During the long and increasingly painful years of the blockade very little news came out of Iraq. Then in 1995 the British medical journal Lancet reported the sanctions had been responsible for the deaths of some 500,000 Iraqi children. This report actually did attract some attention,and was even reported in the New York Times. Nevertheless it was hard to get anyone to pay much attention to what was at the very least a monumental humanitarian disaster.
  In 1996 Kathy Kelly, a tireless veteran fighter for peace, social justice and human rights, founded an organization called Voices in the Wilderness, with the mission of exposing what was happening to the children of Iraq. It was from Kathy's website I first learned about any of this. Another important website was Citizens Concerned for the People of Iraq. These were the first people to circulate the damning memo from he Defense Intelligence Agency. The next year Dennis Halladay was appointed as U.N. representative in Iraq. When he quit a year later he went public with a bitter condemnation of the sanctions which he called "genocide". Some of the people in Voices in a typically Kathy Kelly action started small blockade running exercises, bringing small amounts of food and medicine into Iraq. Ramsey Clark, a former U.S. attorney general, joined in these efforts. U.S. Government policy at this time demanded a $500,000 fine and up to fifty years in prison.
  Of course nobody was going to make any arrests, which was too bad because the headlines would have been great:
"Catholic Worker, Ramsey Clark arrested for Smuggling Medicine to Iraqi Children"
  As hard as Kathy and her cohorts tried though, somehow that brutal sanctions story never did get into mainstream media as it should have. People who did first hand eyewitness  reports certainly spared their readers nothing of the horrors they found. Most especially notable are, in addition to Kathy herself, Felicity Arbuthnot and John Pilger. If you ever want to know how bad it was you can Google any of them.

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