User:LouPuls/Phyllis Bennis

Phyllis Bennis is a Fellow of the Institute for Policy Studies and the author of seven influential books and ongoing commentary. . She directs the New Internationalism Project at IPS. She was a teenage supporter of Gene McCarthy and an activist protestor against the Vietnam War during college and promoted peaceful relations with Vietnam since. She also has long worked to end the Israeli occupation of Palestinian lands and their apartheid policies, and to end the US occupation and wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

She is also a fellow of the Transnational Institute in Amsterdam, which has a video of her comments on recent WikiLeaks revelationsWhistleblowers

Op-Ed Obama's Afghanistan Review: A Whitewash of a Disastrous Occupation December 24 - According to the Obama administration, nothing can happen in the U.S. war in Afghanistan that doesn’t mean good news.

Letter to the Ed A Double Standard on Middle East Aid December 4 - U.S. aid to Israel should be given the same scrutiny as aid to Egypt. Published in The Washington Post.

Commentary WikiLeaks: War, Diplomacy & Ban ki-Moon's Toothbrush December 1 - The Wikileaks documents demonstrate that U.S. diplomacy is not being used to find alternatives to war, but rather pursued in the interests of illegal wars. Published in The Huffington Post.

Phyllis is also a fellow of the Transnational Institute in Amsterdam. She has been a writer, analyst, and activist on Middle East and UN issues for many years. While working as a journalist at the United Nations during the run-up to the 1990-91 Gulf War, she began examining U.S. domination of the UN, and stayed involved in work on Iraq sanctions and disarmament, and later the U.S. wars and occupations in Iraq and Afghanistan. In 1999, Phyllis accompanied a delegation of congressional aides to Iraq to examine the impact of U.S.-led economic sanctions on humanitarian conditions there, and later joined former UN Assistant Secretary General Denis Halliday, who had resigned his position as Humanitarian Coordinator in Iraq to protest the impact of sanctions, in a speaking tour. In 2001 she helped found and remains on the steering committee of the U.S. Campaign to End Israeli Occupation. She works closely with the United for Peace and Justice anti-war coalition, co-chairs the UN-based International Coordinating Network on Palestine, and since 2002 has played an active role in the growing global peace movement. She continues to serve as an adviser to several top UN officials on Middle East and UN democratization issues.