Authors' Bios
(in alphabetical order)
Tanweer Akram is an economist from Bangladesh and a consultant to an international financial institution. His articles and reviews have appeared in many publications such as Applied Economics, Third World Quarterly, Kyklos, Savings and Development, Journal of Emerging Markets, Journal of Bangladesh Studies, Bangladesh Development Studies, Z Magazine, Counterpunch, Pressaction and Swans.
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Justin Alexander founded Jubilee Iraq in March 2003. He had been campaigning against sanctions for five years, including a fact finding and sanctions-breaking visit to Iraq in 2001 with a delegation of Middle Eastern churches. Separately he campaigned for the cancellation of poor country debt as a volunteer with the Jubilee 2000 Coalition. He has worked in the fields of ethical investment and philanthropy, and graduated from Balliol College, Oxford University, with a major in Physics and Philosophy.
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Anthony Arnove is the editor of Iraq Under Siege: The Deadly Impact of Sanctions and War (South End Press, 2002) and Terrorism and War, a collection of new interviews with Howard Zinn (Seven Stories Press). He is also the editor, with Howard Zinn, of Voices of a People's History of the United States, forthcoming in 2004.
An activist based in Brooklyn, he is a member of the International Socialist Organization and the National Writers Union, and writes regularly for ZNet. His work has appeared in The Financial Times, L'Humanité, Le Nouvel Observateur, In These Times, The Nation, Mother Jones, Left Business Observer, Monthly Review, and other publications. Arnove is on the editorial board of the International Socialist Review and is a member of the Iraq Speakers Bureau. He traveled to Iraq in 2000 and Palestine and Israel in 2001, and has recently toured France and the United Kingdom as an antiwar speaker.
Arnove worked for seven years as an editor and publisher at South End Press and now is a freelance editor and author.
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Naseer Aruri is Chancellor Professor (Emeritus) of Political Science at the University of Massachusetts at Dartmouth. He is Chair of the Board of Directors of the Trans-Arab Research Institute (Boston), a member of the Executive committee of the Center for Policy Analysis on Palestine (Washington, D.C.), and a member of the Board of Directors of the newly established Institute for International Criminal Investigations (The Hague). He is a member of the Independent Palestinian Commission for the Protection of Citizens Rights (Ramallah) since its inception in January l994, a Founding Member of the Arab Organization for Human Rights, Cairo and Geneva in 1982, and a member of the editorial board of Third World Quarterly (London). He was also a member of the Board of Directors of Human Rights Watch/Middle East, 1990-1992, and a three-term member of the Board of Directors of Amnesty International, USA, 1984-1990.
Born in Jerusalem, Palestine, he holds a Ph.D. from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and served on the faculty of the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth (1965-1998). He has appeared on radio and television including PBS, UN Radio, Monitor Radio, National Public Radio, CNN (Crossfire), Lehrer News Hour, Pacifica, ABC News, the BBC World Service, al-Jazeera, Radio Cairo, Radio Algeria, Radio Monte Carlo, and is often interviewed on news outlets such as the BBC dealing with the Middle East throughout the world. He writes frequently for Middle East International (London), al-Hayat (London), al-Mustaqbal, (Beirut) and other dailies and weeklies.
He has lectured at more than 200 universities in North America and widely throughout the world on the Middle East and human rights, including the Keynote address on the occasion of the 40th Anniversary of the Universal Declaration on Human Rights at the invitation of the United Nations Staff Union -- UN Headquarters, New York, December 9, 1988.
His many publications include The Palestinian Resistance to Israeli Occupation (1970), Enemy of the Sun: Poems of Palestinian Resistance, with Edmund Ghareeb (1970), Occupation: Israel Over Palestine (1983), The Obstruction of Peace: The U.S., Israel and the Palestinians (1995), and Palestinian Refugees: The Right of Return ( Pluto, 2001). His latest book, Dishonest Broker: The U.S. Role In Israel and Palestine was published (March, 2003) by South End Press in Cambridge, MA. He has published numerous articles in scholarly journals and magazines, which appear in various languages.
