contributions

by Robert Fisk
He was everything loyal and everything miserable about the Palestinian dream. I have a tape recording of Arafat, sitting with me on a cold, dark mountainside outside the Lebanese port of Tripoli in 1983 where the old man - he was always called the old man, long before he was elderly - was under siege by the Syrian army, another of the Arab "brothers" who wanted to lead the Palestinian cause and ended up fighting Palestinians rather than Israelis.
Even worse, the Syrians (…)

A five-year-old Iraqi girl has arrived in Britain, having been orphaned when a US missile destroyed her family’s home in Falluja.
Ayisha Saleem was brought here six days ago by her uncle, Mohammad, who decided to leave after the 4 October attack.
The US military says it used precision strikes to take out insurgents loyal to Abu Musab al-Zaqawi.
The attack happened before it stepped up its offensive on the city last week.
Mohammad said he was dazed when he first heard of the bombing. (…)

New York Times
The e-mail messages and Web postings had all the twitchy cloak-and-dagger thrust of a Hollywood blockbuster. "Evidence mounts that the vote may have been hacked," trumpeted a headline on the Web site CommonDreams.org. "Fraud took place in the 2004 election through electronic voting machines," declared BlackBoxVoting.org.
In the space of seven days, an online market of dark ideas surrounding last week’s presidential election took root and multiplied.
But while the (…)

The voting machine controversy likely will linger after a look at the systems source code software from Ohio-based Diebold yielded reports of numerous bugs.
Diebold was one of three companies — including Election Systems & Software and Sequoia — that provided updated technology for the 2004 election.
Computer Science Professor Avi Rubin of John Hopkins University analyzed Diebold’s 47,609 lines of code and found it uses an encryption key that was hacked in 1997 and no longer is used (…)

By Nick Meo in Kabul
The Afghan government is to request the return of the "Dead Sea Scrolls of Buddhism" from the British Library, amid concerns the priceless manuscripts were looted during civil war in the early nineties.
Afghanistan’s Minister of Culture will formally ask for the 2000-year-old scrolls to be sent from London to the newly restored Kabul Museum in the next few weeks as part of a campaign to bring home stolen treasures from foreign collections.
The British Library, (…)

By Jim Lobe
WASHINGTON - The death of Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat will test whether US President George W Bush intends to maintain his staunch support for Israel’s right-wing government at the risk of further alienating the US’s European allies and Muslim public opinion.
It will also provide an early insight into whether the hardline coalition that has dominated US foreign policy since September 11, 2001 - aggressive nationalists, neo-conservatives who support Israel’s governing (…)

by Jane Stillwater
Sometimes I think politics is like watching the Simpson show. "I actually found a new Attorney General who is a worse civil rights abuser than John Ashcroft!" Who said that? Krusty the Clown?
And what about the 2004 election? An estimated NINE MILLION Americans cast questionably weird votes. Would Montgomery Burns be that evil? Would Homer Simpson be that dumb?
"If you want to find out if there are nine million fake votes," said my friend Joe, "just tally up the (…)

A Distant Mirror of Holy War
By Norman Solomon
On the surface, the most prominent headline on the New York Times front page Nov. 10 was simply matter-of-fact: "In Taking Fallujah Mosque, Victory by the Inch." Yet it’s not mere happenstance that American forces have bombed many of Fallujah’s mosques.
For public consumption, U.S. military officers — like their civilian bosses and American journalists — usually discuss this war in secular, even antiseptic terms. When the Times quoted (…)

By LORI MATSUKAWA
Alvin Clark, of Tacoma, developed aplastic anemia he believes is related to his exposure to depleted uranium dust after he was hit by friendly fire in Saudi Arabia.
Shells and armor used by U.S. tanks, gunships and helicopters are often made of depleted uranium because depleted uranium, or D.U., is a heavy metal, able to pierce armored vehicles or resist being pierced. But it’s also radioactive, a waste product of nuclear enrichment plants like Hanford.
A pentagon (…)

by Naomi Klein
P. Diddy announced on the weekend that his “Vote or Die” campaign will live on. The hip-hop mogul’s voter-registration drive during the U.S. presidential elections was, he said, merely “phase one, step one for us to get people engaged.”
Fantastic. I have a suggestion for phase two: P. Diddy, Ben Affleck, Leonardo DiCaprio and the rest of the self-described “Coalition of the Willing” should take their chartered jet and fly to Fallujah, where their efforts are desperately (…)