eileen fleming

"The Times claims that Pakistan's "nuclear arsenal is expanding faster than
any other nation's" but makes no mention of Israel's nuclear arsenal..."

"Your corrupt ways had finally made you blind Idiot wind, blowing like a circle around my skull, From the Grand Coulee Dam to The Capitol. Idiot wind, blowing every time you move your teeth, You're an idiot." - Bob Dylan

On the August 31, 2009 edition of "FOX News Sunday" Dick Cheney said:

"Just today, for example, the courts in Pakistan have ruled that A. Q. Khan, the father of the Pakistan nuclear weapon man who provided assistance to the Iranians, the North Koreans, the Libyans, has now been released from custody. It is very, very important we find out and know long term what he is up to. He is, so far, the worst proliferator of nuclear technology in recent history." [1]

Mr. Khan, can be considered to be a rogue scientist and a pariah, for in 2004, he admitted he sold nuclear technology to North Korea, Libya and Iran. He is revered as a national hero in Pakistan for his role in transforming the country into a nuclear power and he now claims his confession was forced.

"While it is almost inconceivable that Mr. Khan would again be actively involved in Pakistan's nuclear program, which has created an arsenal of roughly 100 weapons, there was broad concern that he could reactivate an international black-market network that was only partly dismantled." [2]

In regards to North Korea, Cheney said, "They are testing nuclear weapons. They have been major proliferators of nuclear weapons technology. They built a reactor in the Syrian Desert very much like their own reactor for producing plutonium for nuclear weapons. They probably are the worst proliferators of nuclear technology any place in the world today. And there ought to be a price for that." [3]

On August 30, 2009, The New York Times reported that "The United States has accused Pakistan of illegally modifying American-made missiles to expand its capability to strike land targets, a potential threat to India, according to senior administration and Congressional officials.

"The accusation comes at a particularly delicate time, when the administration is asking Congress to approve $7.5 billion in aid to Pakistan over the next five years, and when Washington is pressing a reluctant Pakistani military to focus its attentions on fighting the Taliban, rather than expanding its nuclear and conventional forces aimed at India.

"While American officials say that the weapon in the latest dispute is a conventional one — based on the Harpoon antiship missiles that were sold to Pakistan by the Reagan administration as a defensive weapon in the cold war — the subtext of the argument is growing concern about the speed with which Pakistan is developing new generations of both conventional and nuclear weapons." [4]

The Reagan Administration also pulled the strings, supplied the ammo and trained the Salvadoran death squads at Fort Benning's notorious school of The Americas [which has been Orwellian renamed the Western Hemisphere Institute of Security Cooperation] in the U.S. backed war in El Salvador.

The Archbishop of San Salvador, Óscar Arnulfo Romero y Galdámez was murdered on March 24, 1980 by a shot into his heart, while holding up the Eucharist. It happened one day after his sermon calling on Salvadoran soldiers, as Christians, to obey God's higher order and to stop carrying out the government's repression and violations of basic human rights. It is believed that the assassins were trained in the USA.

The Reagan White House also hosted fundamentalist Christians such as Hal Lindsay, Pat Robertson, Jerry Fawell and allowed the "Moral Majority" to infiltrate the West Wing.

These fundamentalist Christians have little in common with the Jesus who said it is the Peacemakers who are the daughters and sons of God; not those that bomb, torture or occupy others.

The New York Times also reported, "American military and intelligence officials say they suspect that Pakistan has modified the Harpoon antiship missiles that the United States sold the country in the 1980s, a move that would be a violation of the Arms Control Export Act."

However, no mention is made of Israel's missile strikes in Gaza City using U.S.A F-16 fighter jets such as in 2002 although White House Spokesperson Ari Fleischer described the missile strike as "a deliberate attack against a building in which civilians were known to be located" and that it was done with the knowledge "that innocents would be lost."

The U.S. Arms Export Control Act (U.S. Public Law 90-829) prohibits the use of U.S. weapons against civilian targets and although Palestinians have attacked Israeli civilians with their dirty bombs, those weapons were not provided by the USA.

The Times claims that Pakistan's "nuclear arsenal is expanding faster than any other nation's" but makes no mention of Israel's nuclear arsenal, which was exposed by Mordechai Vanunu in 1986.

Vanunu was NOT a scientist. He did earn a BA degree in philosophy and geography while he worked nights in Israel's seven story underground WMD facility in the Negev-but the sign outside claimed it was a textile factory.

