Just back from Afghanistan, Institute for Public Accuracy executive director Norman Solomon and veteran Rick Reyes are available for interviews.

While in Kabul they met with scores of officials and policy analysts at UN agencies, the World Bank, the Afghan Independent Human Rights Commission and the Center for Conflict and Peace Studies (run by the president’s cousin Hekmat Karzai). On Tuesday, Solomon and Reyes met with Mohammed Ehsan Zia, the Afghan government’s minister of rural rehabilitation and development. They also had meetings with independent Afghan journalists, visited a refugee camp for displaced people from southern Afghanistan and met with prominent Afghan advocates for women’s rights.

NORMAN SOLOMON
Solomon is the author of War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death. He recently wrote the piece “A Little Girl in Kabul.”

Solomon is executive director of the Institute for Public Accuracy.

RICK REYES
After enlisting in the Marine Corps, Reyes served as an infantry rifleman. He was deployed in “Operation Enduring Freedom” (Afghanistan) 2001 and then “Operation Iraqi Freedom” (Iraq) 2003. In 2008 he got involved in the Brave New Foundation’s Rethink Afghanistan project and testified in front of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Video of that testimony is posted here.

Reyes is a co-founding member of Veterans for Rethinking Afghanistan.

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