Ward Churchill Ties His Shoelaces...Together!

“I really have to cite this to people who are capable of tying their shoes without instructions?” ---Ward Churchill

UPDATE: "Albright's Blunder" is an excellent article about U.N. Ambassador Madeleine Albright's interview on "60 Minutes" (May 12, 1996).

On May 12, 1996, America's U.N. Ambassador Madeleine Albright was interviewed about the U.N. sanctions on Iraq by journalist Lesley Stahl on "60 Minutes." These sanctions were imposed on Iraq after they attacked and annexed Kuwait during the Gulf War. The American military operation to expell Iraq from Kuwait was called Operation Desert Storm. The purpose of the sanctions was to keep the the Iraqi government from reinvading Kuwait or attacking other neighbors.

In the "60 Minutes" interview, Stahl asked Albright a loaded question:

"We have heard that half a million children have died. I mean, that's more children than died in Hiroshima. And, you know, is the price worth it?"

Albright responded:

"I think this is a very hard choice, but the price — we think the price is worth it." [Wikipedia]

In his essay "Some People Push Back," Ward Churchill criticizes the U.N. trade sanctions on Iraq for causing hardships, but he never even mentions that the sanctions were imposed after Saddam invaded Kuwait. Ward Churchill never even mentions that the purpose of the sanctions was to keep Saddam from invading Kuwait again. This dishonest omission shows that "Some People Push Back" is nothing but pro-Saddam propaganda.

In his February 23, 1998 fatwa (judgement) "Declaration of the World Islamic Front for Jihad against the Jews and the Crusaders," the terrorist Osama Bin Laden also criticizes the trade sanctions on Iraq without mentioning that the sanctions were imposed to prevent Saddam from attacking Kuwait again.

In his ignorant, propagandistic 9-11 essay "Some People Push Back," Churchill incorrectly identifies then-U. N. Ambassador Madeleine Albright as our Secretary of State. Churchill misspells her first name Madeleine as Madeline. Churchill takes Albright's 1996 interview on "60 Minutes" out of context and claims incorrectly that Madeleine Albright was "responding" on "Meet the Press" to a charge of "genocide" that Ward Churchill attributes (without a dated citation) to the U.N. Oil for Food official Denis Halliday in the fall of 1998 in the New York Times.

Albright could not have been responding in 1996 to allegations made by Halliday in 1998. Our U.N. Ambassador Madeleine Albright was responding to what Lesley Stahl says "[w]e have heard."

Ward Churchill claims:

[F]ormer U.N. Assistant Secretary General Denis Halladay [sic--Halliday], repeatedly denounced what was happening [under the U.N. sanctions imposed on Iraq after Saddam's army invaded Kuwait, killed their people, and set their oil fields afire] as "a systematic program...of deliberate genocide." His statements appeared in the New York Times and other papers during the fall of 1998 [no cite], so it can hardly be contended that the American public was "unaware" of them. Shortly thereafter, Secretary of State Madeline [sic--U.N. Ambassador/Madeleine] Albright openly confirmed Halladay's [sic] assessment. Asked during the widely-viewed TV program Meet the Press [sic--60 Minutes, May 12, 1996] to respond to his "allegations," she calmly announced that she'd decided it was "worth the price" to see that U.S. objectives were achieved. [My emphasis in red.]

The Plagiarist of Ethnic Studies Ward Churchill is not only a dishonest scholar, he is also spelling, fact, and chronology-challenged.

Firstly, the U.N. official's name is spelled Halliday, according to a short biography he wrote about himself. If Churchill had been informed about U.N. aid programs for Iraqis, he would have known that.

Halliday wrote:

Secretary-General Kofi Annan appointed Denis J. Halliday, a national of Ireland, to the post of United Nations Humanitarian Coordinator in Iraq as of 1 September 1997, at the Assistant Secretary-General level, and he served as such until end September 1998. During this period, the Security Council Resolution 986 “Oil for Food” Programme, introduced in 1996/97 to assist the people of Iraq under the Economic Sanctions imposed and sustained by the Security Council, was more than doubled in terms of oil revenues allowed. This enabled the introduction of a multi-sectoral approach, albeit modest, to the problems of resolving malnutrition and child mortality. Mr Halliday resigned from the post in Iraq and from the United Nations as a whole effective 31 October 1998...

Secondly, Albright's first name is spelled Madeleine, and she was our Ambassador to the U.N. in 1996, not the Secretary of State. Ward Churchill gets all this wrong, but he still thinks that he knows enough to say that Americans should "rise up" and hang Ambassador Madeleine Albright!

An anonymous "contributor" to the Maoist MIM quietly corrects Churchill's spelling [updated link] of Halliday (but not Madeleine!) when he "quotes" Churchill ("What could AmeriKKKans have known about the Iraq sanctions?: Part II." 2-20-05):

U.N. Assistant Secretary General Denis Halliday, repeatedly denounced what was happening as "a systematic program . . . of deliberate genocide." [My emphasis in red.]

