by Walter Brasch

It’s hard to believe that Vice-President Dick Cheney believes in Constitutional rights -- at least after all that he and his protégé, George W. Bush, have done to the American people the past five years. First, there is the USA PATRIOT Act, which twisted and shredded the First, Fourth, Fifth, Sixth, Eighth, and Fourteenth amendments to the Constitution. Those amendments once guaranteed the rights of freedom of speech, press, assembly, and religion, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances; freedom from unreasonable searches; due process and the right against self-incrimination; the right to counsel, a speedy trial, and the right to a fair and public trial by an impartial jury; reasonable bail and freedom from cruel and unusual punishment; and an equal protection guarantee for both citizens and non-citizens...

http://www.dissidentvoice.org/Nov05/Brasch1106.htm

by Lucinda Marshall

Saddened and angry though we may be by the deaths of over 2,000 U.S. military personnel, we need to look at this milestone in context. As much as the Pentagon would just as soon not own up to losing 2,000 of its boots on the ground, it beats the heck out of having to own up to the real loses. Because what that number does not include is the more than 15,000 who have been wounded. It doesn't count the many more who are coming home with Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome and health problems due to exposure to our own chemical weaponry. And it certainly doesn't include the tens if not hundreds of thousands of Iraqis who have been killed. Nonetheless, the antiwar movement chose to make this milestone a focus of nationwide vigils and the notion that this was a media moment to run with in and of itself bears some serious examination...

http://www.dissidentvoice.org/Nov05/Marshall1106.htm

by William H. Thornton

The end of the Cold War found the U.S. and its NATO allies unprepared for the geocultural realities they met in Eurasia. As in the Middle East, Islam was bound to play a central role here, but the American concept of church/state division and the European concept of secular modernity put Western analysts at a loss where Islamism (the cultural politics of Islam) was concerned. Americans were especially in a fog in their effort to supplant Russian influence in the newly independent nations of Central Asia, where an Islamic renaissance had been in progress long before the Soviet collapse. Although all the ex-Soviet republics are officially secular, Islam is at once a key to legitimacy and a linchpin of resistance throughout the region. U.S. policy makers tend either to ignore this religious factor or, when that becomes impossible, to treat it as a cultural atavism in need of repair. That bias obscures the most crucial cultural fact of current Eurasian politics: that insofar as civil Islam (a moderate form that welcomes democracy but contests the culturally invasive commercialization that is synonymous with current “globalization”) is the worst enemy of uncivil Islam, Washington’s broad-spectrum “war on terrorism” sets in motion a vicious circle whereby aid to dictatorial regimes pushes moderate Islamists into the extremist camp, which in turn becomes a pretext for more aid...

http://www.dissidentvoice.org/Nov05/Thornton1106.htm

by Evelyn J. Pringle

The FTAA faces widespread opposition in Latin America and for good reason. Ten years of NAFTA's so-called economic reforms have resulted in widespread poverty, high unemployment, massive debt, and a series of other economic crises. Bush is hoping to get the deal back on track while attending the summit, but his prospects look grim. Protests against his visit were already underway in Argentina three days before he arrived there, with the blocking of bridges and streets in the capital of Buenos Aires, and posters bearing the slogans “Stop Bush” and “Fuera Bush,” some of which were superimposed over graphic pictures of wounded children in Iraqi. Argentine Nobel Prize winner Adolfo Pérez Esquivel recently told a radio audience that Bush is “a torturer, violator of human rights, an assassin, a violator of United Nations resolutions, of international treaties and of the sovereignty of peoples, as has happened in Iraq.”...

http://www.dissidentvoice.org/Nov05/Pringle1106.htm

Revisiting the Dream Memo

by Gary Leupp

I’ve been putting together a chronology of the Niger Uranium Disinformation Scheme, drawing on numerous Plame Affair timelines available online. As the question of who outed Plame leads to the question of who invented the yellowcake purchase story in the first place, the chronology has to include material on the Rome embassy break-in, Italian investigations, British reports on an African uranium purchase, CIA statements in response to those reports, officials’ public statements alleging a uranium deal, the establishment of bodies within the U.S. government to prepare for and explain the assault on Iraq, conversations between reporters and administration officials about Plame, investigations into the “prewar handling of intelligence,” prewar yellow journalism, the Fitzgerald investigation, etc. . . . My chronology-in-progress, which I’ll post when done, plainly indicates that the infamous 16 words in President Bush’s January 2003 State of the Union speech, and similar statements by Rice and Powell earlier that month, were caused by many months of discussion between U.S., British and Italian officials about alleged efforts by Iraq to obtain yellowcake from Niger; months of activity by Michael Ledeen in concert with Italian friends culminating with his input into the Office of Special Plans;

http://www.dissidentvoice.org/Articles7/Leopold_OSP-Manipulation.htm

months of Judith Miller’s reporting on Iraq’s supposed nuclear program; and months of disputation between neocon proponents of the uranium story (backed up conveniently by British intelligence) and CIA skeptics. The evidence on which the statement rested was debunked by the IAEA even before the attack on Iraq began, but the administration and its supporters continued to argue that there was intelligence aside from the discredited documents linking Iraq to Niger uranium. One little item left out of all the timelines I’ve seen is an article by Con Coughlin in the December 14, 2003 issue of the British newspaper, the Daily Telegraph...

http://www.dissidentvoice.org/Nov05/Leupp1106.htm