News Release Archive - 2006

Hans Blix, the head of the Weapons of Mass Destruction Committee, is testifying on Capitol Hill this afternoon before a subcommittee on weapons of mass destruction and proliferation. The following analysts will also be testifying as part of the same proceedings and are available for interviews:

Amb. THOMAS GRAHAM Jr.
Graham is a member of the Global Security Institute’s Bipartisan Security Group and was involved in negotiations for every major international arms control and non-proliferation agreement of the past 30 years. He said today: “President John F. Kennedy truly feared that nuclear weapons might well sweep all over the world. In 1962 there were reports that by the late 1970s there would be 25-30 nuclear weapon states in the world with nuclear weapons integrated into their arsenals. If that had happened there would be many more such states today — in September of 2004, the Director General of the International Atomic Energy Agency, Mohamed El Baradei, estimated that more than 40 countries now have the capability to build nuclear weapons. Under such conditions every conflict would carry with it the risk of going nuclear and it would be impossible to keep nuclear weapons out of the hands of international terrorist organizations they would be so widespread.

“One of the principal problems with all this has been that the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty nuclear weapon states have never really delivered on the disarmament part of this bargain and the United States in recent years appears to have largely abandoned it. The essence of the disarmament commitment was that pending the eventual elimination of nuclear weapon arsenals called for in Article VI of the Treaty, the nuclear weapon states would agree to important interim steps including a treaty prohibiting all nuclear weapon tests, drastic reduction of their nuclear arsenals and a significant diminishment of the role of nuclear weapons in their security policies. None of this has been accomplished over 35 years later.”
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JONATHAN GRANOFF
Granoff is president of the Global Security Institute. He said today: “Nearly every country in the world has accepted the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty as a necessary legal instrument to address this threat. While simultaneously condemning the spread of nuclear weapons, this treaty sets forth a related obligation to obtain their universal elimination. In 1995, in order to obtain the indefinite extension of the NPT, now with 188 states [as] parties, commitments to nuclear elimination were confirmed and strengthened by the five declared nuclear weapon states — China, United States, France, Russia, and Britain. However, the nuclear weapon states with over 96 percent of the weapons, the United States and Russia, have not fully addressed their fundamental dilemma: they want to keep their nuclear weapons indefinitely and at the same time condemn others who would attempt to acquire them.”
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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

Sen. Arlen Specter this afternoon challenged the constitutionality of the president’s practice of adding signing statements to legislation.

Specter, who is chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee, said the practice “is inappropriate under the Constitution, which provides that when Congress passes legislation, the legislation is presented to the president and if the president doesn’t like the legislation, he vetoes it and if he likes the legislation, he passes it. But that he’s not able to pick and choose from among various positions which he wants to not follow.”

The senator went on to discuss how this practice has affected the PATRIOT Act and other legislation and to outline possible solutions.

Specter’s remarks were made at the National Press Club’s “Luncheon Speakers” event in response to a question submitted by Sam Husseini of the Institute for Public Accuracy; video of the event is available at C-SPAN.

The following analysts are available for interviews:

CHRISTOPHER KELLEY
A leading expert on bill-signing statements and the “unitary executive,” Kelley is author of a dissertation [PDF] on the unitary executive and the presidential signing statement and editor of the just-released book Executing the Constitution: Putting the President Back into the Constitution as well as numerous papers on the strategic importance of the signing statement.

Kelley said today: “President Bush has used a little more than 100 signing statements to make over 950 distinct challenges, by my count, to provisions of law, and I would assume when he finally gets the bill regarding the treatment of detainees, he will continue to add to the number of challenges.” Kelley is currently a visiting assistant professor in the Department of Political Science at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio.
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JENNIFER VAN BERGEN
Van Bergen has written several articles on the unitary executive doctrine, including “The Unitary Executive: Is the Doctrine Behind the Bush Presidency Consistent with a Democratic State?”
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Mark Fiore’s video cartoon on the unitary executive and presidential signing statements can be found here.

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

NAT HENTOFF
Hentoff writes in his column in today’s Washington Times: “Little attention is being paid to Section 6 of this Warner-McCain-Graham bill that denies the right to a habeas-corpus hearing not only to Guantanamo Bay prisoners, but to any alien detainee outside the United States designated by the president as an ‘enemy combatant.’ …

“Nine retired federal judges have tried to awaken Congress to this constitutional crisis. Among them are such often-honored jurists as Shirley Hufstedler, Nathaniel Jones, Patricia Wald, H. Lee Sarokin and William Sessions (who was head of the CIA and the FBI). They write, particularly with regard to Mr. McCain’s concerns about torture, that without habeas petitions, how will the judiciary ensure that ‘Executive detentions are not grounded on torture’?”

