WAWA/WeAreWideAwake is my Public Service to America as a muckracker who has journeyed seven times to Israel Palestine since June 2005.
WAWA is dedicated to confronting media and governments that shield the whole
truth.
We who Are Wide
Awake are compelled by the "fierce urgency of Now" [Rev MLK, Jr.] to raise
awareness and promote the human dialogue about many of the crucial issues of our
day: the state of our Union and in protection of democracy, what life is like
under military occupation in Palestine, the Christian EXODUS from the Holy Land,
and spirituality-from a Theologically Liberated Christian Anarchist
POV.
"Observe good faith and justice towards all nations; cultivate peace and harmony with all...and passionate attachments for others, should be excluded; and that, in place of them, just and amicable feelings towards all should be cultivated. The nation which indulges towards another a habitual hatred or a habitual fondness is in some degree a slave...a passionate attachment of one nation for another produces a variety of evils." George Washington's Farewell Address - 1796
"My aim is to agitate & disturb people. I'm not selling bread, I'm selling yeast." Unamuno
"Imagine All the People Sharing All the World." John Lennon
"If enough Christians followed the gospel, they could bring any state to its knees." Father Philip Francis Berrigan
"You can stand me up at the gates of hell, but I won't back down." Tom Petty
"If I can't dance, it's not my revolution." Emma Goldman
"We have yet to begin to IMAGINE the power and potential of the Internet." Charlie Rose, 2005
Only in Solidarity do "We have it in our power to begin the world again" Tom Paine
"Never doubt that a few, thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world: Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has." Margaret Mead
"You shall know the truth and the truth will set you free." John 8:32
DO SOMETHING!
Photo of George shown here and in web site banner courtesy of Debbie Hill, 2000.
We hold these truths to be self-evident: That all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights; that, among these, are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness; that, to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed; and, whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it. -July 4, 1776. The Declaration of Independence
HomeBlogMarch 2011 March 4, 2011: Before Manning and Assange: There was Vanunu Mordechai
March 4, 2011: Before Manning and Assange: There was Vanunu Mordechai
March 4, 2011: Before Manning and Assange: There was Vanunu Mordechai
UPDATED 25 June 2012:
Vanunu's
next historic trial was again postponed in May with the court claiming he did not go through the "proper channels" in submitting his
appeal to revoke his citizenship under Israel's Citizenship Revocation
Law:
Follow Vanunu's ongoing saga at his YouTube Channel vanunuvmjc
The following connects the dots from Vanunu to Manning and Assange and was published on 4 March 2011.
On March 2, 2011,
The Army announced it had filed 22 additional charges against Pfc. Bradley E.
Manning, the soldier suspected of providing classified government documents
published by the WikiLeaks anti-secrecy group. The counts against him involve
the leaking of the Afghan and Iraq war logs as well as the quarter million
State Department cables disseminated last year.
CBS News national
security correspondent David Martin reported that the new charges formally
accused Manning of using unauthorized software on government computers to
extract classified information, illegally download it and transmit the data for
public release by what the Army termed "the enemy."
CBS Radio News
chief legal analyst Andrew Cohen reported that military officials look like
they want to throw the book at Manning, not just to punish him, but also to
send a message to other service members who may be tempted to do what Manning
allegedly did.
In a written
statement detailing the new charges, the Army said that if Manning were
convicted of all charges he would face life in prison, plus reduction in rank
to the lowest enlisted pay grade, a dishonorable discharge and loss of all pay
and allowances, but they are not seeking the death penalty. [1]
No mention was
made regarding the fact that on January 27, 2011, McClatchy
Newspapers reported that Bradley Manning’s, direct supervisor warned that
Manning had thrown chairs at colleagues and shouted at higher-ranking soldiers
in the year he was stationed at Fort Drum, N.Y., and advised he not be sent to
Iraq, where his job entailed accessing classified documents through the Defense
Department's computer system. But superior officers ignored that advice because
the unit was short of intelligence analysts and needed Manning's skills.
“An Army report
into the service's high suicide rate concluded in July that military commanders
had become so focused on training troops for deployment that they no longer had
the time to address issues such as alcoholism, prescription drug abuse and even
violence, and instead hoped they'd disappear in combat…The result was a ‘comedy
of errors’ as one commander after another assumed someone else was addressing
Manning's problems, one official said.” [2]
Manning has been
held in solitary confinement at the Marine brig in Quantico, Virginia, in
inhumane conditions. White House press secretary Robert Gibbs had recently
admitted that the White House was not paying attention to Bradley Manning's
extreme confinement conditions, or the fact that pre-approved visitors of
Bradley's have been detained and interrogated by military police in order to
block their scheduled visit.
“Military
pre-trial confinement is supposed to be about ensuring a soldier's presence at
court martial, yet for eight months now Manning has been subjected to extreme
pre-trial punishment through the arbitrary use of rarely applied
regulations--specifically the ‘maximum security classification’ and the
‘prevention of injury’ order. Manning is allowed no meaningful physical
exercise, he is allowed no social interaction with other inmates, he is kept in
his cell at least 23 hours per day, and he is not allowed out of his cell
without restraints…There is no allegation that Manning did anything but share
truthful information with the American public regarding the realities of our
nation's ongoing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, with absolutely no benefit to
himself, in order to spark public debate regarding foreign policy.” [3]
In 2002, President Bush declared U.S.
citizen, Jose Padilla an enemy combatant and he was stripped of all rights and
detained at a Navy brig in South Carolina where he was held in solitary
isolation for 43 months and denied access to an attorney for two years.