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Gilles d'Aymery is Swans' publisher and co-editor. Born in France, educated at the Universities of Economics & Law of Toulouse and Paris, and at the Institut d'Etudes Politiques de Paris, he has traveled extensively and speaks several languages. Aymery has worked in the international oil & gas industry, moved to the U.S. in 1982, eventually changed course to become a computer consultant to small US businesses, and created Swans in 1996. He has been dedicating his time to the project since January 2001 and has written over 170 articles and essays on a wide range of topics.
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Jan Baughman conducts clinical research for a biotech company, evaluating new immunological therapies for treatment of cancer and other diseases. She holds a Master of Public Health degree in epidemiology and biostatistics and a BA in physiological psychology. While captivated by science and research, journalism has been a constant theme in her life, from serving as editor and columnist for school newspapers, to becoming Swans co-editor.
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George Capaccio is a storyteller, teacher, and writer. In 1997, Capaccio made his first trip to Iraq to witness, in the Quaker tradition, the effect of sanctions. His concern began with the first Gulf War, with roots in Vietnam War protests.
He has returned to Iraq eight times, under the sponsorship of several organizations including Voices in the Wilderness, American Friends Service Committee and the Middle East Council of Churches, though usually at his own expense. Each trip offered an opportunity to bring medicine to hospitals, visit schools, interview senior UN officials, and meet with families.
Capaccio has spoken throughout the US Northeast; written articles, Op-Ed pieces, a collection of stories and poems, and an original monologue (Memento Mori) which he also performed; participated in radio and TV interviews; produced two video documentaries; and lobbied Congress. He also contributed a chapter to Iraq Under Siege (South End Press).
His efforts on behalf of the people of Iraq have been recognized by advocates for peace. His collection of poetry about Iraq won the 1999 PeaceWriting Award, and he received the 2001 Peacemaker Award from the Massachusetts Chapter of Veterans for Peace.
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Milo Clark is a writer and researcher focused on strategic issues. A proper Eastern establishment education -- Williams, A.B. cum laude; Harvard University Graduate School of Business, M.B.A. -- taught him critical thinking; and his intimate exposure to business, government and educational institutions has provided much perspective to his ongoing research. Clark's work, over 100 essays and commentaries, has been published in Swans.
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Gregory Elich is a consultant in technology, an independent researcher, a journalist, and an activist. Elich has published dozens of articles on the Balkans, East Asia, and Africa. His work has appeared in Covert Action Quarterly, New African, Politika, Der Junge Welt, Swans, and several other publications in the United States, Canada and Europe. He
was a member of a US delegation that visited the Balkans after the 1999 NATO war against Yugoslavia,
and a member of the Margarita Papendreou delegation, the first to fly on a Western national
airline to Baghdad in challenge to the sanctions. Elich was a member of the collective that wrote Hidden Agenda, US/NATO Takeover Of Yugoslavia, (International Action Center). He was a speaker to the OneDance People Summit, in Santa Cruz, California, in January 2004.
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Sara Flounders is co-director of the International Action Center (IAC). She and
John Catalinotto are coordinators of the Depleted Uranium
Education Project. They co-edited the books, Metal of Dishonor:
Depleted Uranium, and Hidden Agenda: the U.S./NATO Takeover of
Yugoslavia. Flounders co-edited six other IAC books. The IAC initiated the call for an international ban on DU weapons, helped organize an effort to bring the issue of DU to the UN Human Rights Commission in Geneva, helped measure radiation levels in Iraq before the 2003 war and exposed the US use of DU in Kosovo and Afghanistan. Flounders has traveled to Iraq, Yugoslavia, Palestine, Korea and Japan as part of mobilizing opposition within the U.S. to its continued intervention and wars. Now she is an organizer for the ANSWER Coalition, which called for major demonstrations before and since the US attack on Iraq. She is currently organizing mobilizations to "Bring the Troops Home Now and End the Occupation of Iraq."
