Tag: Mordechai Vanunu

  • Henry Kissinger asks Obama to release convicted spy for Israel

    Henry Kissinger asks Obama to release convicted spy for Israel

    Kissinger+MaoFormer US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger asks Obama to release convicted spy for Israel

    By The Associated Press (CP)

    JERUSALEM — Former U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger is urging President Barack Obama to release an American convicted of spying for Israel 24 years ago.

    In a letter obtained by The Associated Press, Kissinger wrote to Obama, “I believe justice would be served by commuting” Jonathan Pollard’s life sentence.

    Pollard, now 56 years old, was a civilian intelligence analyst for the Navy. He was convicted in 1987 of passing classified information to Israel.

    Kissinger’s March 3 letter joins other recent calls for Pollard’s release from former high-ranking American officials, including former CIA Director R. James Woolsey and former Secretary of State George Shultz.

    In January, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu also called on the U.S. to release Pollard.

    Jonathan Pollard

    Kissinger: Release Israeli spy Pollard

    By Jeff Stein

    Saying he found the arguments of other top former U.S. national security officials “compelling,” former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger on Monday called for President Obama to commute the remainder of Israeli spy Jonathan Pollard’s life sentence.

    “At first I felt I did not have enough information to render a reasoned and just opinion,” Kissinger said in his Mar. 3 letter, released today by a public relations firm that has been lobbying for the release of Pollard, sentenced to life in prison for espionage in 1987.

    “But having talked with [former Secretary of State] George Shultz and read the statements of former CIA Director [R. James] Woolsey, former Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman [Dennis] DeConcini, former Defense Secretary [Caspar] Weinberger, former Attorney General [Michael] Mukasey and others whose judgments and first-hand knowledge I respect, I find their unanimous support for clemency compelling.”

    Shultz was secretary at the time of Pollard’s sentencing.

    “I believe justice would be served by commuting the remainder of Pollard’s sentence of life imprisonment,” Kissinger wrote.

    The White House declined to comment on the Kissinger letter, referring to a statement by then spokesman Robert Gibbs on Jan. 15 in response to a question about Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu’s public petition for Pollard’s release.

    “Look, I think the — obviously the State Department answered this a little bit yesterday in saying that they received the request; they’ll take a look at it,” Gibbs said. “I think it is important to underscore that Mr. Pollard was convicted of some of the most serious crimes that anybody can be charged with.”

    Backed by major Jewish leaders, the campaign to free Pollard has been mobilized by David Nyer, a 25-year-old social worker in a New York health clinic.

    Beginning last summer, Nyer has bagged a number of big names in his effort, including former Rep. Lee Hamilton (D-Ind.) who was chairman of the House Intelligence Committee at the time of Jonathan Pollard’s sentencing; Lawrence J. Korb, assistant secretary of defense in the Reagan administration; former Clinton White House Counsel Bernard Nussbaum and former Deputy Attorney General and Harvard Law Professor Philip Heymann.

    Apart from Woolsey, most other intelligence officials have been adamantly opposed to the release of Pollard, a Navy intelligence analyst who provided thousands of highly classified documents to his Israeli handlers. Former CIA Director George Tenet reportedly threatened to quit when the Clinton administration considered it.

    voices.washingtonpost.com/spy-talk, March 7, 2011

  • RELEASE MORDECHAI VANUNU

    RELEASE MORDECHAI VANUNU

    VANUNUTargeting: Barack Obama (President, USA), Rt Hon David Cameron (Prime Minister, UK) and Binyamin Netanyahu (Prime Minister, Israel)
    Started by: Gail Vaughn

    The following letter has been sent by Mairead Maguire, Nobel Peace Laureate, and Gerry Grehan, Chair of the Peace People, Northern Ireland, to President Barak Obama, UK Prime Minister David Cameron, Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, other world leaders and prominent personalities, to ask for their help in obtaining the lifting of all restrictions on Mordechai Vanunu and for him to be granted freedom to leave Israel.

    Please express your support for this letter by signing this petition.

    28 July 2010

    We are writing to you on behalf of a good man, a man of peace and conscience, who was returned to prison for three months on 23 May 2010.

    He was released from prison on Sunday 8 August 2010.  We need your support to help gain his freedom from Israel.

    He is Mordechai Vanunu the Israeli nuclear whistle blower.  In October l986, Vanunu told the world that Israel had a Nuclear Weapons Programme.  He was kidnapped and given 18 years imprisonment for espionage and treason.  Twenty four years later he continues to be punished.  In the Jewish Scriptures there is great emphasis on justice and freedom.   He served the full 18 years of his sentence (twelve years in solitary confinement, described by Amnesty International as “cruel, inhuman and degrading”).  Upon his release, the Israeli Government put severe restrictions upon him, including forbidding him to leave Israel and speak to the foreign media.  It was the breaking of these restrictions, in summer 2004, by speaking to the foreign media, (mainly a long interview to the BBC), which resulted in his being returned to solitary confinement again this May.

