Illegal to Help Starving Iraqis

Kathy Kelly, the courageous American peace activist, was charged with illegal conduct for taking food and medicines to Iraq during the years the U.S. imposed starvation-inducing sanctions. During those grim years (is today any less grim in Iraq?) rates of kwashiorkor and marasmus - types of severe malnutrition among children - increased 60-fold in Iraq due to the sanctions, according to the World Health Organisation.

Kelly and a handful of American Christian peace activists were fined, arrested, harrassed, and even imprisoned for giving food to these people because it was illegal under U.S. law to provide any succour to Iraqis. (Interesting that a few years later we kind Americans went to "liberate" these same Iraqis whom we'd bombed and starved for the previous twelve years.)

Today, an American charity called Islamic American Relief Agency (IARA) has been charged with, but not proven to be, supporting terrorist organisations. No convictions have been made proving any terrorist link, but the Justice Department is proudly touting the indictment of the charity and four of its officers for transferring $1.4 million to Iraq during the years of U.S. sanctions against that country, roughly 1991 to 2003.*

In other words, all that the IARA has been shown to have done is provide charity to Iraqis. There was no Iraqi insurgency in the years of the sanctions, there was no "al-Qaida in Iraq" (the U.S. media's favourite buzzphrase of 2007), there were no attacks on American soldiers or interests during that time. There were only starving children, over one million of whom died because of the sanctions, and an additional several hundred thousand starving Iraqi adults.

The IARA dared to feed those people. Like Kathy Kelly and her fellow Christian activists, they have been punished. Our fair, kind, and freedom-loving government has frozen their assets (millions of dollars donated by American citizens) and disallowed them from raising any more money for charity.

*See Lara Jordan's AP article dated today: "In an indictment handed down in March, the charity and four of its officers were charged with illegally transferring $1.4 million to Iraq from March 1991 to May 2003 — when Iraq was under various U.S. and U.N. sanctions."

COMING SOON: The Holy Land Foundation case in review. This is a U.S. charity that was found innocent on all of the 200-odd charges of terrorism brought against it by our government. How widely was this covered in our press? Have you heard of it?