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Manuel García, Jr. is a physicist at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL), for which he designed and fielded innovative, nanosecond-fast measurement techniques, applied to underground nuclear explosions between 1978 and 1992, when the U.S. halted nuclear testing. He received a Ph.D. in Aerospace Engineering from Princeton University in 1978.
Between 1993 and 1999, he worked with other LLNL employees in an independent group, the Society of Professional Scientists and Engineers, seeking to unionize the Livermore Lab scientists, as a means of countering the abuses common to systems of patronage management: arbitrariness, favoritism, discrimination, retaliation, and expediency driving work. García became an openly public and vocal activist on behalf of Wen Ho Lee during the 1999-2000 scandal that embroiled the US nuclear weapons labs in a national controversy meshing alleged espionage, nuclear secrets, China politics and human rights into a poisonous political tangle.
His scientific writing has been published in journals such as, Journal of Applied Physics, Review of Scientific Instruments, and Journal of Physics D: Applied Physics. His social commentaries and poetry have been published in Swans, WenHoLee.org, EXTRA! and in Flaunt Peace in the Face of War: Volume 3 of Poems for Peace Anthology (Berkeley: Rudge/Mother's Hen/ARC Press, 2003).
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Denis J. Halliday is a former United Nations Assistant Secretary-General who resigned at the of end 1998 while serving in Iraq as Head of the Oil-for-Food Programme. He resigned after a 34-year career in order to expose and be free to speak publicly about the genocidal UN sanctions imposed and sustained on the innocent people of Iraq by the member states of the Security Council. Since then, as a visiting professor at Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania, a lecturer for Trinity College, Dublin, Ireland, and as a traveling activist -- he has spoken to parliamentarians, the public, colleges and universities, and has worked with TV, radio and print media around the world. Halliday addresses such issues as the impact of UN sanctions on Iraq, the pre-emptive invasion and current illegal occupation of Iraq, the ongoing corruption of international law, the future of the UN, the undermining of non-violence, the UN Charter, and the Declaration of Human Rights by the superpower and others. Halliday was nominated for the Noble Peace Prize in 2000, he was awarded an honorary doctorate by Swarthmore in 2002, and he received the Gandhi International Peace prize in 2003. Although working overseas since 1962, Denis Halliday remains a national of Ireland.
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Edward S. Herman is a Professor Emeritus of Finance, Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania, and a contributor to Z Magazine since its founding in 1988. Herman is the author of numerous books, including a number of corporate and media studies. These include Corporate Control, Corporate Power (1981), the two-volume Political Economy of Human Rights (1979) and Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media (1988, 2002), both of which he co-authored with Noam Chomsky, as well as The "Terrorism" Industry: The Experts and Institutions That Shape Our View of Terror (1989), which he co-authored with Gerry O'Sullivan, and The Myth of the Liberal Media: An Edward Herman Reader (Peter Lang, 1999). He contributes an occasional column to Swans.
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Rania Masri is a writer and activist. She is the director of the Southern Peace Research and Education Center, at the Institute for Southern Studies (Durham, NC, USA). In August 2003, the Institute launched the Campaign to Stop the War Profiteers and Corporate Invasion of Iraq.
Her writings have been published in the following books: Iraq - a Liberated Country? (Der Irak - ein befreites Land?) (2003); Iraq: Its History, People and Politics (2003); The Struggle for Palestine (2002); and Iraq Under Siege: The Deadly Impact of Sanctions and War (Second Edition - 2002).
She serves on the steering committee of the United for Peace and Justice coalition. She is a national board member of Peace Action, the coordinator of the Iraq Action Coalition, and a member of three national speakers' bureaus. In addition, she is a member of the documentary production team of 'About Baghdad.'
Masri has a doctorate from North Carolina State University. Born in Beirut, Lebanon, she moved to the U.S. in 1986.
