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Howard Zinn, noted historian, writer and activist best known for his “People’s History of the United States,” died Wednesday. See Boston Globe obituary.

Some of Zinn’s statements and writings:

“Obama will not fulfill that potential for change unless he is enveloped by a social movement which is angry enough, powerful enough, insistent enough that he fill his abstract phrases for change — that he fill them with some real solid content.” At The Real News.

In “A Just Cause, Not a Just War“: “I believe two moral judgments can be made about the present ‘war’: The September 11 attack constitutes a crime against humanity and cannot be justified, and the bombing of Afghanistan is also a crime, which cannot be justified.”

“Small acts, when multiplied by millions of people, can quietly become a power no government can suppress, a power that can transform the world. Even when we don’t ‘win’ there is fun and fulfillment in the fact we have been involved.”

Further video and material is at ZNet.

DAVID BARSAMIAN
Available for a limited number of interviews, Basamian interviewed Zinn numerous times over the years and worked on two books with him, The Future of History and Original Zinn. He was to see Zinn last night in California.
Barsamian said today: “Zinn was the essence of the engaged intellectual who believed that the struggle for justice was the great work of humankind. And he engaged in that struggle with incredible humor, intelligence and grace. We have lost a great voice but the work continues.”
Barsamian is founder of Alternative Radio, which has a Howard Zinn page.

ANTHONY ARNOVE
Arnove is co-author with Zinn of Voices of A People’s History of the United States. He appeared this morning on Democracy Now.

DAVE ZIRIN
Zirin just wrote the piece “Howard Zinn: The Historian Who Made History.”
His books include A People’s History of Sports in the United States.

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

 

On Thursday Trump attacked the work of Howard Zinn, whose books include A People’s History of the United States. Until his death in 2010, Zinn was repeatedly featured on accuracy.org news releases.

KEVIN KUMASHIRO, kevin@kevinkumashiro.com,
Kumashiro is former dean, University of San Francisco School of Education. His books include Teaching toward Democracy.
He said today, “Here we go again. Yesterday’s attacks by the Trump administration on efforts to raise awareness about the historical and systemic nature of race and racism are not new.

“Divisive, un- or anti-American, biased, inflammatory — for decades, such were the claims made about efforts to teach a more accurate and complete history of the United States. From the multicultural curriculum of the Civil Rights era and the ‘people’s history’ by Howard Zinn, to recent struggles to include ethnic studies curriculum and the 1619 Project in schools, scholars and educators have long argued that curriculum is irresponsible, misleading, and undemocratic when it fails to include the experiences of marginalized groups, as well as the dynamics, systems, and ideologies that caused or perpetuated their disenfranchisement. Such inquiry is particularly important to make visible the many ways that race and racism are invisible, normalized, obscured, or rationalized, including in the curriculum itself. Not surprisingly, it is this whitewashed curriculum that often gets framed as objective and neutral, whereas efforts to raise awareness about the discomforting realities of race and racism get framed as, in Trump’s words, ‘toxic propaganda.’

“Two weeks ago, the White House directed against using taxpayer dollars to support ‘divisive, un-American propaganda training sessions’ — and by explicitly flagging trainings about ‘critical race theory’ and ‘white privilege,’ demonstrated once again the easy tendency to conflate studying racism with being divisive or weakening the nation. Yesterday, at the White House History Conference, Pence warned that, in schools, ‘some are seeking to erase our history.’ Trump attributed this erasure to ‘decades of leftwing indoctrination’ by the likes of Zinn and others, even threatening to withhold funding from California schools that teach the 1619 Project. Earlier that day, Education Secretary DeVos praised the ‘1776 Unites Curriculum’ for its more positive portrayal of the experience” of African Americans in the U.S. when “compared to the 1619 Project, and Trump echoed this praise and suggested that the government should support the creation of more such ‘pro-American’ curriculum.

