From: Dickey, Michael F (michael_f_dickey@groton.pfizer.com)
Date: Mon Sep 30 2002 - 12:14:42 MDT
-----Original Message-----
From: Samantha Atkins [mailto:samantha@objectent.com]
Sent: Monday, September 30, 2002 1:28 PM
To: extropians@extropy.org
Subject: Re: Who's the greater threat?
Again I point out that no less than Madeline Albright agreed
publichly with these facts. That is a bit difficult to sweep
under the rug.
- samantha
----------------------------
Belief does not tend toward edification. Even is she did agree with those
figures, and even if she did believe those figures to BE true, it does not
make them so.
>From the article I posted on IRAQ Sanctions
http://www.reason.com/0203/fe.mw.the.shtml
"Still, the report might well have ended up in the dustbin of bad
mathematics
had a CESR fact-finding tour of Iraq not been filmed by Lesley Stahl of 60
Minutes. In a May 12, 1996, report that later won her an Emmy and an Alfred
I. DuPont-Columbia University Journalism Award, Stahl used CESR's faulty
numbers and atomic-bomb imagery to confront Madeleine Albright, then the
U.S. ambassador to the United Nations. "We have heard that a half million
children have died," Stahl said. "I mean, that's more children than died in
Hiroshima. And -- and you know, is the price worth it?" Albright replied, "I
think this is a very hard choice, but the price -- we think the price is
worth it."
It was the non-denial heard 'round the world. In the hands of sanctions
opponents and foreign policy critics, it was portrayed as a confession of
fact, even though neither Albright nor the U.S. government has ever admitted
to such a ghastly number (nor had anybody aside from CESR and Lesley Stahl
ever suggested such a thing until May 1996). The 60 Minutes exchange is very
familiar to readers of Arab newspapers, college dailies, and liberal
journals of opinion. Ralph Nader and Pat Buchanan mentioned it several times
during their respective presidential campaigns.
After September 11, the anecdote received new life, as in this typically
imaginative interpretation by Harper's Editor Lewis Lapham in the magazine's
November issue: "When Madeleine Albright, then the American secretary of
state [sic], was asked in an interview on 60 Minutes whether she had
considered the resulting death of 500,000 Iraqi children (of malnutrition
and disease), she said, 'We think the price is worth it.'"
Albright has been dogged by protesters at nearly all her campus appearances
the past several years, and rightly so: It was a beastly thing to say, and
she should have refuted the figures. Quietly, a month after the World Trade
Center attack, she finally apologized for her infamous performance. "I
shouldn't have said it," she said during a speech at the University of
Southern California. "You can believe this or not, but my comments were
taken out of context."
Regards,
Michael
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