contributions

By William Rivers Pitt "The vice president, I’m surprised to hear him talk about records. When he was one of 435 members of the United States House, he was one of 10 to vote against Head Start, one of four to vote against banning plastic weapons that can pass through metal detectors. He voted against the Department of Education. He voted against funding for Meals on Wheels for seniors. He voted against a holiday for Martin Luther King. He voted against a resolution calling for the release (…)

A CIA report has found no conclusive evidence that former Iraqi President Saddam Hussein harboured Al Queda leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, which the Bush administration asserted before the invasion of Iraq.
"There’s no conclusive evidence the Saddam Hussein regime had harboured Zarqawi," a US official said yesterday about the CIA findings.
The official, speaking on condition of anonymity, stressed that the report, which was a mix of new information and a look at some older information, did (…)

A BUZZFLASH EDITORIAL
You’d just as soon have Dick Cheney over for a cup of coffee as have the local mortician over for a cup of tea.
But let’s face it, tonight’s debate pitted the Democratic vice-presidential candidate against the Republican Vice-President, who is really the acting President of the United States. Although as boring as drying wallpaper and as brazen a liar as a ballroom pickpocket, Cheney clearly, once again, proved that junior is just the pedigree puppet whose strings (…)

by George Wright and Sarah Left
National polls conducted since the televised Bush-Kerry debate on September 30 showed a surge in support for the Democratic challenger, and this seems to have been reflected in surveys of the all-important swing states.
A SurveyUSA poll in Ohio yesterday - just hours ahead of the locally-filmed vice-presidential debate - found that John Kerry had bounced back from a four-point deficit. The poll said 49% of voters supported him, against 48% for George Bush. (…)

Waving white flags, Iraqis have fled Samarra on river boats as US forces claimed victory over insurgents in an offensive aimed at taking control of rebel-held cities.
Iraq’s US-backed interim government is hoping American and Iraqi forces will crush a bloody insurgency and take back all of the country before the scheduled January elections.
But Sunday’s operation in Samarra, north of Baghdad, brought condemnation from residents about the cost in lives and suffering, and guerrillas in the (…)

Rafah, Gaza Strip - Israeli soldiers shot dead a 13-year-old Palestinian schoolgirl in the southern Gaza Strip on Tuesday after she approached an army watchtower in a tense border zone, witnesses said.
An Israeli military source said the girl was shot inside a restricted area when soldiers suspected she had a bomb. Palestinian medics said she had been hit by 20 bullets.
Iman al-Hams and two other girls, all of them wearing school uniforms, passed a watchtower in Rafah refugee camp near (…)

Israel calls its latest murder spree ‘Days of Penitence’. I often wonder who dreams up those supposedly inspirational titles designed to make uniformed killers feel better about their ruthless missions.
Just as the US military brought ‘Enduring Freedom’ to thousands of lifeless Iraqi women and children, Israel has forced over 60 Palestinian residents of Gaza to ‘atone’ with their lives for the firing of rockets into the southern Israeli town of Sderot, resulting in the demise of two (…)

By DAVE LINDORFF
The man of a hundred voices, Harry Shearer, host of NPR’s "Le Show," recently did a skit about Sen. John Kerry’s training for the first debate, which featured a soprano-voiced aide who would ask the verbose and vacuous Democratic presidential contender a mock question, and then press a button to administer an electric shock the minute Kerry started off on a windy subordinate clause or an equivocation.
It was extremely funny, and the way Kerry kept to tightly scripted (…)

Suzanne Goldenberg in Washington
America’s former proconsul in Baghdad delivered a damning critique of the Bush administration’s policy on Iraq yesterday, saying the US had made two grave errors of judgment in the early days of the war.
Paul Bremer, who was America’s most senior official in Baghdad until the handover last June, said the US committed two major blunders which compromised the course of events in Iraq: it went to war without enough troops and it did not contain the looting (…)

By Daniel Patrick Welch
There comes a time in every horror story where the true face of evil must make itself known. In fact, in every narrative, the revelation of the Man Behind the Curtain is a poignant moment. In Oz, the wizard is finally shown to be a tired old man in the corner manipulating machinery to create the impression of power. When Zod and his cohorts leveled the White House in Superman II, he saw through the stand-in for the President. “No one who commands so many could (…)