17 May 2010By Jacob G. Hornberger
A French court recently recognized the idiocy of one
of the U.S. government’s attempts to enforce its
sanctions against Iran by denying the government’s
request to extradite an Iranian businessman for
allegedly violating the sanctions. U.S. prosecutors
were alleging that the businessman, Majid Kakavand,
violated the sanctions by exporting goods from the
United States that could be used in weapons
manufacturing.
Apparently, U.S. prosecutors took the position that by
importing the items into Iran, Kakavand violated U.S.
law that prohibits the exportation of the goods. In
other words, in the minds of the prosecutors,
importing is the same as exporting because when you
import an item, it must be exported for you to import
it.
Kakavand happened to be traveling in France when U.S.
officials requested his arrest and extradition. Oddly,
he did not oppose the extradition request on the same
ground that the U.S. government has opposed
Venezuela’s request for the extradition of suspected
terrorist Luis Posada Carriles — a legitimate and
well-grounded fear of being tortured. Instead,
Kakavand simply claimed that the U.S. allegation that
the imported items could be used for weaponry was
ridiculous, pointing out that they wouldn’t have even
“needed special customs clearance if they had been
exported from a EU country.”
The French court agreed with Kakavand, denied the
extradition request, and ordered the man’s release.
Perhaps the court was familiar with how U.S. officials
had used the so-called “dual use” game against the
Iraqi people during the 11 years of brutal sanctions
against Iraq.
The best accounts of the deadly game that U.S.
sanctions bureaucrats employed against Iraq have been
set forth in excruciating detail by Joy Gordon, in her
article “Cool War: Economic Sanctions as a Weapon of
Mass Destruction” and in her insightful new book
Invisible War: The United States and the Iraq
Sanctions, which I highly recommend.
We shouldn’t forget that just as the U.S. government
has gone after that private Iranian businessman for
supposedly violating the government’s sanctions
against Iran, it did the same thing to Americans who
violated the government’s sanctions against Iraq.
What made the situation in Iraq even worse, however,
is that some of the people they went after weren’t
even accused of helping Iraq with its (nonexistent)
WMD program. Instead, they went after them because
they had committed the dastardly crime of trying to
save Iraqi children from the brutal effects of the
sanctions.
During the Persian Gulf War, the Pentagon
intentionally destroyed Iraq’s water and sewage
facilities after it conducted a study confirming that
this would help spread infectious illnesses among the
Iraqi people, especially through the drinking of
untreated, sewage-infested water. As Gordon documents
in her book, U.S. sanctions bureaucrats then used the
sanctions to prevent the Iraqis from repairing the
water-and-sewage facilities.
The Pentagon’s study proved to be right. Hundreds of
thousands of Iraqi children died as a result of the
sanctions. The U.S. Ambassador to the UN Madeleine
Albright told “Sixty Minutes” in 1996 (five years
before the sanctions were finally lifted) that the
deaths of half-a-million Iraqi children were “worth
it.”
Two high UN officials, Hans von Sponeck and Denis
Halliday, resigned their posts with the UN because of
what they termed sanctions genocide.
They weren’t the only ones who were struck by a crisis
of conscience. The same thing happened to an American
citizen named Bert Sacks, who decided to take $40,000
worth of medicine to the Iraqi people in 1997.
What was the reaction of U.S. officials to Sacks’
humanitarian efforts? Now, before you answer that
question, keep in mind the secondary justification
that U.S. officials employed when they invaded Iraq
five years later — after the primary justification for
invading, those infamous WMDs that Saddam was about to
fire at the United States, evaporated. They said that
the invasion was intended to help the Iraqi people
achieve democracy because, they said, U.S. officials
loved the Iraqi people and just wanted to help them
out.
But if you answered that they praised Sacks and gave
him a humanitarian medal, you would be wrong. Instead,
they threatened him with criminal prosecution and
ultimately leveled a civil fine of $10,000 against
him, a fine that Sachs fought all the way to the
Supreme Court in a case that he ultimately lost.
Sacks wasn’t the only American who was trying to help
the Iraqis escape the ravages of the sanctions. There
was also a group of American medical workers,
including doctors, who risked federal criminal
prosecution and civil fines for violating the
sanctions by traveling to Iraq to help the Iraqi
people.
To my knowledge, that group of doctors escaped
prosecution and fine by the U.S. government. Another
American physician, a New York oncologist named Rafil
A. Dhafir, was not so lucky, no doubt because he was a
Muslim, one who had been born in Iraq. In fact,
according to his entry in Wikipedia, he is “believed
to be the only U.S. citizen ever to be held in prison
for violating the sanctions on Iraq.” Having
committing the dastardly crime of using a charity to
send money to help alleviate the suffering of the
Iraqi people, the U.S. government indicted him and
convicted him for violating the sanctions.
Ironically and revealingly, Dhafir’s conviction took
place in 2005, three years after the U.S. invasion of
Iraq, an invasion that by that time (i.e., no infamous
WMDs) U.S. officials were justifying out of a
purported love and concern for the Iraqi people.
Everyone has heard the time-honored quote by
Santayana: “Those who don’t learn from history are
condemned to repeat it.” What better example of
Santayana’s dictum than the U.S. history of sanctions
in Iraq and Iran?
Jacob Hornberger is founder and president of The
Future of Freedom Foundation.
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