contributions

by Robert Fisk
The pictures are grainy, the voices sometimes unclear. But when Kim Sun-il shrieks "Don’t kill me" over and over again, his fear is palpable. As the heads of Iraq’s kidnap victims are sawn off, Koranic recitations - usually by a well-known Saudi imam are played on the soundtrack. At the beheading of an American, the murderer ritually wipes his bloody knife twice on the shirt of his victim, just as Saudi officials clean their blades after public executions in the kingdom. (…)

By CATHERINE MATACIC The Kansas City Star
Holocaust survivor Hedy Epstein is used to being called anti-Semitic. She is also used to being called a "self-hating Jew."
Those are some of the responses the 79-year-old from St. Louis gets for traveling to Israel to protest government policies toward Palestinians, she said Sunday in a speech at the University of Missouri-Kansas City.
"Jews as a whole know what suffering is … and now it seems that the Holocaust victims and their children (…)

A FRENCH woman who lied about being the victim of a vicious anti-Semitic attack - a claim that sparked nationwide outrage - was today handed a four-month suspended sentence for lying.
From correspondents in Cergy-Pontoise
A FRENCH woman who lied about being the victim of a vicious anti-Semitic attack - a claim that sparked nationwide outrage - was today handed a four-month suspended sentence for lying.
Marie-Leonie Leblanc, 23, was also given two years’ probation and ordered to (…)

By Tom Allard
The Australian Defence Force stands accused of censorship after it banned the showing of the inflammatory anti-war blockbuster Fahrenheit 9/11 on military bases, despite requests direct to the distributor from serving personnel.
The film’s distributor, Hopscotch, confirmed yesterday that a soldier had approached it for a copy of Michael Moore’s film to show at a military base cinema.
Hopscotch offered it free and the immediate superiors of the soldier - who worked (…)

By JOHN KIFNER
The streets around the Democratic National Convention site resembled an armed camp on Sunday helicopters overhead, bomb-sniffing dogs and their handlers, police officers and soldiers lining the intersections, many kinds of barriers, and an officially designated "Free Speech Zone" sealed off with cyclone fencing and razor wire.
It looked like an empty cage.
The designated demonstration area, a dank place under abandoned elevated tracks, failed its first test on Sunday (…)

The US army admits for the first time to having detained adolescents in its prisons in Iraq, according to a German press report.
The TV magazine "Report Mainz," to be broadcast Monday evening on the ARD network, quoted Lieutenant Colonel Barry Johnson, a spokesman for the US troops in Iraq, as saying that they still imprisoned 58 Iraqis in the age of from 14 and 17.
The Iraqi adolescents are held in the prisons of Abu Ghraib and"Camp Bucca" and the length of their average (…)

By NATALIA MUÑOZ
NORTHAMPTON - When his turn came to speak at the community dialogue on the Iraq War, Staff Sgt. Jimmy Massey of the United States Marines Corps chewed his gum slowly and slowly scanned the 150 people in the audience. What he was about to say required deliberation.
"We shot a man with his hands up," he said, "We even shot women and children."
Massey was one of three Iraq War veterans to speak yesterday at a forum sponsored by the Veterans Education Project and the (…)

FAILURE of intelligence? What failure? Washington’s spies, analysts and sundry apparatchiks were highly successful in giving their masters exactly what they wanted - an excuse to wage the war that Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz had been planning for years. Unsuccessful in persuading Bill Clinton to wage it, they knew they could enthuse George W. Bush.
Weapons of mass destruction were an afterthought. Wolfowitz confessed as much to Vanity Fair. "For bureaucratic reasons we (…)

By Atul Aneja
Relations between Turkey and Israel appear to be souring rapidly amid reports that Israeli commandos are training Kurds in northern Iraq to encourage the emergence of an independent Kurdish state.
Israel has vociferously denied these reports, which acquired prominence in a recent article written by the American investigative journalist, Seymour Hersh, in The New Yorker magazine.
In a damage control exercise, the Israeli Deputy Prime Minister, Ehud Olmert, rushed to the (…)

A senior Iraqi interior ministry official has been assassinated amid a string of deadly car bombs in Mosul and Baghdad.
Colonel Musab al-Awadi, the director of Tribal Shaikhs (leaders) Office in the Iraqi interior ministry, was shot dead by unknown armed men in the Baya area in central Baghdad, reported Aljazeera’s correspondent Atwar Bahjat on Monday. Two of his bodyguards were also killed.
The assassination was the latest violence to hit Iraq on Monday.
Earlier, two car bombs (…)