contributions

A US soldier has likened Iraq’s Abu Ghraib prison to hell, plagued by poorly trained guards and short of even basic amenities.
Testifying on Friday before a military court hearing to determine if Pfc Lynndie England - accused of abusing Iraqi inmates and photographed holding a naked Iraqi prisoner on a leash - should stand trial, Sgt Hydrue Joyner recalled the Baghdad prison was a highly dangerous place.
The plain-spoken soldier - a member of England’s 372nd Military Police Company - (…)

By Greg Guma
Burlington, VT, Aug. 6 (UPI) — In case you’ve been living in a duct-taped bomb shelter, we’re in the midst of a national dialogue about strength. It’s central to President George W. Bush’s public persona and a main argument for his effectiveness. Not to be outdone his Democratic opponent, Sen. John F. Kerry, D-Mass., has done everything from riding a motorcycle to making "stronger at home" a campaign mantra to sell a muscular image.
Strength is also central to the image of (…)

Whistle-blower says turning over Abu Ghraib photos ’a hard call’
FORT BRAGG, North Carolina (CNN) — An investigator testified Friday that Army Pfc. Lynndie England identified herself in Abu Ghraib prison photos, and described the way Iraqi detainees were being treated as "intimidation" and "humiliation" techniques.
Special Agent James Stewart said that when he questioned England in May about the photo showing her with a dog leash around a detainee’s neck, she called it an "intimidation (…)

By Beth Potter
Baghdad, Iraq - Sweat streams down Qusay Yahiya’s well-tanned face as he complains about the hour it has taken to make it to the front of the line at the gas station to fill his blue Kia station wagon.
"This is caused by the Americans," Yahiya, 34, who makes about $4 per day as a taxi driver, said, waving his hand at the line of cars stretching down the street. "I waited for such a long time to fill up my tank when my country is rich in oil. Is this freedom?"
Lines more (…)

by Philip Weiss
A month or so back, Bob Kerrey loped in late from a meeting of the 9/11 commission to the New School stage to have a discussion with the author Richard Ben Cramer about his new book, How Israel Lost: The Four Questions. The throaty author offered his keystone for negotiations in the Middle East-"Give back the land"-but the university president shrugged off the suggestion. No one in the Arab world has ever really cared about the Palestinians, he said, and there are no (…)

Earlier this year, when the Bush administration was using some Enron-style arithmetic to jigger its 2004 employment growth estimates, Brad DeLong wrote a series of take-no-prisoners posts about the political disembowelment of the Council of Economic Advisors - the White House’s in-house economic think tank.
Under previous presidents, both Republican and Democratic, the CEA had a certain amount of credibility for the rigor and honesty of its work - as well as a certain insulation from the (…)

US marines say they have killed an estimated 300 Mahdi Army fighters in Najaf in the past two days, but a Muqtada al-Sadr spokesman says most of those killed were civilians.
The spokesman claimed only 36 fighters had been killed in several Iraqi cities after clashes that have fuelled fears of a new rebellion among Iraqi Shias.
The fresh fighting, which still raged on Friday, marks a major challenge for the interim government of Prime Minister Iyad Alawi and appears to have destroyed a (…)

By MIKE FERNER
Remember "The Truman Show," starring Jim Carrey? Trapped from birth in a huge, corporate-controlled movie set that doubled as a fake small town, Carrey played an unwitting salesman, perpetually on-camera. In one scene, a man tries to warn Carrey, parachuting onto the set with a sign that says, "You’re On TV!" He’s immediately hustled off-camera.
There’s a smaller, mobile version of The Truman Show’s set traveling westward across the country that you should go see if you (…)

By Julie Hyland
Three Britons freed from Guantanamo Bay in March have released a 115-page dossier accusing the US of carrying out torture and sexual degradation at the military concentration camp in Cuba.
Detention in Afghanistan and Guantanamo, launched in the US on Wednesday August 4 by the men’s British lawyers, is a devastating account of the abuse experienced and witnessed by the three at the camp, which draws direct parallels with the torture of detainees by US forces at the (…)

The Cultural Conditions of Unconditional Surrender
By DAVID PRICE
Today’s fifty-ninth anniversary of the United States’ bombing of Hiroshima finds most Americans still satisfied that President Truman’s decision to use the bomb was a difficult but necessary one designed to bring peace and save lives. It seems unlikely that many Americans will reconsider their positions on this issue. To some Hiroshima has become the paradigm of the very notion of "bombing for peace," and one’s variance (…)