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On 14 February 2002 the International Court of Justice issued its Judgement in the case of the Democratic Republic of the Congo v Belgium. The ruling is one of the most significant ever issued by the Court in respect of the relationship and accountability of government officials to their citizens or subjects. Because I believe Read more…

THE conditions in which prisoners are being held brutally and illegally in an American concentration camp on Cuba go to the heart of the “war on terrorism”, and mark the Blair government for its betrayal of the basic rights of British citizens to the interests of a foreign power.   Shafiq Rasul, from Tipton, near Read more…

Please stop sending me those emails. You know who are. And you know what emails I mean … Okay, I’ll spell it out — those forwarded emails suggesting, or flat-out stating, the CIA and the U.S. government were somehow involved in the horrific September 11 attacks. There are emails about a fellow imprisoned in Canada Read more…

The Office of Strategic Influence went from obscurity to infamy to oblivion during a spin cycle that lasted just seven days in late February. Coming to terms with a week of negative coverage after news broke that the Pentagon office might purposely deceive foreign media, a somber defense secretary announced: “It is being closed down.” Read more…

ROGER BYBEE Bermuda Triangle: Where Corporate Taxes Vanish The Bermuda Triangle is the place where taxes on US corporations and the wealthy disappear. But there is nothing mysterious about the cause of the revenues’ disappearance, or where they are winding up. Even in the wake of post-9/11 sentiment about loyalty to America, corporations and the Read more…

Though no connection between Iraq and the terrorist attacks of September 11 has been found, the Bush administration has raised expectations significantly that it will again bomb Iraq as it extends its “war on terrorism” into new countries. “For better or worse, a bipartisan consensus has emerged in the Bush administration and Congress alike that Read more…

Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz  San Francisco: City Lights, 2002  Review by Elizabeth Martinez  This gem of a book sparkles with revelations about what the 1960s were like for a working-class part-Indian woman from Oklahoma turned feminist-Marxist revolutionary on her way underground. Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz is also, and I rarely use the word, a unique activist/scholar/author. Her contribution ranges Read more…

Michael Albert At the WSF as a representative of Z and an invited speaker, I attended the opening cultural events at close range, learned from presentations in areas of great personal interest, hosted a party by Z for 30 wonderful folk, spoke on a panel, offered a testimony, participated in filming and photographing various folks Read more…

Anthony Arnove In the Persian Gulf War, the war in the Balkans, and now in Afghanistan, U.S. military planners said they had developed new methods of warfare that would hit military targets and spare civilian life or, in the preferred terminology, “collateral damage.” “This is war and war is hell,” Senator Joseph Lieberman (D-CT) said Read more…

Bronski Gay TV—clearly, this is an idea whose time has come. After all, in the words of the porn industry, it’s a money shot. So on January 10 MTV and Showtime, cable outlets both owned by Viacom, announced that they were developing the first cable channel geared to a lesbian and gay audience. The proposed Read more…

Leonard Innes Six months ago, the Enron Corporation was riding high. In a little over a decade it had grown from a relatively small gas pipeline company to one of the leading energy corporations worldwide—7th on the Fortune 500 list of top U.S. companies and one of the 100 largest corporations in sales worldwide. Enron’s Read more…

Fettes I didn’t know Marty well, but when I heard of his death on December 17, 2001, I felt I had lost an old friend. Marty was active in the workers’ movement for almost 70 years, as a writer, agitator, activist and teacher. His death is a tremendous loss to those who knew him. Marty Read more…

Review by Tom Gallagher No one rising in the 1960s folk music revival escaped the influence of the main figures of the previous one—Pete Seeger and Woody Guthrie. But, for David Hajdu, these singers “were not so much Pete and Woody’s Children as Pete’s Children or Woody’s Children.” Hajdu’s book Positively Fourth Street is the Read more…

S. Herman Free trade continues to be a primary mantra of the New World Order, used to justify the World Trade Organization (WTO) and the drive to enlarge its jurisdiction, as well as to rationalize the structural adjustment programs of the IMF and World Bank and instruments like the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). Read more…

Kautzer Smile for the camera.” It’s a phrase that has attained a permanent (albeit fluid) place in our colloquial American lexicon. Rooted in the amateur photography of family and friends, it has now become a sarcastic catch- phrase uttered when under the gaze of surveillance cameras in banks, gas stations, parking lots, and shopping malls. Read more…

Bruce Levine The article titled “Pay Attention: Ritalin Acts Much Like Cocaine” was published in August 2001 in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA). It’s not likely you’ve heard about it. Pharmaceutical companies do their best to ensure we hear something altogether different, something like this: “Psychiatric medication—just like insulin—restores the chemical imbalances Read more…

