MARY BETH BRANGAN
Brangan is U.S. co-coordinator for the World Atomic Safety Holiday Campaign, an international network of 50 groups. She said: “It’s absurd that while major oil pipelines are being shut down as a precaution, the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission is relaxing normal safety rules in order to keep the reactors running during the rollover.”
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LLOYD J. DUMAS
Author of “Lethal Arrogance: Human Fallibility and Dangerous Technologies” and professor of political economy at the University of Texas at Dallas, Dumas can assess potential Y2K technical problems as well as the millennial activities of religious cults.

EDWARD S. HERMAN
Co-author of “The Real Terror Network” and “The ‘Terrorism’ Industry,” Herman said: “Although the terrorism threat is being hugely inflated and its prospective casualties are hardly likely to reach the level of holiday traffic deaths in California alone, it makes dramatic copy. The government likes it because its warnings show how caring the government is, besides which the ‘threat’ helps justify the enormous military-intelligence budget that both major parties support. There is a terrorist threat, probably more domestic-based than foreign, but the media are not interested in why such threats exist and the domestic and foreign policy roots of terrorism. For them, it is irrational and exciting.”

SIMONA SHARONI
Visiting scholar at the University of Washington’s Center for International Studies in Seattle, Sharoni said: “How can we celebrate the new millennium without an enemy? In many ways the Algerian man who tried to cross into the U.S. from Canada allegedly carrying bomb-making materials may have given the U.S. foreign policy establishment a present they seem to have been longing for since the end of the Cold War: a new threat.”
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SAM HUSSEINI
Communications director at the Institute for Public Accuracy, Husseini said: “Apparently we have nothing to fear but the future itself. Our government has spent much of the century creating a virtual empire and — in the decade since the Berlin Wall fell — continuing its military dominance. Spawning a cycle of dependence, this ‘big government’ is now supposed to be our savior from those whose resentment of its policies may lead them to heinous criminal acts against us. We have so lowered expectations that in what should be a time of great hope, it seems we’re just hoping to get by.”
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For more information, contact at the Institute for Public Accuracy: Sam Husseini, (202) 347-0020