On December 11, 2001 the following letter was sent from former U.S. Attorney General Ramsey Clark to the ambassador and foreign minister of each member of the UN Security Council and the UN General Assembly.

International Action Center
39 West 14th St, #206
NY, NY 10011
212-633-6646 fax: 212-633-2889
www.iacenter.org iacenter@iacentr.org

December 11, 2001

Dear Ambassador,

The Security Council must direct the United States that it may not attack Iraq and must cease threatening to do so. Nor can ittrain, aid, or finance other forces seeking the violent overthrow of the Iraqi government. Any such acts would violate the obligations of nations under the Charter of the United Nations and constitute crimes under international law.

U.S. military and economic assaults on Iraq in the past dozen years are a continuing crime against peace and humanity. They violate the Genocide Convention.

The Pentagon admits it conducted 110,000 aerial sorties against a defenseless Iraq dropping 88,500 tons of bombs equivalent to 7 1/2 Hiroshima bombs in 42 days from January 17 to February 28, 1991. The bombs targeted every type of structure and facility necessary to support civilian life. Family dwellings, water and food systems and supplies, industry, commerce, business, education, religion all across Iraq were the direct object of U.S. bombs punishing a whole population.

More than 150,000 thousands defenseless people died in Iraq as a result of this military assault, which included thousands of individual war crimes.

From August 6, 1990 to date the most severe economic sanctions and forced impoverishment have deliberately inflicted hunger, malnourishment, sickness and death generously among the people of Iraq killing and crippling infants, children, the elderly, pregnant women, nursing mothers, persons with chronic illnesses, and emergency medical cases fist and most frequently.

More than 1 1/2 million people have died as a direct result of these sanctions. More than half have been children under five years of age. The sanctions, coerced from the Security Council by the U.S., have violated the Genocide Convention because they have deliberately created conditions of life intended to destroy the Iraqi population in whole, or in part, because of the nationality, race, religion and ethnic origin of its people. The sanctions have had their intended effect.

Every U.N. agency dealing with food, health and children has confirmed the human horror of the sanctions. They include the FAO, UNICEF, WFP, WHO. The most courageous and honorable of the U.N. employee's directly involved with enforcement of the sanctions and inspections under them have resigned their positions and publicly protested the sanctions and inspections policies. The food for oil program approved only in late 1996, and used thereafter primarily as a devise for delay, frustration and accusation, was initiated only when international protest against the savagery of the sanctions overwhelmed the fear in which Security Council members held the threat of U.S. reprisal if they did not support U.S. policies.

The U.S. has bombed Iraq whenever it chose to do so at any time for the past twelve years. Missiles and bombs have targeted Saddam Hussin for assassination. Many hundreds have been killed, including as an illustration of the meaning of such bombing, Leila al Attar, the internationally famous artist, museum director, wife, mother, human being. The sound of U.S. jets over Iraq is
omnipresent, keeping constant the terrifying memory of the continuous aerial and missile assault of February-March 1991 which averaged an aerial sortie every 30 seconds.

In the face of these staggering crimes against Iraq, the U.S. has conducted a constant campaign of vilification in the international media it controls. While claims Saddam Hussein is the evil it seeks to destroy its broad brush paints all of Iraq as a symbol of evil. The U.S. propaganda is racist, anti Muslim, hate engendering and false.

The U.S. has corrupted and seriously compromised the United Nations by appearing to act in its name, tragically diminishing humanities best hope for peace, dignity and decent conditions of life for all by its decade of brutish and criminal assaults on the people of Iraq. Though coerced, the Security Council is complicit in these crimes against peace and humanity, war crimes and genocide because it has at the least allowed its name and moral authority to be usurped by the United States.

The United States time and time again has acted on the advice of Plato's Athenian Stranger, who fearing the judgment of history remains anonymous by waging "...war for the sake of peace". Consider how victims of U.S. wars, surrogate and direct, since World War II have fared: Korea, Vietnam, Cambodia, Nicaragua, the Domenican Republic, the Philippines, Liberia, Cuba, Guatemala, Grenada, Palestine, Lebanon, Iran, Somalia, Sudan, Haiti, El Salvador, Honduras, Angola, Croatia, Bosnia, Yugoslavia, Kosovo, Sierra Leone, Iran, Indonesia, Afghanistan. Yet where is the promised peace?

Consider the havoc direct U.S. military violence has wreaked in the past decade on the people of Iraq, all the Republics of the former Federal Republic of Yugoslavia created to make peace possible in the Balkans, Nicaragua, Haiti, Somalia, Sudan, North Korea, Kosovo, Afghanistan. And who will be next? The media reports daily on the candidates.

Is there anything Iraq has done in the past decade which threatened peace, endangered life, or caused violence that could possibly compare with the violence and calumny the U.S. has visited on Iraq. There is no legal basis, or moral justification for a U.S. attack on Iraq, or for U.S. financing and assisting in the overthrow of its government. For the U.S. to do so is an international crime and prohibited by the Constitution and laws of the United States. Prevailing power in the U.S. and its government intends to attack Iraq when the current assault of Afghanistan has accomplished its purpose to consolidate U.S. domination over the Middle East, the Gulf region and central Asia.

