DAHR JAMAIL
Jamail is an independent journalist who reported for eight months from inside Iraq after the invasion. His most recent piece is “An Increasingly Aerial Occupation.”
More Information
VERA BEAUDIN SAEEDPOUR
Editor of Kurdish Life and founder of the Kurdish Library, Saeedpour is available to comment on the election and other developments in Iraq.
HARB MUKHTAR
Mukhtar is a translator in Baghdad.
CELESTE ZAPPALA
DANTE ZAPPALA
As Bush gave his address in Philadelphia on Monday, Celeste Zappala and her son Dante were at a protest nearby. Celeste Zappala’s eldest son, Sgt. Sherwood Baker, was the first Pennsylvania National Guardsman to die in combat since World War II. He was killed in action in Baghdad on April 26, 2004, while searching for weapons of mass destruction.
More Information
More Information
JAMES PAUL
Bush today derided the notion that oil was a factor in U.S. plans regarding Iraq. Paul, executive director of the Global Policy Forum, has written several pieces about oil including “Oil in Iraq: The Heart of the Crisis.” His group co-published the recent study “Crude Designs: The Rip-Off of Iraq’s Oil Wealth.”
More Information
JOHN BURROUGHS
Bush claimed today: “When a unanimous Security Council gave him [Saddam Hussein] one final chance to disclose and disarm, or face serious consequences, he refused to comply with that final opportunity. … The United States did not choose war — the choice was Saddam Hussein’s.”
Burroughs, executive director of the New York-based Lawyers’ Committee on Nuclear Policy, said today: “Iraq basically cooperated with UN inspectors in late 2002 and early 2003. As a result of inspections, the International Atomic Energy Agency’s head Mohamed ElBaradei, who just won the Nobel Peace Prize, stated unambiguously in early 2003 that there was no evidence of a reconstituted Iraqi nuclear weapons program, and that they needed only three more months to fully confirm the absence of a program.
“It was Bush who chose war, in clear violation of the UN Charter since the Security Council refused to approve a draft U.S. resolution in March 2003 that would have authorized the invasion. Saying something that is blatantly untrue over and over again, as Bush insists on doing, does not make it any less of a lie.” Burroughs is co-author of the piece “The UN Charter and the Iraq War,” which appears in the new book Neo-Conned! Again.
More Information
For more information, contact at the Institute for Public Accuracy:
Sam Husseini, (202) 347-0020; or David Zupan, (541) 484-9167