“Our country cannot become more just and democratic without illuminating, addressing, and healing from its long legacies of injustices, including imperialism, colonialism, and racism, which means that continuing to deny or ignore the legacies and systems of racism that have defined the United States for centuries will only perpetuate the problems. The battle over what story about the United States gets taught in schools, and who gets to tell that story, is what makes education, at its core, one of the main sites of ideological struggle for any democratic society — and is, therefore, a battle that the general public must engage.”

See talk by Howard Zinn at MIT in 2005: “The Myth of American Exceptionalism.” “Democracy Now” played a clip from an interview with Zinn Friday morning that talked about overlooked heroes in U.S. political history, like Mark Twain, who was the Vice President of the Anti-Imperialist League and Helen Keller, who was a socialist.

 

The trial of the Kings Bay Plowshares 7 enters its third day today in Brunswick, Georgia.

These activists have spent varying amount of time in jail for having entered a major nuclear facility to nonviolently “symbolically disarm” the massive nuclear arsenal stationed there.

Prosecution witnesses on Tuesday refused to “either confirm or deny” the existence of nuclear weapons on the base.

The defendants face decades in prison if convicted. The judge has indicated she wants to finish the trial Wednesday or Thursday.

See Wednesday morning report from the Intercepted podcast: “Omnicidal Tendencies. Also see report by “Democracy Now”: “Kings Bay Plowshares 7: Trial Begins for Liz McAlister & Others for Breaking Into Nuke Sub Base.”

See reporting from the court room from the Ithaca Voice and by Linda Pentz Gunter in the British Morning Star.

Howard Zinn testified in a similar Plowshares case in 1985 and related the action to a tradition in the U.S. of civil resistance. See video.

But in this case, the judge has restricted expert testimony and prevented a defense based on religious freedom.

See Sam Husseini’s report “Catholic Activists Stand Trial for Protesting Nuclear Weapons” in The Nation: Daniel Ellsberg “has filed an affidavit with the court arguing that the defendants were justified in their actions because they are attempting to prevent ‘omnicide, the collateral murder of nearly every human on earth in a war in which the nuclear missiles aboard Trident submarines were launched.’

“But decisions of the judge have largely shut the door to the jury hearing anything about such defenses of ‘justification’ or ‘necessity.’ On Friday, Judge Lisa Godbey Wood of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Georgia prohibited a whole series of defenses — including the testimony of international lawyer Francis Boyle of the University of Illinois, on the illegality of U.S. nuclear policy — writing that while the defendants’ ‘subjective beliefs about the illegality of nuclear weapons may be relevant background information, whether nuclear weapons are actually illegal under international or domestic law…is not relevant or an appropriate issue to litigate in this case.”

The prosecution in excruciating detail showed pictures of the actions of the protesters. Husseini posted pictures of the actions, which include spray painting statements on a monument to nuclear missiles on the base and spilling their own blood on the emblem of the facility.

The defendants left a copy of Ellsberg’s latest book — The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner — at the base. It was not among the items the prosecution offered for evidence, although they did discuss Kind bar wrappings the defendants had apparently brought onto the base.

Available for interviews:

FRANCIS BOYLE, fboyle at illinois.edu
Professor of international law at the University of Illinois, Boyle’s books include Destroying World Order. He also submitted declarations to the court which the judge is preventing the jury from knowing about. “This is a kangaroo court with a rubber stamp and a railroad all put together,” said Boyle.

ART LAFFIN, artlaffin at hotmail.com
Laffin is member of the Dorothy Day Catholic Worker community in Washington, D.C. He is also editor of the two-volume work Swords into Plowshares, which has a forward by the late Father Daniel Berrigan. He gave a talk Tuesday night at a nearby church on the history of the Plowshares movement, see audio here and here.

These activists — all Catholic Workers — are: Father Steve Kelly, who is still in prison, Elizabeth McAlister (who is the widow of Phillip Berrigan), Martha Hennessy (the granddaughter of Catholic Worker founder Dorothy Day), Mark Colville of the Amisdat House New Haven, Clare Grady of the community in Ithaca New York, who made the first of the defendants opening statements, Patrick O’Neill of the community in Garner, N.C., and Carmen Trotta of the New York community.