LISA HAJJAR
Hajjar, a professor in the Law and Society Program at the University of California-Santa Barbara, wrote the articles “Torture and the Lawless New Paradigm” and “An Army of Lawyers.”
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KIT GAGE
Director of the First Amendment Foundation, Gage can address issues related to the government using secret “evidence.” She said today: “Under the proposed scheme, military commissions give the unclassified version of the ‘evidence’ to the person being charged. But there’s a problem with that which we encountered when the government was using secret evidence in deportation proceedings in the mid-’90s. The core information shown to the accused was ‘Mr. X says you’re a terrorist’ — which is impossible to rebut.”
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CHRISTOPHER H. PYLE
Professor Pyle is co-author of the book The President, Congress, and the Constitution. He said today: “The proposed legislation is an amnesty bill for torturers.” He wrote in a recent oped titled “The War Crimes Scam” that: “The Supreme Court’s decision last June in the Hamdan case threw the military, CIA, and administration into a panic. The Court didn’t just declare the military tribunals illegal. It held that the Geneva Conventions protect all detainees in the ‘war on terrorism,’ which meant that anyone who abused prisoners — or authorized their abuse — was vulnerable to prosecution as a war criminal. …

“The torture and abuse were not random acts by guards and interrogators. They were part of a deliberate administration policy that began in November 2001 when President George W. Bush authorized military tribunals that were specifically designed to admit evidence based on torture. …

“The new military tribunals won’t be permitted to admit evidence obtained by torture. However, they will be allowed to admit hearsay — secondhand accounts that seem reliable, but which will not expose the interrogators to embarrassing questions about their brutal methods. Then, to further hide the abuse of prisoners from judges and the public, these three senators will strip every court in the United States of authority to hear legal challenges by prisoners to their detention or mistreatment.

“In short, the fix is in. Administration officials will be immune from future prosecution for authorizing, encouraging, justifying, and concealing torture and abuse. Interrogators can’t be prosecuted for carrying out these war crimes, and innocent prisoners can’t expose the government’s crimes in court, now or in the future.” Pyle is a professor of politics at Mount Holyoke College specializing in Constitutional law and civil liberties.
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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

NBC is reporting: “The rift among Republicans over the treatment of terrorism detainees appears to have closed, with maverick GOP Sen. John McCain telling NBC News on Friday that a deal reached with President Bush will lead to fair trials and interrogations but not torture.”

But based on details of the plans thus far made public, the following legal experts, who are available for interviews, offered these analyses:

CHRISTOPHER H. PYLE
Professor Pyle is co-author of the book The President, Congress, and the Constitution and author of the book Military Surveillance of Civilian Politics. He said today: “The compromise pretends to save the Geneva Conventions from repeal, but repeals much of the law enforcing them. It does not expressly forbid a single brutal practice, including mock executions by near-drowning, but it does retroactively absolve administration officials of legal responsibility for past war crimes. It denies the innocent victims of kidnapping and detention, like Maher Arar, any right to challenge their captivity in court. And it permits the use of evidence obtained by torture in military tribunals by camouflaging it as hearsay testimony.” Pyle is a professor of politics at Mount Holyoke College specializing in Constitutional law and civil liberties.
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MICHAEL RATNER
President of the Center for Constitutional Rights, Ratner said today: “This ‘deal’ still wipes out habeas corpus, denying those at Guantanamo and in U.S. custody around the world the right to test their detentions in court. Abolishment of the writ [of habeas corpus] is the equivalent of the authorization of executive detention — one of the hallmarks of a police state.

