contributions

Britain and the United States are facing fresh allegations of prisoner abuses at Guantanamo Bay after three former British detainees claimed that they were repeatedly abused during their detention at the US naval base in Cuba, the Guardian newspaper reported Wednesday.
Details of the experiences of Rhuhel Ahmed, Shafiq Rasul and Asif Iqbal were disclosed by the paper on Wednesday and would be formally released in the United States later in the day.
The allegations have been (…)

By Andrew Buncombe
Terror alert: how four-year-old information was transformed into clear and present danger
An imbroglio of disarray and confusion that offers an insight into the politics of security
Ministers refuse to say what the threat means for Britain
Shocking prisoner abuses are revealed
Private England called to explain her ’bit of fun’ on the Abu Ghraib night shift
Police seize 13 men in terror raids across UK
Leading article: The terrorist threat must never be (…)

by Timothy Bancroft-Hinchey
Bush regime sinks lower by the day
That US soldiers serving the Bush regime considered that the systematic torture of prisoners of war was fun, no big deal, to vent their frustration, not serious and just joking around, does not surprise anyone any longer.
The face of the great American heroine, Private Lynndie England, cigarette hanging from the corner of her mouth, giving the thumbs-up sign while standing over or beside a pile of abused, terrified (…)

By CARLOTTA GALL
KABUL, Afghanistan, Aug. 3 - For months Afghan and American officials have complained that even while Pakistan cooperates in the fight against Al Qaeda, militant Islamic groups there are training fighters and sending them into Afghanistan to attack American and Afghan forces.
Pakistani officials have rejected the allegations, saying they are unaware of any such training camps. Now the Afghan government has produced a young Pakistani, captured fighting with the Taliban in (…)

On 4 August 1914, the Great War began. 900,000 Britons perished. Ninety years on, just four veterans were able to honour the fallen
By Cahal Milmo
Ninety years ago, an 18-year-old apprentice mechanic called Henry Allingham rushed to a crowded London recruiting office to sign up to fight against Germany.
He was one of nine million men and women from Britain and its dominions who would head for the battlefields of the First World War. By its end, more than 8.5 million soldiers of all (…)

by Stephen Crockett and Al Lawrence
The Bush Republicans are serving the interests of Big Oil and foreign oil producing nations to the detriment of our nation’s future and the American people. Bush’s publicly stated reasons for not using the Strategic Oil Reserve to lower the price of gasoline, diesel fuel and home heating oil sounds good until you apply a little logic and history to the issue. Bush claims that opening the Reserve would make the United States weaker in dealing with supply (…)

by Doug Lorimer
The Australian and British governments - Washington’s partners in last year’s illegal invasion of Iraq - have offered to send troops to Sudan as part of a UN "peacekeeping" force, despite the fact that there is no proposal before the UN Security Council for the setting up of such a force.
The UN estimates at least 30,000 people have been killed and some 1.5 million made homeless in Sudan’s thinly populated western Darfur region as a result of fighting between rebel (…)

Every four years, journalists complain about the same thing: Political conventions are dull, scripted and almost entirely devoid of any "real news." Though the argument is illogical at best— most events in a political campaign are "scripted," but journalists still find a way to cover them— it probably explains why the networks decided to provide just three hours of prime-time coverage of the Democratic convention in Boston last week.
Reporters and pundits tend to look for appealing (…)

LAHORE: The government will not take any decision on sending troops to Iraq that goes against public opinion, Prime Minister Chaudhry Shujaat Hussain said on Monday.
"I have said once, twice, more than a hundred times that the government has no intention of sending troops to Iraq. Even President General Pervez Musharraf is not inclined to take any such decision." Any such decision will be made after considering public opinion, Mr Hussain told reporters after the inauguration ceremony of a (…)

by Charles Bowden
The day always begins with the left arm. The clock reads 5:30 or 6:00 A.M. The plaque next to the bed always whispers the same thing: I WAS GIVEN LIFE, THAT I MIGHT ENJOY ALL THINGS. That is it, the glowing numbers announcing the time, the velvet darkness, and then, with the light switched on, the line whispering off the plaque. The body sits up and—this is the hard part to state, because here the words fail—the left arm of the body grabs the left arm of the waiting (…)