Only because he was a good worker was he cross trained in many departments and that was how he figured out that he was but a cog in Israel's manufacturing of upwards of 200 nuclear warheads by 1985.

Vanunu also did NOT sell his story or photos to the London Sunday Times and he was kidnapped by the Mossad before he could even sign a contract.

On December 3, 2006, former CNN Mid East Bureau Chief in Lebanon, Jerry Levin interviewed the whistle blower of Israel's WMD program regarding "His civil suit against the Israeli newspaper, Yediot Aharanot. It was launched while he was still in prison for revealing Israel's secret atomic and hydrogen bomb making program through an article in the London Times.

"The newspaper published stories about me saying I was sending information out how to build bombs to the Hamas," said a still incredulous Mordechai. "When I came out of prison the trial started."

"We bring to testify the head of the Shabak [Ed: aka Shin Bet, the Secret Service, equivalent to the FBI in the United States]. He said that he received the information from his people and that he didn't check it. And we proved that I don't know any information about how to make bombs. But a year ago they win in the court."

"How? Why?"

"The judge decided that the newspaper has the right to publish the story because it received it from the Shabak. Shabak is like the voice of god."

"So you lost."

"Big."

"What do you mean, "big?"

"Well, if newspapers publish lies about me, you would think I have the right to receive compensation from the newspapers and they would be denied to publish more lies. But the judge decided, no, I should pay Yediot Aharanot $10,000.00. How can a newspaper be damaged by publishing such stories about me? So we are appealing this decision. The hearing could be soon."

Turning to the criminal charges against him for speaking to foreign journalists, I asked if his defense intends to call any more witnesses beyond the army general who signed the orders restricting his freedom of movement and speech.

"Yes, Peter Hounam, the reporter who in 1986 wrote the story I give the London Times about Israel's nuclear bomb program. They have charged me that when I was released from prison in 2005; he was involved in a big interview which I gave to the BBC. But the allegation is not true because the interview was done by an Israeli journalist. But they deported him anyway. So we are negotiating about this,"

"About what?"

"Well, he has accepted to come, but the government wants to complicate the case by insisting to decide that they can refuse to let him come back. So they are saying he must have the same restrictions on him that they put on me. But he says that if they confine him to a hotel he will not come."

"So what is being negotiated?"

"We accept not to bring him, if the government cancels this charge about the BBC interview. If they don't take it out, we will bring him."

"Do you see an element of persecution in all this governmental pressure?"

Unhesitatingly, Mordechai answered. "There is. It is my Christianity that they cannot accept. That is the source of my problems with my case."

"All?"

"Yes, because even if they understand they need to make justice with me and let me go and let me speak, they have a problem with their people. What to do about a Christian man who was born a Jewish man who became a Christian and who received respect from all over the world. They don't want this man to be receiving a good image especially with the young Israeli generation. So that is the first point.

"The second point is, because Israel is a Jewish State, the government believes they have the right to have the bomb. But I am coming and saying they don't need to have the bomb. They need to make peace. And that is another source of the problem for them. But even with that I don't understand why they are persecuting me. What are they afraid from?"

"But they say they know what they are afraid from. They say you have more secrets."

"But they know that this is blah, blah, blah, because my secrets are twenty years old. All this nuclear weapons has continued to develop and all what I had was published twenty years ago. There is nothing new from me. And now North Korea has built the bomb. Iran is going to build the bomb. So what information can I contribute when it is twenty years old? Israel should let me go. They have had their revenge. Even killers murders in Israel are released after fifteen years, seventeen years. They let them go. Run away do what ever they want."

"Are you hopeful?"

"I have my scenario that includes the hope that Israelis are also human beings and that one day they will wake up because they must wake up and become normal society. Because there still is danger that what they saw in the past one hundred fifty years, all those extreme nationalists, dictators, right wings that brought tyranny to Italy, Spain, Germany, South Africa, Russia all of them collapsed because they were not normal society. Their people woke up because they wanted normal society. But here we don't have normal society. Here is Jewish religion society and even liberals here are speaking like they are dictators.

"Israel is not like the United States. People came from Europe to build new society in the name of freedom, liberty for all the human beings. But they didn't respect the Indians in the beginning and the blacks. But then one day they woke up and start giving them rights. That is what normal society does. But here it is not normal society. It is about religion. So my scenario is when the Israel people who want normal society wake up it will be a total disaster for the Jewish state."

