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AT LEAST five US officials given the job of organising Iraq’s prison system following the war have been linked to abuses of inmates at jails in the US, German NDR public television said today.
In an advance extract of its Panorama program, the station said that the US Justice Department had sent the men to Iraq knowing they were suspected of links to abuses.
It cited the already documented case of Lane McCotter, the former director of the Utah state department of corrections, who (…)

by DOUGLAS VALENTINE
The new book Guantanamo: What The World Should Know is an interview between author/editor Ellen Ray, and Michael Ratner, an eloquent human rights attorney and president of the Center for Constitutional Rights. Mr Ratner and his colleagues at the CCR have the distinction of being the first Americans to mount a legal challenge of the Kafkaesque detention and interrogation facilities the Bush Administration uses at the US military base in Guantanamo, Cuba, to incarcerate (…)

Bush’s campaign mastermind has a simple rule: attack your opponent’s strengths. As the polls show, it works.
by Paul Harris
Tiffany Watkins stood in front of a projection screen and went through her presentation to the convention delegates. Neither Watkins, nor the audience gathered in the plush New York hotel, were typical Republicans. They were all black. Nevertheless, Watkins, an operative from campaign HQ, urged them to get out the vote for President George W. Bush. ’We are not (…)

The United States and its allies have moved closer to capturing Osama bin Laden in the last two months, a top U.S. counterterrorism official said in a television interview aired Saturday.
“If he has a watch, he should be looking at it because the clock is ticking. He will be caught,” Joseph Cofer Black, the U.S. State Department coordinator for counterterrorism, told private Geo television network.
Asked if concrete progress had been made during the last two months, when Pakistan has (…)

By Jerry Seper
Press leaks describing an FBI investigation into questions of whether a Pentagon analyst handed over classified Defense Department documents on Iran that were passed to Israel may have derailed the bureau probe, law enforcement authorities said yesterday. "The investigation sort of evaporated when the leaks started," said one source familiar with the inquiry. "Investigators were watching the activities of a few people and now they know they’re being watched. It has (…)

By WILLIAM C. MANN
WASHINGTON (AP) - A former Senate Intelligence Committee chairman asserted Sunday that the general who ran the war in Afghanistan said more than a year before the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq that his resources were being shifted in preparation for taking on Saddam Hussein.
Sen. Bob Graham, D-Fla., contends that just months into combat in Afghanistan, Gen. Tommy Franks also told him that fighting terrorism in Somalia, Yemen and elsewhere should take priority over invading (…)

By John Gershman
(Posted with permission from Foreign Policy in Focus)
I. Executive summary
The Bush administration’s "war on terrorism" reflects a major failure of leadership and makes Americans more vulnerable rather than more secure. The administration has chosen a path to combat terrorism that has weakened multilateral institutions and squandered international goodwill. Not only has President George W Bush failed to support effective reconstruction in Afghanistan, but his war and (…)

by MATT KELLEY
WASHINGTON - Documents that should have been written to explain gaps in President Bush’s Texas Air National Guard service are missing from the military records released about his service in 1972 and 1973, according to regulations and outside experts.
For example, Air National Guard regulations at the time required commanders to write an investigative report for the Air Force when Bush missed his annual medical exam in 1972. The regulations also required commanders to (…)

By Bill Van Auken, SEP presidential candidate
George W. Bush’s closing speech Thursday night at the Republican National Convention should serve as a warning of what is being prepared by his administration in its pursuit of the interests of America’s ruling elite.
The festival of fear, intimidation and hatred staged inside Madison Square Garden carried with it the implicit threat of escalating war abroad and dictatorship at home. It expressed the perplexity of a ruling elite that (…)

Warner executives tell director David Russell logistical problems are preventing a pre-election release.
By Elaine Dutka
A clash between David O. Russell and Warner Bros. over the DVD re-release of his Gulf War film "Three Kings" intensified Thursday as studio executives informed the filmmaker the video could not be released before the November election.
The news came days after the movie studio’s decision to drop his 35-minute antiwar documentary, "Soldiers Pay," as a DVD bonus (…)