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By Jesse Jackson
IN 1984 I said to the Democratic Convention: "This is not a perfect party. We are not a perfect people. Yet we are called to a perfect mission — to feed the hungry, to clothe the naked, to house the homeless, to teach the illiterate, to provide jobs for the jobless, and to choose the human race over the nuclear race."
Our goals in 1984 were the same as Fannie Lou Hamer’s 20 years earlier. To open up our politics to all our people. To register the neglected. To build a (…)

By MICHAEL MAINVILLE Special to the Sun
MANAS AIR FIELD, Kyrgyzstan - U.S. Air Force Captain Dale Linafelter was dumbfounded when he first found out he was being deployed to the Manas air base in the former Soviet republic of Kyrgyzstan.
"I’d never even heard of Kyrgyzstan," said Captain Linafelter, the flight safety investigator at the base, which hosts the largest number of American forces in Central Asia outside Afghanistan.
He wasn’t alone. Very few of the more than 1,150 American (…)

One of the striking things about the Iraq War is the extent to which American foreign-affairs professionals-intelligence analysts, diplomats, and high-ranking military officers-recognize it is a tragically misguided venture. Among the most recent to speak out is the CIA officer formerly charged with analyzing Osama bin Laden. Known only as "Anonymous," he is the author of the new book Imperial Hubris -a scathing look at the way the United States has conducted the War on Terror thus far. TAC (…)

by Mike Ferner
BOSTON - As military veterans wrangle over whom to support for president, one veterans’ organization has fired a shot across the bow of whoever will occupy the White House next year.
Over 400 Veterans for Peace (VFP) members gathered last weekend in Boston for the organization’s annual convention, hearing from Daniel Ellsberg, historian Howard Zinn, former UN weapons inspector Scott Ritter, members of Military Families Speak Out, and the newly-formed Iraq Veterans Against (…)

Jane Regan
PORT-AU-PRINCE (IPS) - When some 300 workers lost their jobs at factories in northeast Haiti last month, the two sides in the struggle pitting a clothing maker against a young union only dug in deeper.
The stakes are much higher than just one more boss versus dissatisfied and low-paid workers. More and more textile plants in North America are closing their doors and shifting production to low-cost factories in the South that labour activists call "sweatshops", and Haiti’s (…)

BAGHDAD
More than 120 people died in a series of bombings and attacks in Iraq Wednesday, as US Secretary of State Colin Powell said the wave of violence would not stop the holding of elections next year.
A minibus packed with explosives blew up near a police station and a market north of Baghdad, killing 70 people and wounding 30 in the worst attack since the handover of power one month ago.
The powerful suicide bomb left a sea of destruction, obliterating market stalls and destroying (…)

By Doug Struck
Cash has become the U.S. military’s first line of defense in some parts of Iraq, where U.S. soldiers are distributing money to encourage goodwill and to counter their enemies’ offers of money to unemployed Iraqis willing to attack Americans, according to officers here.
Even patrol leaders now carry envelopes of cash to spend in their areas. The money comes from brigade commanders, who get as much as $50,000 to $100,000 a month to distribute for local rehabilitation and (…)

Hands Off Venezuela Campaign-
http://www.handsoffvenezuela.org
En Espanol: http://www.manosfureadevenezuela.org
VENEZUELA WEEK OF SOLIDARITY 9th-15th AUGUST
PROGRAMME OF EVENTS
In Venezuela any elected official can be removed mid-term by a simple referendum majority. This extremely democratic constitutional right (imagine if we could’ve voted out Blair a year ago, before the war) was originally suggested by President Hugo Chávez, who ironically will be now the first person to face (…)

Maori Party co-leader Tariana Turia said yesterday the southern Maori seat Te Tai Tonga was definitely within the party’s sights come election time next year.
The newly re-elected member for Te Tai Hauauru was in Dunedin on the invitation of the University of Otago’s Te Roopu Maori and was wasting no time in spreading the fledgling political party’s organisation to the south.
A Dunedin branch of the party and youth branches were likely to be set up soon, she said.
"There is definitely (…)

Report’s findings enough to warrant independent into prisoner abuse
The public can be forgiven for overlooking news of a just-released report on the abuse scandal of U.S. detainees in Iraq and Afghanistan. That’s because it came out the same day as the report on Sept. 11 intelligence failures.
Unfortunately, in terms of candor and thoroughness, the detainee abuse report pales in comparison.
The 300-page document was written by Army inspector general Lt. Gen. Paul Mikolashek after a (…)