He said the United States had responded to an appeal by the International Federation of the Red Cross and Red Crescent by providing $4 million of the $7 million it initially requested worldwide.

Powell was reacting to stinging comments made on Monday by Jan Egeland, the United Nations emergency relief coordinator, who said “If, actually, the foreign assistance of many countries now is 0.1 or 0.2 percent of the gross national income, I think that is stingy, really. I don’t think that is very generous. It bothers me that we—the rich nations—are not becoming more generous the more rich we become.”

The State Department said today that the United States would contribute another $20 million in addition to the $15 million already pledged, including the $4 million going to the Red Cross and Red Crescent.

The death toll has reached nearly 45,000 with millions homeless in eleven countries on two continents.

And it’s time for those people to vote and I am looking forward to it.

It’s one of those moments in history where a lot of people will be amazed that a society has been transformed so quickly from one of tyranny and torture and mass graves to one in which people actually are allowed to express themselves at the ballot.

Also today, Medact (an organization of health professionals that exists to highlight and take action on the health consequences of war, poverty and environmental degradation) released a report, “Enduring Effects of War: Health in Iraq 2004," that concludes:

It is estimated that 100,000 Iraqis have died as a result of the 2003 invasion of Iraq and its aftermath.  Violence accounted for most of these deaths, particularly air strikes by coalition forces.  The risk of death from violence in the 18 months after the invasion was 58 times higher than in the 15 months before it, while the risk of death from all causes was 2.5 times higher.  No starker proof is required of the disastrous effects of war, even a supposedly short and contained one, on innocent people.  The 2003 war exacerbated the threats to health posed by the damage inflicted by previous wars, tyranny and sanctions.  It not only created the conditions for further health decline, but also damaged the ability of Iraqi society to reverse it.

The report offers the following details:

Water and sanitation: Sanitation facilities, most already non-operational, were looted throughout Iraq during and after the 2003 war.  Half the sewage treatment plants are now working but nearly 500,000 tons of raw sewage and partially treated sewage are discharged daily into the rivers.  Less than half the population in rural areas has direct access to piped potable water.

Nutrition and food security: Damage to the infrstructure that sustains food security has been sustained during the conflict and subsequent periods of neglect, and it continues to be a major concern.  One in four people are still highly dependent on public food distribution system, which in any case does not provide adequate food for the poorest households, who cannot afford to supplement the deficiencies through market purchases.

Crumbling facilities: Offical estimates suggest that 12% of hospitals were damaged and 7% looted in 2003; more than a third of the facilities that provided family planning services destroyed; and about 15% of community child care units closed.  These are likely to be underestimates.  The two main public health laboratories in Bafhdad and Basra were looted and destroyed.  Two of the three rehabilitation hospitals in Baghdad were looted to the extent that they had to close, and the main psychiatric hospital was looted an patients abused, raped and turned loose.  Four of the seven central supply warehouses were looted.  Most hospitals have chronic problems with sewage and garbage disposal, water and power supply and lack of drugs and equipment.  A rapid assessment showed that a third of the hospitals and half the health centres surveyed needed urgent and extensive rehabilitation.

Shortage of drugs, equipment and supplies: After the war there were no antibiotics, insulin and chemotherapeutic drugs at any public hospital or health center in the southern governorate… There is widespread suspicion of criminal involvement in the distribution of pharmaceutical supplies.  Pharmaceuticals are allegedly diverted from the warehouses and appear on the market in neighboring countries.  Supply trucks are intercepted before they reach their destination.

"I like him,” Senator Patrick J. Leahy of Vermont, the leading Democrat on the Senate Judiciary Committee, said today after a closed meeting with Alberto Gonzales, whom he has known as White House counsel.

“I said jokingly that the president, with the majority he has in the Senate, could have sent up Attila the Hun and got him confirmed,” Mr. Leahy said. “But Judge Gonzales is no Attila the Hun; he’s far from that, and he’s a more uniting figure."

Patrick Leahy’s vow earlier this spring that he would demand a full disclosure regarding Abu Ghraib has now melted.  Does John Kerry even remember that he once demanded that Donald Rumsfeld resign because of Abu Ghraib?

The New York Times helpfully reminds readers:

As White House counsel, Mr. Gonzales wrote a memo suggesting that the detainees need not be given the full protections of the Geneva Convention.

Oh, is that what that memo was all about!

A few years before his death at the hands of Salvadoran death squads, Ignacio Ellacuria, one of the six slain Jesuits we commemorate on campus this week, delivered the commencement address at Santa Clara University. He told his listeners that the Jesuit’s University of Central America in San Salvador had been bombed ten times. “We have been blocked and raided by military groups and threatened with the termination of all aid. Dozens of students and teachers have had to flee the country in exile; one of our students was shot to death by police who entered the campus.”

What were the faculty and students at the UCA doing to incur the wrath of the Salvadoran elite?  And how had they become so threatening that they had to be eliminated by the state terrorists who ruled that blood-soaked land?

“Precisely because a university is inescapably a social force,” Ellacuria argued, “it must transform and enlighten the society in which it lives.” But he cautioned that “there is no abstract and consistent answer” about how to do that.  “We must constantly look at our own peculiar historical reality.” In El Salvador, for them, it meant putting the prestige and resources of the UCA at the service of the poorest strata of that society and publicly working to dismantle a political and economic system that delivered the country’s land and wealth into the hands of just a dozen families.  Shortly before his death, Ellacuria lamented that we in the West “have organized our lives around inhuman values… The system rests on a few using the majority of the resources, while the majority can’t even cover their basic necessities. It is crucial to define a system of values and a norm of living that takes into account every human being.”

