News Release Archive - 2004

DENIS HALLIDAY
Former head of the U.N. Oil for Food Program in Iraq and assistant secretary general of the U.N., Halliday resigned in protest in 1998. Currently in New York City, he is available for a limited number of interviews. Halliday said today: “The Oil for Food ‘scandal’ is not a scandal of the United Nations, but rather of the member states, particularly of Washington and London.”
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JOY GORDON
Author of the article in the current issue of Harper’s magazine, “The U.N. is Us: Exposing Saddam Hussein’s Silent Partner,” Gordon said today: “What is being consistently overlooked is a distinction of enormous significance: the U.N. is being attacked for the policies and failures of particular member nations. The Oil for Food Program was not some concoction of Kofi Annan’s. It was created by a vote of the members of the Security Council. And every aspect of how the program ran — what goods were allowed, the monitoring procedures, the transfer of funds, everything — was explicitly established by the members of the Security Council. Kofi Annan did not have a vote; but the U.S. and Britain did, and they approved every resolution and decision that determined how the Oil for Food Program worked.”

BERT SACKS
Sacks was involved in repeated efforts to get humanitarian relief into Iraq during the 1990s. In 2002 he was fined by the U.S. government for a 1997 trip which helped bring $40,000 in medicine to children in Iraq in violation of U.S. sanctions. Sacks said today: “The U.N.’s Oil for Food Program didn’t begin until 1996, more than six years after sanctions began. A ‘scandal’ in a program that didn’t yet exist cannot be blamed for six years of Iraqi deaths. When the Oil for Food Program was finally allowed, it permitted $4 billion in oil sales a year for humanitarian needs: this came to $10 per person per month for each Iraqi living in South/Central Iraq. Of the total amount of oil sales, 30 percent went immediately for war reparations — $16 billion to Kuwaiti Petroleum — while the U.N. reported 960,000 Iraqi children were chronically malnourished.”
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RAHUL MAHAJAN
Mahajan is author of the book Full Spectrum Dominance: U.S. Power in Iraq and Beyond. He said today: “The recent resurgence of the Oil for Food ‘scandal,’ through Sen. Norm Coleman and others, very conveniently gives the U.S. government a way to keep Kofi Annan on the defensive so he criticizes neither the U.S. assault on Fallujah nor anything around the severely flawed prospective Iraqi elections. For all the talk of a lack of U.N. accountability, consider that after the August 2003 bombing of the U.N. in Iraq there was a full investigation and several people, some high up, were fired or demoted. Now there’s an investigation into Oil for Food, which has reached as high as Benon Sevan, Director of the Office of the Iraq Program. Compare this to the total lack of accountability in the U.S. government following 9/11, administration stonewalling over the 9/11 commission’s creation, and the minimal investigation of corruption in the Coalition Provisional Authority, which has not involved any high officials.”
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For more information, contact at the Institute for Public Accuracy:
Sam Husseini, (202) 347-0020; or David Zupan, (541) 484-9167

The White House is hosting a two-day conference on the economy with special emphasis on Social Security starting tomorrow.

MARK WEISBROT
Weisbrot is the co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research and co-author, with Dean Baker, of Social Security: The Phony Crisis (University of Chicago Press). He said today: “The following facts have been left out of the debate on Social Security ‘reform’:

— According to the numbers used by everyone, including the President’s Commission, Social Security can pay all promised benefits for the next 38 years without any changes at all. The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO) just upped that estimate to 48 years.

— By either measure, the ‘long-term problem’ faced by Social Security over the whole next 75 years is actually less than it faced in each of the decades of the 1950s, 60s, 70s, and 80s.

— By either measure, Social Security is more financially sound than it has been throughout most of its 69-year history.

