill screams from all sorts of 'humanitarian groups' about how the sanctions were causing 'millions of Iraqi children to die' and now there's a chorus of crickets chirping?NEW YORK -- A former U.N. procurement officer was released on bail yesterday after pleading guilty to accepting nearly $1 million in bribes in connection with the corrupt Iraq oil-for-food program.
U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan hours earlier had lifted Alexander Yakovlev's diplomatic immunity in response to a request by the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, said his chief of staff.
Mr. Yakovlev was the first U.N. official indicted in the scandal, which is being investigated by federal prosecutors, several congressional panels and a U.N. commission headed by former U.S. Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker.
He pleaded guilty to counts of wire fraud, conspiracy to commit wire fraud and money laundering and was released later on $400,000 bond. He faces up to 20 years in prison for each count.
The Volcker commission, in an interim report yesterday, said Mr. Yakovlev had "engaged in a continuous course of conduct of accepting payments from U.N. contractors," going back to at least 2000.
(I am quite honestly too lazy to look them up. You know they were out there four years ago - so do I - so let's just assume that history has not been re-written and those people & groups weren't eliminated from time itself.)
Although many suspected that Saddam and his posse were outright stealing money generated from the 'Oil-for-Food' program, there wasn't enough proof to really generate much ado about anything before the war. And now that the war has revealed all of this corruption - not only on the part of the Baathist members in Baghdad, but severely entrenched in the oh-so-saintly United Nations, the only outrage derived from all of this is from those of us that pointed out again and again and again that the 'millions of dead children' were not because of the sanctions themselves.
So where are all those 'end the sanctions' groups? What is their reaction to all these new revelations?
I think I know where: mixed in with the crow pie their shovelling in their faces. Either that or all of those whiners cannot begin to formulate any sort of response that doesn't make them look like....well, complete fracking morons.
Yet another example of people thinking with their hearts instead of using simple logic to analyze a given situation.
Scroff - those are the same people that said that the U.S. was to blame for all the crap happenin
Read more in Crow Anyone?
scroff said:
Oh those rotten 'humanitarian groups'. I remember them from way back in the early to mid 1990's b
Read more in Crow Anyone?
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Oh those rotten 'humanitarian groups'. I remember them from way back in the early to mid 1990's before OFF... here's just a few examples!
A January 22, 1991, Defense Intelligence Agency report titled “Iraq Water Treatment Vulnerabilities” noted,
Iraq depends on importing specialized equipment and some chemicals to purify its water supply, most of which is heavily mineralized and frequently brackish to saline.... Failing to secure supplies will result in a shortage of pure drinking water for much of the population. This could lead to increased incidences, if not epidemics, of disease.... Unless the water is purified with chlorine, epidemics of such diseases as cholera, hepatitis, and typhoid could occur.
A May 1991 Pentagon analysis entitled “Status of Disease at Refugee Camps,” noted,
Cholera and measles have emerged at refugee camps. Further infectious diseases will spread due to inadequate water treatment and poor sanitation.
Col. John Warden III, deputy director of strategy for the Air Force, observed,
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.
A 1995 article entitled “The Enemy as a System” by John Warden, published in the Air Force’s Airpower Journal, discussed the benefits of bombing “dual-use targets” and noted,
A key example of such dual-use targeting was the destruction of Iraqi electrical power facilities in Desert Storm.... [Destruction] of these facilities shut down water purification and sewage treatment plants. As a result, epidemics of gastroenteritis, cholera, and typhoid broke out, leading to perhaps as many as 100,000 civilian deaths and a doubling of the infant mortality rate.
And last but not least, when asked if the effects of sanctions were worth a half million children, Madeleine Albright replied,
I think this is a very hard choice, but the price, we think the price is worth it.
Yea, the sanctions were peachy, they didn't hurt anyone. Silly crickets...
Right.
|| Posted by scroff, August 13, 2005 08:31 AM ||Scroff - those are the same people that said that the U.S. was to blame for all the crap happening in Iraq because of the sanctions.
Sanctions....you know, those dreaded impostions that kept Iraq from rebuilding water plants but allowed Saddam to build quite a few more palaces.
THIS is what I'm talking about - you're hearing crickets from their direction about where the UN played a pivotal role in this.
|| Posted by Mad Mikey, August 13, 2005 09:29 AM ||