"Supposing five years from now when I'm eighty and you are fifty-five, we are still here talking about your situation; we are talking about how every year the government renews the restrictions and the courts agree; and we are talking about your scenario that has stayed just a dream?"

"I hope when you are eighty I will meet you in Washington DC. But for that to be we need to do some extraordinary acts to get out from here.

"What kind of extraordinary acts?"

"I can tell you this way. Israel kidnapped me from Rome in 1986 and put me in prison. So I'm calling to the CIA and to all the world to kidnap me from Israel."

"Kidnap you?"

"Yes, if some one or any organization will help me to try to get out from here. I will do it. And the Israelis know it very well. I am ready to leave the country in any way."

"Even being spirited out?"

"Yes, because I am not allowed to go to foreign embassies where I can ask for asylum. That's why they watch me, because they don't want me to get out from here."

"You want the CIA, special forces, whatever to do a reverse Entebbe?"

"Yes," he said with a big grin, "the Marines. But I don't think your military your defense establishment like me. Otherwise they would have helped me long ago. But the real government of the United States is the Pentagon. That is the power behind Israel. They give Israel two billion dollars and military power in support. And so those military maybe don't like me because I am speaking against nuclear weapons and I am speaking for peace. So they are worried."

"What you want to do is dangerous."

"Yes. But you have done it. So I will be happy for anyone to take me out from this prison."[5]\

In 2005, Vanunu told me:

"Did you know that President Kennedy tried to stop Israel from building atomic weapons? In 1963, he forced Prime Minister Ben Guirion to admit the Dimona was not a textile plant, as the sign outside proclaimed, but a nuclear plant.

"The Prime Minister said, ‘The nuclear reactor is only for peace.’ Kennedy insisted on an open internal inspection. He wrote letters demanding that Ben Guirion open up the Dimona for inspection. The French were responsible for the actual building of the Dimona. The Germans gave the money; they were feeling guilty for the Holocaust, and tried to pay their way out.

"Everything inside was written in French, when I was there, almost twenty years ago. Back then, the Dimona descended seven floors underground. In 1955, Perez and Guirion met with the French to agree they would get a nuclear reactor if they fought against Egypt to control the Sinai and Suez Canal. That was the war of 1956. Eisenhower demanded that Israel leave the Sinai, but the reactor plant deal continued on. Kennedy demanded inspections.

"When Johnson became president, he made an agreement with Israel that two senators would come every year to inspect. Before the senators would visit, the Israelis would build a wall to block the underground elevators and stairways. From 1963 to ’69, the senators came, but they never knew about the wall that hid the rest of the Dimona from them.

"Nixon stopped the inspections and agreed to ignore the situation. As a result, Israel increased production. In 1986, there were over two hundred bombs. Today, they may have enough plutonium for ten bombs a year."

I was in the audience on Feb. 10, 2007 when Dr. Phyllis Bennis, Mid East analyst stated, "Iran has signed the NPT, which allows them the right to have nuclear power and to enrich uranium. The 185 non-nuclear states have agreed to give up the right to have nuclear weapons and the five nuclear powers that signed the NPT agreed to get rid of their nuclear weapons. Iran is not in violation of the NPT, but America is! The USA has been in violation ever since the day they signed it. The USA is acting like a rogue state."

The restrictions denying freedom of movement against A. Q. Khan have all been lifted; but Israel continues to deny Vanunu the right to leave the state and he will turn 55 this year.

Israel still has not signed the NPT and has never allowed inspectors into the Dimona.

I wonder what Cheney and his kind of Christians would say about all of the above and the related:

The 64th Anniversary of USA Terrorism Enlightened by the Wisdom of Nonviolence
http://www.thepeoplesvoice.org/TPV3/Voices.php/2009/07/31/the-64th-anniversary-of-usa-terrorism-en

1. http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2009/08/30/raw-data-transcript-cheney-fox-news-sunday/
2. http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/07/world/asia/07khan.html
3. http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2009/08/30/raw-data-transcript-cheney-fox-news-sunday/
4. http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/30/world/asia/30missile.html?th&emc=th
5. http://www.wearewideawake.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=362&Itemid=134

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Only in Solidarity do "we have it in our power to begin the world again."-Tom Paine

Eileen Fleming, A Feature Correspondent for The Palestine Telegraph and Arabisto.com
Founder of WeAreWideAwake.org
Author of "Keep Hope Alive" and "Memoirs of a Nice Irish American 'Girl's' Life in Occupied Territory"
Producer "30 Minutes with Vanunu" and "13 Minutes with Vanunu"