— The projected shortfall for the whole 75-year period is about 0.7 percent of GDP (according to Trustees’ numbers which the President’s Commission is using) or 0.4 percent of GDP (according to the CBO). This is about one-third to one-fifth of the cost to the Treasury of the 2001 and 2003 tax cuts, if made permanent.”
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DOUG HENWOOD
Author of the book After the New Economy, Henwood said today: “It looks like the Bush administration is going to try to sell Social Security privatization with the same strategy it used to sell the war in Iraq: fear, exaggeration, and lies. Last weekend, the president warned of ‘looming disaster’ for the system. That’s just not true. The official projections show the system solvent for about four more decades — and those projections themselves are made on the basis of economic and demographic projections that are implausibly, even irresponsibly, gloomy. At worst, the system faces easily manageable problems. With more plausible economic and demographic assumptions, it faces no problems at all.”
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ELLEN FRANK
Frank is a senior economist at the Poverty Institute at Rhode Island College. She said today: “President Bush is fond of saying that workers should be ‘allowed’ to save for retirement. But Americans are already allowed to save, are indeed encouraged to save through various tax-favored accounts. Yet most can’t save nearly enough to retire on. Today, the majority of elderly Americans depend on Social Security for most of their income. This will become increasingly true as younger workers begin retiring with no private pensions — nothing but their savings to fall back on. Social Security was intended to supplement individual savings and private pensions — Roosevelt’s three-legged stool. Turning Social Security into a savings plan is of benefit to absolutely no one but the financial firms who will manage all those individual accounts.”

For more information, contact at the Institute for Public Accuracy:
Sam Husseini, (202) 347-0020; or David Zupan, (541) 484-9167

AP reported this weekend that “Gary Webb, a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative reporter who wrote a controversial series of stories linking the CIA to crack cocaine trafficking in Los Angeles, has died at age 49…of an apparent suicide.”

AP wrote: “Webb’s 1996 series in the Mercury News alleged that Nicaraguan drug traffickers had sold tons of crack cocaine in Los Angeles and funneled millions of dollars in profits to the CIA-supported Nicaraguan Contras during the 1980s.” The Mercury News backed away from the series and Webb resigned from the paper. Webb went on to write the book Dark Alliance: The CIA, the Contras, and the Crack Cocaine Explosion which laid out his case in more detail.

ROBERT PARRY
Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories in the 1980s for the Associated Press and Newsweek; he and Brian Barger broke the story of contra-cocaine smuggling for AP in December 1985. He is author of the book Lost History: Contras, Cocaine, the Press & “Project Truth.” Today he wrote the article “America’s Debt to Journalist Gary Webb.” Parry said: “Webb’s editor at the Mercury News sold out the story and demoted Webb, causing him to quit the paper. Even Webb’s marriage broke up…. Webb’s contra-cocaine series prompted internal investigations by the Central Intelligence Agency and the Justice Department, probes that confirmed that scores of contra units and contra-connected individuals were implicated in the drug trade. The probes also showed that the Reagan-Bush administration frustrated investigations into those crimes for geopolitical reasons.”

Parry’s latest book is Secrecy & Privilege: Rise of the Bush Dynasty from Watergate to Iraq.
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For more information, contact at the Institute for Public Accuracy:
Sam Husseini, (202) 347-0020; or David Zupan, (541) 484-9167