Act immediately to end the shame of the Security Councils abject failure to assert the independence and sovereignty of the United Nations under its Charter and to end this scourage of war. Prohibit the United States from attacking Iraq.

Sincerely,
Ramsey Clark

Sunday July 7, 10:35 AM

'Cruel' Americans stormed homes, filmed naked women: villagers

US soldiers stormed the homes of Afghan villagers after they were bombed in a US air-raid last weekend and barred people from treating their wounded relatives, outraged Afghans said here. "First they bombed the womenfolk, killing them like animals. Then they stormed into the houses and tied the hands of men and women," Mohammad Anwar told AFP at Kakrakai village in central Uruzgan province's Dehrawad district. "It was cruelty. After bombing the area, the US forces rushed to that house, cordoned it off and refused to let the people help the victims or take them away for treatment," he said. Anwar was pointing to the home of his brother Sharif, who was hosting a huge pre-wedding party for his son on the night of June 30 when US airships strafed Karkrakai and surrounding villages.

Sharif, who risked the wrath of the Taliban to keep Afghan President Hamid Karzai alive during his daring mission into then-Taliban-ruled central Afghanistan last October, was killed. So were Anwar's wife, Sharif's wife and four children. The groom-to-be son survived because he was confined to a separate house as local wedding tradition decrees.

The US-led coalition commander in Afghanistan, Lieutenant General Dan McNeil, announced Saturday that 48 people, according to Afghan officials, had been killed.

Anwar, a senior Karzai-appointed military commander in neighbouring Kandahar province, said the toll would have been less if the troops storming his brother's home had allowed relatives to tend to the victims. "Had people been allowed to take these injured to the hospital more and more lives would have been saved," he said as he received bereaved villagers in the local mosque. "Many of the injured with broken arms and broken legs died due to loss of blood. "Until seven or eight o'clock in the morning the Americans did not allow anyone to help the injured and to cover the bodies. Most of their clothes had been burnt off (in the attack). "They kept filming and photographing the naked women." Anwar said he had no answers for the questions of his stunned people. "The people are asking: Is the result of the support we have extended to the Americans? This is humiliation. Our women were disgraced."

The United States, in Afghanistan seeking remnants of the former hardline Islamic Taliban regime and its al-Qaeda allies, has insisted that coalition aircraft had attacked only after they were fired on. It began air strikes against al-Qaeda and the now-ousted Taliban in October last year, after the September 11 terror attacks in the United States blamed on al-Qaeda.

Anti-American rage gripped the nearby villages of Shatoghai, Siasung and Mazar, also hit in the US bombardment. "One day God will give us the strength and we will fight them," said Haji Wali, whose home in Shatoghai was attacked. "Even during the Russian's occupation (1979-1989) there was never such a sustained bombing of the area. We are weak and they are oppressing us," he railed.

He trashed attempts at compensation, saying coalition forces had offered the villagers' tents. "They want to please us by providing us with four tents. Is two or four tents worth the price of our lives? "Would the Americans forgive us if we killed two Americans and give them two tents in return? The Taliban used to lock us in jail, but they would not bomb us and dishonour our women."

Jamal Khatun lost her son, 13, and grandsons Rehmat and Nabi, both four, in the strike on Siasung village. "We were asleep on the verandah when the bombs hit, we had no idea what was happening," she told AFP as she clutched the blood-soaked clothes of her dead son and grandchildren. Rozi Khan said a child was killed and eight people injured in her village of Mazar. "We migrated here to escape drought. Why was our house targeted?"

BAGHDAD BATTLE KILLS 2,300

The battle for Baghdad cost the lives of at least 1,101 Iraqi civilians, many of them women and children, according to records at the city's 19 largest hospitals. The civilian death toll was almost certainly higher. The hospital records say that another 1,255 dead were "probably" civilians, including many women and children.

Uncounted others who died never made it to hospitals and now are buried in shallow graves that have been dug throughout the city - in cemeteries, back yards, hospital gardens, city parks and mosque grounds. More than 6,800 civilians were wounded, the hospital records show.

A Pentagon spokesman called even one civilian death too many, but military historians said that, compared with past wars, the death toll was relatively low. The numbers, gleaned from archives that separated military from civilians, include those killed between March 19, when the US air war began, and April 9, when the city fell to American forces. The biggest number of deaths appears to have occurred April 5 and 6 when US troops began fighting their way into the city.

At the Shaheed Al Adnan Hospital in central Baghdad, for example, the ledger showed 44 civilian deaths in the first 17 days of the war, then 41 for the last five days, including 24 on April 5 and 12 on April 6. Iraqi doctors acknowledge that the records may not be perfect. Although it was a fairly simple task to categorise women and children as civilians, men presented a different challenge, especially in the final days of the war.

