contributions

There is a pathological element to the whole Iraq situation.
No one, no American soldier there included, believes that Bush is telling the truth about his motives. They all know that what he says is one thing while what he’s doing is quite another.
His pals are raking the dolleros in faster than the US mint can print ’em, and he gets to strut around like John Wayne sticking it to them natives.
Every soldier in Iraq knows this. Now we’re surprised that they’re having their own little (…)

Michael Hann examines the air of secrecy and silence surrounding the US media’s treatment of George Bush’s ’war on terror’
American contractors and soldiers torturing Iraqi prisoners in a prison outside Baghdad? A huge story, by anyone’s standards, surely, especially when pictures of the abuse were broadcast on the US TV network CBS.
So it was no surprise that newspapers around the world made huge, horrified play of the events at the Abu Ghraib prison. It was more of a surprise, however, (…)

Making women’s issues go away A damning new report reveals that the Bush administration has quietly removed 25 reports from its Women’s Bureau Web site, deleting or distorting crucial information on issues from pay equity to reproductive healthcare.
By Rebecca Traister
If you’d logged onto the Department of Labor’s Women’s Bureau Web site in 1999, you would have found a list of more than 25 fact sheets and statistical reports on topics ranging from "Earning Differences Between Men and (…)

Britain’s mass-circulation Daily Mirror newspaper published photographs today which it claimed showed British troops abusing an Iraqi prisoner in a camp near Basra, southern Iraq.
.../...
http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2004/05/01/1083224634091.html

By David Adelaide
On Canada’s Atlantic and Pacific coasts, right-wing provincial governments have introduced draconian legislation this week to break strikes by public sector workers and impose massive wage and job cuts.
In Newfoundland, the Tory provincial government introduced legislation Monday to force an end to a four-week-old strike by a total of 20,000 civil servants and hospital, highway maintenance and other public sector workers. Bill 18 explicitly threatens any worker with (…)

Workers employed by Fiat at a car parts plant in southern Italy continued their strike this week. The strike organised by the FIOM-CGIL metalworkers union has resulted in the halting of all Fiat motor vehicle production.
The two-week action by employees at the Melfi plant in the Basilicata region is to demand better pay and shift patterns. During the course of the strike, workers have blockaded roads around the factory preventing parts from reaching other auto plants in Italy where most of (…)

By Lee Keath
Baghdad - Ten United States soldiers, a South African civilian and at least 10 Iraqis were killed in attacks around the country on Thursday, including eight Americans who died in a bombing south of Baghdad and two Iraqi children shot to death in a gunbattle.
The bombing occurred at 11.30am near the town of Mahmoudiyah, where the team from the 1st Armoured Division was removing roadside bombs from a key highway south of the capital, the military said in a statement.
A (…)

Click to watch the CBS TV pictures
By Richard Phillips
On April 29, CBS television’s "60 Minutes II" program screened graphic images of Iraqi prisoners being tortured and sexually humiliated by US troops at the Abu Ghraib prison near Baghdad. The photographs, which show American soldiers- men and women-smiling, laughing or giving thumbs-up signs alongside naked Iraqi prisoners, expose the sadistic and brutal methods employed by American forces and provide more evidence of the catalog of (…)

Last night a young man around 16 years old was killed by a soldier in the village of Haris. He was shot in the chest. Soldiers on the scene refused to talk to IWPS saying that no-one spoke English. Can Israelis please call the army and ask for their version of events?
The number of the Israeli DCL is +972 9 775 9219, +972 9 775 9359. The commander, Lt. Colonel Yaacob Shlomov is at +972 9 792 2359.
The IDF spokesperson is at +972 3 608 0212.
Please e-mail us at iwps@palnet.com or call (…)

http://www.uruknet.info/?p=2249
Lee Gordon
Thursday April 29, 2004 " The Guardian" — It was when I saw little Ali’s ruined body that I stopped being just a reporter and became a true embed. The scene was a makeshift field hospital in Falluja. A missile fired at the hospital has left the walls of the room Ali lies in pockmarked with shrapnel.
Glass crunches underfoot. Four-year-old Ali is lying in a cot, the mattress matted with dried blood. He is bleeding from a horrific groin wound (…)