Thirdly, U.N. Ambassor (not Secretary of State) Madeleine Albright made her controversial remarks--which she retracted and characterized as stupid--in an interview with Lesley Stahl on Sixty Minutes, not on Meet the Press.

Fourthly, U.N. Ambassador Madeleine Albright made her controversial remarks on May 12, 1996, so she could not possibly have been "responding" to Denis Halliday's alleged statement about genocide that Churchill claims appeared in the New York Times in the fall of 1998!

The basic facts that support Churchill's argument are wrong. The "scholar" doesn't know how to spell the diplomats' names. He doesn't correctly identify Albright's position. He doesn't know where or when she was on T.V. He has Albright "responding" to Halliday two years before he made the remarks Churchill attributes to him.

The anonymous "contributor" to the MIM quotes Churchill in the first paragraph cited below but changes Churchill's spelling of Halladay to Halliday. In the second paragraph cited below, the "contributor" actually corrects the record about the TV program and the date, without explicitly noting that Churchill said something different just above. MIM still can't spell Madeleine, and he doesn't know that she was our U.N. Ambassador on May 12, 1996.

Read the jumbled nonsense that the "contributor" to the Maoist MIM writes [updated link] as he "cites" Churchill and fixes the spelling of Halliday but not Madeleine:

[F]ormer U.N. Assistant Secretary General Denis Halliday, repeatedly denounced what was happening as "a systematic program . . . of deliberate genocide." His statements appeared in the New York Times and other papers during the fall of 1998, so it can hardly be contended that the American public was "unaware" of them. Shortly thereafter, Secretary of State Madeline Albright openly confirmed Halliday's assessment. Asked during the widely-viewed TV program Meet the Press to respond to his "allegations," she calmly announced that she'd decided it was "worth the price" to see that U.S. objectives were achieved.(1)

...Amerikans had knowledge of the child mortality and other undesirable effects of the Iraq sanctions even earlier than Dennis Halliday's statements in 1998, or 1996, the year of the 60 Minutes broadcast with Madeline [sic] Albright. [My emphasis in red. Note that MIM spells Madeleine like Churchill does.]

I can’t find a statement by Halliday in the New York Times describing the UN sanctions as “a systematic program…of deliberate genocide” (Churchill supposedly quoting Halliday) in the fall of 1998. Churchill does not cite the New York Times article he says he got that quote from.

I have written about the issue of Albright and Halliday in other posts.

I think that the Oil-for-Food scandal shows that U.N. officials, Saddam, his media assets, and dishonest businessmen were not really worried about starving Iraqi children. Saddam always had the option to abide by the UN sanctions, and even during the Oil-for-Food Program he was secretly selling oil outside the sanctions.

The FBI official Mark J. Mershon pointed out:

[T]he oil-for-food program... ultimately proved to be a cash cow masquerading as a humanitarian aid program.

Even after the Oil for Food Program was up and running (by 1997), the UN, Saddam, his mouthpieces in the media, and crooked businessmen made Iraqis go hungry while Saddam built his palaces. Denis Halliday was very briefly (September 1997-September 1998) the U.N.'s Humanitarian Coordinator in Iraq and was involved with what turned out to be the corrupt Oil-for-Food Program.

NBC News (1-6-2006) explains:

The oil-for-food program ran from 1996 to 2003. It was created to help Iraqis cope with U.N. sanctions imposed after Saddam Hussein’s 1990 invasion of Kuwait. It let the Iraqi government sell limited — and eventually unlimited — amounts of oil primarily to buy humanitarian goods.

If Saddam was eventually selling unlimited amounts of oil, I think Iraqis were hungry because Saddam and his helpers in the UN and elsewhere took so much of the oil money for themselves.

According to Paul Volcker (10-27-05), Saddam Hussein's manipulation of the Oil-for-Food Program diverted almost two billion dollars from the humanitarian purposes of the program. More than 2000 companies were involved in the illicit payments. According to Volcker, Saddam also made an estimated 11 billion dollars by smuggling oil outside of the Oil-For-Food Program.

The Denver/Boulder chapter of the American Indian Movement even alleged that years ago Saddam gave money to the American Indian Movement (AIM) to help take back the Black Hills. I wonder what Saddam was getting in return from the AIM? The author of this allegation is not identified, but he sounds like he might be Ward Churchill:

Through the IITC, cordial diplomatic relations were developed by 1979 with the Baath Socialist Party of Iraq. Through this relationship, substantial contributions were made to AIM and to the struggle for the return of the Paha Sapa (Black Hills)...

Churchill's inaccurate facts and the American Indian Movement's apparent financial connections with the Saddam regime make me pretty sure that Churchill is not an independent source of information about whose fault it is that Iraqis went hungry.