UN Official: US Troops 'Starving' Iraqi Civilians

GENEVA - A United Nations human rights investigator on Friday accused U.S. and British forces in Iraq of breaching international law by depriving civilians of food and water in besieged cities as they try to flush out militants.


Swiss Jean Ziegler, UN special rapporteur of the commission on human rights on the right to food, speaks, with regard to World Food Day on October 16, about the hunger situation in the world at the United Nations in Geneva, Switzerland, Friday, Oct. 14, 2005. (AP Photo/Keystone, Martial Trezzini)
But the U.S. military denied the charge and said that while supplies were sometimes disrupted by combat, food was never deliberately withheld.

Jean Ziegler, a former Swiss sociology professor who is U.N. special rapporteur on the right to food, said the Geneva Conventions banned military forces from using "starvation of civilians as a method of warfare".

But he said that in Falluja, Tal Afar and Samarra, Iraqi and U.S.-led forces had cut off or restricted food and water to encourage residents to flee before assaults on entrenched Sunni insurgents over the past year.

This is quite horrendous, since when did starving your opponent become acceptable?

Same with torture, it seems to me torture has become acceptable again as a method of extracting infomation, which is frankly quite apalling. Torture itself is an unrealible method, the person you are torturing will tell you what you want to hear to stop the pain, so the intel you get will be wrong.

Whatever news comes out from the Greenzone take it with a pinch of salt, its so very hard to tell whats the truth these days.

I never suppored this folly in Iraq and I still don't.

We are being led by fools, idiots and lunatics.