contributions

By JIM DWYER
After months of legal dickering, the city’s elaborate plans to steer antiwar protesters away from Central Park will be tested tomorrow by what is widely expected to be one of the city’s largest political demonstrations in decades.
Although the main protest group, United for Peace and Justice, failed to win a city permit to hold a formal rally on the park’s Great Lawn, it remains the ult`imate destination for many participants in the march, which some organizers believe could (…)

A top Pentagon analyst is under investigation for having allegedly spied for Israel, according to reports.
The FBI believes the Pentagon employee gave Israel access to secret material regarding US policy towards Iran, US TV network CBS has claimed.
Israel’s Washington embassy has denied the allegations, describing them as "completely false and outrageous".
CBS says the analyst worked on US policy in Iraq and has ties to leading officials in the Department of Defence.
The network said (…)

Marching after all
by Geov Parrish
On Sunday, despite all the legal roadblocks put in its way, a massive march will protest the Republican National Convention in New York City. The march — expected by its organizers, United for Peace and Justice, to draw a quarter of a million people — is the kickoff for what will doubtless be a week of tense standoff between anti-Bush protesters and the largest security apparatus ever assembled for a national political party convention.
Even getting (…)

Official: High-level Pentagon worker could have shaped policy
The FBI has evidence that a person who has been working at high levels in the Pentagon may be a spy for Israel, senior U.S. officials confirmed to CNN on Friday.
The suspect could have been in a position to influence Bush administration policy toward Iran and Iraq, the senior official said.
However, another government official said the suspect is "not in a level to influence policy."
"He is an analyst in an (…)

By Jonathan Schell
Is the United States — as so many have said, in celebration or dismay — a planet-mastering empire or not? The question presses upon us as George W. Bush gets ready to descend upon New York for the Republican convention, as he once descended upon the aircraft carrier Abraham Lincoln under the banner declaring "mission accomplished" in Iraq.
Just as the President’s landing on the Lincoln invited an assessment of the Iraq war, so now his visit to New York invites (…)

Christopher Bollyn
Lost in the media circus about the Iraq war, supposedly being fought to prevent
a tyrant from obtaining weapons of mass destruction, is the salient fact that
the United States and Britain are actively waging chemical and nuclear warfare
in Iraq - using depleted uranium munitions .../...

Robert Greenwald’s critically acclaimed political documentary, Uncovered: The War on Iraq, will open in Chicago on August 27 at the Landmark Century Theatre, 2828 N. Clark St. at 7:30 p.m. Opening night will be sponsored by Chicago’s very own national news magazine In These Times. Admission is $9.50.
The evening will include a panel discussion following the first screening with In These Times senior editors David Sirota, director of strategic communications for the Center for American (…)

This Strips Away the Last Vestiges of Moral Authority
By ROBIN COOK
Those close to him mutter, under their breath of course, that Tony Blair’s only moment of doubt over Iraq came in the wake of the exposure of the Abu Ghraib scandal.
This is plausible, as our Prime Minister possesses a Gladstonian moral imperative. He believes that any economy with the truth over the threat from Saddam’s vanishing weapons of mass disappearance would be forgiven in the short run by his electorate and in (…)

By Peter Popham in Rome
Military prosecutors in Italy believe Waffen SS troops who committed atrocities against Italian civilians in the last phase of the Second World War have been shielded from justice for decades by a secretive, Odessa-style organisation.
The prosecutors in the trial of seven former officers in Hitler’s Waffen SS in the north Italian city of La Spezia, accused of the 1944 murder of 560 villagers in the Tuscan village of Sant’Anna di Stazzema, refused to put their (…)

A protestor identified as Terra Lawson-Remer (upper right) lowers herself to a waiting police officer after she helped unfurl a banner on the facade of the Plaza Hotel in New York on August 26, 2004. The 60-foot banner reads ’Truth’ and ’Bush’ with arrows pointing in opposite directions. Two members of a protest group called Operation Sibyl rappelled down the facade to unfurl the banner. Photo by Peter Morgan/Reuters by Chaka Ferguson (…)