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I'll just reply very briefly to one important point: >On Ramsey Clark > >Ritter: I wouldn't be in touch with Ramsey Clark I fought in the Gulf War. >I was in that war, I know what went on during that war, and we're not war >criminals. I'm not a war criminal. And none of the people I served with are >war criminals. And yet he's accusing the United States of committing war >crimes because A-10 aircraft fired depleted uranium shells at Iraqi tanks. >That's horribly irresponsible. In actual fact, Clark et. al's allegations of war crimes - which include the sanctions themselves as a war crime - are more detailed and wide-ranging than that. See this report, fronted by a disturbing photograph: http://deoxy.org/wc/warcrime.htm Also note that Noam Chomsky alleges that "If the Nuremberg standards [for war crimes] were applied today, every post-war American president would have to be hanged." This is no unsubstantiated generalisation. Chomsky has written over 30 books on the subject of US foreign policy and the corporate propaganda system, which provide copious evidence for this claim; he is widely regarded as one of the best and most incisive left-wing US political writers of this century. Many of his books can be read online at: http://www.zmag.org/chomsky/index.cfm Chomsky's work is important because, as he and other students of media propaganda such as Herman frequently point out, supression of political dissent in "liberal democratic" societies does not operate so much by overt propaganda, as it would under totalitarianism, but by the more sophisticated method of framing discourse in terms of implicit assumptions which are always presupposed and rarely even made evident, let alone directly challenged (I have a short article which explains this a little bit more - email me if interested). Reading Chomsky helps to break out of these preconceptions, some of which are fairly obvious, others of which are unquestioned even by quite dissident thinkers. -- Robin P.S. Human Rights Watch and Ritter should perhaps both try to get hold of the report "Depleted Uranium - a Post-War Disaster for Environment and Health". The US can hardly plead ignorance, as it has conducted experiments in radioactive warfare, on its own citizens! More details to follow soon when I track them down. -- ----------------------------------------------------------------------- This is a discussion list run by the Campaign Against Sanctions on Iraq For removal from list, email soc-casi-discuss-request@lists.cam.ac.uk Full archive and list instructions are available from the CASI website: http://welcome.to/casi