James van Luik

"I'm horrified. The people out there - the Iraqis, the media and the troops - risk the most appalling ill health. And the radiation from depleted uranium can travel literally anywhere. It's going to destroy the lives of thousands of children, all over the world. We all know how far radiation can travel. Radiation from Chernobyl reached Wales and in Britain you sometimes get red dust from the Sahara on your car."

The speaker is not some alarmist doom-sayer. He is Dr. Chris Busby, the British radiation expert, Fellow of the University of Liverpool in the Faculty of Medicine and UK representative on the European Committee on Radiation Risk, talking about the best-kept secret of this war: the fact that, by illegally using hundreds of tons of depleted uranium (DU) against Iraq ~ Britain and America have gravely endangered not only the Iraqis but the whole world.

For these weapons have released deadly, carcinogenic and mutagenic, radioactive particles in such abundance that-whipped up by sandstorms and carried on trade winds - there is no corner of the globe they cannot penetrate-including Britain. For the wind has no boundaries and time is on their side: the radioactivity persists for over 4,500,000,000 years and can cause cancer, leukemia, brain damage, kidney failure, and extreme birth defects - killing millions of every age for centuries to come. A crime against humanity which may, in the eyes of historians, rank with the worst atrocities of all time.

Yet, officially, no crime has been committed. For this story is a dirty story in which the facts have been concealed from those who needed them most. It is also a story we need to know if the people of Iraq are to get the medical care they desperately need, and if our troops, returning from Iraq, are not to suffer as terribly as the veterans of other conflicts in which depleted uranium was used.

A Dirty Tyson

'Depleted' uranium is in many ways a misnomer. For 'depleted' sounds weak. The only weak thing about depleted uranium is its price. It is dirt cheap, toxic, waste from nuclear power plants and bomb production. However, uranium is one of earth's heaviest elements and DU packs a Tyson's punch, smashing through tanks, buildings and bunkers with equal ease, spontaneously catching fire as it does so, and burning people alive. 'Crispy critters' is what US servicemen call those unfortunate enough to be close. And, when John Pilger encountered children killed at a greater distance he wrote: "The children's skin had folded back, like parchment, revealing veins and burnt flesh that seeped blood, while the eyes, intact, stared straight ahead. I vomited." (Daily Mirror)

The millions of radioactive uranium oxide particles released when it burns can kill just as surely, but far more terribly. They can even be so tiny they pass through a gas mask, making protection against them impossible. Yet, small is not beautiful. For these invisible killers indiscriminately attack men, women, children and even babies in the womb-and do the gravest harm of all to children and unborn babies.

A Terrible Legacy

Doctors in Iraq have estimated that birth defects have increased by 2-6 times, and 3-12 times as many children have developed cancer and leukaemia since 1991. Moreover, a report published in The Lancet in 1998 said that as many as 500 children a day are dying from these sequels to war and sanctions and that the death rate for Iraqi children under 5 years of age increased from 23 per 1000 in 1989 to 166 per thousand in 1993. Overall, cases of lymphoblastic leukemia more than quadrupled with other cancers also increasing 'at an alarming rate'. In men, lung, bladder, bronchus, skin, and stomach cancers showed the highest increase. In women, the highest increases were in breast and bladder cancer, and non-Hodgkin lymphoma.1

On hearing that DU had been used in the Gulf in 1991, the UK Atomic Energy Authority sent the Ministry of Defense a special report on the potential damage to health and the environment. It said that it could cause half a million additional cancer deaths in Iraq over 10 years. In that war the authorities only admitted to using 320 tons of DU-although the Dutch charity LAKA estimates the true figure is closer to 800 tons. Many times that may have been spread across Iraq by this year's war. The devastating damage all this DU will do to the health and fertility of the people of Iraq now, and for generations to come, is beyond imagining.

The radioactivity persists for over 4,500,000,000 years killing millions of every age for centuries to come. This is a crime against humanity which may rank with the worst atrocities of all time.

We must also count the numberless thousands of miscarried babies. Nobody knows how many Iraqis have died in the womb since DU contaminated their world. But it is suggested that troops who were only exposed to DU for the brief period of the war were still excreting uranium in their semen 8 years later and some had 100 times the so-called 'safe limit' of uranium in their urine. The lack of government interest in the plight of veterans of the 1991 war is reflected in a lack of academic research on the impact of DU but informal research has found a high incidence of birth defects in their children and that the wives of men who served in Iraq have three times more miscarriages than the wives of servicemen who did not go there.

