John Pilger:

In October 1999, I stood in a ward of dying children in Baghdad with Denis Halliday, who the previous year had resigned as assistant secretary general of the United Nations. He said: "We are waging a war through the United Nations on the people of Iraq. We're targeting civilians. Worse, we're targeting children... What is this all about?" Halliday had been 34 years with the UN. As an international civil servant much respected in the field of "helping people, not harming them", as he put it, he had been sent to Iraq to implement the oil-for-food programme, which he subsequently denounced as a sham. "I am resigning," he wrote, "because the policy of economic sanctions is... destroying an entire society. Five thousand children are dying every month. I don't want to administer a programme that satisfies the definition of genocide." Halliday's successor, Hans von Sponeck, another assistant secretary general with more than 30 years' service, also resigned in protest. Jutta Burghardt, the head of the World Food Programme in Iraq, followed them, saying she could no longer tolerate what was being done to the Iraqi people.


When truth is replaced by silence," the Soviet dissident Yevgeny Yevtushenko said, "the silence is a lie." He might have been referring to the silence over the devastating effects of the embargo.

http://pilger.carlton.com/print/133385

"Charles Lewis, the former star CBS reporter who now runs the Centre for Public Integrity in Washington, DC, told me he was in no doubt that, had his colleagues done their job rather than acted as ciphers, the invasion would not have taken place. Such is the power of the modern media; it is a power we should reclaim from those subverting it." (from the same article)


So, I guess the idea is that Dan "Never Met a Hurricane He Didn't Love" Rather, Tom "The Greatest Pimp for the Greatest Generation" Brokaw, and Peter "Protector of the American Peasantry" Jennings should be setting policy.