News Release Archive - 2002

BILL FLETCHER
Executive director of TransAfrica, Fletcher said today: “Bush not being at the Earth Summit in South Africa is extremely symbolic. It is a reflection of the arrogance of this administration and its unilateralism. The Summit is perhaps most noteworthy for the events of the popular organizations and NGOs which are trying to address the growing disparity of wealth and the failure of the global North to deal with environmental degradation. I hope that Powell is hearing this, though it would have been better for Bush to hear it himself. Powell is also scheduled to go to Angola. I wish he were going to offer meaningful reconstruction assistance for the recently-ended civil war, which was ignited by U.S. intervention in 1975. Unfortunately, the reason Powell is going there probably has to do with oil; as the administration gears up for this illegitimate war with Iraq, it wants to secure other sources of oil…. Reports that the current African drought and the last African drought may be directly related to industrial air pollution on the part of the global North demonstrate how interconnected this planet is and the fact that we, in the global North, cannot go about acting as if our actions have no global consequences. This drought has directly affected the gravity of the famine, as has the misdirection that some Southern African countries have received from economic advisors in the global North.”
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NJOKI NJOROGE NJEHU
Director of the 50 Years Is Enough Network, Njehu has just returned from the UN World Summit on Sustainable Development (WSSD), or Earth Summit, in Johannesburg, South Africa. She is among the participants today in a news conference organized by the Mobilization For Global Justice in Washington, D.C., looking ahead to the International Monetary Fund and World Bank meetings at the end of September in Washington and planned protests at that time. She said today: “Institutions like the IMF, World Bank and WTO have taken over the WSSD process…. What is clear from Johannesburg is that civil society is not waiting on governments or international agencies to help them survive corporate globalization….”
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SALIH BOOKER
Executive director of Africa Action, Booker said today: “In the decade that has passed since the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro in 1992, pledges made then have largely been abandoned, and environmental degradation and poverty have deepened in Africa and around the world. Development assistance from the wealthy to the developing world has also declined during this period…. In an attempt to stem criticism of President Bush’s failure to attend the WSSD, Secretary Powell will be announcing a supposedly new $4 billion proposal on aid to Africa, to support disease control programs, clean water and sanitation projects, and environmental conservation. However, far from illustrating a U.S. commitment to Africa, this announcement is largely a hoax. Up to half of this money has already been approved or announced earlier, while the balance is based upon projections of future hypothetical appropriations, spread over several years. This is the administration’s form of Enron / Arthur Andersen-style accounting.”
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For more information, contact at the Institute for Public Accuracy:
Sam Husseini, (202) 347-0020; David Zupan, (541) 484-9167

There will be major protests and a march on Saturday at the Earth Summit in Johannesburg, South Africa. The following activists are available for comment:

ANTONIA JUHASZ
Juhasz is a project director for the International Forum on Globalization, which represents over 60 organizations in 25 countries. She said today: “The absence of President Bush should not be mistaken for a lack of U.S. commitment to the outcome of the summit. On the contrary, the administration has set an aggressive agenda for the summit which it has been pursuing — halting any progress on the commitments made by the president’s father in the 1992 Earth Summit and enacting policies that benefit multinational corporations at the expense of people and the environment.”
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MOHAU PHEKO
Pheko is coordinator of the Gender and Trade Network in Africa.
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ANURADHA MITTAL
RAJ PATEL
Food First co-director Anuradha Mittal, in Johannesburg, said today: “Addressing a U.S. delegation-sponsored NGO meeting at the summit, U.S. officials have praised the U.S. farm bill and U.S. farm policy in general, as something which ‘promotes development in the Third World.’ That’s an outrageous claim; the farm bill entrenches dominance of U.S. corporate agriculture, which is heavily subsidized through corporate welfare, and spells doom for the family farmer both in the U.S. and the Third World. The farm bill endangers food security for poor people around the world.” Patel is a policy analyst with Food First.
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JOSHUA KARLINER
Karliner is the executive director of CorpWatch and coauthor of EarthSummit.biz: The Corporate Takeover of Sustainable Development.
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NJOKI NJOROGE NJEHU
Director of the 50 Years Is Enough Network, Njehu said today: “There is remarkable unity between the social movements and the landless movements, both of which will march together tomorrow. The South African government has decided to respect the constitution of South Africa. The people marching tomorrow will be united against privatization efforts, against the erosion of rights of people. The marchers realize that the interests of corporations clash with rights of people. There is a huge presence of corporations here and their representatives are saying nice things, but that doesn’t mean very much when they are pursuing destructive policies.” Njehu will participate in a news conference organized by the Mobilization For Global Justice in Washington, D.C., on Tuesday, Sept. 3, which will look ahead to the International Monetary Fund and World Bank meetings at the end of September in Washington and planned protests at that time.
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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