Some loyalists to Saddam Hussein reportedly fought in civilian clothes, and some soldiers shed their uniforms in retreat. But the doctors said they were able to separate military from civilian by relying on age and other factors. In general, if a person was dressed in civilian clothes and carried no military identification the doctors assumed he was a civilian. They said that many soldiers did present military ID at the hospitals. The records make no effort to determine whether the dead were killed by American or Iraqi fire, although the doctors believe that US weapons produced most of the casualties. "Was our record-keeping perfect?" said Dr Basim Al-Shaeli, a general surgeon at Al Kharama in the city's southwest sector. "During the invasion, I was performing 10 major operations a day, staying here around the clock. While I was doing this, the shooting would be going on, bullets would be crashing into the hospital around us, and we could hear the tanks outside the gates.

"I was performing surgery on an injured neck, an injured head or face, and I was insisting that they be taken home the next day, because the demand for beds was so great, and even so we were always overcrowded. And this wasn't just me; every doctor here worked like this. "So no, our records are not perfect. But I believe they are accurate."

The Baghdad death toll also does not include the hundreds of civilians who died in other parts of Iraq. Tabulations have not been made in many of Iraq's cities, but available information indicates hundreds of civilians died during the US assault. In Najaf, for example, the Najaf Teaching Hospital reported that as of Sunday it had treated 286 civilian dead during the war. During the same period, the hospital counted 57 military dead. The Bush administration says it will make no effort to tally Iraqi dead, either civilian or military.

The Iraqi Red Crescent Society says it will have no report on civilian deaths ready until mid-May. So the hospital records provide what appears to be the first credible, if imperfect, starting point for determining how many civilians in the capital perished in the war. The Red Crescent said these 19 hospitals were the likeliest to have received dead and injured during the war. The records show 1,101 deaths that doctors felt were clearly those of civilians, 845 of which were recorded at three hospitals - Al Kharama, Al Askan and Yarmuk - near the Baghdad airport. An additional 1,255 dead probably were civilians, doctors say, all reported at the same three hospitals near the airport. At Al Kharama, 30 per cent of 450 such bodies belonged to women and children, doctors said.

Others were men without identification in civilian clothes who the doctors believed were civilians. But a final determination was not made, in part because of the enormous volume of bodies to be dealt with. By contrast, 125 American service personnel and 31 British were killed in the entire war. The last official estimate of Iraqi civilian deaths - based on Iraqi government claims before Baghdad fell - totalled about 1,250. Dr Ameer K Daher, a general surgeon who was trapped near his home by the fighting, recalled that when cluster bombs smashed nearby houses, he and his neighbours set up a field hospital in a secondary school. "We buried 10 people in the mosque and treated 45 more with what supplies we had in our homes," he said. "We were not the only people forced to do this."

Pentagon spokesman Lt Col James Cassella said "even one civilian death is one civilian death too many." Others noted that civilian deaths vary widely from war to war. Civilian deaths in the first Gulf War in 1991 were estimated at 3,500 from bombing and other "direct war effects," said Beth Osborne Daponte, a senior research scientist at Carnegie Mellon University. Historic conflicts such as World War II caused millions of civilian deaths.

Mark Burgess, a research analyst with the Centre for Defence Information, an independent think tank in Washington, said the Baghdad numbers appear low when placed in the context of previous civilian death tolls. He cited as examples the US firebombing of Tokyo or the bombing of Dresden, Germany, both during World War II. Those episodes killed tens of thousands. "Considering the amount of ordnance dropped on Baghdad, it probably could have been a lot worse," he said. "Clearly these are a lot of casualties, and any civilian casualty is regrettable and should be examined, but looking at the number of casualties historically gives us a clearer picture."

American officials have always said that they hoped to minimise civilian casualties, and in the days before US troops moved from Kuwait into Iraq, most troops were given extensive training on so-called rules of engagement intended to minimise civilian casualties. But in the days after US troops entered Iraq, the lines between Iraqi combatants and civilians blurred as US supply lines came under attack by Iraqi loyalists dressed in civilian clothes. A suicide bombing at an army checkpoint near Najaf that killed four soldiers heightened tensions, as did reports that those loyal to Saddam Hussein were driving white pickup trucks, a vehicle also common among Iraqi civilians. News accounts reported several incidents of US soldiers firing on cars, only to learn that their occupants were families trying to escape the fighting. US air bombing maps included several dozen "NFAs," or no-fire areas, in Baghdad, large red circles centred on clearly civilian targets such as hospitals, power plants, hotels, schools and some government ministries.

But Saddam placed his forces in schools, deployed tanks and anti-aircraft artillery in residential neighbourhoods and hid rocket launchers under bridges, knowing the American reluctance to attack such places. Drive the streets of Baghdad today and it becomes clear that the city is not London or Berlin after World War II, where bombing destroyed large stretches. The bombing damage is spotty, occasional. Still, in many neighbourhoods, residents are quick to point out exactly where American bombs ended the lives of neighbours and friends. Doctors at several hospitals alleged that some civilians died because American soldiers were not allowing civilian ambulances into neighbourhoods near the battles.

Two pregnant women were killed when an American tank shelled their ambulance on the way to Yarmuk Hospital on April 7, doctors there say. The driver and a doctor along to provide care were both injured. They add that soon afterward, shells hit the hospital's diabetes centre, destroying an entire floor, which volunteer workers have been working to repair since. Perhaps the most graphic image of the death toll is the 150 graves dug into the garden around the Al Askan Hospital.