contributions

By Nathan Guttman
WASHINGTON - Larry Franklin, the Pentagon analyst suspected of passing classified material about Iran to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, has never hidden his unequivocal support of Israel. Colleagues from the Near East and South Asia desk at the Defense Department said yesterday that his sympathy for Israel was overt and public - he didn’t refrain from praising Israel and he held aggressive views about several Arab governments, primarily the ayatollahs’ (…)

By MARC SANTORA
For every young man with an unorthodox piercing in a seemingly painful place, there was an elderly woman who walked in the midday sun for hours.
For each wildly costumed, madly gyrating, drum-beating protester, there was a family that had made the trip into Manhattan together to march as one.
And for all the chants denouncing President Bush as a terrorist, for all the obscenities screamed full throated, there were just as many people, young and old, who expressed in (…)

By Joshua Micah Marshall, Laura Rozen, and Paul Glastris
On Friday evening, CBS News reported that the FBI is investigating a suspected mole in the Department of Defense who allegedly passed to Israel, via a pro-Israeli lobbying organization, classified American intelligence about Iran. The focus of the investigation, according to U.S. government officials, is Larry Franklin, a veteran Defense Intelligence Agency Iran analyst now working in the office of the Pentagon’s number three (…)

Today’s huge demonstration in New York City revealed the depth of opposition both to Bush’s criminal war in Iraq and its reactionary assault on civil rights and civil liberties at home. The Mayor and the police worked to stifle and limit dissent by restricting free speech rights and by creating a climate of fear and intimidation. They were assuming that people would capitulate without a struggle.
In the last few weeks in New York City, however, the opposite happened. People got mad, they (…)

The unseen cost of war: American minds
By M.L. LYKE
The soldier’s eyes dart from ceiling to floor, window to door. The rough hands — hands that poked dead animals and probed human body bags in search of enemy explosives — wrap around a cup of high-octane buzz he doesn’t need. He’s wired, wound tight — a buff, tough sergeant ready to explode inside a strip-mall Starbucks.
"I knew I had a problem in Iraq when I wanted to start machine-gunning whole towns," says the National Guardsman, (…)

By John Whitesides
NEW YORK - Hundreds of thousands of protesters flooded the streets of New York to condemn President Bush on the eve of the Republican convention on Sunday, but Vice President Dick Cheney praised Bush’s "calm" leadership after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.
Beating drums and shouting "no more Bush," a largely peaceful mile-long column of protesters marched past a heavily fortified Madison Square Garden to raise their voices against the war in Iraq and other Bush policies. (…)

Hundreds of thousands of people have rallied in New York against President Bush, as his Republican Party gathers for its national convention.
Speakers on the first day of the convention will include the former mayor of New York, Rudolph Giuliani, and Senator John McCain.
A massive security sweep has virtually sealed off the convention venue.
Police officers with dogs, bomb-detecting equipment and riot gear have closed off the surrounding streets.
Delegates to the convention, due to (…)

by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
Delivered on the steps at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington D.C. on August 28, 1963
Audio Of Speech
I am happy to join with you today in what will go down in history as the greatest demonstration for freedom in the history of our nation.
Five score years ago, a great American, in whose symbolic shadow we stand signed the Emancipation Proclamation. This momentous decree came as a great beacon light of hope to millions of Negro slaves who had been seared (…)

by Manuel Valenzuela
Gunboat soldiers of wars past and brutal, bitter at the truths spoken thirty years ago, have taken us back to bloody deltas and haunting demons, purposefully smearing one man and making an entire nation relive memories still too fragile to exorcise from the collective mind of the American people. Traversing waters of painful history so that we ignore the now toxic waterways of the Tigris and Euphrates, tools of proxy and pawns of convenience have only succeeded in (…)

by Grant McCool
NEW YORK - Hundreds of thousands of demonstrators toting colourful banners and shouting "no more Bush" have taken to the streets of New York, the day before the Republican convention is to open, to decry the U.S.-led war in Iraq and President George W. Bush’s policies.
Organisers for United for Peace and Justice coalition estimated 400,000 people marched for more than five hours in summer heat and humidity. Police declined to estimate the size of the crowd, but it (…)