“The ‘deal’ amnesties those in the administration who may be guilty of war crimes as Argentina and Chile tried to do during their ‘dirty wars.’That is illegal under international law.”
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LISA HAJJAR
Hajjar, a professor in the Law and Society Program at the University of California-Santa Barbara, wrote the articles “Torture and the Lawless New Paradigm” and “An Army of Lawyers.”
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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

HOWARD ZINN
Zinn, author of the bestseller A People’s History of the United States, is available for a limited number of interviews beginning Thursday afternoon. He said today: “The U.S. government used deceit to go to war with Iraq and in very similar fashion it is now propagandizing the U.S. public about Iran.”
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ANN WRIGHT
Currently in Washington, D.C., Wright is a retired U.S. Army colonel and former State Department diplomat. As Bush spoke on Tuesday, she was arrested outside the United Nations in protests against the Iraq war and the prospect of an attack on Iran.
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STEPHEN ZUNES
Zunes is Middle East editor for the Foreign Policy In Focus Project and wrote an annotated critique of Bush’s speech. Zunes pointed out that while Bush quoted a letter from Arab and Muslim intellectuals to justify his policies, the same letter also stated: “the main problem with U.S. policies in the Middle East (in particular in Iraq, Palestine, and elsewhere) is precisely their failure to live up to America’s democratic ideals of liberty and justice for all.”

Zunes noted: “The letter also called on President Bush to ‘break with 60 years of U.S. support for non-democratic regimes in the region, and to make that known to the world in unequivocal terms’ and ‘to press for an end to regime repression of democratically spirited liberal and Islamist groups, and to emphatically distance itself from such repression and condemn it in the strongest terms whenever and wherever it occurs.’ There is no indication that the Bush administration intends to change its policies, however.” Zunes is a professor of politics and the author of the book Tinderbox: U.S. Middle East Policy and the Roots of Terrorism.
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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

President Bush’s address to the United Nations today followed his statement yesterday that “the goals of this country are to help those who feel hopeless, the goals of this country are to spread liberty, the goals of this country is [sic] to enhance prosperity and peace.”

NOAM CHOMSKY
Available for a very limited number of interviews, Chomsky is author most recently of Failed States: The Abuse of Power and the Assault on Democracy. He said today: “Fine words are cheap. What the Bush administration has done, more characteristically, is to destroy hope, undermine freedom, bring prosperity to a few and war and terror to the many. His meeting with Abbas [scheduled for Wednesday] could pave the way to resolution of the Israel-Palestine conflict by sharply changing course, withdrawing support for illegal annexation of Palestinian lands and dismemberment of the shrinking territories granted to Palestinians, and joining the long-standing international consensus on a two-state settlement based on the international border with guarantees for the right of all states ‘to live in peace within secure and recognized boundaries,’ including Israel and Palestine. That would not resolve all the crises of the region, but would take a long step towards that goal and lay the basis for further progress towards hope, liberty, prosperity and peace.”
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CHRIS TOENSING
Editor of Middle East Report, Toensing said today: “The more stress Bush lays on ‘democracy promotion,’ the more the world will be reminded of actual U.S. policy — everything from Washington’s leadership of an international aid embargo on the democratically elected Palestinian government to Washington’s continued backing for autocrats in Cairo and Riyadh to a Canadian inquiry’s finding yesterday that U.S. officials kidnapped a completely innocent man [Maher Arar] and ‘rendered’ him to a Syrian dungeon for torture.”
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ERVAND ABRAHAMIAN
Abrahamian will participate in a meeting with Iranian President Ahmadinejad on Wednesday morning. Abrahamian is author of the article “Iran: The Next Target?” and several books including Inventing the Axis of Evil and Iran Between Two Revolutions.
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MAUREEN WEBB
Webb is a human rights lawyer and activist. She has spoken extensively on post-September 11 security and human rights issues. She is author of the forthcoming Illusions of Security, and can address the Maher Arar case and its wider implications.
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YASH TANDON
Executive director of the South Centre, Tandon was just in Cuba for the meeting of the Non-Allied Movement and is in New York City for the UN meeting until Wednesday. He said today: “Kofi Annan has talked of the priorities of security, development and human rights. But frequently development is low on the agenda and without it, human rights and security become largely academic. Migration is also another major issue that needs to be addressed: Why are people leaving the South and going to the North?

“Development needs to be self-engineered. This notion that many in the North have that the South is going to develop through trade liberalization is a total misconception. We’re seeing capital going from the South to the North.”
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DAVID CLINE
HANY KHALIL
JUDITH LeBLANK
Cline is national president of Veterans for Peace; Khalil and LeBlank are with United for Peace and Justice. They are with several thousand other people protesting Bush’s speech outside the UN.
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ROBERT NAIMAN
National coordinator of Just Foreign Policy, Naiman said today: “President Bush is calling on the world to ‘stand up for peace’ but he has refused to pledge not to launch a military attack on Iran, even if negotiations over its nuclear program are successful. Instead, his military officials are revising plans for air strikes on Iran, while his Director of National Intelligence refuses to acknowledge that a Congressional report touting the danger of Iran’s nuclear program contains ‘egregious, misleading, and unsubstantiated information,’ in the words of the International Atomic Energy Agency.” [Video of Negroponte can be found here.] More Information

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

While the Warner-Graham-McCain bill has gotten substantial attention with regards to its Geneva conventions provisions, the Center for Constitutional Rights has criticized both the bill and the administration’s proposal as gutting habeas corpus.