As the Earth Summit — or World Summit on Sustainable Development — continues to meet in Johannesburg, South Africa, many nongovernmental organizations are calling for increased corporate accountability and protesting against corporate control of the Summit itself.

Yesterday, a court in Bhopal, India, rejected the Indian government’s application for a reduction of criminal charges against former Union Carbide chairman Warren Anderson. The court has instead directed the prosecuting agency to hasten the extradition of Anderson from the United States. Anderson, who is accused of “culpable homicide” for deaths from the poisonous gas leak from Union Carbide’s pesticide factory in Bhopal in 1984, has refused to appear in court in India.

ALICE SLATER
WENONAH HAUTER
Slater is president of GRACE — the Global Resource Action Center for the Environment. Currently at the Earth Summit, Hauter is director of Public Citizen’s Critical Mass Energy and Environment Program. They are available for interviews on environmental aspects of the Summit and questions of corporate accountability and influence.

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AMIT SRIVASTAVA
JOSHUA KARLINER
Srivastava, a CorpWatch India delegate attending the Earth Summit, said today: “On December 2, 1984, deadly gases at a Union Carbide plant in Bhopal, India, leaked — killing 8,000 people in three days. Over 20,000 have since died. Even today, one person a day dies from the aftermath. Survivors and their supporters have been on a worldwide relay hunger strike, including here in Johannesburg. Dow Chemical, which now owns Union Carbide, is waging a PR campaign within the Summit instead of taking responsibility. This is a prime example of the shameful lack of corporate accountability that the Summit has so far done very little to correct.” Karliner, the executive director of CorpWatch, said today: “At the first Earth Summit, and now in Johannesburg, the world’s governments have failed to address the central role that transnational corporations play in the world’s most pressing environmental dramas….”
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DIANE WILSON
Earlier this week, 52-year-old Texas fisherwoman Diane Wilson was arrested for climbing a tower within a Dow Chemical complex, where she hung a 12-foot banner: “DOW — RESPONSIBLE FOR BHOPAL.” She recently completed a month-long hunger strike to protest the attempt to dilute outstanding criminal charges against former Union Carbide chairman Warren Anderson.
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CASEY HARRELL
Greenpeace USA’s Toxics Campaigner, Harrell served Warren Anderson a symbolic arrest warrant two weeks ago. Prior to this, the Indian government had claimed that Anderson could not be found.
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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 lead headline in this morning’s Washington Post is: “Bush Aides Say Iraq War Needs No Hill Vote.” In contrast, Wayne Morse — one of only two Senators who voted against the Gulf of Tonkin resolution used by the Johnson administration to escalate the Vietnam War — argued that declaring war is the responsibility of Congress. Audio of his 1964 statements is available:

Morse: “No war has been declared in Southeast Asia and until a war is declared it is my position that it is unconstitutional to send American boys to their death in South Vietnam or anywhere else in Southeast Asia… I don’t know why we think, just because we’re mighty, that we have the right to try to substitute might for right. And that’s the American policy in Southeast Asia — it’s just as unsound when we do it as when Russia does it.” Audio: www.radioproject.org/sound/Morse1.mp3

Morse: “Since when do we have to back our president — or should we — when the president is proposing an unconstitutional act?” Audio at: www.radioproject.org/sound/Morse2.mp3

