Online Journal

As the number of US troops killed in Iraq passed the 4,000 mark, George W. Bush, after conferring Monday with US officials in Washington and Baghdad, told the American people that the outcome "will ‘merit the sacrifice," according to the Washington Post.

My question is, for what mother, father, husband, wife or child will this illegal pointless war that has sapped the blood of a million Iraqis as well, not to mention some $12 trillion from our Treasury -- better used for life-giving projects -- will this sacrifice be merited?

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"Scoop" Independent News Washington, D.C.

We have been warned again and again that seeing the world as an "us versus them" proposition is a fatal error. It's polarizing. It leads to "class warfare." It absolves "us" of the collective responsibility we all have in a democracy. Can't have it, not allowed.

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[Photo: Uruknet]

Online Journal

A classified memo written by a top military official stationed in western Iraq reveals that a prison in downtown Fallujah is so overcrowded and dirty that it does not even meet basic “minimal levels of hygiene for human beings.”

“The conditions in these jails are so bad that I think we need to do the right thing in terms of caring for the prisoners even with our own dollars, or release them,” says the memo, written late last month by Maj. Gen. John Kelly, commander of U.S forces in western Iraq.

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Al-Ahram / Uruknet

Every once in a while Ibrahim Hawash, 42, calls his wife Noha from his nightshift job to make sure that she has followed the treatment course prescribed by their family doctor for the involuntary urination of their four children, who are in primary school. The doctor says that the four children lost their ability to control urination due to the fear they underwent when Israeli army jets bombed a home near theirs in the Jabalya refugee camp in the northern Gaza Strip during the "Warm Winter" military campaign three weeks ago. The four children still remember the terrifying night when they woke frightened up to the sound of a thundering explosion in the area and found that the glass of their home's windows had fallen onto their bed.

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A review of the 2008 novel by James Howard Kunstler (Atlantic Monthly Press)

"The world has become such a wicked place," she said quietly, just a statement of fact."

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