Mordecai Vanunu is a hero!
Mordechai Vanunu, a former Israeli nuclear technician, is serving an 18-year sentence in an Israeli prison for blowing the whistle on his government's secret nuclear weapons program. He was held in solitary confinement from September 30 1986 until March of 1998.
Vanunu was one of 11 children of Moroccan Jewish parents who emigrated to Israel in 1963, when he was age 9. When he was a young man he served in the Israeli army and then went to work in the Dimona nuclear "research center" in the Negev desert near his home at Beersheba. The facility harbored an underground plutonium separation plant operated in strictest secrecy. As the years went by he grew increasingly troubled about his work in the nuclear bomb program. In 1985, before leaving Dimona, he took extensive photographs inside the factory in order to document the truth for his countrymen and the entire world.
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A British newspaper, the London Sunday Times, learned of his story and sent a reporter to Sydney to check it out. The newspaper then flew Vanunu to England, where his photos and his facts were further checked by British scientists familiar with nuclear weapons. Vanunu's story, published October 5, 1986, gave the world its first authoritative confirmation that tiny Israel had become a major nuclear weapons power, with material for as many as 200 nuclear warheads of advanced design.
Israeli agents got early wind of Vanunu's intentions. Even before publication of the story, they had him lured from Britain. They abducted him in Italy, and dumped his drugged body onto an Israeli cargo vessel bound for Israel. In the following months he was charged with espionage and treason, and was convicted at a closed-door trial.
In the 12 years between his kidnapping and his release from solitary confinement, Vanunu was denied all human contact except with guards, members of his immediate family, a lawyer, and a priest. His brothers and sisters saw him only through a thick metal screen. Amnesty International condemned his prison isolation as "cruel, inhuman and degrading," and they have called for his immediate release. There are concerns about the effect of this prolonged confinement on his physical and mental health.
http://www.serve.com/vanunu/archive/story.htmlhttp://www.serve.com/vanunu/archive/I Am Your Spy
by Mordechai Vanunu
I am the clerk, the technician, the mechanic, the driver.
They said, Do this, do that, don't look left or right,
don't read the text. Don't look at the whole machine. You
are only responsible for this one bolt. For this one rubber-stamp.
This is your only concern. Don't bother with what is above you.
Don't try to think for us. Go on, drive. Keep going. On, on.
So they thought, the big ones, the smart ones, the futurologists.
There is nothing to fear. Not to worry.
Everything's ticking just fine.
Our little clerk is a diligent worker. He's a simple mechanic.
He's a little man.
Little men's ears don't hear, their eyes don't see.
We have heads, they don't.
Answer them, said he to himself, said the little man,
the man with a head of his own. Who is in charge? Who knows
where this train is going?
Where is their head? I too have a head.
Why do I see the whole engine,
Why do I see the precipice--
is there a driver on this train?
<snip>
This bolt is part of a bomb. This bolt is me. How
did I fail to see, and how do the others go on
fitting bolts. Who else knows?
Who has seen? Who has heard? -- The emperor really is naked.
I see him. Why me? It's not for me. It's too big.
Rise and cry out. Rise and tell the people. You can.
I, the bolt, the technician, mechanic? -- Yes, you.
You are the secret agent of the people. You are the eyes of the nation.
Agent-spy, tell us what you've seen. Tell us what the insiders, the clever ones, have hidden from us.
Without you, there is only the precipice. Only catastrophe.
<snip>
-written from Ashkelon Prison, Israel
http://www.serve.com/vanunu/archive/iamyourspy.html
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