Reporter: “Senator, the Constitution gives to the president of the United States the sole responsibility for the conduct of foreign policy.”
Morse: “Couldn’t be more wrong. You couldn’t make a more unsound legal statement than the one you have just made. This is the promulgation of an old fallacy that foreign policy belongs to the president of the United States — that’s nonsense — it belongs to the American people, and the Constitution of our fathers has made that very, very clear…”
Reporter: “You know that the American people cannot formulate and execute foreign policy.”
Morse: “Why do you say that? Why, you’re a man of little faith in democracy if you make that kind of an — I have complete faith in the ability of the American people to follow the facts if you’ll give them. And my charge against my government is we’re not giving the American people the facts.” Audio: www.radioproject.org/sound/Morse3.mp3

The following are among those available for interviews:

MIKE GRAVEL
Gravel, currently president of Direct Democracy and sponsor of the National Initiative for Democracy, was a noted critic of the Vietnam War while in the Senate. He entered the Pentagon Papers into the Congressional Record.
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PAUL ROGAT LOEB
Author of Soul of a Citizen: Living With Conviction in a Cynical Time and Hope in Hard Times: America’s Peace Movement and the Reagan Era, Loeb said today: “As during the Vietnam War, we’re being asked to accept whatever the president does as wise and justified. By ceding our right to have a full national debate over whether we should go to war with Iraq, we’re setting the stage for similarly damaging potential consequences…”
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NORMAN SOLOMON
Executive director of the Institute for Public Accuracy, Solomon recently wrote a Los Angeles Times article headlined: “Where Is the Voice of Dissent? As we weigh an attack on Iraq, we need someone like the Vietnam era’s Wayne Morse.” He said today: “Transfixed with tactical issues, none of the senators on television in recent days would dream of acknowledging the present relevance of a statement made by Senator [Wayne] Morse a third of a century ago: ‘We’re going to become guilty, in my judgment, of being the greatest threat to the peace of the world. It’s an ugly reality, and we Americans don’t like to face up to it.'”
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For more information, contact at the Institute for Public Accuracy:
Sam Husseini, (202) 347-0020; David Zupan, (541) 484-9167

The Earth Summit — or World Summit on Sustainable Development [see www.johannesburgsummit.org ] — begins on Monday in Johannesburg, South Africa. The following analysts are available for comments:

COLLEEN FREEMAN
A policy analyst with Friends of the Earth, Freeman said today: “Clearly, the promises of the Rio Earth Summit of 10 years ago have not materialized. Friends of the Earth’s view is that one of the principal causes — if not the principal cause — has been the failure of many corporations to act in a socially and environmentally sound manner and be held accountable. Institutions such as the World Trade Organization have provided multinational corporations far-reaching legal rights and benefits unaccompanied by corresponding affirmative obligations to ensure responsible corporate behavior or measures to safeguard citizen rights…. President Bush’s recent statement that corporate self-regulation is insufficient in the financial and accounting arenas is equally true for environmental and social protections. Yet the administration has steadfastly resisted any proposals to develop binding measures to hold corporations accountable globally.”
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KRISTIN DAWKINS
Vice president for international programs for the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy, Dawkins said today: “Discussions about the water problem often focus only on the symptom: they quote the number of people without access to water to meet even basic needs. This is also likely to be the focus at the World Summit on Sustainable Development. However, while it is true that 1.3 billion people do not have access to safe drinking water and that 2.3 billion people do not have access to healthy sanitation facilities, a little-known fact is that 90 percent of the world’s water-poor live in rural area. Centralized water supplies and sanitation are unlikely to be the answer to their woes. The multinational water companies are primarily interested in capturing a specific market, that of urban growth centers, particularly in developing countries. That will not help meet the basic needs of the water-poor. The solution lies in ensuring healthy ecosystems. The global water crisis will worsen — especially in the developing world — if water is commodified.”
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DAPHNE WYSHAM
Wysham is a fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies and the director of the Sustainable Energy and Economy Network. She said today: “Since the 1992 Earth Summit, despite commitments to curtail global emissions of carbon dioxide, public finance institutions have poured over $60 billion into fossil fuel projects in the developing world. Most of these financial aid packages are designed to feed the growing appetite of the rich world for oil, coal, and gas. The vast majority of the more than 50 billion tons of carbon dioxide (potent greenhouse gases) that these projects will produce will come from power plants, S.U.V.s, and other combustion points in the Western world. U.S. taxpayers are also paying for the financing of climate destruction since the U.S. government is the leading backer of many of these projects. This financing should be redirected toward renewable energy.”
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For more information, contact at the Institute for Public Accuracy:
Sam Husseini, (202) 347-0020; David Zupan, (541) 484-9167

