HOWARD ZINN
Zinn is author of the widely read A People’s History of the United States and can address the historical significance of today’s indictment events.
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DANIEL ELLSBERG
Ellsberg is author of the book Secrets: A Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers. After Ellsberg revealed the Pentagon Papers (internal government documents which showed a pattern of governmental deceit about the Vietnam War), the Nixon White House attacked him. In time, the attacks, which included illegal activity, led to the conviction of several White House aides and were a crucial factor in Nixon’s impeachment proceedings.
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MIKE GRAVEL
Gravel, currently president of Direct Democracy, was a noted critic of the Vietnam War while in the Senate. He entered the Pentagon Papers into the Congressional Record. He said today: “The indictment of Libby says that this is a serious investigation; his continuing the investigation says that this is the tip of the iceberg. Fitzgerald needs more time to dig around, but he’s serious about putting people behind bars, so you could see people finally coming clean. Cheney has been the most aggressive leader in the administration and told the biggest lies about the war, and this puts it at his doorstep, so he could well go through a Spiro Agnew experience.” In 2002, Gravel stated that the administration was deceiving the nation into war with Iraq.
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KATHARINE GUN
Gun is available for a limited number of interviews. 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 U.N. delegations on the Security Council in an effort to win approval for an invasion of Iraq. It was during this period that President Bush was claiming (March 8,2003) that “We are doing everything we can to avoid war in Iraq.” Gun faced two years imprisonment under the British Official Secrets Act, but charges were dropped.
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LARRY JOHNSON
Johnson worked as a CIA intelligence analyst and State Department counter-terrorism official. He is a member of the Steering Group of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity. He said: “It is slowly dawning on the American people that the Bush administration attack on Valerie and Joe Wilson was part of a broader conspiracy to hide the fact that our political leaders fabricated a case for war in Iraq. Dick Cheney, Scooter Libby, and Karl Rove, among others, apparently preferred to destroy a valuable intelligence asset rather than expose the truth that the United States went to war in Iraq based on misinformation and deception. That is a crime deserving the most serious punishment.”
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NORMAN SOLOMON
Solomon is executive director of the Institute for Public Accuracy and author of War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death. He said today: “In this real-time Shakespearean drama, Rove and Libby are more than bit players — but they’re certainly not the lead characters. Serving the GOP’s top two elected officials, Rove and Libby are no rogue elephants. We should begin to explore this scandal with questions about George W. Bush and Dick Cheney that echo the Watergate era: What did they know and when did they know it? Was there a coordinated coverup — and, if so, how high did it go?

“The ‘outing’ of Valerie Plame as a CIA agent was an attempt to damage her husband, former ambassador Joe Wilson, after he challenged the validity of the administration’s pre-invasion claims about WMDs in Iraq. The smokescreen effort to hide the source of the leak occurred in the context of a series of deceptions related to the war.”
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DAVID SWANSON
Swanson is co-founder of the AfterDowningStreet.org coalition of veterans and peace groups. The group is urging the release of the papers of the White House Iraq Group. He said today: “Fifty percent of Americans want Congress to consider impeaching President Bush if he lied about the war in Iraq, according to a recent poll commissioned by AfterDowningStreet.org and conducted earlier this month by Ipsos Public Affairs, the highly-regarded non-partisan polling company.”
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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