contributions

Jeff Gannon, Johnny Gosch, Hunter Thompson, and Bohemian Grove snuff porn Friday, February 25, 2005 I’ve been watching this story percolate since the weekend, and with Thursday’s return of "Jeff Gannon" to the blogosphere with a column entitled "Fear and Loathing in the Press Room" really bringing it all full circle, several questions are begged here.
As the Jeff Gannon story progressed and turned into a Bush White House homosexual prostitution scandal, Internet (…)

A U.S. military contractor in Iraq is at the center of a controversy over how American-forces disbursed and accounted for hundreds of millions of dollars in Iraq.
The firm, Custer Battles is being charged in a lawsuit of defrauding the Coalition Provisional Authority of tens of millions of dollars during work in Iraq, which included securing Baghdad International Airport.
Two former employees sued the company last year under the False Claims Act, seeking to recover damages on behalf of (…)

by Ben Frank
In the first two months of 2005 US casualties in Iraq have more than doubled over the first two months of 2004.
If this pattern continues, more than 100 US troops will die next month, and more than 200 will die in April.
The Question of the Day is:
Why does the United States continue to send young Americans and billions of dollars to Iraq? Are US soldiers really ’spreading freedom’ ... or is this about oil and strategic positioning via the 14 ’enduring bases’ the US is (…)

Peter Benenson 1921-2005 Founder of Amnesty International
by Antony Barnett
There are not many newspaper articles that can genuinely claim to have changed the world for the better. But on Sunday, 28 May 1961, The Observer published a campaigning piece on the front of its Weekend Review section.
The article was entitled ’The Forgotten Prisoners’ and it was by Peter Benenson, a 33-year old Eton-educated London lawyer.
Benenson had been angered after learning about two Portuguese (…)

by Gar Alperovitz Listening to the debate between the Administration and even its most adventurous critics one would imagine that only an extremely limited range of Social Security options are even conceivable. One would also imagine that we live in an extremely poor society which is ultimately going to have to find ways to squeeze its seniors financially or somehow we will all perish. The truth is radically different.
This is the wealthiest nation in the history of the world. A serious (…)

New Report Details the Politicization of the Social Security Administration Under President Bush
WASHINGTON - Today Reps. Henry A. Waxman, Rep. Charles B. Rangel, and Rep. Sander M. Levin, along with Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi, Democratic Whip Steny Hoyer, and Reps. Obey, Miller, and DeLauro, released a new report that shows how the Social Security Administration has modified its communications strategy to undermine public confidence in Social Security.
The report, based on a review (…)

Project Censored Award Winner
Preventive Psychiatry E-Newsletter charged Monday that the reason Veterans Affairs Secretary Anthony Principi stepped down earlier this month was the growing scandal surrounding the use of uranium munitions in the Iraq War.
Writing in Preventive Psychiatry E-Newsletter No. 169, Arthur N. Bernklau, executive director of Veterans for Constitutional Law in New York, stated, “The real reason for Mr. Principi’s departure was really never given, however a special (…)

by Mark Sherman WASHINGTON - A federal judge ordered the Bush administration Monday to either charge terrorism suspect Jose Padilla with a crime or release him after more than 2 1/2 years in custody.
U.S. District Judge Henry Floyd in Spartanburg, S.C., said the government can not hold Padilla indefinitely as an "enemy combatant," a designation President Bush gave him in 2002.
"The court finds that the president has no power, neither express nor implied, neither constitutional nor (…)

by Davud Pratt, Foreign Editor A running joke in Washington late last year held that Langley, the CIA’s home in Virginia, was changing its name to Fallujah after the restive Iraqi town then held by insurgents. Like Fallujah, Langley - according to some White House wags - was full of rebels that needed to be cleared out. This would inevitably lead to lots of casualties along the way. But putting the jokes and bravado aside, many at the CIA’s longtime base already knew that the winds of (…)

by Sara B. Miller HUNTINGTON, VT. - This is a town with no diners, one church, two general stores, and 1,800 people. When the kindergarten teacher’s son returned from Iraq after 10 months, the potluck church dinner in his honor was so packed no one had room to sit. Only a handful of the more than 200,000 men and women who have been deployed to Iraq come from this sleepy whistle-stop. But everyone seems to know someone who has served, even died, there: a friend’s husband, a neighbor, the (…)