contributions

Fleeing China, Landing In Guantanamo By Hauke Goos July 14, 2006, 05:09 PM In 2000, five men left their homes in northern China to escape the prospect of torture and imprisonment. They dreamed of a future in the United States. Caught up in America’s war on terror along the way, they instead ended up in Guantanamo. It’s been six years since they last saw their families.
They sit on their beds in a barracks on the outskirts of the city, waiting. The door is ajar, revealing a cloudless late (…)

Activists Sue To Block Electronic Voting By The Associated Press July 13, 2006 at 3:31 ET Computerized voting was supposed to be the cure for ballot fiascos such as the 2000 presidential election, but activist groups say it has only worsened the problem and they’ve gone to court across the country to ban the new machines.
Lawsuits have been filed in at least nine states, alleging that the machines are wide open to computer hackers and prone to temperamental fits of technology that have (…)

US Suffers Winner’s Complex - Gorbachev ABC News Created: 13.07.2006 11:48 MSK Mikhail Gorbachev is generally regarded as the man who broke down the “iron curtain” that separated the communist world from the West and thawed the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union. Now, 15 years after a coup removed him from power and the Soviet Union dissolved, he has some stern words for the United States, whose relationship with Russia has soured lately.
“We have made some (…)

The Collapse Of Baghdad By Larry Johnson Saturday, 15 July 2006 at 12:51 The following is worth your time to read. Bush can continue to tout the "success" of Iraq, but the reality is something else:
Baghdad starts to collapse as its people flee a life of death By James Hider, of The Times, from Baghdad
As I hung up the phone, I wondered if I would ever see my friend Ali alive again.
Ali, The Times translator for the past three years, lives in west Baghdad, an area that is now in (…)

Israel Takes A Stupid Pill By Larry C Johnson Saturday, 15 July 2006 at 13:53 Apparently not content to let the U.S. do a self-immolation act in the Middle East by itself, Israel decided to set itself on fire by invading Lebanon. Burn baby burn? Like George Bush, Israel’s Prime Minister, Ehud Olmert, never served in a combat unit and launched military operations without thinking the matter through. In fact, Olmert reportedly never even served in the military. I raise this because (…)

Editorial: The Real Agenda July 16, 2006
It is only now, nearly five years after Sept. 11, that the full picture of the Bush administration’s response to the terror attacks is becoming clear. Much of it, we can see now, had far less to do with fighting Osama bin Laden than with expanding presidential power.
Over and over again, the same pattern emerges: Given a choice between following the rules or carving out some unprecedented executive power, the White House always shrugged off the (…)

http://www.washingtontimes.com/upi/...
Report: Britain’s ID Card Plan May Fail
UPI
July 16, 2006 at 4:26PM
British Prime Minister Tony Blair’s identity card idea may not come to fruition for another generation, e-mails leaked from Whitehall say.
The Times of London said senior officials responsible for the multibillion-pound project believe that Blair’s program is set up to fail.
Blair’s ID card plan proposes that eventually all Britain’s 50 million adults will carry ID cards that (…)

Tax Revenue Mysteries By Alan Reynolds Published July 16, 2006 Federal tax receipts continue to soar, with the individual income tax now expected to rise about 15 percent this year and the corporate tax by 20 percent. A year ago, when people noticed tax receipts were going to be up by 15 percent, New York Times columnist Paul Krugman tried to dismiss it as "a temporary blip." That card can’t be played twice. The Bush team, on the other hand, has an odd habit of describing reductions in (…)

We Need An Honest Debate On Iraq By E.J. Dionne 7/16/2006 The most intellectually honest case for the war in Iraq was never about Saddam Hussein’s alleged weapons of mass destruction. It was the Big Bang Theory. Not to be confused with theories about the origins of the universe, the Middle East Big Bang idea was simple and seductive. Unlike other arguments for the war, it was based on some facts. The point was that the Middle East was a mess. A nest of authoritarian regimes bred (…)

Former Vets With GOP Ties Boost War Effort In Blogs By Jerry Zremski, News National Correspondent 6/25/2006 WASHINGTON - A former spokesman for President Bush recently offered to several newspapers supposedly objective freelance stories from Iraq by two combat veterans who lead a pro-war group with deep Republican ties. Several months after revelations that a Pentagon contractor was paying Iraqi news outlets for favorable war coverage, former White House spokesman Taylor Gross approached (…)