AS’AD ABUKHALIL
Associate professor of political science at California State University at Stanislaus and fellow at the Center for Middle Eastern Studies at the University of California at Berkeley, AbuKhalil is author of the article “Islam and the Study of Central Asia.” He said today: “Learning about Islam is not terribly instructive here, just as Christian theology is not a good framework to explain David Koresh. Non-religious political factors are involved…. There are up to 3 million refugees in Afghanistan and they are basically forced to stay there while they may be bombed. The Afghani people, despite their ethnic divisions, historically always rally against outside aggressors. The Afghani people and fellow Muslims would find any punishment of the people and the country as unfair and unjust. After all, the Taliban were not voted in with free elections, but were thrust on the country due to direct Pakistani military and intelligence support, with tacit U.S. agreement.”

JAY TRUMAN
Truman grew up in Southern Utah, where he watched mushroom clouds rise from the Nevada Test Site. Today, as director of the Downwinders organization, he is one of the nation’s foremost authorities on nuclear weapons policy. He said today: “Rumsfeld declined to answer whether the U.S. would rule out the use of nuclear weapons. Rumsfeld’s assistant, Paul Wolfowitz, has stated that the Pentagon is poised to unleash ‘a very big hammer.’ The administration could be angling to use earth-penetrating nuclear weapons, which they were already planning to test. Contrary to the administration claims that these weapons are almost surgically clean, these weapons are incredibly ‘dirty’; by their very nature they will produce a great deal of intensive local radiation and massive widespread fallout for hundreds of miles, as tests of similar cratering devices in Nevada have already shown.”
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WILLIAM HARTUNG
Hartung is senior research fellow at the World Policy Institute and co-author of “Toward a New Nuclear Posture: Challenges for the Bush Administration” and “Tangled Web: The Marketing of Missile Defense, 1994-2000.” He said today: “It certainly seems as if these attacks are being used as an excuse by the military and the political right to basically take all their pet projects … and label them ‘anti-terrorist.’ In the name of ‘national unity,’ the Democrats have for the most part agreed to roll over and give the president anything he asks for in the military and intelligence spheres — hardly a sterling example of democracy at work. The $20 billion increase for the Pentagon was rubber-stamped without debate, or even an outline of how the funds might be spent. Before this increase, our military budget was already $343 billion — at Cold War levels.”
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ROBERT JENSEN
Author of the forthcoming book Writing Dissent and an associate professor at the University of Texas at Austin, Jensen is among activists who are planning nationwide gatherings to begin Sunday. He said today: “The resistance to hyper-aggressive U.S. plans is deepening. In five days I have received 1,200 personal email messages and calls in response to my writing, which argues for the Bush administration to drop its belligerent stance. The majority of these people are terrified of what the U.S. is planning and desperate for a solution based on justice, not retribution and power politics. The notion that Americans all have a blood lust is simply not true.”
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For more information, contact at the Institute for Public Accuracy:
Sam Husseini, (202) 347-0020; David Zupan, (541) 484-9167