This Monday is Women’s Equality Day — the anniversary of the 19th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, allowing women the right to vote. The following analysts are available for interviews:

YIFAT SUSSKIND
Susskind, associate director of MADRE, an international women’s human rights organization, said: “Women’s Equality Day provides an opportunity for us all to reflect on women’s rights and equality around the world. Four major areas of concern for women that require our attention include the following: Firstly, women throughout the world have been experiencing cutbacks in healthcare services as the U.S. attacks healthcare funding…. A second issue that continues to be huge for women around the globe is a need to develop alternatives to neo-liberal economic programs. Policies that place developing countries at the bottom rung also target women, who tend to bear the brunt of the hardship in struggling economies. Another important issue is that of international justice, the international criminal court. MADRE has worked for women’s equality in this field through the creation of the Women’s Caucus for Gender Justice. Finally, we need to reflect on the effects that growing U.S. militarization has on women throughout the world, and take time to honor the innovative and powerful efforts of women to resist militarization.”
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RICKIE SOLINGER
Author of Beggars and Choosers: How the Politics of Choice Shapes Abortion, Adoption and Welfare in the U.S., Solinger said: “Which women flourished during the economic boom — and which women did not benefit from the high-flying economy of recent times? Today, with the boom behind us, women across the country — especially the ones pushed by welfare ‘reform’ into jobs with extra-low ‘female’ wages, without health benefits, in communities with inadequate day care opportunities — are facing lay-offs, lifetime public assistance limits, and soaring housing costs. Does Women’s Equality Day claim ‘equality’ for middle-class women or for all women?”

RADHIKA BALAKRISHNAN
Associate professor of economics at Marymount Manhattan College, Balakrishnan is author of The Hidden Assembly Line: Gender Dynamics of Subcontracted Work in a Global Economy. She said: “One of the preconditions of women’s equality is a recognition of the paid and unpaid work that women do. Women all over the world are the primary care-givers in a family. We need to understand the relationship between women’s waged work and their unpaid work they conduct in the care economy. Government policy often assumes that the unpaid work that women do is infinitely elastic, so that when governments cut funding for healthcare they assume that women will then take care of the sick. This is also often in conjunction with a need to work longer hours in the wage market as well. Macroeconomic policy has to be understood in terms of both its gendered implications and assumptions. In order to achieve women’s equality, we need to have a global perspective. The work that women do in a small town in Bangladesh will end up as clothing on a poor woman in New York. Advocacy for women’s equality needs to understand not only the problems of the poor in each individual country but how their lives are intrinsically connected through the global economy.”

