contributions

By Erik Stetson
Concord, New Hampshire - One of the Environmental Protection Agency’s earliest leaders, flanked by Republican state politicians, blasted the president’s record on the environment Monday during a news conference organized by an anti-Bush environmental group.
Russell Train, a Republican, was the EPA’s second chief under presidents Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford. But he said Bush’s record is so dismal he’s casting his presidential vote for Democrat John Kerry in November. (…)

The press must also be held to account for falsehoods we reproduced before the invasion
by George Monbiot
So Andrew Gilligan, the BBC reporter who claimed that the government had sexed up the intelligence about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction, was mostly right. Much of the rest of the media, which took the doctored intelligence at face value, was wrong. The reward for getting it right was public immolation and the sack. The punishment for getting it wrong was the usual annual bonus. (…)

Kevin Shay, Washington
I recently saw Michael Moore’s film, Fahrenheit 9/11, which even reviewers for conservative media outlets like Fox News have praised. I knew I would like the documentary, based on reviews I read. But still, I can’t remember seeing a movie that has affected me as much. I can’t remember ever seeing a movie where the audience gave it a standing ovation when it ended, which occurred in many more theatres across the country than just the Maryland one I attended.
Natalie (…)

By URI AVNERY
Sometimes a trivial episode throws a revealing light on a grave public disease.
A classic example: the Captain of Koepenick. On the face of it, it was a minor criminal incident: in 1906, a shoemaker named Wilhelm Voigt was released from prison, after serving a sentence for forgery. To get work he needed a passport, which, as a former convict, he could not get.
So he went to a junk shop and bought the uniform of an army captain, commandeered some soldiers in the street, (…)

by Lisa Ashkenaz Croke (bio)
Prime Minister Tony Blair’s office admitted that he exaggerated the number of bodies found in mass graves throughout Iraq by about 88 percent. The Observer revealed June 18 that its own calculations found that 5,000 bodies have been recovered from 55 gravesites; according to the British publication, Downing Street has confirmed the number. The Observer notes that an additional 215 suspected mass gravesites have yet to be examined and confirmed.
During a joint (…)

By: Jack Dalton www.ommp.org
"…some men in order to present the supposed intentions of their adversaries have committed the most enormous cruelties…" Clearchus, a Spartan General 500B.C.
It appears that the torturing of Iraq’s children is now a part of the Bush cabals "policy" of "bringing democracy, liberation and freedom" to the Iraqi people. This goes way past just simply outrageous.
Of the 535 members of congress, only one member has a child in Iraq, or in uniform for that matter. (…)

Nearly a dozen lawyers of the Bangladesh Supreme Court have expressed their willingness to go to Iraq to plead for ousted Iraqi President Saddam Hussain, who is under detention by US-led coalition forces.
In a statement published in mass-circulated vernacular daily ’Prothom Alo’, the 11 lawyers said they are making preparations to extend legal assistance to Saddam.
Asked to comment on the statement, Ozair Farooq, the immediate past President of the Supreme Court Bar Association, said (…)

Pentagon papers indicate probe of assaults outside of Abu Ghraib prison
By Miles Moffeit and Arthur Kane
DENVER POST
Iraqi prisoners allegedly were stripped of their clothing and exposed to harsh conditions at two war-zone detention facilities separate from the notorious Abu Ghraib prison, according to Pentagon documents obtained this week by The Denver Post.
The Army is investigating whether a detainee was sexually humiliated during an interrogation at Forward Operating Base (…)

Ahmed Janabi
Wednesday 21 July 2004 - A study by the college of economics at Baghdad University has found that the unemployment rate in Iraq is 70%.
The study says the problem of high unemployment is going from bad to worse, with the security situation deterioriating and the reconstruction process faltering.
Private employment agencies - a new phenomenon in post-Saddam Iraq - are cropping up across the country and advertising their "services" through the mass media.
Promising job (…)

A roadside bomb has exploded killing one US soldier and taking the number of US military dead since the invasion of Iraq in March 2003 above 900.
Major Neal O’Brien of the 1st Infantry Division said the most recent soldier killed was on patrol in a Bradley fighting vehicle in Duluiyah, 72km north of Baghdad, when a bomb detonated shortly after midnight on Wednesday.
Another US soldier was killed and six others wounded when their patrol hit a road side bomb early on Wednesday in Duluiya, (…)