contributions

Michael Isikoff and Mark Hosenball, Newsweek
While rejecting claims that Al Qaeda had collaborated with Saddam Hussein’s regime on strikes against the United States, the federal panel investigating the September 11 attacks today disclosed intriguing new evidence that Osama bin Laden’s organization may have cooperated with Iraq’s volatile next door neighbor: Iran.
A commission report released at a public hearing Wednesday suggests for the first time that bin Laden played a (…)

TED GALEN CARPENTER, Cato Institute
The Bush administration’s disenchantment with its onetime favorite Iraqi client, Ahmad Chalabi, has centered on the explosive allegation that he and his associates may have forwarded highly classified U.S. information to the fundamentalist Islamist government in Iran. Specifically, Chalabi and his cohorts are accused of informing Tehran that the United States had broken the communications code of Iran’s intelligence service.
If true, this could become (…)

Charles Aldinger, Reuters
President Bush voiced support for Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld on Thursday after the Pentagon said Rumsfeld ordered the detention of a terrorist suspect in Iraq who was held for more than seven months without notifying the Red Cross.
"I’m never disappointed in my secretary of defense. He’s doing a fabulous job and America’s lucky to have him in the position he’s in," Bush told reporters at the White House when asked if he was disappointed at Rumsfeld’s (…)

Amman, Jordan. THE head of a legal team defending former Iraqi President Saddam Hussein welcomed an official US probe into the September 11 attacks which found no evidence linking Iraq and the al-Qaeda terror network.
Jordanian lawyer Mohammad Rashdan said the results of the probe proved once more "that the Anglo-American aggression launched against Iraq is null and not based on any legal reason".
"(Saddam’s) defence committee challenges the US administration, President (George W.) Bush (…)

Nicolas Pelham and James Drummond, FT
Iraq’s incoming government is considering imposing martial law to help stabilise the country after another two car bomb attacks on Thursday killed at least 41 Iraqis.
The first bomb, packed with artillery shells, exploded outside an army recruiting centre in central Baghdad killing 35 people. The centre had been hit in a similar strike earlier this year. A second attack north of Baghdad killed another six Iraqi civil defence soldiers.
The blasts (…)

The United States is holding thousands of suspects at more than two dozen detention centres, half of which operate in secret, says a leading American 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 (…)

by Democracy Now!
Attorney John Bonifaz argues the president has commited high crimes by lying to the American public and Congress about Iraq in the lead-up to the invasion. He makes his case in the new book “Warrior-King: The Case For Impeaching George W. Bush." [Includes transcript]
Next Tuesday on June 22nd, former President Bill Clinton’s much-anticipated memoir, “My Life” will hit bookstores. The 1,000-page book is expected to soar to the top of the best-seller lists (…)

Dahr Jamail
Dr. Faiq Amin, the manager of the Medico Legal Institute (ie, the Baghdad morgue), told me a couple of days ago that their maximum holding capacity is 90 bodies.
Since Janurary an average of over 600 bodies each month have been brought there. Of these, at least half have died of gunshots or explosions. He also pointed out that these numbers do not include the heavy fighting areas of Fallujah and Najaf.
In addition, Dr. Amin said, “We deal only with suspicious deaths, not (…)

MATT KELLEY , The Guardian
At the request of CIA Director George Tenet, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld ordered the military to secretly hold a suspected terrorist in Iraq, a Pentagon spokesman said.
The suspected terrorist has been held since October without being given an identification number and without the International Committee of the Red Cross being notified, Pentagon spokesman Bryan Whitman said. Both conditions violate the Geneva Accords on treatment of prisoners of war. (…)

David Hambling
Weapons that can incapacitate crowds of people by sweeping a lightning-like beam of electricity across them are being readied for sale to military and police forces in the US and Europe.
At present, commercial stun guns target one person at a time, and work only at close quarters. The new breed of non-lethal weapons can be used on many people at once and operate over far greater distances.
But human rights groups are appalled by the fact that no independent safety tests (…)