12 August 2005
Secretary Condoleeza Rice
Secretary of State
Department of State
2201 C Street, NW
Washington, DC 20520
Dear Secretary Rice:
I write to express my concern about the harsh treatment of a fellow academic, Dr. Huda Ammash, an Iraqi scientist who has been imprisoned for two years without being charged let alone tried. Credible sources inform us that Dr. Ammash has been wrongly accused of helping develop a chemical weapons program that, as we now know, did not exist. She has written critically of the environmental devastation wrought by sanctions and war, but, as an academic yourself, you know that her writings enjoy the protection offered by academic freedom and Article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
Dr. Ammash is a researcher and a published scientist and former dean of the Women’s College at Baghdad University and the only female member of the Iraq Academy of Sciences. Sadly, she is not the only scientist being detained, but she is an academic whom one American arms expert, Charles Duelfer, has urged be freed immediately. He claims that the accusation that resulted in her imprisonment—restarting the bioweapons program in the mid-1990s—is false in light of the fact that no such weapons have been found.
Presumption of innocence is axiomatic in American justice. I ask that you use your good offices to make this point to your colleagues in the Department of Defense who have violated that norm in the case of Dr. Ammash.
Sincerely,
Roger W. Bowen
General Secretary