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

STEPHEN ZUNES
Associate professor of politics at the University of San Francisco and senior policy analyst and Middle East editor for the Foreign Policy in Focus Project, Zunes said today: “Claims of Iraqi ties to Al Qaeda appear to be little more than a desperate effort by administration officials to convince the American public to support a reckless military adventure. Reports by the State Department, the CIA, the FBI and foreign intelligence agencies have all found no evidence to support such assertions. Osama bin Laden and his fundamentalist Al Qaeda movement have long demonstrated their hatred of Saddam Hussein and his secular Ba’ath Party, and the Iraqi dictator has been ruthless in his repression of Islamist opponents. Iraq’s support of international terrorism peaked during the 1980s and was limited to radical secular groups like Abu Nidal. (Ironically, the U.S. dropped Iraq from its list of states sponsoring terrorism during that period in order to provide Saddam’s regime with economic and military assistance!) Furthermore, Saddam Hussein is foremost a survivor. He knows that to give any support to Al Qaeda would provide the Bush administration the excuse it has been looking for to invade Iraq and topple his regime.”
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ANAS SHALLAL
A “Partner for Peace” with the Seeds of Peace program, one of the founders of the Mesopotamia Cultural Society and an independent Iraqi-American business owner in Washington, D.C., Shallal said today: “There’s a lot of misunderstanding about how most Iraqis feel about the situation. I currently have relatives from Iraq visiting me. They definitely want to see some change, but they don’t want it to come from outside. They want to be able to make that change themselves. The Iraqi National Congress is an unsavory group of people. They are tainted by all the CIA money they have taken and are not very well respected by the Iraqi mainstream. For any change to be credible, it has to come from within the society. Iraqis are under sanctions and this has taken a real toll, and they blame most of that on the West. The sanctions have also isolated Iraqis in terms of information and freedom of movement and that makes Saddam more powerful.”

PHYLLIS BENNIS
Bennis spoke on Capitol Hill on Tuesday. She is a fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies and co-editor of Beyond the Storm: A Gulf Crisis Reader.
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For more information, contact at the Institute for Public Accuracy:
Sam Husseini, (202) 347-0020; David Zupan, (541) 484-9167

Bush administration officials have cited the Iraqi government’s use of chemical weapons as a key reason for launching an overwhelming attack on Iraq. Condoleezza Rice said last week: “He [Saddam Hussein] has used chemical weapons against his own people and against his neighbors…” On Sunday, a front-page New York Times article reported: “A covert American program during the Reagan administration provided Iraq with critical battle planning assistance at a time when American intelligence agencies knew that Iraqi commanders would employ chemical weapons in waging the decisive battles of the Iran-Iraq war, according to senior military officers with direct knowledge of the program.”

The following analysts are available for interviews:

KANI XULAM
Director of the American Kurdish Information Network, Xulam said today: “The Iraqi government’s gassing of Kurds in the 1980s should not be used as a ploy for war now. We need to develop ways of bringing war criminals to justice across the board. A major U.S. attack on Iraq will likely unleash the use of much-talked-about weapons of mass destruction on the Kurds because northern Iraq is being used as a staging ground to topple the regime in Baghdad.”
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JEREMY SCAHILL
An investigative journalist and author of the recent article “The Saddam in Rumsfeld’s Closet,” Scahill said today: “Some of the very same government officials who are now advocating invasion of Iraq, citing its use of chemical weapons over a decade ago, were in fact cooperating with Iraq when it was actually using such weapons. For example, Donald Rumsfeld met with Saddam Hussein in 1983 and again was in Baghdad in 1984 just after U.S. State Department reports of Iraq’s use of chemical weapons surfaced. The purpose of his missions to Baghdad was not to get the Iraqis to stop using such weapons — it was to forge closer ties.”
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PHYLLIS BENNIS
Bennis will be speaking on Capitol Hill on Tuesday. She is a fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies and co-editor of Beyond the Storm: A Gulf Crisis Reader.
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LAMIS ANDONI
An independent journalist and analyst, Andoni has covered the Mideast for two decades. She said today: “It has been known for years that the U.S. government provided satellite data to Iraq while it was using chemical weapons. This is a reminder of U.S. hypocrisy and calls into question the real motives for the U.S. government’s war policies on Iraq.”
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For more information, contact at the Institute for Public Accuracy:
Sam Husseini, (202) 347-0020; David Zupan, (541) 484-9167

On Saturday (August 17) in Washington, D.C., there will be a march calling for reparations for African Americans. The following commentators are available for interviews:

