contributions

by Justin Raimondo
Amid the plethora of recent books on the rise of an American empire, and the veritable flood of magazine and newspaper articles on this topic, the Caxton Press, of Caldwell, Idaho, has done us all a great service by republishing the very best critique of the imperial impulse: Ex America, by Garet Garrett.
First published in 1953, as The People’s Pottage, Ex America is a collection of three essays: the first, "The Revolution Was," is the story of how the New Deal pulled (…)

By AMY GOODMAN
Mordechai Vanunu worked as a nuclear technician at Dimona, Israel’s secret nuclear installation from 1976 to 1985. He worked there at a time when Israel was insisting it would not be the first to introduce nuclear weapons to the Middle East. What Vanunu discovered is that Israel had secretly developed an extensive nuclear program, hiding its existence from the Israeli people and parliament, and the world.
Vanunu leaked information and photos of Israel’s nuclear weapons (…)

By Ramzy Baroud
Finally, the conflict in Darfur in western Sudan is a focal point in international diplomacy and media attention. This is the least to expect after months of bloody campaigns of murder, rape and dare I say, ethnic cleansing, starting as early as February 2003.
Almost all parties that have recently discovered the existence of Sudan’s western region, an area that compares to the size of France, are engaged in a war of words, propaganda if you wish. Even Muslims and Arabs, (…)

by Kate Kelland
When it comes to American presidential elections, blue blood counts.
So say British researchers who predict that Democratic challenger John Kerry will oust President George Bush on November 2 because he boasts more royal connections than his Republican rival.
After months of research into Mr Kerry’s ancestry, Burke’s Peerage, experts on British aristocracy, reported yesterday that the Vietnam war veteran is related to all the royal houses of Europe and can claim kinship (…)

by Ernesto Cienfuegos
Los Angeles, Alta California - (ACN) The current Governor James McGreevey homosexual scandal is actually the result of yet another Israeli sexpionage operation targeting "sexually loose" Democratic Party government officials. Two other recent operations, that should be fresh in the memories of the American people, are the Congressman Gary Condit and the President Bill Clinton Affairs.
In the parlance of the shadowy underworld of international espionage, the use of (…)

By Jason Leopold
It’s obvious that no mainstream news reporter has the gumption to seriously question Vice President Dick Cheney’s ethics when he was chief executive of Halliburton, the oil-field services company that is currently embroiled in a scandal with the Pentagon due to its questionable accounting practices related to its work in war-torn Iraq.
Pity those journalists because this is the stuff Pulitzer’s are made of. What’s even more remarkable is that there’s reams of documents (…)

By Joshua Holland
In 1973, when Richard Mellon Scaife and Joseph Coors kicked together some seed money to start the Heritage Foundation, the Democrats held the Senate and had a 50-seat majority in the House. As progressives are starting to understand, the funding, planning, and coordination of the conservative movement has led to tremendous success in elections and government policy. But another arena of ideological competition has gone largely beneath the radar. An asymmetric political (…)

By Manuel Valenzuela
“The process of transformation [American empire building]...is likely to be a long one, absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event-like a new Pearl Harbor.”
From PNAC plan entitled Rebuilding America’s Defenses: Strategies, Forces and Resources for a New Century, endorsed by neocons in the Bush Administration, the corporate media and Washington think-tanks. Ingrained in the plan are ever-increasing levels of military spending, incessant empire building, (…)

Thirty-five years ago, as fighting raged in Vietnam, a group of hippies and 400,000 of their soul mates converged on a dairy farm in New York state for three days of frolicking in the spirit of peace, love and music.
Organizers called it "Woodstock," after the Catskill Mountains town where they’d hoped to have the concert. (The show eventually went on in Bethel, New York, about 50 miles away.) It was 1969, the last year of the tumultuous ’60s. Few words conjure up so well the free spirit (…)

The children resemble fictitious, freakish figures better suited for a horror movie than ordinary life.
One child’s enormously bloated stomach prevents it from doing anything but lying in bed.
Another child lies in its mother’s arms. It’s impossible to tell if the child’s smiling or crying. Its mouth, which is a huge, purple, scarred, messy hole, is so disfigured it doesn’t change from its permanent position: wide open.
Perhaps the most disturbing picture is one of a uniformed American (…)