Eileen FlemingVanunu continues to grow"
February 20, 2008
13 Minutes with Vanunu on
Video, taped January 2008
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latest Vanunu Video
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On February 19, 2008, Vanunu wrote: The court
hearing today Feb. 19, was again postponed,
because of a small snow here. We are waiting
for the next hearing date soon.
On July 2, 2007, an Israeli court sentenced Vanunu,
to six more months in jail for violating a ban imposed
on him in 2004, forbidding him to speak to foreigners.
Two days before President Bush landed in Tel Aviv
and a day before Vanunu's appeal was to begin, Israel
sentenced him to community service instead.
On Feb. 5, 2008, Vanunu met with prison officials to
arrange community service and learned that to his
"surprise they say there is no community service
in East Jerusalem. I told them the agreement for
community service was on this condition that it
will be only in the East Jerusalem. They say no
one told them about this… I will do community
service in the East Jerusalem or the appeal begins
and may be the prison sentence."
After an historic year and half long freedom of speech
trial, Vanunu was convicted of 14 parole violations
including contact with foreign journalists in 2004 and
for attempting to attend Christmas Eve mass at the
Church of the Nativity, five miles away in occupied
Bethlehem.
Vanunu has lived on the east side of Jerusalem, the
Palestinian side of town since his release from 18 years
in Ashkelon Prison on April 21, 2004.
West Jerusalem, is 99% Jewish and has
never been Vanunu's community.
"I went three times to West Jerusalem by
taxi because I had to go to the Supreme Court.
All three times some right wing extremist Jews
shouted and threatened me. My community is the
Lutheran Church in the Old City, the Palestinians
on the streets and internationals. I have met with
hundreds, thousands- probably even five thousand
people since 2004."
Everyone who talks with Vanunu on the street, on
the phone or by email understands that they are being
monitored by cogs in the industrial
security-surveillance complex.
On February 13, 2008, Washington Post Staff
Writer Paul Kane wrote: "The Senate yesterday
approved a sweeping measure that would expand
the government's clandestine surveillance powers,
delivering a key victory to the White House by
approving the telecom immunity provision…the
Senate approved the reauthorization of a law
that would give the government greater powers
to eavesdrop in terrorism and intelligence cases
without obtaining warrants from a secret court…
The most important change approved by the
Senate yesterday would make permanent a law
approved last August that expanded the
government's authority to intercept -- without a
court order -- the phone calls and e-mails of people in
the United States communicating with others overseas." http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/
article/2008/02/13/AR2008021300959.html?hpid=topnews
That news was ignored by ABC, CBS and NBC. The MSM
has also failed to report that on January 28, 2006,
Vanunu's historic freedom of speech trial began and
that on February 22, 2006 it was revealed that
Israel had asked Microsoft to hand over all the details
of Vanunu's Hotmail account before a court
order had been obtained.
Vanunu: "Microsoft obeyed the orders and gave
them all the details…three months before I was
arrested and my computers were confiscated…it is
strange to ask Microsoft to give this information before
obtaining the court order to listen to my private conversations.
It means they wanted to go through my emails in secret, or
maybe, with the help of the secret services, the Shaback,
Mossad…Sfard [Vanunu's attorney] proved that the police
had misled the judges who gave the orders to arrest me:
to search my room, to go through my email, to confiscate
my computers and that they misled Microsoft to believe
they are helping in a case of espionage. The State came
to the court with two special secret Government orders;
Hisaion [documents or information that are deemed
confidential by the government and kept from the court,
the defendant, and lawyers.] This allows the prosecution
to keep documents related to my court hearing secret.
One was from the Minister for Interior Security and one
from the Minister of Defense."
Vanunu's secretly taped police interrogations, his 2004
Christmas Eve arrest for "attempting to leave the country"
when he attempted to celebrate mass at the Church of the
Nativity in Bethlehem, the confiscation of his private
property by thirty IDF that stormed into his room at St.
George's Cathedral in 2004, according to Vanunu have all
"been done…under the false and misleading statements to
the courts of 'suspicion of espionage', and yet they are
not charging me with spy crimes… and the fact is that I
have not committed any crimes."
"But the real problem that Vanunu represents...at a
critically important moment in the history of the Middle
East that Israel is a nuclear power and that its warheads
stand ready to be fired from the Negev desert. [Vanunu]
will also remind the world that the Americans, despite
battering their way into Iraq to destroy Saddam Hussein's
nonexistent weapons of mass destruction, continue to give
their political, moral and economic support to a country that
has secretly amassed a treasure trove of weapons of
mass destruction.
