(For more information, visit www.vanunu.com)

Published on Wednesday, March 23, 2005 by CommonDreams.org
Daniel Ellsberg Statement on Vanunu
Statement by Daniel Ellsberg on the recent indictment of Mordechai
Vanunu in Israel for his violation of restrictions banning him from
speaking to foreigners or giving interviews to foreign journalists.
Ellsberg has just returned from Israel, where he had been invited to
testify against these restrictions on March 16 before a committee of
the Knesset; the committee hearing was cancelled, evidently in secret
anticipation of this indictment.

The fact that Israel has a large and growing nuclear arsenal - larger
than Britain's - has been recognized by the rest of the world ever
since Mordechai Vanunu revealed it conclusively nineteen years ago.
For demolishing his country's policy of concealment, denial and
"ambiguity" of its status as a nuclear weapons state, Vanunu served
eighteen years in prison, including an unprecedented period of eleven
and a half years of solitary confinement in a six-by-nine foot cell.

Meanwhile, not one of the harms that some feared might result from
his revelations has materialized in the slightest degree. The notion
that any further details he could disclose, nineteen years later,
could harm Israel's national security is absurd. Why then, after he
has served his full sentence, is the State of Israel invoking British
Mandate Emergency Regulations of 1945, pre-dating its own
independence, to threaten him with prison for exercising his
fundamental human rights to speak to foreigners and foreign
journalists? Why do its leaders still insist on suppressing any open
discussion in Israel itself of its real military posture and its
implications for their security?

Here's one possible answer. This very month both Israel and the US
are making open threats of armed attacks as early as this summer on
Iran's nuclear weapons potential. For Israel to confirm openly
Vanunu's revelations at this particular time - dramatically
abandoning forty years of obfuscation - would attract unfavorable
attention to the fact that such threats or attacks against Iran are
aimed not at achieving a nuclear-weapons-free zone in the Middle East
but at prolonging, indefinitely, Israel's monopoly of nuclear weapons
in the region. That is an unstated aim for both the US and Israel,
but a less than compelling justification for war. This may be a
reason - but not a legitimate one - for returning Mordechai Vanunu to
silence in solitary.

What the world needs of this prophet of the nuclear era is not his
silence but his freedom to speak and travel, to inspire others to
follow his example of truth-telling in their own countries, above all
here in the United States.

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