EVAN DAVIS
SUSAN TRUITT
Co-founder of the Citizens’ Alliance for Secure Elections (CASE), Truitt said today: “The Citizens’ Alliance for Secure Elections has organized a rally to demand that every vote be counted accurately from the November 2 election. We demand a full recount of Ohio’s votes and a thorough investigation of all reported irregularities and discrepancies and charges of voter disenfranchisement throughout the state. The right to vote is a civil right and in a democracy no abridgement of that right can be tolerated. The rally will be held on Saturday, December 4 at 1 p.m. at the Ohio statehouse lawn in Columbus.” Evan Davis works with CASE and is helping coordinate the rally.
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ROBERT PARRY
Author of the just-released book Secrecy & Privilege: Rise of the Bush Dynasty from Watergate to Iraq, he said today. “One of the striking things was that immediately after the Ukraine election, many major news organizations in the U.S. began demanding that the official results be thrown out because of questions about their legitimacy. The reasons cited included the fact that exit polls had shown the opposition candidate prevailing while the official results came in the opposite way, that there had been complaints from voters about harassment and that there had been efforts apparently to bully the vote in certain directions toward the government. … Ironically, of course, some similar facts existed for the U.S. election on November 2. The exit polls had shown John Kerry winning. There were complaints especially in Ohio about efforts to hold down the minority votes and to put the important electoral votes into George Bush’s camp. His own political supporters controlled the apparatus in both Ohio and Florida, two of the key states. … Instead of the unvarnished truth being the primary concern, the idea of national unity at a time of crisis became the preeminent concern.”
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JAMES K. GALBRAITH
Galbraith teaches at the Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas at Austin. He said today: “The [Ukraine] election was stolen. That’s not in doubt. Secretary of State Colin Powell admitted it. The National Democratic Institute and the International Republican Institute both admitted it. … In Washington, former National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski demanded that the results be set aside and a new vote taken, under the eye — no less — of the United Nations. … Personally, I don’t know whether the Ukrainian election was really stolen. … But if the Ukraine standard were applied in Ohio — as it should be — then the late lamented U.S. election certainly was stolen. In Ohio, the secretary of state in charge of the elections process was co-chairman of the Bush campaign in the state. He obstructed the vote count systematically — for instance, by demanding that provisional ballots without birth dates on their envelopes be thrown out, even though there is no requirement for that in state law. He also required that provisional ballots be cast in a voter’s home precinct, ensuring that there would be no escape from long lines. Republicans fielded thousands of election challengers to Democratic precincts, mainly to try to intimidate black voters and to slow down the voting process. A recount, demanded and paid for by the Green and Libertarian parties, has been stalled in court, so that it won’t possibly upset the certification of Ohio’s electoral votes. In Franklin County, Ohio, there was rampant abuse, with voting machines added in Republican precincts and taken away in Democratic ones, as documented by the Columbus Dispatch. The result was a crippling pileup at the polls; many thousands did not vote because they simply could not afford to wait. I witnessed this with my own eyes.”
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For more information, contact at the Institute for Public Accuracy:
Sam Husseini, (202) 347-0020; or David Zupan, (541) 484-9167

A series of events are planned this week as human rights, legal, environmental and other experts are demanding that Dow Chemical, the current owner of Union Carbide, be held accountable for the Bhopal disaster, which took place 20 years ago in India.

On Wednesday, Dec. 1, at 1:00 p.m. ET there will be a media teleconference call. It will include:

* Irene Zubaida Khan, secretary general of Amnesty International, which has just released the report “Clouds of Injustice: Bhopal Disaster 20 Years on.” She is currently in London. The report states: “More than 7,000 people died within a matter of days when toxic gases leaked from a chemical plant in Bhopal, India, on the night of 2/3 December 1984. Over the last 20 years exposure to the toxins has resulted in the deaths of a further 15,000 people as well as chronic and debilitating illnesses for thousands of others for which treatment is largely ineffective.”

* Rajan Sharma, currently in New York City, is the primary attorney representing the Bhopal survivors since 1999.

* Rachna Dingra of the International Campaign for Justice in Bhopal will talk about the latest from Bhopal.

* Ryan Bodanyi is coordinator of Students for Bhopal, which is organizing events at colleges around the world.
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DIANA RUIZ
Director of the Dow Accountability Project at the International Campaign for Justice in Bhopal, Ruiz said today: “At least 150,000 people, including children born to parents who survived the disaster, are suffering from exposure-related health effects such as cancer, neurological damage, chaotic menstrual cycles and mental illness. Over 20,000 people are forced to drink water laced with unsafe levels of mercury, carbon tetrachloride and other persistent organic pollutants and heavy metals…. Union Carbide Corporation [now owned by Dow] and its former chairman Warren Anderson face serious criminal charges at the Chief Judicial Magistrate’s court in Bhopal. Neither party has appeared in court to face trial, and both have been declared absconders (fugitives from justice) by the Bhopal court.”
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JACK DOYLE
Doyle is author of the new book Trespass Against Us: Dow Chemical and the Toxic Century. He said today: “Personal and public health, human blood and body tissue, reproduction and developmental biology — these are the highest, most personal, most sacrosanct forms of property. Yet chemical companies like Dow are regularly violating — trespassing — on human health and well being.”
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RICK HIND
Legislative director of the Greenpeace Toxics Campaign, Hind has examined the Bhopal disaster. He said today: “In addition to accidents, we now face terrorism as a new way that chemical plants could be turned into weapons of mass destruction. Since 2001, Congress has failed to adopt legislation to prevent chemical plant disasters. However, chemical security legislation will be re-introduced in the beginning of 2005.”
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For more information, contact at the Institute for Public Accuracy:
Sam Husseini, (202) 347-0020; or David Zupan, (541) 484-9167

