contributions

By MATT KELLEY
WASHINGTON — A federal judge has ordered the Pentagon to find and make public by next week any unreleased files about President Bush’s Vietnam-era Air National Guard service to resolve a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit filed by The Associated Press.
U.S. District Judge Harold Baer Jr. handed down the order late Wednesday in New York. The AP lawsuit already has led to the disclosure of previously unreleased flight logs from Bush’s days piloting F-102A fighters and other (…)

By Jeremy Laurance and David Usborne
The Government came under pressure yesterday to ban the use of the antidepressant drug Prozac in children after US regulators warned that it could increase the risk of suicide.
Prozac is the only antidepressant that doctors can prescribe to children in Britain following a safety review last year. The drug was singled out by the UK Medicines and Healthcare Products Regulatory Authority (MHRA) as the only one of the modern generation of antidepressants (…)

by Chris McGreal
Ariel Sharon has threatened that Yasser Arafat will meet the same fate as Hamas leaders who were assassinated earlier this year by the Israeli military.
In ambiguous comments to Israeli newspapers to mark the Jewish new year, the prime minister said he intends to force the Palestinian leader into exile. But he also hinted that Mr Arafat might be killed.
Speaking to Ma’ariv newspaper, Mr Sharon made direct reference to the Hamas spiritual leader, Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, (…)

by Judith Moriarty
A hundred thousand words have been written of the glories and the sufferings of war and still men of wealth and perverse corrupted character order up the killing of the multitudes.
Mantra’s of patriotism-fear-nationalism-rally the naïve youth of a land to fight for elusive slogans like; "liberation-freedom-liberty and democracy". Public relations schemes have recruiters in war-mongering busses; pull up in rust belt towns-ghettos and distant rural farmlands, promising (…)

by Justin Raimondo
"F*cking crazies" - that’s how Colin Powell described the neoconservatives to Britain’s Foreign Secretary Jack Straw during the run-up to the Iraq war, according to The Accidental American : Tony Blair and the Presidency, by BBC broadcaster James Naughtie, due to be released this week in the U.S. To which one can only add : you got that one right, brutha.
The neocons are certainly crazed in the megalomaniacal sense to suggest that the American response to 9/11 must be (…)

by wen MacAskill and Julian Borger
The United Nations secretary general, Kofi Annan, declared explicitly for the first time last night that the US-led war on Iraq was illegal.
Mr Annan said that the invasion was not sanctioned by the UN security council or in accordance with the UN’s founding charter. In an interview with the BBC World Service broadcast last night, he was asked outright if the war was illegal. He replied: "Yes, if you wish."
He then added unequivocally: "I have (…)

This Iraqi Kidnapping has the Mark of an Undercover Police Operation
by Naomi Klein and Jeremy Scahill
When Simona Torretta returned to Baghdad in March 2003, in the midst of the "shock and awe" aerial bombardment, her Iraqi friends greeted her by telling her she was nuts. "They were just so surprised to see me. They said, ’Why are you coming here? Go back to Italy. Are you crazy?’"
But Torretta didn’t go back. She stayed throughout the invasion, continuing the humanitarian work she (…)

The National Intelligence Council presented President Bush this summer with several pessimistic scenarios regarding the security situation in Iraq, including the possibility of a civil war there before the end of 2005.
In a highly classified National Intelligence Estimate, the council looked at the political, economic and security situation in the war-torn country and determined that at best stability in Iraq would be tenuous, a U.S. official said late Wednesday, speaking on the condition (…)

By Mark Benjamin, UPI
NEW YORK (UPI) Nearly 17,000 service members medically evacuated from Iraq and Afghanistan are absent from public Pentagon casualty reports commonly cited by newspapers, according to military data reviewed by United Press International. Most don’t fit the definition of casualties, according to the Pentagon, but a veterans’ advocate said they should all be counted.
The Pentagon has reported 1,019 dead and 7,245 wounded from Iraq.
The military has evacuated 16,765 (…)

by Barbara Adam, Bloomberg
Australian labor unions will take their protest over James Hardie Industries NV’s funding shortfall for asbestos victims to the U.S. today, seeking to extend their boycott of the company’s building products to its largest market.
KPMG estimated James Hardie’s asbestos liabilities to be A$1.57 billion ($1.1 billion), a New South Wales state government inquiry was told in June. The company allocated A$293 million in 2001 to a foundation to meet all compensation (…)