For interviews with the Plowshares activists and other information, contact:
Mary Anne Grady Flores, gradyflores08 at gmail.com
Bill Ofenloch, billcpf at aol.com
Ellen Barfield, ellene4pj at yahoo.com

[Note: electronic equipment is not allowed in the court room, so defendants and others there may be slow in responding to electronic communications.]  

NOAM CHOMSKY, via Karla Quinonez-Ruggiero at Adelante Alliance, occupy at adelantealliance.org
Available for a very limited numbers of interviews scheduled well in advance, Chomsky’s latest pamphlet, titled Occupy, is being released on MayDay. It’s the first of the new “Occupied Media” pamphlet series from Zuccotti Park Press. Chomsky just wrote the piece “May Day,” which states: “People seem to know about May Day everywhere except where it began, here in the United States of America. That’s because those in power have done everything they can to erase its real meaning. For example, Ronald Reagan designated what he called, ‘Law Day’ — a day of jingoist fanaticism, like an extra twist of the knife in the labor movement. Today, there is a renewed awareness, energized by the Occupy movement’s organizing, around May Day, and its relevance for reform and perhaps eventual revolution.”

MARINA SITRIN, marina.sitrin at gmail.com
Sitrin is co-author of the forthcoming May Day: The Secret Rendezvous, which is part of the same “Occupied Media” pamphlet series. She said today: “The Occupy Wall Street protests in New York City and elsewhere are gearing up for May Day. One of the most significant things about these protests is their ‘horizonalnzess’ — that is the lack of hierarchical structure. This is remarkably similar to how protests in Greece, Spain, Egypt and elsewhere are developing.” See for NYC: maydaynyc.org and nationwide: occupytogether.org

STAUGHTON LYND, salynd at aol.com
Lynd’s books include The Fight Against Shutdowns: Youngstown’s Steel Mill Closings, From Here to There: The Staughton Lynd Reader and Solidarity Unionism at Starbucks. He recently wrote the introduction to Howard Zinn’s re-released book On History. He said today: “There is a general impression in the U.S. that May Day is a communist holiday since communists did latch on to it eventually, but it’s a wrong impression. May Day originated in 1886 in the U.S. There was a large nationwide general strike that day, the purpose of which was to obtain an eight-hour day. There were radicals involved, but they were anarchists, not communists. On May 4 of that year, at a plant in Chicago that was locking out its workers, the authorities opened fire. So a meeting was called at the hay market and it was peaceful. Then a junior officer riled up the crowd and someone threw a bomb. The government went after the leaders of the popular movement in Chicago, who were not associated with the bomb-throwing, leading to the trial and
execution of ‘the Haymarket martyrs.’

“The European social movements picked it up immediately and May Day spread around the world. It was not associated with communism until after World War I. The U.S. government has feared and sought to suppress May Day — creating things like ‘Law Day’ on May 1st and a new ‘Labor Day’ in September — as a sort of tame labor celebration. But the original May Day was neither communist nor state-endorsed, it was a holiday of the international working class.

“Since 2006, May Day has been rescued to some extent by immigrants from Mexico and Guatemala and elsewhere who see it as a workers’ holiday and a chance to come out of the shadows. And now, this year, we see the Occupy movement picking it up.”

PRISCILLA MUROLO, pmurolo at sarahlawrence.edu
Murolo’s books include From the Folks Who Brought You the Weekend: A Short, Illustrated History of Labor in the United States. She said today: “May Day is coming home. The oppression of the labor movement moved it offshore, but this year there should be extensive May Day activities inside the U.S. as well as around the world.