MAUDE BARLOW
Barlow is national chairperson of the Council of Canadians, Canada’s largest public advocacy organization with over 100,000 members. The group has done extensive work on examining various policy issues around U.S.-Canadian relations.
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MICHAEL MANDEL
GAIL DAVIDSON
Mandel is a professor of law at Osgoode Hall Law School in Canada and author of the book How America Gets Away With Murder: Illegal Wars, Collateral Damage and Crimes Against Humanity. Davidson is a member of Lawyers Against the War. They are authors of the article “Why Bush Should Be Banned from Canada.” Mandel said today: “Many of the crimes of which President Bush stands accused are crimes under Canadian law, specifically under the Crimes Against Humanity and War Crimes Act. Were it not for his having diplomatic immunity, Bush would clearly be liable for prosecution. As it is, we are instructing people on how to use legal mechanisms…”
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LEE ZASLOFSKY
Zaslofsky works with three young men who enlisted in the U.S. military and are now war resisters in Canada: Jeremy Hinzman, Brandon Hughey and David Sanders. He is coordinator for the War Resisters Support Campaign, and himself went to Canada to avoid the Vietnam War. Some of them will be at protests in Ottawa as Bush arrives in Canada. Zaslofsky said today: “We are urging the Canadian government to take a position similar to that during the Vietnam War period; U.S. war resisters should be welcome in Canada.”
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JUSTIN PODUR
A Canadian writer and activist, Podur is editor of the blog “The Killing Train.” He said today: “President Bush’s original plan was to come to Ottawa, Canada’s capital, for two days (Nov. 30 to Dec. 1). The idea that he might address the Canadian Parliament was floated. But after the massive demonstrations against Bush in Chile during the APEC summit and the possibility of large protests here, a Bush spokesperson said the Ottawa visit will be cut short because ‘frankly, we don’t want to be booed.’ The protests in Ottawa are primarily directed against the U.S. war in Iraq, which the vast majority of Canadians reject. They are also directed against U.S. demands that Canada place its economy, its military, and its diplomacy in the service of U.S. power. Canada has already curtailed immigration and civil liberties legislation to comply with U.S. demands, and Canada is playing a significant and increasing role in U.S. military adventures abroad, particularly in Haiti and Afghanistan. Canadian corporations are engaging in war profiteering, supplying weapons to the United States that will ultimately be used against civilians in Iraq. All of this is repudiated by the majority of Canada’s population, and these are among the reasons protesters will be gathering in Ottawa during Bush’s visit. Canada’s politicians are out of step with these realities and need these protests to remind them that they answer to the Canadian people, not the American president.”
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For more information, contact at the Institute for Public Accuracy:
Sam Husseini, (202) 347-0020; or David Zupan, (541) 484-9167

MIKE HOFFMAN
Co-founder and national coordinator of Iraq Veterans Against the War, Hoffman said today: “For Thanksgiving, one can expect President Bush and others to pontificate about the troops and the sacrifices we’ve made in Iraq; but what has he actually done to support us?” Hoffman is currently near Philadelphia.
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ROBERT W. VENABLES
Author of the two-volume book American Indian History, Venables said today: “Hallmark Cards is not likely to promote the fact that the first thing the Pilgrims did when they landed in what is now Massachusetts was loot Indian graves. The original Thanksgiving held great potential for cooperation, but the children of that first Thanksgiving slaughtered each other as the Pilgrims demanded more and more Indian land. The white children of the first celebration sold the Indian children of the first Thanksgiving into slavery in Virginia, the Caribbean, Spain and Morocco…. If you want to see what globalization does if it’s carried out by right-wing corporate forces, consider that after 1492 half the globe — the entire Western Hemisphere — was forced to accept a Western standard of religion, politics and economics. As for the United States, it broke all its treaties — at least 395 of them — with Indian nations.” Venables teaches a course on American Indians at Cornell University.
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KALLE LASN
Lasn is co-founder and editor-in-chief of Adbusters magazine, which organizes Buy Nothing Day — Friday, Nov. 26 this year. He said today: “For 24 hours, millions of people around the world do not participate — in the doomsday economy, the marketing mind-games, and the frantic consumer-binge that’s become our culture. We pause. We make a small choice not to shop. We shrink our footprint and gain some calm. Together we say to Exxon, Nike, Coke and the rest: enough is enough. And we help build this movement to rethink our unsustainable course.”
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For more information, contact at the Institute for Public Accuracy:
Sam Husseini, (202) 347-0020; or David Zupan, (541) 484-9167

