Vanunu and eileen fleming, June 2009.

When President Obama took office, this activist reporter began phoning, faxing and emailing him and Secretary of State Clinton seeking a statement regarding the fact that Israel continues to deny the Nuclear Whistle Blower the right to leave the state ever since he emerged from a tomb sized windowless cell on 21 April 2004, after 18 years in jail for telling the world the truth and providing the photographic proof that Israel had manufactured upwards of 200 nuclear warheads by 1986, in the Dimona's seven-story underground nuclear facility. Â


For the last two years, I have been requesting a statement from this Administration vis-Ã -vis the fact that Israel's very statehood was established contingent upon their upholding the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights. As a co-signer of the Declaration of Human Rights, America is responsible for holding all Member States accountable when they fail to honor it. I have relentlessly reminded my government that Article 13-2 guarantees " Everyone has the right to leave any country, including his own, and to return to his country." Â

Both Mr. Edgar Vasques, State Department Media Affairs Officer and Ms. Nicole Thompson, Press Relations Officer for Clinton, have been gracious to me and Ms. Thompson even raised my hopes when she told me "it is not impossible to receive an answer from the Secretary of State." Â

As we cannot know the future, there is no way to ascertain the impossible so I persist. De Gaul pulled all of France's million settlers out of Algeria when few believed he would. For decades, South African whites refused to share power with the country's black majority, and then, overnight, they agreed to do exactly that! The Iron Curtain and the Berlin Wall both fell; and so, I struggle now to break down the walls of hypocrisy that The New York Times illuminated which also led me to comprehend why I have not received a statement from The White House, regarding Vanunu yet. Â

"The Dimona complex in the Negev desert is famous as the heavily guarded heart of Israel 's never-acknowledged nuclear arms program, where neat rows of factories make atomic fuel for the arsenal. Over the past two years, according to intelligence and military experts familiar with its operations, Dimona has taken on a new, equally secret role -- as a critical testing ground in a joint American and Israeli effort to undermine Iran 's efforts to make a bomb of its own. Behind Dimona's barbed wire, the experts say, Israel has spun nuclear centrifuges virtually identical to Iran's at Natanz, where Iranian scientists are struggling to enrich uranium. They say Dimona tested the effectiveness of the Stuxnet computer worm, a destructive program that appears to have wiped out roughly a fifth of Iran's nuclear centrifuges and helped delay, though not destroy, Tehran's ability to make its first nuclear arms.

"Though American and Israeli officials refuse to talk publicly about what goes on at Dimona, the operations there, as well as related efforts in the United States, are among the newest and strongest clues suggesting that the virus was designed as an American-Israeli project to sabotage the Iranian program...Officially, neither American nor Israeli officials will even utter the name of the malicious computer program, much less describe any role in designing it.

"How and when Israel obtained this kind of first-generation centrifuge remains unclear, whether from Europe, or the Khan network, or by other means. But nuclear experts agree that Dimona came to hold row upon row of spinning centrifuges...Another clue involves the United States".[An] expert added that Israel worked in collaboration with the United States in targeting Iran, but that Washington was eager for "plausible deniability.'" [1]

 When FDR met with labor leaders for four hours in 1934, he told them, "You've convinced me that you are right. Now, go out there and FORCE ME TO DO IT.

What he meant, was that the pressures on a President to stay with the status quo, the forces of the economic and political elites of the country so enormous, that even when a President wants to change direction, he requires forces that will push him in the correct direction.

On April 5, 2009, President Obama raised the hopes of millions with his promises in Prague:

"We are here today because enough people ignored the voices who told them that the world could not change. We're here today because of the courage of those who stood up and took risks to say that freedom is a right for all people, no matter what side of a wall they live on, and no matter what they look like. We are here today because the simple and principled pursuit of liberty and opportunity shamed those who relied on the power of tanks and arms to put down the will of a people.

"Some argue that the spread of these weapons cannot be stopped, cannot be checked - that we are destined to live in a world where more nations and more people possess the ultimate tools of destruction. Such fatalism is a deadly adversary, for if we believe that the spread of nuclear weapons is inevitable, then in some way we are admitting to ourselves that the use of nuclear weapons is inevitable.

"As the only nuclear power to have used a nuclear weapon, the United States has a moral responsibility to act"It will take patience and persistence. But now we, too, must ignore the voices who tell us that the world cannot change. We have to insist, 'Yes, we can.'

"There is violence and injustice in our world that must be confronted. We must confront it by standing together as free nations, as free people. I know that a call to arms can stir the souls of men and women more than a call to lay them down. But that is why the voices for peace and progress must be raised together.

"Let us honor our past by reaching for a better future. Let us bridge our divisions, build upon our hopes, and accept our responsibility to leave this world more prosperous and more peaceful than we found it. Together we can do it.

"Words must mean something [and] violence and injustice must be confronted by standing together as free nations, as free people"[and] Human destiny will be what we make of it."Â

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