January 17, 2011: Response from The White House RE: Mordechai Vanunu Via The New York Times

When President Obama took office, this activist reporter began phoning, faxing and emailing him and Secretary of State Clinton to speak up 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.

For the last two years, I have been requesting a statement from this Administration vis-à-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.”

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.”

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.

“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]

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." 

In 1987, from Ashkelon prison, Vanunu wrote:

"The passive acceptance and complacency with regard to the existence of nuclear weapons anywhere on earth is the disease of society today…This struggle is not only a legitimate one - it is a moral, inescapable struggle...no government, not even the most democratic, can force us to live under this threat. No state in the world can offer any kind of security against this menace of a nuclear holocaust, or guarantee to prevent it.

"Already now there are enough nuclear missiles to destroy the world many times over…This issue should unite us all, because that is our real enemy…Any country, which manufactures and stocks nuclear weapons, is first of all endangering its own citizens. This is why the citizens must confront their government and warn it that it has no right to expose them to this danger.

"Because, in effect, the citizens are being held hostage by their own government, just as if they have been hijacked and deprived of their freedom and threatened…Indeed, when governments develop nuclear weapons without the consent of their citizens - and this is true in most cases - they are violating the basic rights of their citizens, the basic right not to live under constant threat of annihilation.

"Is any government qualified and authorized to produce such weapons?”

In 2005, Vanunu told me:

"When I became the spy for the world, I did it all for the people of the world. If governments do not report the truth, and if the media does not report the truth, then all we can do is follow our consciences. Daniel Ellsberg did, the woman from Enron did, and I did.

"President Kennedy tried to stop Israel from building atomic weapons. Prime Minister Ben Guirion 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.

"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.

"The Israelis have 200 atomic weapons and they accuse the Palestinians and Muslims of terrorism. The Dimona is 46 years old; reactors last 25 to 30 years. The Dimona has never been inspected and Israel has never signed the Nuclear Proliferation Treaty but all the Arab states have.

"Twenty years ago when I worked there they only produced when the air was blowing towards Jordan ten miles away. No one knows what is happening now. The world needs to wake up and see the real terrorism is the occupation and the Palestinians have lived under that terror regime for 40 years.”

While campaigning, Obama once admitted that if we took the Sermon on the Mount seriously, it would lead to the abolishment of the Industrial Military Complex and "Our problems stem from our acceptance of this filthy, rotten system.”-Dorothy Day

“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.

There can be no question that unless nuclear weapons and war are abolished and all people are free and known as equals; the world will remain in a state of madness run by hypocrites in high places.

                                            US and Israeli Nuclear Deceptions 

 1. http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/16/world/middleeast/16stuxnet.html?_r=2&nl=todaysheadlines&emc=tha2&pagewanted=all