MICHAEL PARADIES SHOOB
Shoob, co-director (with Joseph Mealey) of the recent documentary film about Karl Rove titled “Bush’s Brain,” commented today: “I would say that the ‘mark’ of a Rove operation is absolute control, no leaks, no visible dissent. And, it would seem to me that the resignation of Colin Powell and the wholesale purge of dissenting voices at the CIA indicate the kind of consolidation of power by the White House that Rove is looking to create. Also, Rove has been very successful in portraying anyone who disagrees with the administration as either ‘evil’ or ‘unpatriotic.’ That will continue. Rove has said that he would prefer for Americans to watch their news with the sound ‘off.’ So, I think he will continue to look for every opportunity to run a John Wayne ‘white hats versus black hats’ movie from the White House.”
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GAR ALPEROVITZ
Alperovitz, a professor of political economy at the University of Maryland, is author of the new book America Beyond Capitalism: Reclaiming Our Wealth, Our Liberty, and Our Democracy. He said today: “The election of 2004 marks a turning point for Democrats and progressives. But the key to their future is not simply a matter of better ‘framing’ of their message or finding a way to appeal to Americans concerned with moral values. Clearly a new long-term strategy is needed if they are ever to regain positive momentum. This requires the kind of profound reassessment of first principles and broad vision which conservatives undertook when they were sidelined and out of power in the 1950s and 1960s.” Alperovitz also said: “If we are ever to deal with the great social and economic issues facing the nation … progressives will also have to rethink some fundamental assumptions at the very core of the political economic system — especially those concerning control of the nation’s extraordinary wealth. Fortunately, the beginnings of such a process are well underway. Moreover, just beneath the surface of most media reporting, a variety of on-the-ground efforts offer new ways to give practical meaning to strategies which have far-reaching implications for longer term progressive economic renewal.”
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For more information, contact at the Institute for Public Accuracy:
David Zupan, (541) 484-9167

DAVID COBB
Cobb was the 2004 presidential candidate for the Green Party. He said today: “We announced our intention to seek a recount of the vote in Ohio. Since the required fee for a statewide recount is $113,600, the only question was whether that money could be raised in time to meet the filing deadline. That question has been answered. Thanks to the thousands of people who have contributed to this effort, we can say with certainty that there will be a recount in Ohio.” The Green Party is working with the Libertarian Party in securing a recount. The presidential candidates for the two parties have demanded that Ohio Secretary of State Kenneth Blackwell, a Republican who co-chaired this year’s Bush campaign in Ohio, recuse himself from the recount process.

The media director for the Cobb-LaMarche campaign, Blair Bobier, said today: “The Ohio presidential election was marred by numerous press and independent reports of mis-marked and discarded ballots, problems with electronic voting machines and the targeted disenfranchisement of African-American voters. A number of citizens’ groups and voting rights organizations are holding the second of two hearings today in Columbus, Ohio, to take testimony from voters, poll watchers and election experts about problems with the Ohio vote. The hearing, from 6 to 9 p.m., will be held at the Courthouse, meeting room A, 373 S. High St., in Columbus.”
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JOHN BONIFAZ
General counsel for the National Voting Rights Institute, Bonifaz is the lawyer for the recount effort. He said today: “We must ensure that all votes are properly counted.”
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JONATHAN TURLEY
Turley is a professor of constitutional law at George Washington University; he is not connected to the recount efforts. Turley said today: “Electors are certified on Dec. 7. They actually vote on Dec. 13. But those votes are not opened by Congress until Jan. 6. So there is still time to challenge the results in Ohio — as well as other close states such as New Mexico, Iowa and Nevada.”