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Thomas J. Nagy is Associate Professor of Expert Systems, George Washington University School of Business & Public Management. His chapter, showing intent and premeditation of the slaughter of Iraqi children via economic sanctions, was published in Iraq: The Human Cost of History, Pluto Press, London, 2004. He has just returned from lectures and interviews in Denmark and Britain, teaching a seminar on computers to wage peace at McMaster University.
Coilín Oscar ÓhAiseadha is an Irish medical doctor currently living in Denmark. He was inspired by the work of Thomas J. Nagy to co-found the Danish Committee for Peace and Development in Iraq, which provides Danish citizens, media and politicians with reliable factual information about the conflict in Iraq.
Mike FitzGibbon is a research fellow with the Centre for Sustainable Livelihoods at University College Cork, Ireland, where his focus is on broadening and deepening public understanding of famine and food insecurity. He also works and advocates in the areas of equality, antiracism/interculturalism, asylum/refugee/immigration issues and homelessness.
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Michael Parenti lectures widely across North America and abroad. He is the author of over 250 articles and seventeen books, including The Terrorism Trap; History as Mystery; Against Empire; To Kill A Nation: The Attack on Yugoslavia; and the 7th edition of Democracy for the Few. His most recent work is The Assassination of Julius Caesar: A People's History of Ancient Rome, which has been nominated for a Pulitzer Prize. For more information, consult his Web site.
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Louis Proyect received his formal education at Bard College (BA, 1965) and The New School University in New York City (MA, 1967). On or about that time he joined the US Socialist Workers Party (SWP) where he organized sales of the party press, public meetings and gave classes on Marxist theory. He parted with the SWP in 1978. Instead of completing his Ph.D. in Philosophy (57/60 credits), he spent most of the 1980s in the Central American solidarity movement, first with the Committee in Solidarity with the People of El Salvador, and then with Tecnica, an organization that sent skilled professionals to Nicaragua. In the early 1990s he joined the staff of Columbia University where he currently works as a computer programmer.
Proyect is the moderator of the Marxism List and maintains a scholarly site, marxmail.org, in the non-sectarian tradition of The Socialist Union, a group led by Bert Cochran and Harry Braverman in the '50s. His work has been published in many journals and magazines such as New Politics, Journal of the History of Economic Thought, Organization and Environment, Cultural Logic, Dark Night Field Notes, Green Left Weekly and Canadian Dimension. Proyect regularly contributes political columns and book reviews to Swans.
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John Sloboda is Professor of Psychology at Keele University, UK. He is a lifelong peace activist and has devoted most of his energies to projects that challenge the assumptions of the "new humanitarian interventionism" and the "war on terror." He was involved in a project to assess the cost to the civilian population of Serbia of NATO bombing and sanctions, and in January 2003 co-founded Iraq Body Count, a Non-Governmental Organization devoted to maintaining and publishing a comprehensive record of civilians killed in the Iraq conflict. In January 2004, he became Executive Director of the Oxford Research Group.
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Gerard Donnelly Smith, a poet and musician, teaches creative writing, literature and composition at Clark College in Vancouver, WA (USA). His book, Cerro de la Estrella, (Logan Elm Press, 1992) was chosen for The Governor's Award for the Arts in Ohio, 1992. Excerpts from The American Corpse (10 poems) were published in Apex of the M in 1995. He is the current director of the Columbia Writers Series, an Honorary Board Member of The Mountain Writers Series, and co-advisor of the Native American Student Council at Clark College. He has also organized readings for Poets Against the War. Smith is a regular contributor to Swans.
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Michael W. Stowell received his formal education at the University of Wisconsin and in the sweatshops, taverns and churches of contemporary, middle-class America. He now sojourns beyond civilization without political affiliation, an anarchist mind with a socialist heart. He is a tribalist, a naturalist, and a cyclist who uses communication to evolve the revolution. He contributes a regular column to Swans.
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