Since DU darkened the land Iraq has seen birth defects which would break a heart of stone: babies with terribly foreshortened limbs, with their intestines outside their bodies, with huge bulging tumors where their eyes should be, or with a single eye-like Cyclops, or without eyes, or without limbs, and even without heads. Significantly, some of the defects are almost unknown outside textbooks showing the babies born near A-bomb test sites in the Pacific.

Doctors report that many women no longer say 'Is it a girl or a boy?' but simply, 'Is it normal, doctor?' Moreover this terrible legacy will not end. The genes of their parents may have been damaged for ever, and the damaging DU dust is ever-present.

Blue on Blue

What the governments of America and Britain have done to the people of Iraq they have also done to their own soldiers, in both wars. And they have done it knowingly. For the battlefields have been thick with DU and soldiers have had to enter areas heavily contaminated by bombing. Moreover, their bodies have not only been assaulted by DU but also by a vaccination regime which violated normal protocols, experimental vaccines, nerve agent pills, and organophosphate pesticides in their tents. Yet, though the hazards of DU were known, British and American troops were not warned of its dangers. Nor were they given thorough medical checks on their return-even though identifying it quickly might have made it possible to remove some of it from their body. Then, when a growing number became seriously ill, and should have been sent to top experts in radiation damage and neurotoxins, many were sent to a psychiatrist.

Over 200,000 US troops who returned from the 1991 war are now invalided out with ailments officially attributed to service in Iraq-that's 1 in 3. In contrast, the British government's failure to fully assess the health of returning troops, or to monitor their health, means no one even knows how many have died or become gravely ill since their return. However, Gulf veterans' associations say that, of 40,000 or so fighting fit men and women who saw active service, at least 572 have died prematurely since coming home and 5000 may be ill. An alarming number are thought to have taken their own lives, unable to bear the torment of the innumerable ailments which have combined to take away their career, their sexuality, their ability to have normal children, and even their ability to breathe or walk normally. As one veteran puts it, they are 'on DU death row, waiting to die'.

Whatever other factors there may be, some of their illnesses are strikingly similar to those of Iraqis exposed to DU dust. For example, soldiers have also fathered children without eyes. And, in a group of eight servicemen whose babies lack eyes seven are known to have been directly exposed to DU dust.

They too have fathered children with stunted arms, and rare abnormalities classically associated with radiation damage. They too seem prone to cancer and leukemia. Tellingly, so are EU soldiers who served as peacekeepers in the Balkans, where DU was also used. Indeed their leukemia rate has been so high that several EU governments have protested at the use of DU.

The Vital Evidence

Despite all that evidence of the harm done by DU, governments on both sides of the Atlantic have repeatedly claimed that as it emits only 'low level' radiation DU is harmless. Award-winning scientist, Dr. Rosalie Bertell who has led UN medical commissions, has studied 'low-level' radiation for 30 years. She has found that uranium oxide particles have more than enough power to harm cells, and describes their pulses of radiation as hitting surrounding cells 'like flashes of lightning' again and again in a single second. Like many scientists worldwide who have studied this type of radiation, she has found that such 'lightning strikes' can damage DNA and cause cell mutations which lead to cancer.

Moreover, these particles can be taken up by body fluids and travel through the body, damaging more than one organ. To compound all that, Dr. Bertell has found that this particular type of radiation can cause the body's communication systems to break down, leading to malfunctions in many vital organs of the body and to many medical problems. A striking fact, since many veterans of the first Gulf war suffer from innumerable, seemingly unrelated, ailments.

In addition, recent research by Eric Wright, Professor of Experimental Haematology at Dundee University, and others, have shown two ways in which such radiation can do far more damage than has been thought. The first is that a cell which seems unharmed by radiation can produce cells with diverse mutations several cell generations later. (And mutations are at the root of cancer and birth defects.) This 'radiation-induced genomic instability' is compounded by 'the bystander effect' by which cells mutate in unison with others which have been damaged by radiation-rather as birds swoop and turn in unison. Put together, these two mechanisms can greatly increase the damage done by a single source of radiation, such as a DU particle. Moreover, it is now clear that there are marked genetic differences in the way individuals respond to radiation-with some being far more likely to develop cancer than others. So the fact that some veterans of the first Gulf war seem relatively unharmed by their exposure to DU in no way proves that DU did not damage others.

