ALICE SLATER
Director of the Global Resource Action Center for the Environment, Slater said today: “The Rumsfeld report on space [www.defenselink.mil/pubs/space20010111.html] and the Pentagon’s ‘Visions for 2020’ report [PDF: www.peterson.af.mil/usspacecom/visbook.pdf] show that the government plans to militarize space and to dominate and control that military high ground for economic interests. The ABM Treaty stands in their way. China and Russia are aware of that. Bush’s move is also a terrible assault on written promises the U.S. government made in May regarding the Non-Proliferation Treaty. We should instead be working to secure nuclear material to prevent a terrorist attack.”
More Information
AS’AD ABUKHALIL
Author of the forthcoming book Bin Laden and Taliban: The New American War Against Terrorism, AbuKhalil is associate professor of political science at California State University at Stanislaus.
More Information
PHYLLIS BENNIS
A fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies, Bennis said today: “The U.S. has clearly failed to help achieve peace in the Mideast. We need a new diplomatic process led by Europe or South Africa.” [Bennis, co-editor of Beyond the Storm: A Gulf Crisis Reader, is also available to speak about current threats to expand the war to Iraq.]
More Information
NASEER ARURI
Professor emeritus of political science at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth, Aruri is author of the book The Obstruction of Peace: The U.S., Israel and The Palestinians. He said today: “Sharon’s declarations — from Arafat-is-Israel’s-Bin-Laden to Arafat-is-not-qualified-to-be-Israel’s-interlocutor — are part of a broad strategy to browbeat the Palestinians into submission. Easing Arafat out would open the way to imposing a form of a weak central government with local leaders ruling over disconnected cantons that would denationalize and delegitimize the Palestinian cause and its international jurisprudence. It looks like a repackaging of Sharon’s 1981/82 scheme, which was intended to pre-empt a Palestinian state-in-formation and to establish the village leagues as the quislings.”
More Information
MICHAEL RATNER
Ratner wrote the recent paper “Moving Toward a Police State or Have We Arrived?” and is vice president of the Center for Constitutional Rights. He said today: “Military tribunals are not legitimate. What we should be building is an International Criminal Court, but the U.S. government has blocked creating the legal structures necessary to ensuring a safer and more just world…. It is horrifying that the U.S. worked to prevent the surrender of Taliban forces; indeed, that could be criminal.”
More Information
For more information, contact at the Institute for Public Accuracy:
Sam Husseini, (202) 347-0020; David Zupan, (541) 484-9167