Bryan G. Pfeifer A report issued December 23 confirms what many W-2 critics have long charged: that, although carefully concealed by politicians, big business, and the corporate media, Wisconsin’s “welfare reform” has led to a catastrophic social crisis not seen in Milwaukee in decades. On a daily basis the poor in Milwaukee, including thousands of Read more…

Bryan G. Pfeifer A report issued December 23 confirms what many W-2 critics have long charged: that, although carefully concealed by politicians, big business, and the corporate media, Wisconsin’s “welfare reform” has led to a catastrophic social crisis not seen in Milwaukee in decades. On a daily basis the poor in Milwaukee, including thousands of Read more…

Podur Once again, India and Pakistan are on the brink of war. The two countries have fought wars with each other in 1947, 1965 and 1971, and fought smaller clashes in 1999 and various other times. This time both states have nuclear weapons. The current crisis began December 13, 2001, when a group of terrorists Read more…

House, dramatically revamps the federal role in education. Both Democrats and Republicans have hailed the bill, which is largely modeled after Texas standards for testing student achievement. President Bush claims “these historic reforms will improve our public schools by creating an environment in which every child can learn through real accountability, unprecedented flexibility for states Read more…

Lydia Sargent Welcome to the Satire Hotel, a place where the unpatriotic are in jail, suspected terrorists have been shipped to an island off the coast or bombed back to the stone age, and patriotism is an Olympic event. Yes, ever since that fateful day in September, we gals at the Satire Hotel have been Read more…

R. Shalom Within days after the first U.S. bombs fell on Afghanistan, Washington revealed another site for its “war against terrorism”: the Philippines. U.S. military personnel were to be sent to that southeast Asian nation to aid in the fight against Abu Sayyaf, a small group of Islamic extremists that U.S. officials linked to al-Qaeda. Read more…

Chris Shumway Last Fall, the FCC quietly moved forward with plans to overhaul or possibly abolish the last few remaining restrictions on media ownership. These include: prohibitions against one company owning TV stations and cable systems in the same market; restrictions on the number of TV stations one firm can own; restrictions on the percentage Read more…

Norman Solomon Like most people, American journalists are apt to look at the very rich with awe. These days, in a society eager to condemn the Enron debacle, we might want to conclude that decent standards ultimately prevail. But media censure comes down hard on financial mismanagement, flagrant skullduggery, and collapse; not on zeal to Read more…

It’s just good police work.” So comes the insistence by many—usually whites—that concentrating law enforcement efforts on blacks and Latinos is a perfectly legitimate idea. To listen to some folks tell it, the fact that people of color commit a disproportionate amount of crime (a claim that is true for some but not all offenses) Read more…

  Exactly what is behind the phrase “Axis of Evil” that seemingly has surprised observers world round? Was it a faux pas or the weathervane for a new Middle East policy? With the arrival of new actors and the new militant political culture at the Pentagon is the Department of Defense preempting the State Department Read more…

We have entered the era of Yuppie Eugenics. A contemporary, ostensibly voluntary form of older ideas and practices, Yuppie Eugenics is based in modern molecular genetics and concepts of “choice,” and has begun to raise the high tech prospect of employing prenatal genetic engineering. What it shares with the earlier doctrines is the goal of Read more…

Oaxaca, Chiapas, and Mexico City: The contamination of Indian maiz in Mexico by US-grown genetically modified corn touches a common nerve for 57 distinct corn-growing indigenous cultures here whose struggle for justice and against 500 years of institutional racism, has troubled the reigns of this distant neighbor nation’s last three presidents. Now, nearly a decade Read more…

In a recent article, Nick Cohen commented on the rationale behind the extraordinary media obsession with predicting the future. Cohen compares BBC journalists with TV crystal ball-gazer, Mystic Meg: “Instead of being honest, broadcasters pose as sooth sayers. No one can accuse them of possessing views of their own. They are merely omniscient. They see Read more…

Most people believe that their own country is virtuous and that only others misbehave enough to qualify as international outlaws. But the United States has elevated this popular sentiment to the level of national policy, by designating certain countries, of its own choosing, as “rogue states.” The dictionary defines “rogue” as “a fierce and dangerous Read more…

The autumn started with a huge national jolt of shock, fear, grief and anger. Winter has begun with many worries here at home and grim satisfaction about warfare abroad. A line from “King Lear,” early in Act 4, is hauntingly appropriate: “‘Tis the time’s plague when madmen lead the blind.” Shakespeare’s observation fits the current Read more…

Belgrade: Whatever the acts of genocide Slobodan Milosevic has committed – crimes against humanity or war crimes – the process against him is in opposition to international criminal law and presents a dangerous precedent. Instead of being tried on the territory of former Yugoslavia, which would have been the usual procedure, he was, with the Read more…

My name is John Clarke and I am an Organizer with the Ontario Coalition Against Poverty (OCAP). In the early afternoon of February 19th, 2002, I crossed the international bridge between Sarnia, Ontario and Port Huron, Michigan. I was on my way to a speaking engagement that had been set up by students at Michigan Read more…