The Price of Truth
That the evidence from Iraq and from our troops, and the research findings of such experts, have been ignored may be no accident. A US report, leaked in late 1995, allegedly says, 'The potential for health effects from DU exposure is real; however it must be viewed in perspective... the financial implications of long-term disability payments and healthcare costs would be excessive.'

Clearly, with hundreds of thousands gravely ill in Iraq and at least a quarter of a million UK and US troops seriously ill, huge disability claims might be made against the governments of Britain and America if the harm done by DU were acknowledged. There might also be huge claims against companies making DU weapons and some of their directors are said to be extremely close to the White House. How close they are to Downing Street is a matter for speculation, but arms sales makes a considerable contribution to British trade. So the massive whitewashing of DU over the past 12 years, and the way that governments have failed to test returning troops, seemed to disbelieve them, and washed their hands of them, may be purely to save money.

The possibility that financial considerations have led the governments of Britain and America to cynically avoid taking responsibility for the harm they have done not only to the people of Iraq but to their own troops may seem outlandish. Yet DU weapons weren't used by the other side and no other explanation fits the evidence. For, in the days before Britain and America first used DU in war its hazards were no secret. One American study in 1990 said DU was 'linked to cancer when exposures are internal, [and to] chemical toxicity-causing kidney damage'. While another openly warned that exposure to these particles under battlefield conditions could lead to cancers of the lung and bone, kidney damage, non-malignant lung disease, neuro-cognitive disorders, chromosomal damage and birth defects.

A Culture of Denial

In 1996 and 1997 UN Human Rights Tribunals condemned DU weapons for illegally breaking the Geneva Convention and classed them as 'weapons of mass destruction' 'incompatible with international humanitarian and human rights law'. Since then, following leukemia in European peacekeeping troops in the Balkans and Afghanistan (where DU was also used), the EU has twice called for DU weapons to be banned.

Yet, far from banning DU, America and Britain stepped up their denials of the harm from this radioactive dust as more and more troops from the first Gulf war and from action and peacekeeping in the Balkans and Afghanistan have become seriously ill. This is no coincidence. In 1997, while citing experiments, by others, in which 84 percent of dogs exposed to inhaled uranium died of cancer of the lungs, Dr. Asaf Durakovic, then Professor of Radiology and Nuclear Medicine at Georgetown University in Washington was quoted as saying, 'The [US government's] Veterans Administration asked me to lie about the risks of incorporating depleted uranium in the human body.' He concluded, 'uranium does cause cancer, uranium does cause mutation, and uranium does kill. If we continue with the irresponsible contamination of the biosphere, and denial of the fact that human life is endangered by the deadly isotope uranium, then we are doing disservice to ourselves, disservice to the truth, disservice to God and to all generations who follow.' Not what the authorities wanted to hear and his research was suddenly blocked.

During 12 years of ever-growing British whitewash the authorities have abolished military hospitals, where there could have been specialized research on the effects of DU and where expertise in treating DU victims could have built up. And, not content with the insult of suggesting the gravely disabling symptoms of Gulf veterans are imaginary they have refused full pensions to many. For, despite all the evidence to the contrary, the current House of Commons briefing paper on DU hazards says 'it is judged that any radiation effects from possible exposures are extremely unlikely to be a contributory factor to the illnesses currently being experienced by some Gulf war veterans.' Note how over a quarter of a million sick and dying US and UK vets are called 'some'.

The Way Ahead

Britain and America not only used DU in this year's Iraq war, they dramatically increased its use-from a minimum of 320 tons in the previous war to at minimum of 1500 tons in this one. And this time the use of DU wasn't limited to anti-tank weapons-as it had largely been in the previous Gulf war-but was extended to the guided missiles, large bunker busters and big 2000-pound bombs used in Iraq's cities. This means that Iraq's cities have been blanketed in lethal particles-any one of which can cause cancer or deform a child. In addition, the use of DU in huge bombs which throw the deadly particles higher and wider in huge plumes of smoke means that billions of deadly particles have been carried high into the air-again and again and again as the bombs rained down-ready to be swept worldwide by the winds.

