contributions

By Robert Burns
WASHINGTON — September was the second-deadliest month of the year for U.S. forces in Iraq and brought to nearly 500 the number who have died since the insurgency escalated in late March.
The Pentagon announced Sunday evening that two soldiers died late last week of injuries suffered earlier in the month, and another was killed Sept. 30 by a roadside bomb. That brought the month’s death toll to 80, up from 65 in August and equal to the 80 who died in May.
The worst month (…)

Also concedes WMD claims about Iraq were proved wrong
by Jamie McIntyre
WASHINGTON (CNN) — Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld conceded Monday that U.S. intelligence was wrong in its conclusions that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, and appeared to back off earlier statements suggesting former Iraqi President Saddam Hussein had links to al Qaeda.
"Why the intelligence proved wrong (on WMDs), I’m not in a position to say," Rumsfeld said in remarks to the Council on Foreign Relations (…)

by JIM KRANE
BAGHDAD, Iraq - The U.S. military is fighting the most complex guerrilla war in its history, with 140,000 American soldiers trained for conventional warfare flailing against a thicket of insurgent groups with competing aims and no supreme leader.
The three dozen or so guerrilla bands agree on little beyond forcing the Americans out of Iraq.
In other U.S. wars, the enemy was clear. In Vietnam, a visible leader - Ho Chi Minh - led a single army fighting to unify the country (…)

By David McGlinchey
dmcglinchey@govexec.com
Some officials actively circumvent laws that protect federal employment rights for veterans and reservists and others view the regulations as "an annoyance," according to Office of Personnel Management Director Kay Coles James.
She singled out officials who attended a May meeting of the Chief Human Capital Officers Council at the Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington. That meeting was arranged, James said, in part to show personnel (…)

by Michael Tarazi
Israelis and Palestinians Israel’s untenable policy in the Middle East was more obvious than usual last week, as the Israeli Army made repeated incursions into Gaza, killing dozens of Palestinians in the deadliest attacks in more than two years, even as Prime Minister Ariel Sharon reiterated his plans to withdraw from the territory.
Israel’s overall strategy toward the Palestinians is ultimately self-defeating: It wants Palestinian land but not the Palestinians who (…)

by Louis Charbonneau
VIENNA - The world’s stockpiles of plutonium and highly enriched uranium useable in atomic weapons are growing, despite increasing fears about the security of nuclear materials, a U.S. based think-tank says in a new report.
The estimates of civilian and military stocks of plutonium and highly enriched uranium (HEU) — information treated by most governments as classified — were prepared by the Institute for Science and International Security (ISIS), run by former U.N. (…)

By Robin Wright and Thomas E. Ricks
The former U.S. official who governed Iraq after the invasion said yesterday that the United States made two major mistakes: not deploying enough troops in Iraq and then not containing the violence and looting immediately after the ouster of Saddam Hussein.
Ambassador L. Paul Bremer, administrator for the U.S.-led occupation government until the handover of political power on June 28, said he still supports the decision to intervene in Iraq but said a (…)

by John Nichols
Dick Cheney, who spent most of his administration’s first term in a secure undisclosed location, has been campaigning this fall in the Potemkin Villages of Republican reaction. As such, he has not faced much in the way of serious questioning from his audiences of party apparatchiks. Nor has he been grilled by the White House-approved journalistic commissars who travel with the vice president to take stenography when Cheney makes his daily prediction of the apocalypse that (…)

By William Rivers Pitt
"Down goes Frazier! Down goes Frazier! Down goes Frazier!" Howard Cosell
There was a President on that stage in Florida on Thursday night, and his name was not George.
This was supposed to be the debate that played to the strengths of Bush and his administration. Foreign policy in general and the protection of the United States from terrorism in particular, according to all the polls and every talking head within earshot, are the areas where George (…)

By Andrew Gumbel in Los Angeles
The last few classified pages of John Lennon’s controversial FBI file may soon see the light of day after a court rejected the argument that they could compromise relations with an unnamed foreign power - widely assumed to be Britain.
The ruling, by a federal judge in Los Angeles, marked the latest victory in a 21-year struggle by a southern California history professor to bring out the truth about the former Beatle and the FBI, which was put on his tail (…)