MICHAEL BROWN
Author of a recent oped in the International Herald Tribune — “Palestinian Elections: Voting is Good. Freedom is Better” — Brown is the executive director of the nonprofit organization Partners for Peace.
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ALI ABUNIMAH
Abunimah is founder of the Electronic Intifada. He said today: “The election in the occupied territories is deeply flawed. Israel, the Palestinian Authority and many members of the international community have done all they can to ensure that the outcome is predetermined and there is no genuine contest of ideas or candidates. As significant, the vast majority of Palestinians do not live in the occupied territories, but in the Diaspora, as refugees and exiles. They are banned from voting, or from freely traveling to their homeland to participate. This contrasts with the Afghan election, and the scheduled Iraqi elections, where enormous international efforts have been made to enable refugees and exiles to vote. Many Palestinians believe that these elections are intended to produce a compliant, unrepresentative leadership that will sign a deal with Israel giving up their basic rights.”
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ROBERT PARRY
Newsweek is reporting in a just-published article, entitled “‘The Salvador Option’ — The Pentagon may put Special-Forces-led assassination or kidnapping teams in Iraq,” that “the Pentagon is intensively debating an option that dates back to a still-secret strategy in the Reagan administration’s battle against the leftist guerrilla insurgency in El Salvador in the early 1980s.”
Parry wrote in an article in November 2003 that “many top Bush aides played key roles in the repression of leftist peasant uprisings in Central America in the 1980s, a set of lessons the Bush administration is now trying to apply to the violent resistance in Iraq.” Author of the book Lost History: Contras, Cocaine, the Press & “Project Truth,” Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories in the 1980s. He is editor of ConsortiumNews.com; his latest book is Secrecy & Privilege: Rise of the Bush Dynasty from Watergate to Iraq.
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ANDRES THOMAS CONTERIS
Conteris is a Latin America human rights activist. He was detained and released in the Capitol after speaking up at John Negroponte’s Senate confirmation hearing to be ambassador to Iraq in April 2004. Negroponte was U.S. ambassador to Honduras during the Nicaragua Contra war in the early 1980s. Conteris said today: “It’s clear that what the U.S. is moving to in Iraq is a Death Squad Democracy, with units like Battalion 316 which operated in Honduras with the support of John Negroponte.”
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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
