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Vanunu: A Man without a Country has a Local and Global Community
By Eileen Fleming (about the author) Page 1 of 2 page(s)
For OpEdNews: Eileen Fleming - Writer 13 Minutes with Vanunu on Video taped Jan. 2008: 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.
http://www.wearewideawake.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=807&Itemid=197
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:
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