contributions

By Ned Parker
The Iraqi police who work at the JCC usually come from surrounding towns. They change into civilian clothes when they leave the base fearing they will be attacked
It is not clear who rules the restive Iraqi city of Samarra these days. The city council told the Americans six weeks ago it did not want US troops entering their community.
Since then the 1st Infantry Division has mostly stayed on its base a few kilometres (miles) outside the northern city and watched (…)

By Monica Moorehead
A number of well-known actors have come under media and government attacks because of their progressive stances against war and racism. They include Danny Glover, Susan Sarandon, Woody Harrelson, Martin Sheen and Sean Penn.
Marlon Brando, who died July 1 at age 80, was the target of similar attacks more than a generation ago. In fact, he should be forever memorialized for his passionate concern for social justice as much as for taking method acting to unprecedented (…)

By Charles Arthur
Young male prisoners were filmed being sodomised by American soldiers at the Abu Ghraib prison near Baghdad, according to the journalist who first revealed the abuses there.
Seymour Hersh, who reported on the torture of the prisoners in New Yorker magazine in May, told an audience in San Francisco that "it’s worse". But he added that he would reveal the extent of the abuses: "I’m not done reporting on all this," he told a meeting of the American Civil Liberties Union. (…)

By DOUGLAS JEHL
The White House and the Central Intelligence Agency have refused to give the Senate Intelligence Committee a one-page summary of prewar intelligence in Iraq prepared for President Bush that contains few of the qualifiers and none of the dissents spelled out in longer intelligence reviews, according to Congressional officials.
Senate Democrats claim that the document could help clear up exactly what intelligence agencies told Mr. Bush about Iraq’s illicit weapons. The (…)

By Steve Purcell
Families of British soldiers killed in Iraq today expressed their anger and bitterness at the findings of the Butler report.
Rose Gentle, whose son Gordon was killed in Basra last month, said: "It’s time for that man (Mr Blair) to get out now. This proves my son went to war over a pack of damn lies.
"He (Mr Blair) has blood on his hands, he is a disgrace. He should take out the rest of the troops now before some other kid gets killed."
And the father of one of six (…)

by Dustin Langley
Psychological conditioning and exposure to the brutality of imperialist warfare is taking a heavy toll on the young women and men in the U.S. armed forces. Close to one out of five combat soldiers leaves Iraq with mental health problems such as post-traumatic stress disorder, according to a survey published in the July 1 New England Journal of Medicine.
The study found that as many as 17 percent of veterans who had been deployed in Iraq showed symptoms of PTSD, (…)

By WERTHER*
One of the unremitting leitmotifs of one-hundred-percent Americanos is the complaint that "the media just won’t print positive stories about Iraq." Apparently all the canons of journalism dictate that our dailies should be filled with edifying tales about Tikriti tykes receiving soccer balls and canned asparagus, or a venetian blind factory opening in Irbil. Yet somehow, the media conspiracy prevents the public from reading "fair and balanced" accounts that might be (…)

By Felicity Arbuthnot
Iraqis-engulfed in an unimaginable loss throughout thirteen years of sanctions and bombings-were reviled, insulted, but attacked no one. The US’s response to the 9/11 tragedy has been little short of genocide: Two entire civil societies (with no nationals on the 9/11 flights) have been reduced to a pre-industrial state, illegally occupied by asset strippers, whose armies ensure that the dead remain uncounted and inconsequential-except to the grieving. Obviously, to (…)

Robert Fisk
The Mongols stained the Tigris black with the ink of the Iraqi books they destroyed. Today’s Mongols prefer to destroy the Iraqi teachers of books.
Since the Anglo-American invasion, they have murdered at least 13 academics at the University of Baghdad alone and countless others across Iraq. History professors, deans of college and Arabic tutors have all fallen victim to the war on learning. Only six weeks ago - virtually unreported, of course - the female dean of the college (…)

"The worst is the soundtrack of the boys shrieking," the reporter told an ACLU convention last week. Hersh says there was "a massive amount of criminal wrongdoing that was covered up at the highest command out there, and higher."
He called the prison scene "a series of massive crimes, criminal activity by the president and the vice president, by this administration anyway…war crimes."
The outrages have cost us the support of moderate Arabs, says Hersh. "They see us as a sexually perverse (…)