Bert Sacks vs. the US government
Many ETS! readers will be familiar with Seattle activist Bert Sacks, who made nine trips to Iraq starting in 1996 in defiance of US sanctions. He was fined $10,000 by the government in 2002 for one particular trip in 1997 bringing medical supplies. Sacks refused to pay, and in 2004 sued the US government for violating international human rights treaties. He took his case all the way to the US Supreme Court (which declined to consider it), and he lost.
In March of last year, Sacks was served notice that the government was suing to collect the fine. (This came from Obama’s Justice Dept., following again in the footsteps of G.W. Bush.) His trial is set for Sept. 19.
Sacks argues that he cannot pay the fine for legal and moral reasons. He points out that US law defines terrorism as “an act dangerous to human life” intended to “coerce or intimidate a government or a civilian population.” In its campaign of deliberately bombing Iraqi infrastructure in the Gulf War of 1991, then imposing sanctions to prevent rebuilding, with the goal of creating intolerable conditions that would force Iraqis to rise up and overthrow Saddam Hussein, the US government was engaging in terrorism by its own definition. If he were to pay his fine, he would be guilty of giving money to terrorists.
The destruction of Iraqi infrastructure coupled with the sanctions took an enormous toll on Iraqi civilians. (On Saddam, not so much.) Without electricity, Iraq lacked water and sewage treatment, which led to widespread outbreaks of bacterial-borne diseases, which could not be adequately treated because of the sanctions. By the late ’90s, UNICEF estimated that the sanctions had led to the deaths of half a million Iraqi children! No one really knows the complete and final toll on Iraqi civilians by the time the sanctions were lifted after our second military attack on the country.
The consequences of this very deliberate policy (which Madeleine Albright infamously declared “worth it”) were horrifying to anyone paying attention. Bert Sacks was not only paying attention, he was taking action — action to mitigate the harm done by his own government.
When Sacks goes to trial in September, it’s unlikely that these realities will be given great weight in the proceedings. That’s why Sacks is using the opportunity of his trial to make his case in the court of public opinion. To that end he has created a new website — iraqikids.org — to tell his story. (Full disclosure: I helped him create this site.)
In today’s Seattle Times, Bruce Ramsey writes an op-ed about this latest chapter in Sacks’ long-running battle with the federal government, which you can read here.
As Sacks notes on the home page of his new website, “If we wish to positively affect the most powerful empire in the world today, we must hold to and speak the truth: no empire can engage in terrorism for a decade against Iraqi children … and then credibly condemn terrorism and claim to wage a war against it.”
Sacks is sticking to his principles and continuing to speak the truth — an ugly truth about a chapter of US foreign policy most of America has ignored. Good for him. May he succeed in shedding light in those places where Americans fear to look — our own complicity in allowing and enabling acts of terror around the world in the delusion that it enhances our own safety.
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