“In 1884, a nucleus of trade unions — which would later become the AFL — decided that, starting May 1, 1886, they would refuse to work for more than eight hours a day. When that day came, several hundred thousand workers across the country went out on strike for the eight-hour day. The movement’s vital center was Chicago, where radicals — in particular anarchists — were a core component of the trade-union movement. On May 2, Chicago police opened fire on workers picketing the McCormick tractor factory and killed some strikers. In response to these shootings, thousands of workers gathered in Haymarket Square on May 4 for an ‘indignation meeting’ called by the anarchists. As this protest drew to a close, a phalanx of police entered the Square, and someone — we still don’t know who — threw a bomb. Among those killed by he bomb were seven police officers, and their deaths gave the enemies of the eight-hour movement a pretext to crush it. Picket lines were busted up, meetings were raided, labor activists were rounded up for questioning. In the end, eight anarchists — some of whom had not even been in Haymarket Square when the bomb was thrown — were convicted of conspiracy to murder, despite a dearth of evidence against them. Four of the defendants were hanged, a fifth committed suicide, and the others were sentenced to long prison terms and later pardoned by a pro-labor governor.

“This assault on the labor movement was devastating. Not until the 1910s did labor unions establish the eight-hour day as the standard in some sectors, and it wasn’t until 1938 that the Fair Labor Standards Act defined the eight-hour day as the norm in workplaces covered by this law. The meaning of the Haymarket crackdown was not just that it derailed the eight-hour movement but also and more fundamentally that it deprived the U.S. labor movement of its most potent wing. In later years, U.S. labor radicals revived May Day. Veterans of the union organizing drives of the 1930s and 1940s will recall gigantic May Day marches in American cities, but McCarthyism saw to it that U.S. labor was once again deprived of its radical sectors.

“The re-emergence of May Day in 2011 signals of new convergence of organized labor, the immigrants rights movement, and the Occupy movement in the name of the 99%. The excitement surrounding this convergence gives us a chance to experience what our ancestors experienced — the power of a workers’ movement for better labor conditions AND for equality and human rights for one and all.” Murolo is co-director of the Graduate Program in Women’s History at Sarah Lawrence College.

 

AP reports today: “Alabama is updating its historical presence in the U.S. Capitol, swapping out a statue of a rather unknown former congressman for a new bronze likeness of Helen Keller.”

KIM NIELSEN
Nielsen is author or editor of several books on Helen Keller, including The Radical Lives of Helen Keller and, most recently, Beyond the Miracle Worker: The Remarkable Life of Anne Sullivan Macy and Her Extraordinary Friendship with Helen Keller.

She said today: “Helen Keller was a very important figure, both domestically and internationally. Most people know about her personal story, but don’t know about her commitment to activism, to what democracy should really look like, to internationalism and to ending economic inequality. She was one of the U.S.’s most effective ambassadors after World War II.”

Nielsen is a professor of history and women’s and gender studies at the University of Wisconsin-Green Bay.

Helen Keller in her own words:

“We must set to work in the right direction the three great agencies which inform and educate us: the church, the school and the press. If they remain silent, obdurate, they will bear the odium which recoils upon evildoers.”
— From “I Must Speak: A Plea to American Women,” Ladies Home Journal, from Helen Keller: Revolutionary activist, better known for her blindness than her radical social vision available in part at Google Books.

Keller’s 1912 essay “How I Became a Socialist,” which addresses her being attacked by media outlets including the New York Times, and other writings are available on the web page “Helen Keller Reference Archive” and in her book Out of the Dark: Essays, Lectures, and Addresses on Physical and Social Vision at Google Books.

“Our democracy is but a name. We vote? What does that mean? It means that we choose between two bodies of real, though not avowed, autocrats. We choose between Tweedledum and Tweedledee … You ask for votes for women. What good can votes do when ten-elevenths of the land of Great Britain belongs to 200,000 and only one-eleventh to the rest of the 40,000,000? Have your men with their millions of votes freed themselves from this injustice?”
— From A People’s History of the United States: 1492-Present by Howard Zinn

Keller joined the Industrial Workers of the World (known as the IWW or the Wobblies). She stated in “Why I became an IWW” (1916): “I was appointed on a commission to investigate the conditions of the blind. For the first time I, who had thought blindness a misfortune beyond human control, found that too much of it was traceable to wrong industrial conditions, often caused by the selfishness and greed of employers. And the social evil contributed its share. I found that poverty drove women to a life of shame that ended in blindness.” [The last sentence refers to prostitution and syphilis, the latter a leading cause of blindness.] See: Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong by James Loewen.