It will be a tragedy if we reduce our remembrance of the slain Salvadoran Jesuits to a pious tendency to put them on pedestals. Catholic radical Dorothy Day was never pleased when people referred to her as a saint, as she figured it was a way for people to get themselves off the hook, sidestepping their own responsibility for critical thinking and decisive action.

So, if Ellacuria were alive today and teaching here, what irritating questions might he be asking us about the “peculiar historical reality” of Saint Louis and our own University?  We imagine that the inhuman value of “destroying cities in order to save them”—part of our legacy from Vietnam, now being lived out again in Iraq—would be weighing heavy on his heart.  For this week’s criminal and inhuman siege of Falluja has been made possible in no small part by the work in St. Louis at Boeing’s Integrated Defense Systems division.

A Boeing press release on Thursday boasted that its ScanEagle, a “long-endurance fully autonomous unmanned aerial vehicle,” had just surpassed 1,000 flight hours during operations in Iraq.  “Since late summer when ScanEagle was first deployed in theater with the First Marine Expeditionary Force it has provided critical intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance information to tactical commanders. Feedback regarding ScanEagle’s operational effectiveness and clear, detailed imagery has been extremely positive from all echelons of The Marine Corps.”

But to understand what that means in human terms, turn to an interview that appeared Sunday with Billal Hussein, an AP photographer and native of Falluja.  “Destruction was everywhere. I saw people lying dead in the streets, wounded were bleeding and there was no one to come and help them. There was no medicine, water, no electricity nor food for days.  U.S. soldiers began to open fire on the houses, so I decided that it was very dangerous to stay in my house,” he said.  Panicking, he seized on a plan to escape across the Euphrates River. “I wasn’t really thinking,” he said. “Suddenly, I just had to get out. I didn’t think there was any other choice. I decided to swim … but I changed my mind after seeing U.S. helicopters firing on and killing people who tried to cross the river.” He watched horrified as a family of five was shot dead in front of him.  “I kept walking along the river for two hours and I could still see some U.S. snipers ready to shoot anyone who might swim.”

Dare we make a Saint Louis University connection? We as teachers must help our students understand the system in which they are being summoned to serve as professionals and technicians, often with handsome salaries and considerable prestige. A system that, as George Kennan observed decades ago, is structured to “maintain the disparity” in favor of the few Americans who have much of the wealth, “while the majority can’t even cover their basic necessities.” A system that future history books may deem the supreme inhuman value.

If Ellacuria were alive, we suspect he’d be helping his own students (and any others willing and open to learn) by engaging the curriculum of the real world of domination and nurturing the pedagogy of the imagination that refuses to be made complicit.  Such a course of study would be where knowledge disrupts lives:  the lives of ease and comfort, the lives of averting our eyes and of consuming thoughtlessly, the lives of only valuing American life and ignoring our many dead victims abroad.

Back in 1982 Ellacuria concluded his Santa Clara address with a sober admonition:  “If the University had not suffered, we would not have performed our duty. In a world where injustice reigns, a university that fights for justice must necessarily be persecuted.”

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Mark J. Chmiel and Andrew Wimmer teach in
the Department of Theological Studies at Saint Louis University.

He said families left in the city were in desperate need.

“There’s no water. People are drinking dirty water. Children are dying. People are eating flour because there’s no proper food,” he told aid workers in Habbaniya, which has become a refugee camp, with around 2,000 families sheltering there.

Ubadi from the Iraqi Red Crescent Society said many families taking refuge in Habbaniya and other villages nearby were suffering from diarrhoea and malnutrition and needed medicine as well as basic necessities such as lentils, sugar, bread, tea and candles.

Reuters Story

“It’s our third day here at the hospital and all we have done is receive promises from the Americans,” Hassan Rawi, a member of the International Federation of the Red Cross, said.

Reuters Story

“Destruction was everywhere. I saw people lying dead in the streets, wounded were bleeding and there was no one to come and help them. Even the civilians who stayed in Fallujah were too afraid to go out,” he said.  “There was no medicine, water, no electricity nor food for days.  U.S. soldiers began to open fire on the houses, so I decided that it was very dangerous to stay in my house,” he said.

Hussein said he panicked, seizing on a plan to escape across the Euphrates River. “I wasn’t really thinking,” he said. “Suddenly, I just had to get out. I didn’t think there was any other choice.”

“I decided to swim … but I changed my mind after seeing U.S. helicopters firing on and killing people who tried to cross the river.” He watched horrified as a family of five was shot dead as they tried to cross. Then, he “helped bury a man by the river bank, with my own hands.”

“I kept walking along the river for two hours and I could still see some U.S. snipers ready to shoot anyone who might swim. I quit the idea of crossing the river and walked for about five hours through orchards.”

AP Photographer, Bilal Hussein, native of Falluja

Full Story

Lieutenant General John Sattler, commander of the 1st Marine Expeditionary Force, said: “The perception of Falluja being a safe haven for terrorists, that perception and the reality of it will be completely wiped off before the conclusion of this operation.”

US military chiefs said that they saw no need for the Iraqi Red Crescent to deliver aid inside Falluja because they did not think any Iraqi civilians were trapped there.

“There is no need to bring [Red Crescent] supplies in because we have supplies of our own for the people,” said Colonel Mike Shupp of the Marines.