Posted on 01/29/2002 6:51:38 AM PST by TLBSHOW
ONEONTA —
U.S. government officials have falsely linked Iraq to Sept. 11 to justify attacks against the country, a former U.N. official said at a SUCO forum Monday night.
"Understand, our country is getting ready to go to war against Iraq as we speak," said Scott Ritter, former chief United Nations weapons inspector in Iraq.
About 300 people attended the two-speaker forum, "Iraq: An Upcoming Target in the War on Terrorism," which was held in the Hunt Union Ballroom at the State University College at Oneonta.
Members of the Bush administration, including Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, are pulling Iraq under the Sept. 11 "umbrella" because of a "personal agenda" to punish Saddam Hussein, Ritter said. No record of Iraqi intelligence in the Sept. 11 attacks has been found, he said.
"No such linkage exists," he said. "There is no justification for this."
The Rev. G. Simon Harak, ethics professor at Fordham University, said about 15 terrorists on the planes on Sept. 11 are known to be from Saudi Arabia.
"Why aren't we attacking (Saudi Arabia)?" he asked.
Harak said U.S. sanctions against Iraq have destroyed the quality of life for civilians for the past 11 years.
The U.S. will strategically veto certain items to Iraq to make sure the people suffer, Harak said. For example, he said, the U.S. will allow the country to import insulin but not syringes to administer the medicine.
"Is this what we want?" he said. "Come to Iraq and see for yourself what our sanctions are doing."
The sanctions against Iraq, a one-time U.S. ally, have been in place since near the end of the Persian Gulf War, a campaign against Iraq led by former President George Bush in early 1991. In that war, the United States devastated the Iraqi military, which had occupied neighboring Kuwait the previous summer, but failed to remove Hussein from power.
Hussein has remained defiant toward the United States, which has since encouraged a worldwide restriction of trade with oil-rich Iraq. The stated purpose of these "sanctions" has been to weaken Hussein's regime, to encourage rebellion and to allow outsiders to assure that Iraq does not pose a threat to other nations.
Nearly every city and village in Iraq were bombed during the Gulf War and a "countless" number of people have died, he said. Electricity infrastructure was destroyed and people were exposed to uranium, he said.
Water plants also were destroyed, spilling water contaminated with e-coli, malaria and typhoid, he said.
"Who's waging biological warfare now?" Harak said.
Harak, a Jesuit priest, has visited Iraq on three occasions with humanitarian delegations. In violation of the U.S. sanctions, he took medicine and toys to Iraqi hospitals.
Harak said Hussein has done good things for Iraq.
Hussein installed free education, including graduate school, law school and medical school, a free health care system and drastically increased the percentage of literate women, he said.
"I wish it were as clearly demonic as we'd like it to be," he said of Hussein's regime.
Ritter served as a member of the United Nations' weapons inspection team in Iraq for seven years in the 1990s and as its chief inspector for three.
He said the U.S. "has corrupted the weapons inspection process" by illegally using information U.N. inspectors gathered to target Hussein and weapons not considered of mass destruction in the Gulf War.
A former Marine intelligence officer who also served as an arms control inspector in the former Soviet Union, Ritter was responsible for investigating Iraq's concealment of weapons of mass destruction.
He resigned in 1998 amid controversy, claiming that both the United States and the U.N. Security Council were not firm enough in backing the inspections.
U.N. weapons inspectors are not working in Iraq now, Ritter said.
Economic sanctions would be imposed upon the country regardless, giving Iraq no incentive to cooperate, Ritter said.
Ritter said Iraq cannot be hiding weapons of mass destruction because the Gulf War destroyed its infrastructure for making them.
"You don't have weapons of mass destruction appear out of nowhere," he said.
The forum was moderated by political science Professor Paul Conway, who said both speakers gave "truly informed presentations."
Harak was the only American representative at the Baghdad International Conference on the sanctions in May 1999. He has spoken widely on the impact of the sanctions on Iraq, and he is working against the sanctions with the group Voices in the Wilderness.
Ritter has authored a book, "Endgame: Solving the Iraq Problem - Once and For All," and returned to Iraq to film a documentary, "In Shifting Sands," about the impact of U.S. and U.N. sanctions on the Iraqi population.
The free forum was organized by Citizens' Alternative Voice, a newly-formed anti-violence group, and sponsored by the college's political science department, political science club, Public Events Committee and the Hunt College Union.
A brief question and answer session followed the speeches.
Ritter, answering a question, expanded upon his claim that a war on Iraq is the personal agenda of Bush administration officials.
"Iraq today is not an eminent threat," he said. "It has nothing to do with the national security of the United States."
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