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

 

“I would point to the fact that Dr. King’s dream began to be realized when President Lyndon Johnson passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964, when he was able to get through Congress something that President Kennedy was hopeful to do, the president before had not even tried, but it took a president to get it done. That dream became a reality. The power of that dream became real in people’s lives because we had a president who said, ‘We are going to do it,’ and actually got it accomplished.”
— Hillary Clinton, Jan. 7, 2008
http://mediamatters.org/items/200801160002

“No president has really done very much for the American Negro, though the past two presidents have received much undeserved credit for helping us. This credit has accrued to Lyndon Johnson and John Kennedy only because it was during their administrations that Negroes began doing more for themselves. Kennedy didn’t voluntarily submit a civil rights bill, nor did Lyndon Johnson. In fact, both told us at one time that such legislation was impossible. President Johnson did respond realistically to the signs of the times and used his skills as a legislator to get bills through Congress that other men might not have gotten through. I must point out, in all honesty, however, that President Johnson has not been nearly so diligent in implementing the bills he has helped shepherd through Congress.”
— Martin Luther King Jr., remarks published posthumously in January 1969
http://www.afro-netizen.com/2008/01/in-previous-mlk.html

DAVID S. REYNOLDS
Distinguished professor at the CUNY Graduate Center, Reynolds is author of John Brown, Abolitionist: The Man Who Killed Slavery, Sparked the Civil War, and Seeded Civil Rights.

He said today: “The recent tiff over who was responsible for civil rights — Martin Luther King or LBJ — brings up an important issue in American history: To what extent does social progress result from reform movements as opposed to presidents and Congress? History suggests that more often than not reform movements have led the way in changing society, and presidents have been slow to follow.

“Take slavery. Without the unyielding activism of a small group of visionary reformers, slavery may have remained a fixture in America for a very long time. In 1858, two years before winning the presidency, Abraham Lincoln predicted that slavery would take perhaps a century to disappear. (Imagine slavery existing in America until 1958!) Although Lincoln opposed slavery, he was a politician, not a reformer. He denounced the abolitionist movement, since he feared the social convulsions that an effort to free the nation’s four million enslaved blacks might cause. His views on slavery were distant from those of abolitionist reformers like William Lloyd Garrison, who called for immediate emancipation even if it meant breaking the country apart, or John Brown, whose 1859 raid on Harpers Ferry, Virginia reflected his conviction that slavery would disappear only through what he called ‘very much bloodshed.’ John Brown was right. It took the bloodiest war in the nation’s history to uproot slavery. Lincoln, who had formerly shared his era’s racial prejudice and had opposed immediate emancipation of the slaves, in time set in motion the processes that led to the legal end of slavery. Like LBJ, he was following on the heels of reform movements that had long fought social injustice.

“Frequently, presidents go where reform movements have led.”
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HOWARD ZINN
Zinn, author of the bestseller A People’s History of the United States, recently wrote in a piece titled “Election Madness”: “This election hysteria seizes the country every four years because we have all been brought up to believe that voting is crucial in determining our destiny, that the most important act a citizen can engage in is to go to the polls and choose one of the two mediocrities who have already been chosen for us. It is a multiple choice test so narrow, so specious, that no self-respecting teacher would give it to students. …

“Let’s remember that even when there is a ‘better’ candidate … that difference will not mean anything unless the power of the people asserts itself in ways that the occupant of the White House will find it dangerous to ignore.
“The unprecedented policies of the New Deal — social security, unemployment insurance, job creation, minimum wage, subsidized housing — were not simply the result of FDR’s progressivism. The Roosevelt administration, coming into office, faced a nation in turmoil. The last year of the Hoover administration had experienced the rebellion of the Bonus Army — thousands of veterans of the First World War descending on Washington to demand help from Congress as their families were going hungry. There were disturbances of the unemployed in Detroit, Chicago, Boston, New York, Seattle.

