* Sharon * United Nations * Venezuela

AMER ABDELHADI
Manager of an independent radio station, TMFM, in the West Bank city of Nablus, Abdelhadi said today: “The city is under a very brutal curfew, with Israeli soldiers increasing their abuses. There is a lot of speculation that Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon is hoping this will increase the chances for suicide bombings which he hopes would help him in the upcoming election.”
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PHYLLIS BENNIS
Fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies, Bennis is author of the just-released Understanding the U.S.-Iraq Crisis: A Primer. Bennis said today: “A U.S.-led alliance would not be a ‘coalition of the willing’ — it would be a coalition of the coerced and the criminal, as it would violate the UN Charter’s very narrow conditions for a legal war…. The discovery of a dozen, and then four more, empty warhead shells is one more piece of evidence that inspections are working. According to the spokesman for Hans Blix, the inspectors had known about the existence and location of the weapons storage depot where they were found ‘for years,’ and it was only a matter of when they got there to inspect it. If the Iraqis were trying to hide those weapons, he asked, ‘why would they be so silly’ as to put them in a place well-known to the UN team?” Bennis is also author of the book Before and After: U.S. Foreign Policy and the September 11th Crisis.
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MICHAEL RATNER
President of the Center for Constitutional Rights and author of the recently published War With Iraq: An Anti-War Primer, Ratner said today: “The U.S. is already violating international law. It is bombing Iraq illegally in the ‘no-fly’ zones. It has ensured a devastating embargo for over a decade. Now it is massing tens of thousands of troops around Iraq, saying we’re going to finish off your country unless you do what we want. That’s not justice. That’s not peace. That’s not international law. That’s a powerful gang using force and the threat of force to dominate.”
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GREG PALAST
Palast, reporting for BBC Television’s Newsnight, interviewed President Hugo Chavez of Venezuela. Palast said today: “Venezuela is actually the second front in the Bush war against Iraq. During the 1973 oil embargo, it was Venezuela that the Western oil companies turned to in order to maintain supply and break the back of the Arab embargo. In order to continue that control over oil supply and price during an invasion of Iraq, the Bush administration is pushing hard to get rid of the non-compliant, elected government of Hugo Chavez.”
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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