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Jay Shaft - A soldier with a heavy heart and a real tragic choice confronting him contacted Jay Shaft, and told him of his horror in Iraq, and how he would not go back again. This moving interview contains his true words, and it gives his reasons for not wanting to go back for a second time to serve in the USA’s war in Iraq. He is a reservist who has been extended at least three times under “stop-loss” measures to maintain troop deployment levels. He was not ever given a choice or a contract renewal option, and has no legal recourse or way out. He was one week from getting out of the Standing Ready Reserves when he was reactivated and sent to Iraq in 2003.
Daniel Patrick Welch - So what’s a thinking American to do? Metaphors from Alice in Wonderland don’t even cut it any more. Bizarro World is too comical, and “Beam me up, Scotty..” too hopeful. At least the good men and women of the Enterprise had somewhere to beam to. Alas, in the current pundit-, oil-, and money-swamp that is the US, there seems truly to be no escape. Daniel Patrick Welch comments on the surreal quality of life in the US during election season. With the Iraq war playing almost no role in the election debate, Welch fears that American voters have become totally unhinged from reality, and wonders if there is any escape from the current crisis.
John Pilger - Every day now, a one-way moral mirror is held up to us as a true reflection of events. New threats are given impetus with every terrorist outrage, be it at Beslan or Jakarta. Seen in the one-way mirror, our leaders make grievous mistakes, but their good intentions are not in question. Heretics who look behind the one-way mirror and see the utter dishonesty of all this, are few, but only by recognising the terrorism of states is it possible to understand, and deal with, acts of terrorism by groups and individuals which, however horrific, are tiny by comparison. The thought that the state has lost its mind and is punishing so many innocent people is intolerable. And so the evidence has to be internally denied. It is time we stopped denying it.
David Hoile - USA Secretary-of-State Colin Powell’s decision to describe the conflict in Darfur as a “genocide” is set to damage prospects for peace in the Sudan. This is for several reasons. This action will damage Sudan’s faith in the Bush Administration as an honest broker in securing peace in Sudan, either in southern Sudan or Darfur itself. For Washington to chose to put electoral expediency - diverting media attention away from the Iraq fiasco and pandering to anti-Sudanese and anti-Arab pressure group politics - before the truth of the situation in Darfur, will dramatically undermine its reputation. In putting American votes before Sudanese peace, in both western and southern Sudan, Washington is playing a very dangerous game indeed.
Some called it a “dirty bomb” dropped on the Pentagon, namely the report last month that eight out of 20 men who had served in the same unit during the invasion of Iraq now have malignant cancers. That’s 40 percent in 16 months. The soldiers were reportedly exposed only to vaccines and depleted uranium, and vaccines are not known to cause cancer. Until it is proven, beyond a shadow of doubt, that DU is harmless, DU weapons should surely be banned. If the worst-case scenario proves correct, the effects of DU will be felt for years to come - in and around Iraq, Afghanistan, Kosovo and Bosnia. Dust storms will carry DU particles far and wide, and old DU munitions will retain their radioactivity for all eternity - in wrecked tanks where children play and in cooking pots made from recycled scrap.
"Memory says, ‘I did that’,” Friedrich Nietzsche once wrote. “Pride replies, ‘I could not have done that’. Eventually, memory yields.” Three years ago in the United States, on September 11, airplanes fell from the sky and thousands died. Countless numbers mourned the mass murder. Countless mourn still. On the same day 31 years ago, the sky fell in Chile when the democratically elected Allende government was overthrown in a bloody coup staged by the USA government. Who mourns the Chilean sky? In 1953, the USA engineered a coup in Iran that ousted the government of prime minister Mohammad Mossadegh - an Iranian colossus who had done more for his people than any leader in the country’s history. But what goes around comes around. There is always a day of reckoning.
"I believe as greater men before me have, that only with this mantra: “Be a friend to the oppressed and an enemy to the oppressor”, of this - the inner and outer chant, can we Born an overstanding with the Knowledge made manifest from Saddiq to Shariati to Sadr to Khomanie & Khamanie, peace to our bruthas, Farrakhan to Nasrallah and Sistani. It is with this do I hope to add on to the strength of the house, and cipher the third degree of reality, that revolution is bloody so everyday is ashura. What else can an island boy do to destroy amerikkka....” Lawrence Ytzhak Braithwaite, aka Lord Patch, of New Palestine/The Hood, gives a powerful and strikingly original portrayal of life at the frontline between global imperialism and some of North America’s poorest communities.
In the beginning there was Jean-Bertrand Aristide - “Titide”, as he was known locally - preacher of the slums and shantytowns, and voice of the disenfranchised. When the brutal Duvalier dictatorship ended in 1986, Titide was the great hope of a desperate people. Yet, when his third term as president ended on February 29th 2004, the consensus was that he no longer cared about anything but power and money. This assertion was accompanied by a list of the little curé’s misdemeanours: he was thought to be an accomplice to (if not directly responsible for) every crime - drugs trafficking, political assassinations and the dead dogs in the street. Could this be the man who received the 1996 Unesco prize for human rights education? Or is he being unfairly demonised, as popular leaders are, when they have the nerve to upset the established disorder in the US’s backyard?
In the late summer of 2002, a CIA analyst made a quiet visit to the detention centre at the US Naval Base at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. He was fluent in Arabic and familiar with the Islamic world. He was held in high respect within the agency, and was capable of reporting directly, if he chose, to George Tenet, the CIA director. The analyst did more than just visit and inspect. He interviewed at least 30 prisoners to find out who they were and how they ended up in Guantánamo. Some of his findings, he later confided to a former CIA colleague, were devastating.… In an explosive extract from his new book, Seymour Hersh reveals how, in a fateful decision that led to the abuses at Abu Ghraib prison, the US defence secretary gave the green light to a secret unit authorised to torture terrorist suspects.
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