"How can President Bush remain silent on Israel's nuclear
power when he has not only illegally invaded an Arab
state for allegedly harbouring nuclear weapons and
condemned Iran for the same ambitions, but also
praised--along with Tony Blair's government-
-Colonel Gaddafi of Libya for abandoning his nuclear
pretensions? If the Arab states are being "defanged"--
always supposing they had any real fangs in the first
place--why should Israel not be "de-nuclearised"?
Why can't the United States apply the same standards
to Israel as it does to the Arabs? Or why, for that matter,
can't Israel apply the same standards to itself that it
demands of its Arab enemies?"
http://www.zmag.org/content/
showarticle.cfm?ItemID=5222
The legend of Vanunu continues to grow:
An intrepid twenty-one year old German was
arrested on Christmas Eve 2007 just for having
dinner with Vanunu.
Five days prior, Dana from the USA met Vanunu in the
Old City and walked to the American Colony with him
for lunch. Dana informed this civilian journalist via
telephone, "At the table next to us was the Greek
Patriarch of Jerusalem and a lot of photos were being
taken of him. I wasn't concerned about myself, but
I was afraid to meet Vanunu for his sake; that he
would get arrested. I told him this and he just shrugged.
I do believe he was arrested on Christmas Eve just
because he is a Christian."
Also unafraid of speaking with Vanunu are the "Ten
to twenty foreigners [who speak with Vanunu] every
day in the streets, in the restaurants, in churches;
some times long meetings."-excerpted from an
email from Vanunu.
This civilian journalist phoned Vanunu on February 12th
to ask him what he thought about the two homicide
bombers who blew up six miles from the underground
Dimona nuclear plant on Feb. 5th. Reuters originally
reported that a source said the "Army of Palestine" wing of
Fatah's al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades from Gaza carried out the
attack in Dimona along with the Popular Front for the
Liberation of Palestine (PFLP). Within hours it was then
reported that it was two Hamas from Hebron. Israeli
authorities denied the nuclear plant was the target and
not one journalist questioned it.
Vanunu said, "We don't know if they were Hamas or Fatah,
but they got as far as they could get to the Dimona. The
Dimona is very heavily guarded, and only another state
could blow it up, not terrorists."
Vanunu hasn't set foot in the Dimona in twenty-two years,
[International Inspectors never have] yet Israel continues
to insist they cannot let him speak with foreigners or leave
Israel, because Israeli authorities claim he still has a secret
he has not yet told.
Vanunu has repeatedly responded, "All the secrets I had
were published in 1989 in an important book, by Frank
Barnaby, The Invisible Bomb: Nuclear Arms Race in the
Middle East."
Article 12 of the International Covenant on Civil
and Political Rights (ICCPR), which Israel ratified
and is obliged to uphold, stipulates: "everyone
[has] the right to liberty of movement and
freedom to choose his residence" and that
"everyone shall be free to leave any country,
including his own"."Israel is bound by international law not to
impose arbitrary restrictions on Mordechai Vanunu,
including on his right to travel within the country
or abroad, his right to peaceful association with
others and his right to express his opinions" -
Amnesty International Press Release of April 19,
2004 and July 2, 2007.
"For 18 years in prison I felt like a man at a train station,
waiting for my train. I lived in a six by nine foot space
without a window for 18 years. Every day I would get
up, get dressed, put on my shoes, look at the same
four walls and wait for that train that never came…
Now I live in a nine by nine space with four walls, I
have a window to the Mount of Olives and the street.
But, I live like a tourist without even a TV in a cheap
hotel and all I want to do is leave Jerusalem. I am no
longer waiting for a train. Now I am at the airport
terminal waiting for my plane."
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. -
Article 19, UNIVERSAL DECLARATION OF HUMAN RIGHTS
-###-
February 20, 2008 ©
Copyright Eileen Fleming, Reporter and Editor
http://www.wearewideawake.org/ Author Keep Hope Alive
and Memoirs of a Nice Irish American Girl's'
Life in Occupied Territory, Producer "30 Minutes
With Vanunu." Permission is granted for reprint in
print, email, blog, or web media if this credit is
attached and the title remains unchanged. Only
in Solidarity do "we have it in our power to begin
the world again."-Tom Paine
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