contributions

by Robert Fisk
Lord Butler told us Wednesday that Tony Blair acted in good faith. So that’s all right then.
At the al-Yarmouk hospital in Baghdad on the same morning, there was blood on the walls, blood on the floor, blood on the doctors, blood on the stretchers. In the dangerous oven of Baghdad, 10 more lives had just ended. So what was it Tony Blair said in the Commons? "We are not killing civilians in Iraq; terrorists are killing civilians in Iraq." So that’s all right then. (…)

Singer says entertainers are scared of the Bush adminstration. Hugh Davies reports
Sir Elton John has attacked what he calls a McCarthy-like "era of censorship" in America. Entertainers who speak out against the Bush administration or its policy on Iraq, he claimed, risk scorn and damage to their livelihood.
"There’s an atmosphere of fear in America right now that is deadly. Everyone is too career-conscious. They’re all too scared," he added.
Just why the singer, who is not noted for (…)

By Katha Pollitt
I had a swell time at Fahrenheit 9/11, Michael Moore’s documentary about George Bush’s dubious progress from Florida to Iraq. It’s his best movie—funny, heartbreaking, outraged and outrageous—and deserves its huge success. When did you last see a muckraking exposé of events that are still unfolding? The film should make the media blush for its torpor and fake judiciousness and embedment with the Administration. Moore displays footage never before seen of events most (…)

by David Hirst
With the "resignation" of President Hassan al-Bakr of Iraq, Mr Siddam (sic) Hussein Takriti, long the "strongman" of the Ba’athist regime, has finally emerged as its uncontested master. But the Government as a whole is almost certainly the weaker for it.
Whether or not the 67-year-old President resigned for health reasons, his removal will have important, and potentially disruptive repercussions within the ruling hierarchy. Both Mr Bakr and his Vice-President, the 42 year (…)

The United States said today it will vote against a draft resolution in the UN General Assembly demanding that Israel remove the barrier it is building in the West Bank to keep Israeli and Palestinian communities apart.
The 191-nation body was scheduled to take a vote on Monday on the draft submitted by Arab states after the International Court of Justice (ICJ) declared last week that the Israeli construction of the wall "is contrary to international law."
The draft urged Israel to (…)

A FORMER federal Liberal Party president says Prime Minister John Howard should be tried and punished for war crimes over the Iraq conflict.
John Valder told a peace forum in Sydney today the invasion of Iraq by the United States-led coalition was one of the great military atrocities of our time.
Mr Valder likened the war to a person breaking into a neighbour’s house.
If a person invaded a home, killing one or two of its occupants, and subsequently found no evidence for their bad (…)

Family members of slain U.S. businessman Nicholas Berg are being stonewalled by their government as they try to find out exactly what happened in the weeks before he was kidnapped and beheaded in Iraq in May, Berg’s father said.
Among other details, the Bergs want to know whether Berg, who had been in Iraq seeking work for his fledgling telecommunications company, was being held by allied or Iraqi forces before his kidnapping, The Philadelphia Inquirer newspaper reported.
"If it weren’t (…)

Gunmen have killed six Bagh-dad councilors in the two weeks since the US occupation formally ended, sending a wave of fear through Iraq’s grass-roots politicians.
"I am not sure if I can continue," a member of the council in Mansour, the capital’s wealthiest suburb, said on Friday. He had been happy in a first interview to have his name used but changed his mind after Jinan Joseph, a fellow councilor, was gunned down in his own home the night before.
Unlike the frequent attacks on Iraqi (…)

by Gordon Prather
The Select Committee on Intelligence has just issued a report [pdf] highly critical of the National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) of October 2002, which served as the basis for the "Congressional Joint Resolution to Authorize the Use of United States Armed Forces Against Iraq."
Various congresspersons are now saying that if they had known in October 2002 what the Committee has just revealed about the NIE, they would never have voted for the Resolution.
But the (…)

Downing Street has admitted to The Observer newspaper that repeated claims by British Prime Minister Tony Blair that "400 000 bodies had been found in Iraqi mass graves" is untrue, and only about 5 000 corpses have so far been uncovered.
The claims by Blair, in November and December of last year, were given widespread credence, quoted by MPs and widely published, including in the introduction to a United States government pamphlet on Iraq’s mass graves.
In that publication — Iraq’s (…)