“Without a national crisis — economic destitution and rebellion — it is not likely the Roosevelt administration would have instituted the bold reforms that it did. …

“The Democratic Party has only broken with its historic conservatism, its pandering to the rich, its predilection for war, when it has encountered rebellion from below, as in the Thirties and the Sixties. We should not expect that a victory at the ballot box in November will even begin to budge the nation from its twin fundamental illnesses: capitalist greed and militarism.”
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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.

 

In 2002, the U.S. government fined a retired American engineer, Bert Sacks, $10,000 for traveling to Iraq to bring medicines with the humanitarian groups Washington Physicians for Social Responsibility and Voices in the Wilderness.

At a press conference at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C., at 1 p.m. on Tuesday (the 16th anniversary of the beginning of the Gulf War), Sacks will discuss his recently filed petition to the U.S. Supreme Court to take up his case.

The following are available for interviews:

BERT SACKS
Sacks’s most recent article is “Challenge to the Supreme Court: Can the U.S. Kill Iraqi Children Legally?” He said today: “In 1997, I traveled to Iraq to deliver medicine to desperately needy civilians. In response, the U.S. government fined me $10,000. I announced I’d refuse to pay the fine. Several Seattle attorneys offered pro bono support. Our case began in district court and then to appeals court.

“Despite widespread notions to the contrary, it was not hard to show that U.S. policies lethally targeted civilians, using famine and epidemic as tools of coercion, violating international law.

“But the courts declined to invalidate the U.S. embargo. According to the trial court, provisions of the Convention on the Rights of the Child didn’t count because the U.S. (along with Somalia) hasn’t ratified it. The Geneva Convention is not ‘self-executing’ so it doesn’t help me. … Finally, the court ruled, if Congress wants to violate customary international law it may do so and the U.S. courts are powerless to stop it.

“I hope the Supreme Court will decide otherwise. The issue is simple: There are certain norms of international behavior — often called ‘jus cogens’ — that are so fundamental to the rule of law that no nation may violate them. Genocide, wars of aggression, war crimes, and crimes against humanity are among them. So is the killing of 500,000 children to coerce a foreign government.”
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DENIS HALLIDAY
Halliday is a former assistant secretary general of the United Nations and headed the UN “oil-for-food” program until resigning in protest over the continued sanctions on Iraq. He will introduce Sacks at the news conference Tuesday. Halliday said today: “Bert Sacks, of Seattle and before that of Israel and the [U.S.] East Coast, in his quiet and courageous manner, persistently struggled in the 1990s and into this century to reach out to the children of Iraq being killed by U.S./U.K.-driven sanctions. He carried medicines to Iraq, thereby undermining the genocidal impact of those sanctions so eagerly sustained by Washington. This quiet American is the kind of American hero that this country should want to be remembered for. … Bert Sacks will represent before the Supreme Court the very best the U.S. has to offer. Let us hope that in their combined wisdom, [the justices] can recognize his vision of what this country could be.”

EDWARD PECK
Peck, a former U.S. chief of mission in Iraq and ambassador to Mauritania, was deputy director of the White House Task Force on Terrorism in the Reagan administration. He said today: “We should be aware of the punishment inflicted on Iraq by our 1991 aerial destruction of the electrical power grid, combined with the U.S.-urged, UN-imposed total embargo on imports.

“Sewage treatment and water purification plants became inoperative, imports of the chlorine needed for both processes were blocked, and water supplies became seriously contaminated. This led to the deaths of over 500,000 children before the beginning of the UN’s oil-for-food (and medicine) program, a crime defended by then-UN Ambassador Madeleine Albright on American TV, aired thousands of times overseas, as being ‘worth it.’

