In the coming weeks, the Senate will attempt to make a compelling argument for opening up the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to drilling. It turns out that tapping into ANWR’s resources would produce an immediate 600,000 barrels per day of oil—exactly the same amount of oil the U.S. currently purchases from Iraq under the United Nations oil for food program.

  The U.N. Security Council set up the oil-for-food program in August 1990 after Iraq invaded Kuwait and the U.N then imposed comprehensive sanctions on the country. The program was aimed at removing some of the hardships placed on Iraqi civilians as a result of the sanctions. Since then, the U.S. has resented the fact that it has had to purchase Iraqi oil, which is crucial to our country’s overall supply, from Saddam Hussein who Bush Administration officials claim uses the money to fund his military and uses very little to reduce the suffering of innocent Iraqi’s affected by the sanctions.

 

Adapted from Ramsey Clark's (Former U.S. Attorney General) address to the half a million demonstrators at the January 18th National March on Washington to Stop the War on Iraq organized by International A.N.S.W.E.R. (Act Now to Stop War & End Racism).

The U.S. Constitution provides the means for preventing George W. Bush from engaging in a war of aggression against Iraq, and from advancing a first strike potentially nuclear preemptive war. It's called impeachment.

High Crimes and Misdemeanors
Impeachment is the direct constitutional means for removing a President, Vice President or other civil officers of the United States who has acted or threatened acts that are serious offenses against the Constitution, its system of government, or the rule of law, or that are conventional crimes of such a serious nature that they would injure the Presidency if there was no removal.

A Constitutional Imperative

Three days after a British newspaper revealed a memo about U.S. spying on U.N. Security Council delegations, I asked Daniel Ellsberg to assess the importance of the story. "This leak," he replied, "is more timely and potentially more important than the Pentagon Papers."

The key word is "timely." Publication of the secret Pentagon Papers in 1971, made possible by Ellsberg's heroic decision to leak those documents, came after the Vietnam War had already been underway for many years. But with all-out war on Iraq still in the future, the leak about spying at the United Nations could erode the Bush administration's already slim chances of getting a war resolution through the Security Council.

"As part of its battle to win votes in favor of war against Iraq," the London-based Observer reported on March 2, the U.S. government developed an "aggressive surveillance operation, which involves interception of the home and office telephones and the e-mails of U.N. delegates." The smoking gun was "a memorandum written by a top official at the National Security Agency -- the U.S. body which intercepts

The Palestinian Initiative for the Promotion of Global Dialogue and Democracy (MIFTAH) strongly condemns the latest Israeli aggression against the Palestinian people, in which Israeli troops, backed by tanks and helicopter gun ships, killed 11 Palestinians and wounded 140 in Jabalia refugee camp close to Gaza city.

Israeli forces carried out an incursion into the camp in the early hours of this morning, Thursday March 6th, 2003, targeting civilians and firing indiscriminately at residential buildings in the camp. Eyewitnesses said that Israeli tanks fired at Palestinian residents of the camp attempting to remove furniture from a woodworks shop which was set on fire by tank shells. At that point, 8 Palestinians were killed and at least 30 were injured.

Palestinian medical personnel and eyewitness accounts in Jabalia camp also confirmed that Israeli helicopter gun ships killed a 60 year old Palestinian man outside his home. Al-Shifa hospital in Gaza city finally confirmed that the total number of people killed during the assaults reached 11; with more than 140 injured (40 of whom are suffering from critical and/or irrecoverable injuries).