McCain and Graham were questioned separately about this yesterday, by Sam Husseini of the Institute for Public Accuracy, as they left the studios of Sunday morning talk shows in Washington. McCain replied that he was not familiar with those provisions of the legislation.

When Graham was asked if the bill, as the Center for Constitutional Rights has charged, “would prevent anyone taken into U.S. custody — anywhere in the world, past, present or future, innocent or not — from ever having their case heard in a court of law,” the South Carolina senator replied: “That is a complete false statement.”

Graham added: “Every person tried as a war criminal will now be able to appeal their conviction if there is one through our federal court system. … Everywhere we hold someone there are rules in place to appeal their status as enemy combatants.”

Video and transcript of the remarks by McCain and Graham are available here.

MICHAEL RATNER
President of the Center for Constitutional Rights, Ratner said today: “The Warner-Graham-McCain bill denies habeas corpus to all aliens held outside the United States and currently in U.S. custody. And ‘outside’ includes Guantanamo.

“However in the case of those who have been found to be unlawful enemy combatants by Combatant Status Review Tribunal (combatant status review panels used at Guantanamo) it gives a meaningless court of appeals ‘review’ — a review that examines whether or not the U.S. complied with its own procedures — but not … a real court hearing with factual development as habeas corpus requires.

“For those aliens detained outside the U.S. that have not had CSRT hearings — the high majority — in facilities like Bagram in Afghanistan, the Warner bill simply abolished habeas or any other court review.

“The consequences are breathtaking. The U.S. can pick up any alien, even a legal permanent resident in the U.S., and take them to an off-shore prison and hold them forever without any kind of court hearing.

“While all the attention on this legislation has focused on Geneva conventions and military commissions, the Warner alternative, like the administration bill, authorizes lifelong detention without habeas or any genuine review whatsoever.”
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P. SABIN WILLETT
Willett is a partner at the law firm Bingham McCutchen. One of his clients, Abu Bakker Qassim, who was imprisoned at Guantanamo from 2002 to May 2006, had an oped in the New York Times on Sunday.

Willett said today: “Sen. Graham refers to a provision in the Senate bill that gives the court of appeals a review of ‘enemy combatant’ findings made by the military’s Combatant Status Review Tribunals. But the devil is in the details. The Senate bill limits the court’s review to whether the CSRT [has] followed its own rules. … The irony of the new bill is that it would give more rights to Khaled Sheikh Muhammed, who stands accused of murdering nearly 3,000, than to men who’ve never been charged, and never will be charged, with anything.

“Judge Hens Green, the only judge to have looked closely at these CSRTs, roundly condemned them as arbitrary more than a year ago. The CSRTs branded as ‘enemy combatant’ not just enemy soldiers taken on the battlefield, but all kinds of people who were never soldiers at all. They based their findings on secret evidence and reached contradictory and inexplicable results.”

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

KATHARINE GUN
Shortly before the U.S./U.K. invasion of Iraq, in early 2003, Gun was a British government employee when she leaked a U.S. intelligence memo indicating that the U.S. had mounted a spying “surge” against delegations on the U.N. Security Council in an effort to win approval for an invasion of Iraq. President Bush continues to claim, as he claimed then, that “We are doing everything we can to avoid war in Iraq.” (March 8, 2003).

Gun faced two years imprisonment under the British Official Secrets Act, but charges were dropped. She has written the article “Iran: Time To Leak,” which encourages government officials to leak documents to prevent war.
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DANIEL ELLSBERG
After Ellsberg revealed the Pentagon Papers — top-secret government documents which showed a pattern of governmental deceit about the Vietnam War — in 1971, the Nixon White House indicted him for a possible 115-year sentence, used the White House “plumbers” to burglarize his doctor’s office, conducted warrentless wiretaps against him and attempted to physically assault him at a Capitol Hill rally.

He has just authored a piece in the forthcoming issue of Harper’s magazine, “The Next War,” in which he writes about his regret over not having leaked such documents in his possession in 1964, before the Johnson administration’s escalation of the war. He now believes such a course of action could have averted the war.

