contributions

By Ehsan Ahrari
Iyad Allawi, the US-hand-picked prime minister of the Iraqi Interim Government (IIG) and a wanna-be prime minister of the elected government, is on his way to Washington to accomplish several objectives. First and foremost is to get his master, President George W Bush, re-elected. Second, to get an endorsement of his performance thus far from the international community by appearing at the United Nations. Third, to take that endorsement back to Iraq and hope that it will (…)

By PAUL CRAIG ROBERTS
Excuse me, but the story is not CBS and the George W. Bush National Guard documents.
The story is: How did the US Congress, the opposition party, the news media, and the US public let the Bush administration start a war based on phony documents?
If someone deceived CBS and passed off forged documents as real, at least CBS consulted experts about the documents before going on the air.
Speaking of questionable documents, the Bush administration has swallowed a (…)

by David Cole
On September 2 a federal judge in Detroit threw out the only jury conviction the Justice Department has obtained on a terrorism charge since 9/11. In October 2001, shortly after the men were initially arrested, Attorney General John Ashcroft heralded the case in a national press conference as evidence of the success of his anti-terror campaign. The indictment alleged that the defendants were associated with Al Qaeda and planning terrorist attacks. But Ashcroft held no news (…)

A new group aims to expose how billions of pounds which should be funding development is being hidden offshore
by Duncan Campbell
LONDON - Billions of pounds, enough to pay for the entire primary health and education needs of the world’s developing countries, are being siphoned off through offshore companies and tax havens, according to a body formed to expose the offenders.
Aid organisations are alarmed that money which should be used for building the infrastructure of the poorest (…)

By David H. Hackworth
By April 2004, rapes and assaults of American female soldiers were epidemic in the Middle East. But even after more than 83 incidents were reported during a six-month period in Iraq and Kuwait, the 24-hour rape hotline in Kuwait was still being answered by a machine advising callers to leave a phone number where they could be reached.
“Nobody had a telephone number, for crying out loud,” says Brig. Gen. Janis Karpinski, then commanding general of the 800th Military (…)

The weekend’s leaked No 10 papers have revealed the depth of official fears about the legality of the Iraq invasion - and the disaster it presaged
by Richard Norton-Taylor
Leaked Whitehall documents present an extraordinarily revealing picture of how Tony Blair’s closest advisers and his foreign secretary, Jack Straw, warned him of the pitfalls of following the Bush administration’s march to war against Iraq.
For Blair, it was inconceivable that the US would invade without Britain. He (…)

Well - just fancy that! David Blunkett is scheduled to speak at two ’fringe’ events at this year’s Labour Party Conference in Brighton. And by a most remarkable coincidence, both of those events are sponsored by recipients of big fat contracts doled out by... er.... Blunkett’s Home Office!
Who’da thought it, huh?
On Monday 27th September, Blunkett gets to indulge in his favourite pastime of talking patronizing and authoritarian drivel about ’citizenship’. And all courtesy of Siemens (…)

by Joseph Cirincione
Every major military indicator shows the war in Iraq is going badly. The United States is losing ground, losing hearts and minds, and losing the war. Three U.S. soldiers have been killed in Iraq on average every day in September, up from August, which was up from July. Major cities are now considered too unsafe for U.S. forces to enter, including Fallujah, Samarra, Ramadi and other cities in Iraq’s Sunni regions. The Shia populated urban areas are not-for the moment-in (…)

Murderous barbaric butchers betray cause
by Timothy Bancroft-Hinchey
So, Eugene Armstrong has been beheaded. The tape has been sent to the Internet. A victory for senselessness, idiocy, butchery, cruelty, mindless violence, perpetrated by the legions of Baal.
What is the difference between slitting the throat of an American contractor and blasting away the limbs of an Iraqi child with a cluster bomb?
What is the difference between killing an American civilian and killing an Iraqi (…)

by Michael Berglin
The US is the largest single user of depleted uranium (DU) in weaponry. It is also the largest seller and exporter of depleted uranium weapon technology.
DU is used in smart bombs, bunker busters, anti-tank weapons, and the tow missiles. All very highly effective. As we saw in Gulf War I, the US bunker buster bombs tipped with DU were penetrating concrete shielding up to 10 feet thick
The bunker buster"s effectiveness is that it can penetrate and then explode - (…)