contributions

A statement of Amnesty International
http://web.amnesty.org/library/index/engamr510942004
On 21 May 2004, a US military court sentenced Staff Sergeant Camilo Mejia Castillo of the Florida National Guard to the maximum penalty of one year’s imprisonment for desertion. He had refused to return to his unit in Iraq, citing moral reasons, the legality of the war and the conduct of US troops towards Iraqi civilians and prisoners. Amnesty International considers him to be a prisoner of (…)

By William Rivers Pitt
http://www.truthout.org/docs_04/060404A.shtml
The news over the last week or so has been grim for the White House. Ahmad Chalabi, Bush’s favorite Iraqi, has been accused of passing high-level intelligence secrets to Iran. Questions as to who could have coughed up those secrets have been auguring towards Defense Department officials Douglas Feith and William Luti, the two men who ran the secretive Office of Special Plans (OSP).
The OSP, organized for the express (…)

The Guardian
George Bush arrives in Europe with two projects uppermost in his mind: nailing down international diplomatic support for his transition strategy in Iraq and getting re-elected back home in November. Of the two, there is no doubt which is the president’s greater priority. With his ratings at their lowest for many months, Mr Bush’s overwhelming political need is to use his European visit - the inaugural swing of an intensive month of diplomatic meetings on economic issues and (…)

Please understand that this is a transcript made directly from a live radio interview. It may not conform to exeplary standards of grammar. Mr. Von Buelow’s first language is German.
Alex Jones: All right my friends. We are already into the third and final hour of this global transmission against tyranny. And, in the last hour we had Hutton Gibson, expert on the New World Order and of course father of Mel Gibson, on talking about the different key issues. In this hour, we are joined by (…)

by Richard Wolin
The Nation
[from the June 14, 2004 issue]
Philosophers get attention only when they appear to be doing something sinister—corrupting the youth, undermining the foundations of civilization, sneering at all we hold dear. The rest of the time everybody assumes that they are hard at work somewhere down in the sub-basement, keeping those foundations in good repair. Nobody much cares what brand of intellectual duct tape is being used.
The public becomes incensed, however, (…)

Last month, Israeli troops swept into the Rafah refugee camp in Gaza, bulldozing hundreds of homes and leaving around 60 dead. Israel says it was looking for terrorists, but by the time the army withdrew, 1,600 people were homeless. What happens to the people whose houses are destroyed? CHRIS MCGREAL asked six families to show him what they salvaged from the rubble
The Guardian
The Al-Akhras family
There is nothing left of the Akhras’ family’s home. Even the cloths blowing in the (…)

Immanuel Wallerstein
la rivista del manifesto
numero 51 giugno 2004
Since 1945, a primary objective of U.S. foreign policy has been to keep western Europe as a subordinated, highly integrated, part of its geopolitical strategic resources. This was easy to achieve in the aftermath of the Second World War, when Europe was economically exhausted from the effects of the war, and when a majority of its populations, and even more of the political and economic elite, were fearful of (…)

BY BILL FLETCHER, JR.
One of the biggest mistakes people have made looking at the recent Haitian crisis has been to focus on the person of President Bertrande Aristide. This may sound odd since, after all, he is the one who was overthrown. What took place this February was not simply the ouster of an individual, however, but the termination of constitutional rule. Thus, whether someone happens to oppose or support President Aristide is secondary. The primary question is whether it is (…)

By Pascal Fletcher
CARACAS, Venezuela (Reuters) - Opponents of Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez on Thursday won the chance to try to vote him out through a referendum and the left-wing leader said he accepted the challenge.
The populist president faces a recall poll, probably in August, after electoral authorities said initial figures showed the opposition had collected enough valid signatures to trigger the referendum in the world’s No. 5 oil exporter.
Opposition leaders called the (…)

Tomgram: Mike Davis on the Pentagon’s urban war planning
In the escalating crisis that is Iraq, American Marines, after days of battle followed by a tenuous "truce," are deep into but not in control of Fallujah, a resistant city of 300,000 in the "Sunni Triangle," while the Army finds itself poised at the edge of Iraq’s Shiite holy cities. Our troops are toeing what the most revered Shiite religious figures have termed a "red line" across which lies the path to "300 Fallujahs."
This is, (…)