The Royal Society has suggested the solution is massive decontamination in Iraq. That could only scratch the surface. For decontamination is hugely expensive and, though it may reduce the risks in some of the worst areas, it cannot fully remove them. For DU is too widespread on land and water. How do you clean up every nook and cranny of a city the size of Baghdad? How can they decontaminate a whole country in which microscopic particles, which cannot be detected with a normal geiger counter, are spread from border to border? And how can they clean up all the countries downwind of Iraq-and, indeed, the world?
So there are only two things we can do to mitigate this crime against humanity. The first is to provide the best possible medical care for the people of Iraq, for our returning troops and for those who served in the last Gulf war and, through that, minimize their suffering. The second is to relegate war, and the production and sale of weapons, to the scrap heap of history-along with slavery and genocide.

Then, and only then, will this crime against humanity be expunged, and the tragic deaths from this war truly bring freedom to the people of Iraq, and of the world.

2. BIG BROTHER BRITAIN 2006: 'WE ARE WAKING UP TO A SURVEILLANCE SOCIETY ALL AROUND US'

JASON BENNETTO

Britain has sleepwalked into becoming a surveillance society that increasingly intrudes into our private lives and impacts on everyday activities, the head of the information watchdog warns.

New technology and "invisible" techniques are being used to gather a growing amount of information about UK citizens. The level of surveillance will grow even further in the next 10 years, which could result in a growing number of people being discriminated against and excluded from society, says a report by the Information Commissioner, Richard Thomas.

Future developments could include microchip implants to identify and track individuals; facial recognition cameras fitted into lampposts; and unmanned surveillance aircraft, predict the report's authors.

Mr Thomas, who heads an independent body that promotes public access to official information, calls for a debate on what level of surveillance is acceptable.

He said: "Two years ago I warned that we were in danger of sleepwalking into a surveillance society. Today I fear that we are in fact waking up to a surveillance society that is already all around us.

"As ever more information is collected, shared and used, it intrudes into our private space and leads to decisions which directly influence people's lives.

"Mistakes can also easily be made with serious consequences - false matches and other cases of mistaken identity, inaccurate facts or inferences, suspicions taken as reality, and breaches of security.

"I am keen to start a debate about where the lines should be drawn. What is acceptable and what is not?"

He was speaking at the launch of a report funded by the Information Commissioner's Office, which analyses current and future levels of surveillance. The study - "A Surveillance Society"- concludes that routine monitoring is increasing in most areas of life.

This includes the systematic tracking and recording of travel and use of public services; automated use of CCTV; analysis of buying habits and financial transactions; and the monitoring of telephone calls, e-mail and internet use in the workplace.

The major surveillance techniques include:

* Video cameras monitoring buildings, shopping streets and residential areas. Automatic systems can now recognise vehicle number plates and faces.

* Software that analyses spending habits and the data sold to businesses. When we call service centres or apply for loans, insurance or mortgages, how quickly we are served and what we are offered can depend on what we spend, where we live and who we are.

* Electronic tags to monitor offenders on probation.

* DNA taken from those arrested by the police and placed on a database.

* Information stored about foreign travel.

* Smart cards in schools to determine where children are, what they eat or the books they borrow.

* Taps on telephones, e-mails and internet use that can screened for key words and phrases by British and US intelligence services.

The Government also still plans to introduce a new system of biometric ID cards, including "biometrics" - fingerprints and iris scans - linked to a database of personal information.

The group of academics who compiled the report have also predicted future trends in surveillance in the next decade. The include:

* Shoppers being scanned as they enter stores. This will be matched with loyalty card data to affect how they are handled, with big spenders given preferential treatment over others.

* Cars linked to global satellite navigation systems which will provide the quickest route to avoid congestion and allow police to monitor speed and to track selected cars.

* Employees subjected to biometric and psychometric tests plus lifestyle profiles with diagnostic health tests common place. Jobs are refused to those who are seen as a health risk.

* Schools using card systems to allow parents to monitor what their children eat, their attendance, academic and drug test results

* Facial recognition systems to monitor our movements using tiny cameras in lampposts and walls, and unmanned aircraft above.

David Murakami Wood, a co-author of the report carried out by the Surveillance Studies Network said: "The level of surveillance in this country should shock people - it is infiltrating everything we do. The question is whether we want that or not. Most people do not understand how the information is used - for example details obtained from supermarket loyalty cards and credit cards are bought and sold to other companies to provide complex profiles of individual customers.