    Last month Amnesty International declared him a prisoner of conscience and called on the Israeli authorities to lift the restrictions immediately.  “The restrictions on Mordechai Vanunu arbitrarily limit his rights to freedom of movement, expression and association and are therefore in breach of international law.  They should be lifted and he should be allowed to start his life again as a free man.   Mordechai Vanunu should not be in prison at all, let alone be held in solitary confinement in a unit intended for violent criminals.   He suffered immensely when he was held in solitary confinement for 11 years after his imprisonment in 1986 and to return him to such conditions now is nothing less than cruel, inhuman or degrading.”  18 June 2010 Amnesty International

    Yet, when he is released from prison he will still have to remain in Israel and the restrictions will be reviewed and probably renewed yet again, as they have been renewed each year for the past 6 years.

    Vanunu is seen as a traitor by some, a hero by others.   One thing is clear, he has been punished and served the full sentence and it is time after 24 years to do the human thing and let him live as a free man.

    The Israeli Supreme Court continues to accept the Secret Services’ claims that he still has secrets, but a report by Reuters, 20 December 2009, shows that he does not :

    ” … Yet Uzi Eilam, a retired army brigadier-general who ran the Israeli Atomic Energy Commission between 1976 and 1986, said anything that Vanunu — a cause célèbre among disarmament campaigners — might still disclose about Dimona is of little relevance. “I’ve always believed he should be let go,” said Eilam.

    “I don’t think he has significant things to reveal (about Dimona) now.”

    However, we believe that he will be free and our hope is that you will in some way facilitate his early release which would be welcomed by a world waiting and watching for a peaceful and secure future for Israel and its people.    We would greatly appreciate your advising us of any action you take – info@peacepeople.com.

    Shalom,
    Mairead Maguire, Nobel Peace Laureate
    Gerry Grehan, Chair of the Peace People

    Vanunu has been nominated year after year for the Nobel Peace Prize.

    The many prominent names who have called for his release and respect of his human rights over the last 24 years include:

    The late Nobel Laureates Joseph Rotblat and Harold Pinter; Nobel Laureates Former President Jimmy Carter; Archbishop Desmond Tutu; Mary Ellen McNish (on behalf of AFSC); Betty Williams; Adolfo Perez Esquival; Rigoberta Menchu; Shirin Ebadi; Wangari Maathai; Mairead Maguire; John Hume

    Kidnap victims Brian Keenan; Anthony Gray

    Politicians and human rights activists: the late Robin Cook, former UK Foreign Secretary; former Israeli Minister Shulamit Aloni; Helen Bamber; Simon Hughes; Daniel Elsberg; Bruce Kent; Noam Chomsky; Rabbi Philip Bentley (USA); Michael Mansfield QC; Dr Paul Oestreicher; Baroness Helena Kennedy QC; Tariq Ali; Jeremy Corbyn; Ken Livingstone; Ben Birnberg; David Goldberg QC; Alex Salmund

    Actors, writers, musicians and artists:  Emma Thompson; Julie Christie; Susannah York; Vanessa Redgrave; the late Corin Redgrave; Yoko Ono; Bono; Peter Gabriel; the late Graham Greene; the late Yehudi Menuhin; Janet Suzman; Gilad Atzmon; Richard Hamilton; Michael Rosen; David Gilmore; Benjamin Zephaniah, Alexie Sayle; Maggie Hambling; Tom Conti; Simon Callow; Jeremy Hardy; Miriam Margolyes; Prunella Scales; Arnold Wesker; John Williams; Roger Lloyd-Pack; Christopher Logue; the late Adrian Mitchell

    Journalists:  Andrew Neil; Jon Snow; John Pilger; Robert Fisk; Duncan Campbell; Victoria Brittain; Richard Norton-Taylor

  • Don’t Israel’s nuclear weapons count?

    Don’t Israel’s nuclear weapons count?

    yasmin_alibhai_brownYasmin Alibhai-Brown: Don’t Israel’s nuclear weapons count?

    Netanyahu has what he wants to keep up the idea of his plucky, vulnerable little state

    Influential Europeans – including many Muslims – recently debated freedom of expression with the Danish editor who commissioned the cartoons of Prophet Mohammed which led to riots. Held in Berlin, it was a good, at times blazing, debate.

    Freedom of expression, we were given to understand, is one of the valves in Europe’s heart that must remain open to keep our continent alive and healthy. In good faith I exercise that freedom in this column. Let us see if readers and interest groups will support my right to write what follows even if they violently disagree with my observations.