Similarly, he writes that officials in the Bush administration, like Richard Clarke, had they leaked documents showing the duplicity of the Bush administration during the run-up to the invasion of Iraq, could well have prevented the war — though he notes the personal cost could have been tremendous.

Now, Ellsberg urges U.S. government officials to disclose internal controversy concerning an attack on Iran. While several government officials are anonymously voicing their concerns in some media outlets about what the Bush administration is planning on Iran, Ellsberg urges disclosure on a scale that would likely reveal the identity of a source.

Ellsberg said today: “Many officials are asking themselves: ‘How much can I put out without being found out?’ They should consider going beyond that and think of what they could achieve by massive disclosure that would sacrifice their clearance and career — but save many lives.”

Ellsberg emphasized that “What is needed is not leaking operational war plans, but rather the full internal controversy, the secret estimates of costs and prospects and dangers of war and nuclear ‘options’ — the Pentagon Papers of the Middle East.”

See Editor & Publisher’s article on Ellsberg’s proposal. Ellsberg is author of the book Secrets: A Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers.
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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

Reuters is reporting that “World Bank President Paul Wolfowitz on Friday called Singapore’s restrictions on the entry of activists for the World Bank/IMF meetings ‘authoritarian.'”

The news service added: “The city-state has put 27 civil rights activists on a blacklist for entry to the annual meetings of the IMF and World Bank, and some would-be participants to the meetings have been deported.”

ROBERTO BISSIO
Bissio is director of the Third World Network, Latin America, and of Social Watch, which will be releasing the report “Impossible Architecture” next week about International Monetary Fund and World Bank policies.

He said today: “We came to the meetings to talk about substance, but the Singapore government has prevented serious discussion by restricting people in a manner that totally violates its host country agreement. At a town hall meeting, Wolfowitz blamed it all on Singapore but said the World Bank would do nothing to remedy the situation. This was all a joke, so many of us simply walked out. The Singapore government has since removed some of the restrictions, but the damage has largely already been done.

“The World Bank is supposed to be a channel for development — to financially assist poorer countries. But it now takes out more in interest payments than it grants or lends to these countries. It’s an absurd situation.

“The IMF has imposed restrictions on countries but it’s clear that the countries that don’t follow the IMF line, like Argentina, are having the best economic growth and have lessened poverty — they have certainly done so better than those that have adopted the IMF policies, like Mexico and Brazil.”
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CELINE TAN
Tan is with Third World Network, Asia.
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NEIL WATKINS
DEBI KAR
Watkins is national coordinator of Jubilee USA Network, an alliance of religious, human rights, environmental, labor, and community groups working for the cancellation of debts to Asia, Africa, and Latin America. Kar is the group’s communications and advocacy coordinator.

Watkins said today: “Jubilee USA Network today joined more than 160 organizations from across the globe in a boycott of official events at the IMF and World Bank annual meetings set to begin on Sunday in Singapore. While the Network had received accreditation to participate in the meetings, events of the past week in which the Singaporean government barred entry, detained or deported dozens of civil society colleagues from across the globe led to the decision not to participate.”

Watkins added: “We must wonder why the institutions sought to hold their annual meetings in a repressive state such as Singapore in the first place.”
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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

The Washington Post is reporting today: “U.N. inspectors investigating Iran’s nuclear program angrily complained to the Bush administration and to a Republican congressman yesterday about a recent House committee report on Iran’s capabilities, calling parts of the document ‘outrageous and dishonest’ and offering evidence to refute its central claims.”

CARAH ONG
Ong is Iran Policy Analyst at the Center for Arms Control and Nonproliferation. She said today: “The International Atomic Energy Agency called the report’s assertions that Iran is producing weapons-grade uranium at its facility in the town of Natanz ‘incorrect,’ noting that weapons-grade uranium is enriched to a level of 90 percent or more. Iran has enriched uranium to 3.5 percent under IAEA monitoring.” Ong gives a breakdown of the evidence on her blog.
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ROBERT NAIMAN
National coordinator of Just Foreign Policy, Naiman said today: “As in Iraq, the faction of Congress and the administration hungry for military confrontation with Iran is again trying to cook the intelligence and undermine the international inspection system. While the Washington Post ran the committee’s report on page 1, the IAEA’s refutation ran on page 17. The IAEA’s refutation deserves at least as much attention as the committee report, since they are the legitimate experts. Americans should ask their representatives in Congress to oppose another U.S. military fiasco in the Middle East based on manufactured evidence.”
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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