contributions

By Michael Georgy
BAGHDAD (Reuters) - The beheading of hostage Ken Bigley horrified the world. It sickened Iraq’s top pathologist too, but he is getting used to seeing severed heads.
"It was barbaric, but we see all kinds of things here in forensic pathology and beheadings are on the rise. It is the biggest trend by far. Iraq is totally out of control," Faik Bakr told Reuters at his morgue in Baghdad.
Bigley, a 62-year-old engineer, was beheaded with a knife on Thursday after his (…)

PA spokesman calls intelligence warnings weeks before attack ’peculiar’
Palestinian Authority Chairman Yasser Arafat hinted yesterday Israel was behind the massive suicide attacks in Sinai last week and said the PA is in discussions with the Egyptian government concerning the charge.
Thursday’s massive bomb attack on a Red Sea resort in Taba, just across the border in Egypt, left about three dozen people dead.
Referencing Israel’s Shin Bet head Avi Dichter’s warning about the (…)

By Amiram Barkat
A few weeks ago, a senior Greek Orthodox clergyman in Israel attended a meeting at a government office in Jerusalem’s Givat Shaul quarter. When he returned to his car, an elderly man wearing a skullcap came and knocked on the window. When the clergyman let the window down, the passerby spat in his face.
The clergyman prefered not to lodge a complaint with the police and told an acquaintance that he was used to being spat at by Jews. Many Jerusalem clergy have been (…)

Evidence is beginning to mount that the authorities of at least four countries (Switzerland, Italy, U.K. and U.S.A.) are involved in last week’s seizure of two of Indymedia’s servers that brought down more than 20 of the Indymedia network’s web sites and several internet radio streams. Indymedia has yet to receive any official statement or information about what the order entailed or why it was issued.
An FBI spokesperson, Joe Parris, confirmed to Agence France-Presse that the FBI issued a (…)

An exhibit that speaks directly to our hearts and reminds us of the human cost of war.
by Mary Ellen McNish
Over 1,000 pairs of empty combat boots tagged with the names of U.S. soldiers who died in the Iraq war ­ will be displayed, together with a 24-foot “wall” of names and incidents identifying Iraqi civilian deaths.
The Eyes Wide Open exhibition is a multimedia journey through the words, images, and sounds of the Iraq war. Visitors move through a vivid memorial to the war’s soldier (…)

Bush and Cheney seem to be following Rumsfeld in his creativement faux mea culpa.
by Michael Berglin
The administration is trying to pass off a faux mea culpa in telling the US and the world that the intel on Iraq’s Weapons of Mass Destruction was bogus. Layer by layer, the administration’s justifications for the war in Iraq are crumbling. More intel has surfaced to indicate that Iraq’s WDM program had been sunset as early as 1991.
Even as late as one week ago, both Bush and Cheney (…)

by Kim Bullimore
Seven days after the Israeli military campaign in the northern Gaza region began on September 28, 100 Palestinians - one third of them under the age of 15 - have been killed, while more than 300 civilians, including more than 80 children, have been wounded, 168 houses have been demolished, along with kindergartens, dozens of grocery stores, schools and olive groves. Electricity has been cut off and tens of thousands of people have been left without drinking water.
The (…)

by Michael Hill
TROY, N.Y. — Amid the torrent of jabber in Internet chat rooms - flirting by QTpie and BoogieBoy, arguments about politics and horror flicks - are terrorists plotting their next move?
The government certainly isn’t discounting the possibility. It’s taking the idea seriously enough to fund a yearlong study on chat room surveillance under an anti-terrorism program.
A Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute computer science professor hopes to develop mathematical models that can (…)

More and more U.S. soldiers are speaking out against the war in Iraq — and some are refusing to fight.
by David Goodman
After returning home to Pennsylvania, Mike Hoffman founded Iraq Veterans Against the War. "You realize that the people to blame for this are not the ones you are fighting."
MIKE HOFFMAN would not be the guy his buddies would expect to see leading a protest movement. The son of a steelworker and a high school janitor from Allentown, Pennsylvania, he enlisted in the (…)

“And when they got there the cupboard was bare”
By Maarten Vanheuverswyn
“Wait until Charlie gets back with the final report,” George Bush said confidently in June in reply to reporters fishing after a confession of the president that there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. Last week, on October 6, Charles Duelfer, chief US weapons inspector, finally presented his report on the question. The outcome of the report comes as no surprise but nevertheless caused a stir, not least (…)