Forensic Psychiatrist Angela Hegarty
examined Padilla [in 2006] and concluded the extreme isolation and torture had
left Padilla essentially brain damaged, "What happened at the brig was
essentially the destruction of a human being's mind." [4]
From 1986 to 2004, Israel kept Vanunu in a tomb
sized windowless cell-most all of it in solitary confinement. When he was
released he was forbidden to leave the state and speak to foreigners.
On May 23, 2010, Israel sent Vanunu back to solitary confinement
for 78 days-the outcome of his freedom of speech trial, which began on January
25, 2006, because he spoke to foreign media in 2004.
A Brief History:
In the 1980’s Mordechai Vanunu, was a
secular Jew who worked as a technician in Israel's seven-story underground
nuclear facility in the Negev called the Dimona. The sign out front claimed it
was a Textile Plant and all employees signed a secrecy agreement to never speak
about what they did there.
Because Vanunu was a good worker, he
was cross-trained in many areas and when he finally realized he was but a cog
in the making of weapons of mass destruction, he decided to document the facts
by photographing the evidence and soon after resigned and left Israel.
I began a series of interviews with Vanunu in 2005, and that was when he told
me that he obtained the keys to the top secret restricted areas after they had
been carelessly left in the shower room by a supervisor. Vanunu shot two rolls
of film in the underground facility but did not develop them until ten months
later while in Sydney, Australia after meeting Peter Hounam, an investigative
reporter with the London Sunday Times.
After the two developed the film, they
flew to London and Vanunu spent three days with Nuclear Physicist, Frank
Barnaby, who had been employed by the London Sunday Times. Barnaby concurred
that Israel had manufactured upwards of 200 nuclear warheads by 1985 and he
also testified at Vanunu’s closed-door trial.
Just days before the Sunday Times
published the front page story with some of Vanunu’s photos, Vanunu was lured
from London to Rome, where he was clubbed, drugged and kidnapped by the Mossad.
Vanunu was convicted of treason and
espionage, sentenced to 18 years in jail-11 ½ years in solitary- and has been
kept under 24/7 surveillance denied the right to speak to foreigners and leave
the country ever since he emerged from his windowless tomb sized cell on 21
April 2004.
During Vanunu’s trial, Barnaby
testified, "I very vigorously cross-examined Vanunu, relentlessly asking
the same questions in a number of different ways and at different times. I
found Vanunu very straightforward about his motives for violating Israel's
secrecy laws he explained to me that he believed that both the Israeli and the
world public had the right to know about the information he passed on.
"He
seemed to me to be acting ideologically. Israel's political leaders have, he
said, consistently lied about Israel's nuclear-weapons programme and he found
this unacceptable in a democracy.
"The knowledge that Vanunu had about Israel’s
nuclear weapons, about the operations at Dimona, and about security at Dimona
could not be of any use to anyone today. He left Dimona in October 1985 and the
design of today's Israeli nuclear weapons will have been considerably changed
since then. Modern nuclear weapons bear little relationship to those of the
mid-1980.”
It was when Vanunu told me the following that I became stuck with this truth that all Americans need to 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.”
On March 26, 2006, during one of my 7
trips to Jerusalem, Vanunu told me:
"Many journalists come here to the American Colony, from CNN and NY Times.
They all want to cover my story, but their EDITORS say no...CNN wants to
interview me; but they say they can't do it because they don't want problems
with the Israeli censor. BBC is doing the same thing. Sixty Minutes from the
United States from the beginning they wanted to do a program, but because of
the censor situation they decide not to do it. Also big media from Germany,
France, Italy, Japan. None of them wants problems with the Israelis."
I was NOT a reporter until AFTER I met Vanunu and that led to the taping of:
On
October 4, 2010, the International League for Human Rights in Germany announced
Vanunu was awarded the 2010 Carl-von-Ossietzky-Medal. An international campaign
was launched to assure he be at the Award Ceremony, in Berlin to receive it on
December 12, 2010; but the ceremony was renamed a protest because on October
11, 2010, Vanunu’s Supreme Court appeal seeking to lift the restrictions that
have denied him the right to leave Israel was denied.
"HOPE has two children.The first is ANGER at the way things are. The second is COURAGE to DO SOMETHING about it."-St. Augustine
"He who is not angry when there is just cause for anger is immoral. Why? Because anger looks to the good of justice. And if you can live amid injustice without anger, you are immoral as well as unjust." - Aquinas
Everyone has the right to freedom of
opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions
without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and
ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.
" In the final analysis, it is between you and God. It was never between you and them anyway."-Mother Teresa
“You cannot talk like sane men around a peace table while the atomic bomb itself is ticking beneath it. Do not treat the atomic bomb as a weapon of offense; do not treat it as an instrument of the police. Treat the bomb for what it is: the visible insanity of a civilization that has ceased...to obey the laws of life.”- Lewis Mumford, 1946
The age of warrior kings and of warrior presidents has passed. The nuclear age calls for a different kind of leadership....a leadership of intellect, judgment, tolerance and rationality, a leadership committed to human values, to world peace, and to the improvement of the human condition. The attributes upon which we must draw are the human attributes of compassion and common sense, of intellect and creative imagination, and of empathy and understanding between cultures." - William Fulbright
“Any nation that year after year continues to raise the Defense budget while cutting social programs to the neediest is a nation approaching spiritual death.” - Rev. MLK
Establishment of Israel
"On the day of the termination of the British mandate and on the strength of the United Nations General Assembly declare The State of Israel will be based on freedom, justice and peace as envisaged by the prophets of Israel: it will ensure complete equality of social and political rights to all its inhabitants irrespective of religion it will guarantee freedom of religion [and] conscience and will be faithful to the Charter of the United Nations." - May 14, 1948. The Declaration of the Establishment of Israel