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The congressional commission investigating the September 11, 2001 attacks on the US has concluded that there is no evidence to support the Bush administration’s thesis that Saddam Hussein helped Osama bin Laden’s al-Qaeda organisation carry them out. This conclusion, emerging from a strong tradition of congressional oversight, could be taken further.
The evidence the administration produced to demonstrate the link was, at best, spurious, at worst, fabricated. This is not a small matter, (…)

by Stephen W. Stromberg
President Bush may still believe in the pre-war Iraq-al Qaida connection as much as a 5-year old does in Santa Claus, but the editorial boards of several major newspapers are no longer deluded — thanks in large part to this week’s revelation by the 9/11 commission that Iraq and al-Qaida had no working relationship.
The Financial Times: "Whether the Osama and Saddam thesis was more the result of self-delusion or cynical manipulation, it — along with Washington’s (…)

BY ELIZABETH HOLTZMAN
Elizabeth Holtzman is a former congresswoman, New York City comptroller and Brooklyn district attorney. She served on the House Judiciary Committee during impeachment of President Richard Nixon.
At a Senate hearing last week, Attorney General John Ashcroft claimed that President George W. Bush never ordered torture in connection with abusive interrogations of prisoners in Iraq and Afghanistan and violated no criminal laws of the United States. But the attorney (…)

Need a doctor? Need to go to a hospital? Better answer this question first: Do you have health insurance?
According to the U.S. Census Bureau, for 44 million Americans — 8.5 million of them children — the answer is no. That includes 6.4 million Californians, 15 percent of whom are under age 18. The picture is not much better for the millions more whose coverage is grossly inadequate.
As dire as these statistics are, numbers alone cannot paint the whole picture of the devastating (…)

US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld was a worried man on Friday. His war plan has come under bitter criticism and his troops in Iraq have bogged down in the face of a determined adversary. He was in a sombre mood as he should be. But his belligerence seems intact. At his press briefing, he held out a clear warning to Syria and Iran, Iraq’s two neighbours, against taking “hostile actions” against the United States. He accused Syria of supplying Iraq with night-vision goggles and warned Iran (…)

by Uri Avnery
The walled enclaves will lead, of course, to bloodshed on an unbelievable scale. No people on earth will submit to such a life. For thousands and thousands of young Palestinians, a martyr’s death will be preferable
I thought it was terrible. I was wrong. It is far, far worse! These words sum up my feelings at that moment.
I was standing on a hill overlooking the infamous Kalandia checkpoint. Below me was a narrow road, packed with Palestinians in the (…)

The United States is holding thousands of suspects at more than two dozen detention centres, half of which operate in secret, says a leading US human-rights group.
The revelation comes as a CIA contractor is charged with assaulting an Afghan detainee who later died of his injuries.
The secrecy surrounding the centres makes "inappropriate detention and abuse not only likely, but inevitable", said the New York-based Human Rights First in a report on Thursday.
The centres are in Iraq, (…)

At what point does a religion turn cult? And at what point does the cult threaten civilization? I am not certain of the answer to either question, but I am certain that Islam hjas, in the last 12 years forfieted its right to exist!

Berlin - Video images of a US engineer taken hostage in Saudi Arabia, possibly by the al-Qaeda network, could have been put on the internet via a US firm based in California, Der Spiegel magazine reported on Thursday.
The video was released on Tuesday and shows relatively high-quality film of hostage Paul Johnson, who kidnappers from a group called "al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula" have threatened to kill by Friday.
The origin of the video was traced to Silicon Valley Land Surveying (…)

Hey, don’t pay any attention that your imperialist masters could have stopped those planes ...Look over here, another CIA manufactured beheading?
truthout.com
Also see below: Cheney Authorized Shooting Down 9/11 Planes • Questioning Nearly Every Aspect of the Responses to Sept. 11 • Panel Says Chaos in Administration Was Wide on 9/11 •
Editor’s Note | The release of the 9/11 Commission report on the terror attacks of September 11 has sent an earthquake rolling through (…)