One cannot help wondering how much of the agenda of the critiques of the new economic order is set by those setting the terms of the new economic order itself.” wrote Indian labour rights activist Radha D’Souza in 1995 (Parallel People’s APEC: Two Meetings, Two Views). With all the reflection that has been taking place Read more…

The critics and the news media panned it. Variety went so far as to say, “A rare case of blatant political propaganda in a major Hollywood picture, John Q. is a shamelessly manipulative commercial on behalf of national health insurance.” True, the film graphically demonstrates how bad the health insurance situation is in this country Read more…

Though they already dominate every medium that provides information and entertainment to the American people, the nation’s largest media corporations now are poised to gain dramatically greater control over broadcast, cable and print communication. A Feb. 19 decision by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia nullified two long-standing government regulations limiting Read more…

On October 24, Muhammed Butt died of a heart attack at the Hudson County Correctional Center in Kearny, New Jersey. Butt, a Pakistani national, was detained on September 19 by the FBI as a suspect connected with the September 11 attacks. He was then transferred to the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS), which charged him Read more…

In the Constitution of India the Supreme Court and the High Courts were seen as watchdog bodies, independent of the executive, and entrusted with the task of seeing that all institutions function in accordance with the Constitution, and the Rule of Law. They were assigned with powers not only to declare and set aside Executive Read more…

 They came for Rabih Haddad in the afternoon, as his family was getting ready to celebrate the end of Ramadan. Three men from the Immigration and Naturalization Service took him away from the apartment in Ann Arbor, Michigan, that he shared with his wife and four children. His wife frantically shoved a few dates into Read more…

Events in isolation do not establish that a government is corrupt. Tony Blair’s support for Lakshmi Mittal, the Labour donor hoping to buy Romania’s steel industry, looks suspicious, but could, perhaps, be the result of a misjudgement. To suggest that a government is corrupt, you must first detect a pattern of behaviour. Three months ago, Read more…

By Victoria — Fourteen anti-government rallies, the largest attended by 20,000 people in Victoria, were held across B.C. on the weekend in what labour leaders consider the start of a sustained battle against the provincial government. Everything from launching a general strike to preparing for recall campaigns in the fall are being discussed in the Read more…

New York, February 25, 2002- On February 21, 2002, Colombia’s 38-year conflict exploded into full-fledged war when President Pastrana unilaterally broke off peace talks with the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC). MADRE, an international women’s human rights organization, is extremely concerned about the escalation of violence and the threat of grave human rights abuses Read more…

> Buried under the rubble of the World Trade Centre lies a decade-worth of Pakistani foreign policy. Faced by a furious United States, Pakistan’s establishment abandoned what had earlier been declared as vital national security interests. First, Pakistan junked the mullahs beyond the western border. A still bigger earthquake followed just weeks later as thousands Read more…

Much has changed since last September’s jetliner attacks but more has stayed the same. Beneath the outward sense of national unity engendered by the events of last September, the United States remains a harshly unequal society in which policy primarily serves the interests of the privileged 1 percent that owns roughly 40 percent of the Read more…

About two months from now tens of thousands of people will be converging on Washington, D.C. over the weekend of April 19-22. Three national coalition efforts, the Colombia Mobilization, the April 20th Mobilization Committee and the Mobilization for Global Justice, are organizing what promises to be a significant and timely four days of activity. There Read more…

{Note from ZNet: Of course Bush II is mostly known, reviled, and/or revered for reinvigorating the War on Terrorism themes that his father and Ronald Reagan sought to make central to U.S. foreign policy two decades ago, and of course for bombing Afghanistan “from rubble to dust,” while ignoring the probable cost in the form Read more…

[Asaf Oron, a Sergeant Major in the Giv’ati Brigade, is one of the original 53 Israeli soldiers who signed the “Fighters’ Letter” declaring that from now on they will refuse to serve in the Occupied territories. He is signer #8 and one of the first in the list to include a statement explaining his action. Read more…

Feminists hate men. How do we know this? Because it is repeated over and over in the media and by right-wing politicians and other so-called guardians of the moral values of the society. If feminists hate men, then it stands to reason that men should stay clear of — or do their best to attack Read more…

1) No large sum of money contributed to Republican or Democratic — coffers goes un-rewarded. I once debated Otto Reich on a Colorado TV station and afterwards our differences became downright sour, so I can testify to the fact that he was and is a confrontational intransigent, a man who worked hand in glove with Read more…

Week Online: During Sunday’s SuperBowl, the drug czar’s office ran a series of paid ads attempting to link drug use and the “war on terrorism.” If you use drugs, the ads said, you support terrorism. What is your take on this? Noam Chomsky: Terrorism is now being used and has been used pretty much the Read more…