"It is difficult to challenge these organisations, find out what data they have on you, or to change inaccurate information."

Keeping up with the Joneses: a day in the life of one family

It is London in 2006. The Jones family are returning from their holiday in Florida.

In the US they were photographed and fingerprinted on arrival. At Gatwick they have their hand luggage X-rayed and hand-searched, and they are all questioned. Passports (one member of the family has dual nationality with Pakistan) are checked. Details of the flight and all other travel information is recorded.

The family are seen by airport security cameras and on the courtesy bus, which drops them at the car park, which is also covered by CCTV.

As the family drives out of the airport, they switch on a sat-nav system, which guides them home, but also alerts them to speed and traffic-light cameras on the way which record their progress. The son uses his mobile to call a friend. This is logged by the telephone company and could be used by police to locate where the phone was at the time.

On the way back they stop at an out-of-town mall. CCTV records them in the car park and entering the supermarket. All details of their shopping is recorded when they pay using a loyalty card. This will be used to build up a customer "profile" and can be sold on to others.

The money they spend on credit cards is also monitored to check for any unusual spending patterns, which could indicate the card has been stolen. The amounts spent and whether the family keep within agreed credit levels is also monitored and will be used by the bank or building society.

Later they go through the congestion charging zone which they pay for via the mobile and all details, including photographs of them entering central London, are recorded.

At home in central London they unload under the watch of a neighbour's private CCTV system. Waiting at home is a pile of junk mail. The names and addresses of the family have been obtained from a variety of databanks.

The son goes to his room to read a letter telling him his criminal records check is clear and that he has a place on a voluntary scheme.

He orders a takeaway his address, card details and previous orders are already held by the pizza chain.

Britain under surveillance

* The national DNA database holds profiles on about 3.5 million people.

* There are an estimated 4.2 million CCTV cameras in Britain: one for every 14 people.

* More than half of the UK population posseses a loyalty card issued by the firm that operates the Nectar scheme.

* Since 2002 there have been more than 8 million criminal records checks for jobs, of which around 400,000 contained convictions or police intelligence information.

* There are plans to expand capacity to read vehicle number plates from 35 million reads per day to 50 million by 2008.

* Some 216 catalogue companies in the UK are signed up to the Abacus data-sharing consortium, with information on 26 million individuals.

* The database of fingerprints contains nearly 6 million sets of prints.

* An individual can be captured on more than 300 cameras each day.

* By the end of 2002 law enforcement bodies had made more than 400,000 requests for data from mobile network operators.

* The number of motorists caught by speed cameras rose from 300,000 in 1996 to over 2 million in 2004.

* In the year to April 2005 some 631 adults and 5,751 juveniles were electronically tagged.

3. CHOMSKY ON "TERRORISM"

SAAD SAYEED

Known in academic circles for his contribution to the field of linguistics, MIT professor Noam Chomsky is widely recognized as one of the most influential political dissidents of our time. In this interview, Chomsky talks about the roots of terrorism and the role of the intellectual in society.

"The problem lies in the unwillingness to recognise that your own terrorism is terrorism"

Excalibur (Ex): How important is an understanding of the role of states such as the U.S. and the U.K. when examining the question of terrorism?

Chomsky (Ch): It depends on whether we want to be honest and truthful or whether we want to just serve state power ( . . . ) We should look at all forms of terrorism.

I have been writing on terrorism for 25 years, ever since the Reagan administration came in 1981 and declared that the leading focus of its foreign policy was going to be a war on terror. A war against state directed terrorism which they called the plague of the modern world because of their barbarism and so on. That was the centre of their foreign policy and ever since I have been writing about terrorism.

But what I write causes extreme anger for the very simple reason that I use the U.S. government's official definition of terrorism from the official U.S. code of laws. If you use that definition, it follows very quickly that the U.S. is the leading terrorist state and a major sponsor of terrorism and since that conclusion is unacceptable, it arouses furious anger. But the problem lies in the unwillingness to recognize that your own terrorism is terrorism. This is not just true of the United States, it's true quite generally. Terrorism is something that they do to us. In both cases, it's terrorism and we have to get over that if we're serious about the question.

