Baghdad up close and personal

ROVING IN THE RED ZONE
ATol's "Roving Eye", Pepe Escobar, is back in Iraq and in the Red Zone - that is, outside "Fortress USA", the Green Zone. This is the first of his unembedded, non-Kevlar-protected, bodyguardless reports.

Baghdad up close and personal

hhvekouHaving dodged a bullet but not arrest by the Mehdi Army militia, Escobar witnesses the grand-scale mayhem and the minutiae of misery of Baghdad. In the deadly daily embrace of the Red Zone, the surreal overlaps Hollywood-style special effects while ethnic cleansing proceeds neighborhood by neighborhood and the bereaved are advised to visit the market to try to match the missing limbs of their dead. (May 1, '07)
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/IE02Ak01.html

La Brea Tar Pits: A Metaphor for the America Republic?
by William Hughes
(Tuesday, May 1, 2007)

President George W. Bush now has the power, thanks to a mostly cowardly Congress, to declare “Martial Law!” The Defense Authorization Act of 2006 gave him the green light. All he needs is a Reichstag-like incident and our Republic will be history. Like the animals who were trapped in the La Brea Tar Pits in Los Angeles, it has been sinking for years. Author Chalmers Johnson is convinced the U.S. Empire is headed the way of Greece’s and Rome’s.

Read more...

http://world.mediamonitors.net/content/view/full/43005

"Make Sure This Happens!!"
How Rumsfeld Micromanaged Torture

By ANDREW COCKBURN

When Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld boasted, as he did frequently, of his unrelenting focus on the war on terror, his audience would have been startled, maybe even shocked, to discover the activities that Rumsfeld found it necessary to supervise in minute detail. Close command and control of far away events from the Pentagon were not limited to the targeting of bombs and missiles. Thanks to breakthroughs in communications, the interrogation and torture of prisoners could be monitored on a real time basis also.

http://counterpunch.org/

Dishonorable Non-Mention: Why Was Juan Gonzalez Left Out of NY Daily News Pulitzer for 9/11 Health Effects?

The New York Daily News has been awarded the Pulitzer Prize for an editorial series on the medical fall-out from the 9/11 attacks. But in some circles, the Pulitzer award was as noteworthy for whom it did not mention: Daily News columnist and Democracy Now! co-host Juan Gonzalez. Gonzalez was the first reporter to question government officials' insistence that the air around Ground Zero was safe and wrote a series of groundbreaking exposes on the issue. [includes rush transcript]

http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=07/05/01/1410245