contributions

by IPR and Ken Anderson
UNITED KINGDOM — Acting under a court order, Texas-based web hosting company
Rackspace Managed Hosting handed over two UK based servers containing Indymedia
websites to government agents Thursday morning. The order was apparently issued
by a U.S. District Court and served by the FBI, on behalf of a foreign government. .../...
http://magic-city-news.com/article_2243.shtml

By Deborah Zabarenko
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Saddam Hussein avoided telephones, had a special laboratory test his food and went on a palace-building binge, all in a bid to shore up his personal security, a U.S. report says,
The comprehensive report by the chief U.S. weapons inspector in Iraq portrayed the deposed Iraqi leader as a typical dictator who ruled by fear, but who became increasingly paranoid and isolated in the years before his 2003 capture.
"By Saddam’s own account, he had (…)

200 American nukes said to be in Western Europe
by Dmitry Litovkin
Washington is seriously concerned that Russia has incompletely fulfilled its obligations to reduce tactical nuclear arms in Europe. The statement has been released by Stephen Rademaker, Assistant Secretary of State for Arms Control, after the talks with the Russian specialists. The talks were devoted to issues of control over nuclear, chemical and biological weapons.
According to the American official, the European (…)

The time has come to stop using the flag as a blindfold, to stop waving our guns and our gods at each other, to take a close look at the facts which have emerged from the attacks on the World Trade Towers and to recognize the very real possibility, indeed probability, that We The People are the victims of a gigantic and deadly hoax.
In a normal terrorist event, the terrorists cannot wait to take credit, in order to link the violence to the socio-political intent of the terrorist (…)

By Sultan Shahin
NEW DELHI - Deeply perturbed over the development, India has asked the United States to withdraw sanctions it has imposed against two Indian nuclear scientists accused by Washington of transferring technology for weapons of mass destruction and missile secrets to Iran.
New Delhi is particularly worried about the timing. This has happened soon after President George W Bush’s Democratic challenger Senator John F Kerry and then he himself named nuclear proliferation as "the (…)

By CHRISTOPHER BRAUCHLI
Corruption-the most infallible symptom of constitutional liberty. Edward Gibbon
Nostalgia. It’s what we all have when we compare now with then. Contrast Tom Delay’s scandals with that of Wilbur Mills.
Mr. Mills was chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee and one of the most powerful members of Congress. His career took a nose dive as a result of an incident in 1974 when Park Service Police stopped a car in which Wilbur and Annabell Battistella had been (…)

By Jim Lobe
WASHINGTON - Is there anything at all left of the Bush administration’s case for going to war in Iraq or, for that matter, the way it has been fought?
The answer seems increasingly doubtful given what appears to be an accelerating cascade of news, leaks and admissions by senior administration officials over the past several weeks. Consider what has been disclosed in just the last few days.
On Monday, Pentagon chief Donald Rumsfeld told the Council on Foreign Relations in (…)

By David H. Hackworth
Recently, when John Kerry brought up the possibility of a return to the draft, SecDef Donald Rumsfeld was quick to respond that Kerry was full of it.
But my take is that Kerry is right on the mark. Not only because Rummy has been flat wrong on every major military call regarding Iraq, but because this is a war that won’t be won by smart weapons or the sledgehammer firepower we see every night on the tube.
Right now - with both our regular and Reserve soldiers (…)

by Jason Leopold
John Dean, the former counsel to President Richard Nixon, made a case last year for impeaching President George W. Bush if the president intentionally misled Congress and the public into backing a war with Iraq.
"To put it bluntly, if Bush has taken Congress and the nation into war based on bogus information, he is cooked," Dean wrote in a June 6, 2003 column for findlaw.com. "Manipulation or deliberate misuse of national security intelligence data, if proven, could be (…)

By PATRICK COCKBURN
American generals in Iraq triumphantly announced at the weekend that they had successfully taken over Samarra and killed 125 insurgents. They failed to mention that this is the third time they have captured this particular city on the Tigris river north of Baghdad in the past 18 months.
The campaign to eliminate the no-go areas under rebel control in Iraq is getting into full swing. Fallujah is being bombed every night and may soon be subjected to ground assault. (…)