contributions

How long will it take for us to realise what we have done to Iraq, asks Robert Manne.
Last week, as the ferocious battle for Fallujah began, the neo-conservative "scholar", Robert Kagan, paid a triumphal visit to Australia. Kagan was received by the Prime Minister. An edited version of the lecture he delivered was published in five newspapers. He was interviewed, respectfully, by almost every serious public affairs program on the ABC. Unhappily there was in all this virtually no discussion (…)

by Rory McCarthy in Baghdad and Peter Beaumont
The full cost of the battle of Falluja emerged last night as large numbers of wounded civilians were evacuated to hospitals in Baghdad, as insurgents stepped up retaliatory attacks in other cities.
As the first Red Crescent aid convoy was allowed into Falluja, Iraq’s Health Minister, Alaa Alwan, said ambulances had begun transferring a ’significant number’ of injured civilians out of the battle zone, although he did not specify how many. (…)

I hope you’ll read a paper called The Unexplained Exit Poll Discrepancy,
http://bellaciao.org/en/article.php3?id_article=4347
released on Thursday by Prof. Steven Freeman of the University of Pennsylvania. It’s worth seeing in its entirety. A lot of other folks have been posting about it. Rightly so.
What jumped out at a lot of people on the night of the election was how the "errors" in the exit polls consistently occured in the same direction.
The thing about genuine errors, (…)

Peter Beaumont says that American troops feared they would have to fight a bitter street conflict at the start of the invasion. Now civilians are paying the price in Falluja
Their story is the hardest to tell: that of the Iraqi civilians who have remained in the besieged city of Falluja. They have no embedded Western journalists to speak for them, only a few Iraqi correspondents. They cannot leave their homes because of the risk of constant sniper fire. They have no water to drink, no (…)

As the Americans move street by bloody street towards control of the insurgents’ stronghold, aid agencies warn of a humanitarian catastrophe.
by Kim Sengupta and Raymond Whitaker report
Victory was being declared yesterday in the battle of Fallujah, with 1,000 rebels reported dead, hundreds more in custody and spectacular footage from embedded television crews, showing Marines charging through deserted neighbourhoods.
"It’s like those pictures from the advance into Baghdad," said one (…)

By ALEXANDER COCKBURN
The United States is bringing "democracy" to Iraq on the same terms that the Russians imposed its federal mandate on Chechnya, a region which has Iraq’s future written in its rubble. The advocates of intervention in Iraq, the epigones of Wolfowitz , should take a walk through Grozny, and measure against its ruins the fate of their proclaimed ambition to bring democracy to Fallujah and other cities in Iraq.
In the waning weeks of the US election campaign the antiwar (…)

Steven F. Freeman, PhD
University of Pennsylvania
November 11, 2004
stfreema@sas.upenn.edu
Most Americans who had listened to radio or surfed the Internet on Election Day this year, sat down to watch election night coverage expecting that John Kerry had been elected President. Exit polls showed him ahead in nearly every battleground state, in many cases by sizable margins. As usually happens in close elections, undecided voters broke heavily toward the challenger, and the Democratic (…)

by Uri Avnery
“Rejoice not when thine enemy falleth, and let not thine heart be glad when he stumbleth, Lest the Lord see it, and it displease him.” This biblical injunction (Proverbs 24:17) is one of the most profound Jewish moral tenets. In this connection, Israel is very far from being a “Jewish State”, as it likes to define itself. The disgusting filth poured out over Yasser Arafat during the last few days in practically all the Israeli media makes one ashamed to be an Israeli.
The (…)

Most voters in Ohio chose Kerry. Here’s how the votes vanished.
by Greg Palast
This February, Ken Blackwell, Ohio’s Secretary of State, told his State Senate President, "The possibility of a close election with punch cards as the state’s primary voting device invites a Florida-like calamity." Blackwell, co-chair of Bush-Cheney reelection campaign, wasn’t warning his fellow Republican of disaster, but boasting of an opportunity to bring in Ohio for Team Bush no matter what the voters (…)

Latino leaders are disputing election exit polls that indicate a more than 10 percent increase in support for George W. Bush in 2004 compared to 2000. They point to an exit poll designed to reflect Latino demographics indicating that the Latino vote stayed at 2-to-1 for the Democratic ticket.
An exit poll by Edison Media Research for major media outlets, including AP, CBS, CNN and NBC, widely publicized its projection that the Latino presidential vote was 53 percent for Kerry to 44 percent (…)