“In a commendable act of conscience, at his own expense, Mr. Bert Sacks took a small quantity of donated medicines to Iraqi hospitals. Our government rewarded his selfless act with a fine of $10,000. He responded that if America was prepared to punish him for trying to save the lives of children, he was prepared to resist, and has petitioned the Supreme Court to consider the case.

“Bert Sacks’s story deserves to be told on its own considerable merits, and also to help us understand why perceptions others have of America, especially but not only in Iraq, may not be exactly the same as ours.”

HOWARD ZINN
A noted historian, Zinn is the author of many books including the just-published A Power Governments Cannot Suppress. He said today: “The prosecution of Bert Sacks is perhaps the greatest indictment of U.S. policy as it makes clear the contrast between his persecuted humanitarian effort and the government’s militarism. This is exactly what Martin Luther King spoke against when he opposed the bombing of Vietnam.”
More Information

A profile of Bert Sacks from the Seattle Post-Intelligencer is at Common Dreams.

Sacks’s letter to the U.S. Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control regarding his fine, with legal in informational enclosures is here.

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

 

MICHAEL McPHEARSON
Executive director of Veterans for Peace, McPhearson was in the 1991 Gulf War and visited Iraq in 2003. His son has done a U.S. military tour in Iraq since the invasion and may be called back for any “surge.”
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HOWARD ZINN
Available for a limited number of interviews, Zinn’s most recent book is the just-published A Power Governments Cannot Suppress. He wrote the 1967 book Vietnam: The Logic of Withdrawal. Zinn, a World War II veteran, is also author of the bestseller A People’s History of the United States.
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ANTHONY ARNOVE
Arnove is author of the book Iraq: The Logic of Withdrawal, which has an introduction by Howard Zinn and is just out in paperback.
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LINDA SCHADE
Executive director of VotersForPeace.US, Schade co-wrote a recent piece titled “Has the New Congress Already Failed the Test?”
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GARETH PORTER
An “investigative historian” on U.S. national security policy, and author, most recently, of the book Perils of Dominance: Imbalance of Power and the Road to War in Vietnam, Porter said today: “Although South Vietnam 1975 is very far from being Iraq 2007, Bush’s asking for a supplemental to send more troops serves roughly the same purpose as Kissinger’s phony request for emergency funding for South Vietnam on the eve of its demise — to set up Congress for blame. But it’s a failing political strategy, too.”
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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

 

JERRY STARR
Author of The Lessons of the Vietnam War, Starr said today: “The U.S. government is openly manipulating the construction of the Iraqi government. For the past half century, the U.S. has intervened in elections on behalf of candidates and parties considered most responsive to U.S. interests, including Iran and Guatemala in 1954, Vietnam from 1954-73, the Dominican Republic in 1965, and now in the Mideast. It’s difficult to dictate election processes while, at the same time, persuading the larger population that your claims about their future independence are credible.”
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HOWARD ZINN
Available for a limited number of interviews, Zinn wrote the 1967 book Vietnam: The Logic of Withdrawal. He is also author of the bestseller A People’s History of the United States. His most recent piece is “America’s Blinders,” in which he writes: “Now that most Americans no longer believe in the war, now that they no longer trust Bush and his administration, now that the evidence of deception has become overwhelming, we might ask: How come so many people were so easily fooled? … The deeply ingrained belief — no, not from birth but from the educational system and from our culture in general — that the United States is an especially virtuous nation makes us especially vulnerable to government deception.”
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ANTHONY ARNOVE
Arnove is author of the recently-released book Iraq: The Logic of Withdrawal, which has an introduction by Zinn. Arnove wrote recently: “Al-Qaeda made its first appearance in Iraq only after the invasion, a predictable outcome of the U.S. occupation. … Even more circular is the idea that the United States has to stay in Iraq until it ‘defeats’ the resistance to the occupation. The occupation itself is the source of the resistance, a fact that even some of the people responsible for the war have been forced to acknowledge.”
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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