HANS VON SPONECK
Former head of the United Nations oil-for-food program in Iraq, Von Sponeck was recently in Iraq and is currently in Geneva. He said today: “The U.S. government’s actions amount to a campaign of severe political harassment. They should give Hans Blix the time to assess the documents. Bush disparaging Iraq when it is complying with total access for the weapons inspectors shows a disregard for the reality on the ground. The U.S. controlling of documents and sharing them with only the permanent members of the Security Council and not the 10 rotating members further intensifies the existing caste system within the UN Security Council.”
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JAMES PAUL
Executive director of the Global Policy Forum, which monitors policy-making at the United Nations, Paul is author of a series of papers on Iraq.
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JACQUELINE CABASSO
Executive director of Western States Legal Foundation, a nuclear disarmament advocacy organization, Cabasso recently led a “Citizen Weapons Inspection Team” to the gates of the U.S. nuclear weapons laboratory in Livermore, California. She said today: “The Bush administration’s claim that it has ‘evidence’ of continued development of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction appears to be the last refuge of scoundrels. While UNMOVIC and IAEA weapons inspectors are reporting full cooperation from the Iraqis, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld is alleging that the inspectors won’t be able to find evidence of Iraqi WMD programs…. The U.S. determination to wage war against Iraq is becoming more transparent with each passing day. And U.S. hypocrisy is at an all-time high given its own dismal record on international treaty obligations and nuclear use plans.”
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JOHN R. MACARTHUR
Author of Second Front: Censorship and Propaganda in the Gulf War, MacArthur said today: “Virtually everything the Bush administration does is calculated and much is based on lies and half truths. The administration repeated over and over that there was a meeting between Mohamed Atta and an Iraqi official. There is no evidence for this, but according to a poll by the Council on Foreign Relations, a majority of Americans still think this is true…. [During the Gulf War] the most spectacular charge then was that Iraqi soldiers had pulled babies from incubators in Kuwaiti hospitals, and stolen the incubators. The story was false, but wasn’t completely refuted until well after the Gulf War. Likewise, in August 1990, the White House asserted the existence of military satellite photographs that showed Iraqi troops massed on the Saudi Arabian border — preparing, said the White House, to invade that kingdom. These photos have never been made public, probably because they don’t exist. Genuine commercial-satellite photographs of the Kuwait-Saudi Arabia border from that time, published in the St. Petersburg Times, showed no Iraqi troops along the frontier…. Recently, Bush cited an IAEA report that Iraq was ‘six months away from developing a weapon. I don’t know what more evidence we need.’ The IAEA responded that not only was there no new report, ‘there’s never been a report’ asserting that Iraq was six months away from constructing a nuclear weapon….”
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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