contributions

By Ellen Knickmeyer
RAMADI, Iraq — U.S. Marine airstrikes targeting insurgents sheltering in Iraqi residential neighborhoods are killing civilians as well as guerrillas along the Euphrates River in far western Iraq, according to Iraqi townspeople and officials and the U.S. military.
Just how many civilians have been killed is strongly disputed by the Marines and, some critics say, too little investigated. But townspeople, tribal leaders, medical workers and accounts from witnesses at the (…)

Dear Editor: I would like to express my support for Sen. Russ Feingold’s filibuster against renewal of the Patriot Act. Feingold’s filibuster is an important, long overdue effort to preserve endangered civil liberties in the United States.
Although it comes as no surprise that Bush ordered the National Security Agency to spy on Americans, I am nonetheless outraged. It’s heartening to this impeachment supporter that many other Americans oppose such illegal surveillance. According to a Dec. (…)

In asserting his right to ignore the law, President Bush has slapped Congress right across the face and told them they better like it.
Congress can now mutter "Yes, sir" and cower in its corner like a whipped dog, as it has for most of the past five years, or it can fight back to defend its institutional authority. Either choice will mark a turning point in U.S. history.
At immediate issue is the president’s decision four years ago to allow the National Security Agency, an arm of the (…)

Our forefathers created a system of government built on checks and balances that they envisioned would protect a free people from abuses of their privacy, their property and their liberty at the hands of anyone, especially anyone in public office.
They never intended for an imperial presidency to rise above the legislative and judicial branches of government, for they had their fill of kings and emperors who ruled with absolute power in the old world. They knew that absolute power corrupts (…)

I’ll say this for Vice President Dick Cheney: he puts it right out there, whether it is trying to ensure legal protection for those torturing prisoners, or insisting-as he did on Tuesday-that a wartime president “needs to have his powers unimpaired.”
Supporters of this view are dredging up quotes from former officials like George H.W. Bush’s attorney general William Barr who, according to the Washington Post, contends:
“The Constitution’s intent when we’re under attack from outside is to (…)

By Conn Hallinan
In a 2002 Le Monde Diplomatique article titled ’Constructing Catastrophe,’ Israeli journalist Amon Kapeliouk challenged one of the central myths about the ongoing conflict between Israel and the Palestinians. To wit: that Palestinian President Yasir Arafat was offered a great deal at the Camp David talks in July 2000, but turned it down and launched Intifada II.
What is so damaging about the Camp David myth is that it perpetuates the fable that the Palestinian side of (…)

By Michelle Goldberg
Yes, the president committed a federal crime by wiretapping Americans, say constitutional scholars, former intelligence officers and politicians. What’s missing is the political will to impeach him.
Is spying on US citizens an impeachable offense. US President Bush would rather not talk about it.
Is spying on US citizens an impeachable offense. US President Bush would rather not talk about it. On Tuesday, Dec. 20, Washington Post polling editor Richard Morin (…)

Instead of honoring the diversity that has changed baseball forever, Bush played vendetta politics with Cuba’s national baseball team.
By Dave Zirin
This March’s "World Series of Baseball" was supposed to celebrate the explosion of diversity that has forever altered the Major Leagues. Teams from the Dominican Republic, Japan, Puerto Rico, and the little seen but highly regarded Cuban national team were going to play the United States in an unprecedented contest to redefine the slogan (…)

by JEREMY BRECHER & BRENDAN SMITH
Congress passed just before Christmas legislation allowing evidence obtained by torture to be used against Guantánamo captives and denying them the right to habeas corpus—the right to make the government justify their captivity before a court. Christopher Anders of the American Civil Liberties Union calls these provisions "horrific precedents" that are "counterproductive and against the rule of law." Michael Ratner, head of the Center for (…)

By Yifat Susskind
The Bush Administration is touting Iraq’s December 15 election as a giant leap forward for freedom guaranteed to ignite fervor for democracy across the entire Middle East. But closer to home, the Administration has discovered that democracy has created a monster and that the monster is democracy. In Latin America and the Caribbean, popular movements are demanding that the United States’ "gift to the world" make good on its promise of majority rule. That would (…)