HOWARD ZINN
Zinn, author of the bestseller A People’s History of the United States, is available for a limited number of interviews beginning Thursday afternoon. He said today: “The U.S. government used deceit to go to war with Iraq and in very similar fashion it is now propagandizing the U.S. public about Iran.”
More Information

ANN WRIGHT
Currently in Washington, D.C., Wright is a retired U.S. Army colonel and former State Department diplomat. As Bush spoke on Tuesday, she was arrested outside the United Nations in protests against the Iraq war and the prospect of an attack on Iran.
More Information

STEPHEN ZUNES
Zunes is Middle East editor for the Foreign Policy In Focus Project and wrote an annotated critique of Bush’s speech. Zunes pointed out that while Bush quoted a letter from Arab and Muslim intellectuals to justify his policies, the same letter also stated: “the main problem with U.S. policies in the Middle East (in particular in Iraq, Palestine, and elsewhere) is precisely their failure to live up to America’s democratic ideals of liberty and justice for all.”

Zunes noted: “The letter also called on President Bush to ‘break with 60 years of U.S. support for non-democratic regimes in the region, and to make that known to the world in unequivocal terms’ and ‘to press for an end to regime repression of democratically spirited liberal and Islamist groups, and to emphatically distance itself from such repression and condemn it in the strongest terms whenever and wherever it occurs.’ There is no indication that the Bush administration intends to change its policies, however.” Zunes is a professor of politics and the author of the book Tinderbox: U.S. Middle East Policy and the Roots of Terrorism.
More Information

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