Ex: In 1979, Russia invades Afghanistan. The U.S. uses the Ziaul Haq regime in Pakistan to fund the rise of militancy. This gives Zia a green light to fund cross-border terrorism in Kashmir. Now we allegedly have some of those elements setting off bombs in Mumbai. Clearly, these groups are no longer controlled by any government.

Ch: The jihadi movements in their modern form go back before Afghanistan. They were formed primarily in Egypt in the 1970s. Those are the roots of the jihadi movement, the intellectual roots and the activist roots and the terrorism too.

But when the Russians invaded Afghanistan, the Regan administration saw it as an opportunity to pursue their Cold War aims. So they did with the intense cooperation of Pakistan and Saudi Arabia and others ( . . . ) so the Reagan administration organized the most radical Islamic extremists it could find anywhere in the world and brought them to Afghanistan to train them, arm them.

Meanwhile, the U.S. supported Ziaul Haq as he was turning Pakistan into a country full of madrassahs and fundamentalists. The Reagan administration even ( . . . ) kept certifying to Congress that Pakistan was not developing nuclear weapons, which of course they were, so that U.S. aid to Pakistan could continue. The end result of these U.S. programs was to seriously harm Pakistan and also to create the international jihadi movement, of which Osama bin Laden is a product. The jihadi movement then spread ( . . . ) they may not like it much but they created it. And now, as you say, it's in Kashmir.

Kashmir, though, is a much more complex story. There are plenty of problems in Kashmir and they go way back, but the major current conflicts come from the 1980s. In 1986, when India blocked the election, it actually stole the election, and that led to an uprising and terrorist violence and atrocities, including atrocities committed by the Indian army.

Ex: The colonial legacy is generally dismissed by the media. What role does this legacy play in the emergence of home-grown terrorists in countries such as the U.S., the U.K. and Canada as well as to the creation of terrorism as a whole? Ch: It's not brought up in the West because it's inconvenient to think about your own crimes. Just look at the major conflicts going on around the world today, in Africa, the Middle East, in South Asia, most of them are residues of colonial systems.

Colonial systems imposed and created artificial states that had nothing to do with the needs and concerns and relations of the populations involved. They were created in the interests of colonial powers and as old fashioned colonialism turned into modern neo-colonialism, a lot of these conflicts erupted into violence and those are a lot of the atrocities happening in the world today.

How can anyone say colonialism isn't relevant? Of course it is and it's even more directly relevant.

Take the London bombing in 2005. Blair tried to pretend that it had nothing to do with Britain's participation in the invasion of Iraq. That's completely ridiculous. The British intelligence and the reports of the people connected in the bombing, they said that the British participation in the invasion and resulting horrors in Iraq inflamed them and they wanted to do something in reaction.

Ex: What is the role of the intellectual when dealing with imperialism and are the intellectuals doing the job?

Ch: Unfortunately, intellectuals are doing their historic job. The historic role of intellectuals if you look, unfortunately, as far back as you go has been to support power systems and to justify their atrocities. So the article you read in the National Post for the production of vulgar Stalinist connoisseurs, that's what intellectuals usually do as far back as you go.

If you go back to the Bible, there's a category of people who were called prophets, a translation of an obscure word, they were intellectuals, they were what we would call dissident intellectuals; criticising the evil king, giving geopolitical analysis, calling for the moral treatment of orphans, decent behaviour. They were dissident intellectuals. Were they treated well? They were imprisoned and driven into the dessert and so on, they were the fringe. The people who were treated well were the ones who centuries later, like in the gospel, were called false prophets. So it goes through history. The actual role of the intellectual has been supportive of power.

Should they do that? Of course not; they should be searching for truth, they should be honest, they should be supporting freedom and justice and there are some who do it. There is a fringe who do it, but they're not treated well. They are performing the task that intellectuals ought to perform.

Ex: And what keeps you motivated?

Ch: I'll just tell you a brief story. I was in Beirut a couple of months ago giving talks at the American university in the city. After a talk, people come up and they want to talk privately or have books signed.

Here I was giving a talk in a downtown theatre, a large group of people were around and a young woman came up to me, in her mid-'20s, and just said this sentence: "I am Kinda" and practically collapsed. You wouldn't know who Kinda is but that's because we live in societies where the truth is kept hidden. I knew who she was. She had a book of mine open to a page on which I had quoted a letter of hers that she wrote when she was seven years old.

