contributions

By Matt Leclercq
"Fahrenheit 9/11," a left-sided documentary that bashes the Bush administration’s war on terrorism, wouldn’t find much of an audience in a military town.
Or so they thought.
"This has broken all of our past records," said Nasim Kuenzel, an owner of the Cameo Art House Theatre. "The movie that I thought would make us hardly any money - I never thought it would break all the records."
Both showings sold out Friday at the Cameo, the only theater in Fayetteville to carry (…)

By Derek Seidman
Dick Cheney was able to score a hot ticket to see the biggest rivalry in baseball when he attended the Yankees-Red Sox game on Wednesday. The vice president even made his way into the locker room before the game to mumble at a few players. It was a proud moment for Yankee coach Joe Torre, who told the press, “It’s great any time a dignitary like that visits. It slaps you with pride.”
Come the seventh inning stretch, it was Cheney’s turn to get slapped.
As decked-out (…)

Dennis Kucinich lead the effort in the US house of reps against the patriot act and the war in Iraq, and has since demanded that the Bush administration produce it’s evidence of Weapons of mass distruction to no avail. He is the only qualified candidate in the presidential race who will hold this administration accountable and truly make amends to the Iraqi people and the international community. John Kerry is not well liked, and has been forced on us by the US media. Dennis Kucinich is (…)

Stephen C. Pelletiere The New York Times
MECHANICSBURG, Pa., Jan. 31, 2003 - It was no surprise that President Bush, lacking smoking-gun evidence of Iraq’s weapons programs, used his State of the Union address to re-emphasize the moral case for an invasion: "The dictator who is assembling the world’s most dangerous weapons has already used them on whole villages, leaving thousands of his own citizens dead, blind or disfigured."
The accusation that Iraq has used chemical weapons against (…)

by Mark Matthews
WASHINGTON, July 3, 2004 — U.S. officials in charge of the Development Fund for Iraq drained all but $900 million from the $20 billion fund by late last month in what a watchdog group has called an "11th-hour splurge."
An international monitoring board is planning an audit of money from the fund that was spent on contracts for Iraq’s reconstruction that were approved without competitive bidding.
The fund, made up largely of Iraqi oil revenue, is intended to pay for the (…)

de Emad Mekay
Jul 4, 2004 - Just before he left on Jun. 28, administrator Paul Bremer said that one of his biggest achievements was to transform Iraq into a market-based economy, citing lower tax rates and import duties, and more liberal foreign investment laws.
In May 2003, Bremer declared the occupied Arab country ”open for business” and for the past 14 months, the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) promoted major changes of Iraq’s regulatory and legal frameworks, entered into (…)

de Julian Coman
Washington - The former head of the Abu Ghraib prison in Baghdad has for the first time accused the American Secretary of Defence, Donald Rumsfeld, of directly authorising Guantanamo Bay-style interrogation tactics.
Brig-Gen Janis Karpinski, who commanded the 800th Military Police Brigade, which is at the centre of the Abu Ghraib prisoner-abuse scandal, said that documents yet to be released by the Pentagon would show that Mr Rumsfeld personally approved the introduction (…)

Saddam coverage: ’just the way things are done here at the moment’
Claire Cozens, press and publishing correspondent
The world’s media descended on Baghdad this week to witness the historic court appearance of the former Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein. But for journalists covering the hearing it was an exercise in enormous frustration, with only a handful of media organisations allowed in to the court room.
Broadcasters and press alike were furious with the arrangements, which left (…)

Vanessa Thorpe and Gavin Smith in New York
The Observer
Micahel Moore, whose controversial awarding-winning attack on the Bush regime, Fahrenheit 9/11, opens in Britain on 9 July, has revealed that he is to turn his camera on healthcare in the United States.
The director and author will attempt to save as many lives as he can by simply intervening with his camera crew during the course of 90 minutes of filming. He hopes to embarrass health insurance companies and hospitals into (…)

By Sunny Lewis, Environment News Service.
A disturbing new report shows the cumulative impact of harmful Bush administration environmental policies on Hispanic communitie
Maria Nolasco is raising three grandchildren who were poisoned by lead paint. She lives in Bushwick, a low- income section of Brooklyn, New York where houses colored with toxic lead paint are common. Many Bushwick children suffer from lead poisoning, which brings permanent brain damage, learning disabilities, and (…)