JOE FEAGIN
Graduate research professor at the University of Florida and author of numerous books on racism in the United States, Feagin said today: “Reparations for the enslavement and later blatant segregation of African Americans are long overdue. During this 350-year period of extreme racial oppression, African Americans saw their labor stolen, lost several trillions of dollars in income and wealth as a result, and also saw their actual lives severely shortened, while most white Americans (including poor immigrants) benefitted greatly in one way or another. For example, some 240 million acres of federal lands were given away under the Homestead Act from the 1860s to the 1930s almost entirely to white homesteading families, whose descendants today number in the several tens of millions of white Americans….”
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MARY HOOVER
Chair of the education commission of the National Coalition of Blacks for Reparations in America and professor of education at Howard University, Hoover is currently working on a book about reparations and education. She said today: “My family was one of the few which got their ‘Forty Acres and a Mule’ — land in Florida which my ancestors homesteaded. But the federal government took the land in 1941 to build a military plane facility. Now it’s an airport worth over $10 million. While white families were adequately compensated for their land, ours was not. Slavery and racism continue to affect the resources and education people have.”
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SAM JORDAN
A representative of the International Concerned Family and Friends of Mumia Abu-Jamal and former director of Amnesty International USA’s Program to Abolish the Death Penalty, Jordan said today: “Reparations are a key element in the continued struggle to transform the U.S. into a nation governed by the principles of human rights.”
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VERNON BELLECOURT
Bellecourt is a director for international affairs for the American Indian Movement and one of the drafters of the manifesto “The Trail Of Broken Treaties: Restitution, Reparations, Restoration of Lands for a Reconstruction of an Indian Future In America.” He said today: “American Indians have been victims of the American holocaust. Most recently, billions of dollars have ‘disappeared’ from Individual Indian Money Accounts held in trust by the U.S. Treasury. While we have been having our land, water, oil and timber stolen, the nation was built up largely by slave labor. We should be joining together to demand justice.”
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For more information, contact at the Institute for Public Accuracy:
Sam Husseini, (202) 347-0020; David Zupan, (541) 484-9167

ADAM ISACSON
Director of the Colombia program at the Center for International Policy, Isacson said today: “At a time when a new hardline president is declaring a state of emergency in Colombia, the U.S. government is broadening its military mission from counter-narcotics to counter-terrorism. This could lead just about anyplace. Those two trends are worrying enough on their own, but for them to happen at the same time should make us sit up.”
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CECILIA ZARATE-LAUN
Co-founder and director of the Colombia Support Network, Zarate-Laun said today: “Colombia’s new government has issued a decree that installed a state of emergency. It is instituting detentions without warrants and creating a network of informants, which violates the constitution. Meanwhile, the interior minister is pressuring the constitutional courts… Fighting against terrorism is not only a right; it is a duty of the government. However the government cannot be allowed to solve the Colombia conflict by restricting fundamental freedoms and democratic rights.”

* Mideast

ANDREW COCKBURN
Coauthor of Out Of The Ashes: The Resurrection Of Saddam Hussein, Cockburn is familiar with the various Iraqi groups the administration is working with to oust Saddam Hussein. Cockburn is currently in California.

AS’AD ABUKHALIL
AbuKhalil’s recent criticism of the Jordanian monarchy on the Al-Jazeera network prompted a number of actions by the Jordanian government — including closing down the offices of Al-Jazeera in Jordan. He said today: “The stiff Jordanian reaction to my criticism of the record of the royal family and its double dealings toward the Palestinians indicates a measure of the nervousness and insecurity on the part of the king, who wishes to balance his blind loyalty to the U.S. with the sentiments of his largely Palestinian populace. The role of the intelligence apparatus has been expanded under this king, and dissidents are quickly rounded up…. The U.S. is working toward affecting the succession struggle in Saudi Arabia: The pro-U.S. faction under Prince Sultan, who is the defense minister and father of the Saudi Ambassador in D.C., wants Prince Sultan to be made the Crown Prince, while Crown Prince Abdullah wants the traditional standard of chronological seniority to be observed.” Author of Bin Laden, Islam & America’s New “War on Terrorism” and professor of political science at California State University at Stanislaus, AbuKhalil has recently returned from the Mideast.

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