Turley added: “I was surprised on the morning after the election. I was legal analyst with CBS News for the election and we did not go off the air until 6 a.m. At that time, due to the reports and my conversation with Kerry attorneys, I expected a challenge. Kerry’s statement the day after the election that there were not enough provisional ballots to have any chance to alter the result of the election may have been true, but it was a bit misleading since provisional ballots are only part of the story. There were also absentee ballots, there were reports of substantial pockets of election problems, and allegations of over-voting and machine malfunction. In addition, over 70 percent of Ohio’s votes were done with punch cards. We know that when you do a challenge to those, they tend to turn over. So there is room to challenge Ohio and other states. This is not to say that a recount is likely to change the result of the election, but it is not an impossibility.”
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For more information, contact at the Institute for Public Accuracy:
Sam Husseini, (202) 347-0020; or David Zupan, (541) 484-9167

“Heavily armed police commandos stormed a Jerusalem church compound Thursday and arrested nuclear whistle blower Mordechai Vanunu,” the Associate Press reports. Vanunu had been restricted from speaking to non-Israelis or media and had openly violated such prohibitions, including appearing on a news release of the Institute for Public Accuracy on Sept. 17.

The following are available for interviews:

FELICE COHEN-JOPPA, ART LAFFIN
Cohen-Joppa is the coordinator of the U.S. Campaign to Free Mordechai Vanunu; Laffin is associate coordinator of the group. Cohen-Joppa said today: “It is an outrage that Israel has re-arrested nuclear whistleblower Mordechai Vanunu only six months after his release from prison. The unjust and severe restrictions that have forced Mordechai Vanunu to remain in Israel following his release last April, and intend to muzzle his voice for nuclear disarmament, are grave violations of his human and civil rights. These violations are now magnified as Israel has hidden behind news of the death of Yassir Arafat to increase its punishment of Mordechai Vanunu. After 18 years in prison, he has no secrets to reveal. Israel must stop punishing this man who has already suffered so much for letting the world know about Israel’s nuclear arsenal.”
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DANIEL ELLSBERG
Author of the book Secrets: A Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers, Ellsberg said today: “The only secret Mordechai Vanunu has left to tell the world is the one he revealed on the day of his release from 18 years in prison, April 21, 2004: ‘I am a symbol of the will of freedom, that the human spirit is free. You cannot destroy the human spirit.’ That is indeed the most dangerous secret in the eyes not only of Israel but of every state that withholds vital information from its own citizens, including the U.S. and U.K. Israel should let the foremost prophet of the nuclear age go forth to be honored throughout the world — and we call on them to do so — but even if it returns him instead to his 6-by-9 foot cell, Mordechai Vanunu will remain the most free man on earth.”
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MARY and NICK EOLOFF
Mordechai Vanunu’s adoptive parents, the Eoloffs live in St. Paul, Minn. They said today: “We are horrified that today armed Israeli special police forces entered St. George’s Cathedral compound in order to kidnap Mordechai Vanunu for the second time. It is further proof that the security forces have no respect for an individual’s human rights and dignity nor respect for a religious site which is a sacred place of sanctuary. Mordechai has always acted from a moral belief that nuclear weapons are immoral and illegal and that all nations should begin the process of their disarmament.”

MARK GAFFNEY
Gaffney is author of a book about Israel’s nuclear program, Dimona — The Third Temple: The Story Behind the Vanunu Revelation. He also wrote the recent article “The Case of Mordechai Vanunu: Preeminent Hero of the Nuclear Age.” He said today: “Israel has been pressing for attacking Iran while it is suppressing the truth about its own nuclear weapons program — the only program which has come out of the Mideast and has actually developed nuclear weapons and is driving other countries to acquire weapons of mass destruction.”
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Background on Israel’s nuclear capacity
A letter from the Anglican Bishop in Jerusalem on Vanunu’s re-arrest today

For more information, contact at the Institute for Public Accuracy:
Sam Husseini, (202) 347-0020; or David Zupan, (541) 484-9167