It was right after the U.S. bombing of Libya, her family was then living in Libya, and she wrote a letter which was found by a journalist friend of mine who tried to get it published in the United States but couldn't because no one would publish it. He then gave it to me, I published it. The letter said something like this:

"Dear Mr. Reagan, I am seven years old. I want to know why you killed my little sister and my friend and my rag doll. Is it because we are Palestinians? Kinda". That's one of the most moving letters I have ever seen and when she walked up to me and said I am Kinda, and, like I say, actually fell over, not only because of the event but because of what it means.

Here's the United States with no pretext at all, bombing another country, killing and destroying, and nobody wants to know what a little seven-year-old girl wrote about the atrocities. That's the kind of thing that keeps me motivated and ought to keep everybody motivated. And you can multiply that by 10,000. -This interview previously appeared in the News of Pakistan.

4. TAKING AIM AT WEAPONS' TRADE
(Like land mines, conventional arms must be curbed)

MARY ROBINSON

Remember the excitement nearly 10 years ago when the treaty to ban land mines was signed in Ottawa? What began as a small, grassroots campaign had achieved a legally binding international agreement to banish the scourge of anti-personnel mines from the planet. October offers a similar opportunity to tackle the horrific excesses of the arms trade. Later this month, the UN will vote on a resolution to start work on an Arms Trade Treaty, exactly 10 years after it was asked to vote to support a ban on land mines.

It is vital that governments support this resolution, and demand that the Arms Trade Treaty has human rights at its heart. Nuclear, chemical and biological weapons have been controlled by international treaties for decades, yet there is still no comprehensive, legally binding treaty to regulate sales of conventional weapons, from AK-47s to fighter planes.

Land mines are one of the few conventional weapons that are effectively controlled. Yet small arms alone are estimated to kill 1,000 people every day, most of them civilians.

In too many conflict zones, I have seen first-hand how the easy availability of weapons fuels serious human rights abuses. In Rwanda, small arms such as the AK-47 contributed to the scale of the genocide. In Sierra Leone during the civil war, it was clear that the proliferation of weapons had led to an epidemic of rapes and mutilations at gunpoint. And in East Timor in 1999, the militia's access to guns allowed them to terrorize the population and, when the referendum went in favour of East Timorese independence in August of that year, to kill them.

The uncontrolled spread of weapons is destroying lives, communities and opportunities around the world. And the problem is getting worse. In the five years since Sept. 11, 2001, increasing numbers of weapons have been supplied to regimes that have poor human rights records in the name of the so-called "war on terror."

The resolution on an Arms Trade Treaty has been proposed by the governments of Argentina, Australia, Costa Rica, Finland, Japan, Kenya and Britain.

They have made a bold step, which should be welcomed.

However, it is vital that the final text of this resolution references international human rights law. Rights must be at the heart of an Arms Trade Treaty, otherwise it will not prevent arms being sold to human rights abusers; and so it won't effectively save lives.

The campaign for an Arms Trade Treaty is supported by 20 Nobel Peace Laureates and international groups such as Oxfam International, Amnesty International, and the International Action Network on Small Arms. The treaty these groups are calling for would be based on a simple principle: no weapons for those who would violate international law. Such a treaty would ban governments from selling weapons when there is a clear risk that those weapons will be used for human rights abuses, to fuel conflict or to undermine development.

There are those who say such a treaty could never work: that the world's leading arms producing states won't sign it or that it won't make much difference anyway. The experience of the landmine treaty puts the lie to this argument.

Several of the world's biggest military powers still haven't ratified the Ottawa Treaty, yet it has saved thousands of lives over the past decade.

Equally important, it has changed the behaviour of every government.

Few countries now openly trade land mines as they did before the treaty came into force

In the Democratic Republic of Congo, conflict has killed an estimated 3 million people since 1998. There, the UN carries out regular weapons collections. Guns made in Belgium, China, Egypt, Germany, France, Russia and the United States have been found in the hands of rebel groups.

The uncontrolled arms trade is a global problem. Every country that manufactures, sells, or transfers arms is involved.

Governments may not see the devastation their weapons sales cause, but we must not turn a blind eye. The civilian populations in areas of conflict, notably women and children, are crying out for a global solution to this problem.