    From past experience I bet many will find that impossibly hard. They will denounce me as an enemy within, a rule-breaker of unspoken rules, bringing up stuff that must be left buried in the name of peace and justice. I see no reason to comply. This week shows us how such doublethink and doublespeak pulls the world towards Armageddon.

    Leaders of the rich nations have turned their fire on Iran, quite rightly. On Friday came news that the Islamic Republic had been building a secret uranium enrichment plant near Qom. Then the junta fired test missiles, to prove that the bearded ones have really big willies. Unlike Iraq under Saddam, there are, in Iran, nuclear developments that could lead to weapons of mass destruction. It is not an immediate but a future danger, say credible intelligence experts and indeed Barack Obama himself.

    Suddenly the president has got uncharacteristically belligerent, instructing Iran to open up all its nuclear facilities for inspection if it wants to avoid “a path that is going to lead us to confrontation”. In May, Obama stood in Washington with the hawkish Benjamin Netanyahu, who we were told was there to seek assurances that there would be no shift from the conventional US position of total and unconditional support for Israel’s policies right or wrong, known and clandestine.

    On Thursday the US, China, Britain, France, Russia and Germany meet in Geneva and, by that time, Iran will be expected to submit to international scrutiny. As a supporter of the now crushed and broken reformers in Iran, I back the ultimatum to the fanatic and bellicose Iranian President, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. But what about that camel in the room? The one we all see but can’t point out? What about the only power in the Middle East, also fanatic and aggressive, which has a vast stockpile of weapons enough to obliterate the region? Listen people, we need to talk about Israel. And soon. Like now.

    I have been in contact with a young Iranian woman who wore a green scarf and lipstick on the streets of Tehran, whose uncle is currently being tortured in prison there for demonstrating against the results of the election. Somehow she escaped from the country and is in Britain briefly before going on to the US to make a new life. Let us call her M.

    Nobody could hate Ahmadinejad more than M; she hates the whole regime, the treacherous leaders who betrayed the people. When she speaks she often gets asthmatic. But yet, but yet, she finds her passions rising for her country this week because of fears of military strikes by Israel and the manifestly unfair way that Israel is indulged. “I will go back if they attack my country, even if they put me to jail,” M says. “That is my duty. Israel is the enemy of peace and America gives them money to get more arms. I don’t want Iran to have these terrible weapons, but Israel must also be stopped.”

    The big powers are moving tentatively towards global de-nuclearisation, taking small but significant steps to show they do want everyone to pitch in. Obama’s decision to shelve the European defence missile programme shows serious intent, so too Gordon Brown’s announcement that Britain would cut down from four to three its Trident missile-carrying submarines. There was a moment this spring, albeit fleeting, when Rose Gottemoeller, an assistant secretary of state and Washington’s chief nuclear arms negotiator, asked Israel to sign the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, thus breaking the 40-year-old silence and US complicity in its accumulated, un-inspected arsenal. Her reasonable appeal provoked apoplexy in a nation that assumes special, indeed exceptional, treatment.

    In the 1960s, Israel successfully hid its weapons from US inspectors. In 1986, Israeli nuclear technical assistant Mordechai Vanunu revealed information about the concealed stockpiles and has been punished ever since. Hubristic Israel no longer cares to deny that it has hundreds of atom and hydrogen bombs and devastating biological “tools”. Netanyahu has been warning he will destroy the Iranian sites if his country feels the danger is real. Now he has just what he wanted – another crisis in the Middle East, to keep up the idea of plucky, vulnerable, endangered little Israel.

    Alarmingly, even the liberal Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz is on side. History has made too many Israelis fear all humanity in perpetuity and that fear brings out the worst in that nation. It has predictably rejected the long, sober, unbiased UN report on the last assault on Gaza chaired by Richard Goldstone. He accused Hamas of crimes against Jewish civilians and charged Israel with grave crimes, the breaking of the Geneva convention, punishing and terrorising unarmed civilians.

    I have some images of these victims sent to me by a Jewish pro-Palestinian activist. Children turned to ash, blistered mothers weeping, and on and on. There still is no respite for the hungry and dying in Gaza. If Israel can mete out such treatment and not be called to account, just think what the state feels entitled to do to Iran.

    The Israeli human rights activist Gideon Spiro bravely asks that his country be subject to the same rules as Iran and all others in the Middle East: “Rein in Israel, compel it to accept a regime of nuclear disarmament and oblige it to open all nuclear, biological and chemical facilities and missile sites to international inspection.” The US has leverage because it maintains and funds Israel. If Obama shies away from this, there can be no moral justification to go for Iran or North Korea or any other rogue state. And the leader whose election and dreams gave hope to millions thereby hastens the end of the world.

    y.alibhaibrown@independent.co.uk

    Source:  www.independent.co.uk, 28 September 2009