MEG BARTLETT
Bartlett is founder of the group Ground Zero for Peace — First Responders Against War. As an emergency medical technician, she responded to 9/11. She said today: “We do not want our experiences to propagate further violence. No one should have to see what I’ve seen. But people around the world have seen it for years. If our job is to protect life, it doesn’t make sense for us to support violence against anyone. The inside of a body looks the same no matter what continent it’s found on. We’ve begun a letter-writing campaign with people who do the same work in Kosovo, Israel, the occupied Palestinian territories and Afghanistan.”

FEKKAK MAMDOUH
Mamdouh was the primary shop steward for Windows on the World, the restaurant atop the World Trade Center. He knew most of the 73 workers there who were killed on 9/11. He is co-founder of Roc-NY (Restaurants Opportunities Center), which is organizing displaced workers to open co-op restaurants in New York.
More Information
Administration Deceptions, Then and Now

[Donald Rumsfeld spoke Wednesday afternoon at the National Press Club. The New York Times reported (Sept. 27, 2002) that Rumsfeld claimed “American intelligence had ‘bulletproof’ evidence of links between Al Qaeda and the government of President Saddam Hussein of Iraq. Mr. Rumsfeld said that recently declassified intelligence reports about suspected ties between Al Qaeda and the Iraqi government … were ‘factual’ and ‘exactly accurate.'” On March 30, 2003, interviewed on ABC Television, Rumsfeld said about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq: “We know where they are. They are in the area around Tikrit and Baghdad.” See: http://traprockpeace.org/nytimes092702rumsfeld.html and www.dod.gov/news/Mar2003/t03302003_t0330sdabcsteph.html]

SHELDON RAMPTON, JOHN STAUBER, [via Kelly Groves]
Rampton and Stauber authored Weapons of Mass Deception: The Uses of Propaganda in Bush’s War on Iraq. They said today: “Based largely on the administration’s insinuations, a majority of Americans still mistakenly believe that Saddam Hussein was behind 9/11. [See: www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A32862-2003Sep5.html] This is a lie, and a dangerous lie. The Bush administration has hijacked the war on terror and turned it into a war on Iraq.”
More Information

ROBERT JENSEN
RAHUL MAHAJAN
Jensen and Mahajan wrote a piece that appeared yesterday in the Philadelphia Inquirer, titled “When Will Voters Finally Get Wise to the Shell Game?” They said today: “When the weapons-of-mass-destruction rationale for the invasion was exposed as a lie, the focus moved to the liberation of Iraq. As that soured and resistance to the occupation grew, the president shifted to talk about terrorism in Iraq without even bothering to attempt to explain past lies and distortions.” Jensen is the author of the forthcoming Citizens of the Empire: The Struggle to Claim Our Humanity. Rahul Mahajan is the author of Full Spectrum Dominance: U.S. Power in Iraq and Beyond.
More Information
More Information

STEPHEN ZUNES,
Professor of politics at the University of San Francisco and author of Tinderbox: U.S. Middle East Policy and the Roots of Terrorism, Zunes wrote the recent article “The War in Iraq is Not Over and Neither Are the Lies to Justify It.”
More Information

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