contributions

by Peter Verney
(Peter Verney is editor of Sudan Update, based in London.)
At last, the catastrophe in the western Sudanese region of Darfur, a quarter of whose six million people are now displaced by war and whose lives are at serious risk, has gained some international attention. In July, Secretary of State Colin Powell and UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan visited Darfuri refugee camps to pressure the regime in Khartoum into stopping what has become a frenzy of destruction. Their (…)

On 8 July, three Americans were arrested at a clandestine private prison in Kabul. There, the Afghan police found eight Afghanis in various stages of "interrogation". Four of them were hanging by their heels from the ceiling.
The leader of the group was former Green Beret sergeant Jonathan Keith "Jack" Idema, a US bounty hunter and mercenary popularised by Fox News and right-wing publisher Random House. The other two turned out to be Edward Caraballo, a TV producer working on a documentary (…)

by Madeleine Baran
Despite widespread public and investor outrage over extravagant CEO compensation packages, top executives saw their earnings skyrocket last year.
Raises for CEOs at the nation’s largest companies more than doubled in 2003, according to a new study conducted by The Corporate Library (TCL), a private company that analyzes corporations for investors. The median rate for CEOs at the nation’s 500 largest publicly-held companies increased by 22 percent, compared with a nine (…)

by Butler Shaffer
Presidential campaigns in the 1950’s did not include make-believe debates between establishment-anointed puppets. Instead, Dwight Eisenhower and Adlai Stevenson gave speeches (to different groups) that were carried live on television. A news report, at the time, told of a mental hospital where such televised speeches were shown to the patients. The talks got the patients so upset that the hospital had to turn off the television sets. This should have provided an early (…)

The Army is overhauling its helicopter corps after high-profile setbacks in Iraq.
A battle lost, several crashes and the cancellation of the new Comanche stealth helicopter have led critics to suggest the aircraft is too fragile, vulnerable and ineffective for the modern battlefield.
Army officials insist combat helicopters can fight in unmatched ways.
"You can’t get one commander in Iraq to let one helicopter come home," said Brig. Gen. E. J. Sinclair, commandant of the U.S. Army (…)

The governor of Iraq’s Anbar province says he will happily resign if captors release three of his sons, snatched from their home by armed men.
"I am ready to give in to your demands, and if you believe my presence in the (provincial capital) city (Ramadi) does not serve the interests of the region, I am ready to go," said Abd Al-Karim Bargis in an open letter to the province on Saturday.
Bargis defended his period of office in the vast province on the border with Syria, Jordan and Saudi (…)

By DAVID NALLY
"In the whole world no poor devil is lynched, no wretch is tortured, in whom I am not degraded and murdered."
Aimé Césaire.
Genocide is defined in a 1948 UN Convention as acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group by "killing members of the group"; "causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group"; or "deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical (…)

By ALEXANDER COCKBURN
Can someone win the presidency entirely on the basis of a negative asset? I wouldn’t have thought so, but here’s John Kerry, just about 90 days shy of election day, promoting himself as a man of presidential caliber entirely on the basis that he’s the Anyone in "Anyone But Bush". Aside from the flag wagging , that’s what it comes down to, unless you take the probably realistic view that when it comes to war-fighting in the service of Empire he’s far more bloodthirsty. (…)

Fighting between Iraqi resistance warriors and American-led forces in the city of Fallujah has killed 20, the US military said Saturday.
A Fallujah hospital official, Dr. Salim Ibrahim, had said Friday that clashes, which had been reported on earlier, killed 13 Iraqis and wounded 14 others.
Many of those wounded, including at least one child, appeared to be civilians injured in U.S. airstrikes, he said, adding that he could not give an exact count of the dead, because many bodies had (…)

By Robert Parry
The key institutions that are intended to supply the U.S. government and the American people with accurate information - the intelligence community and the news media - have become "broken toys" largely incapable of fulfilling their responsibilities, a predicament that has worsened during the Presidency of George W. Bush.
There’s also still little understanding of the systemic nature of the problem. The 9/11 Commission, for instance, proposed creating a new National (…)