Antiwar protests.

Full of contradictions, flat-out lies and groundless affirmations, the torrent of reporting and commentary on the 'coalition' war against Iraq has obscured the negligence of the military and policy experts who planned it and now justify it. For the past two weeks, I have been travelling in Egypt and Lebanon trying to keep up with the stream of information and misinformation coming out of Iraq, Kuwait, Qatar and Jordan, much of it misleadingly upbeat, but some of it horrifyingly dramatic in its import as well as its immediacy. The Arab satellite channels, al-Jazeera being by now the most notorious and efficient, have given a quite different view of the war from the standard stuff served up by American reporters with their mass uprisings in Basra, their multiple 'falls' of Umm Qasr and al-Faw, their talk of Iraqis being killed for not fighting, and their grimy pictures of themselves, as lost as the English-speaking soldiers they have been living with. Al-Jazeera has had reporters inside Mosul, Baghdad, Basra and Nasiriya, one of them the irrepressible Tasir Alouni, fluent veteran of the Afghanistan war, and they have presented a much more detailed, more realistic account of what has befallen Baghdad and Basra, as well as showing the resistance and anger of the Iraqi population, dismissed by Western propaganda as a sullen bunch waiting to throw flowers at Clint Eastwood lookalikes.

In an academic career spanning seven decades, the lowest point for Philip Morrison came when students at Cornell University picked up rocks and hurled them at him.

It was late October 1962, when John F. Kennedy and Nikita S. Khrushchev were pushing each other to the brink of war in a standoff over Soviet nuclear missiles in Cuba. Mr. Morrison, a professor of physics, stood on the steps of Cornell's student union, using his cane to help steady legs weakened by childhood polio. Along with a colleague, "we gave a half an hour to the idea that instead of discussing nuclear war or bombing Russia or Cuba, we should ask first for the state leaders, Kennedy and Khrushchev, to meet with the secretary general of the United Nations to arrange for some sort of stop to the process. So they could talk it over."

"That could not be called a very radical proposal," says Mr. Morrison, his voice faltering, dropping to a whisper. "Well, we were stoned."

I went to see a local production of "Cabaret" at the University this last Saturday. They did a wonderful job, so good I started seeing a lot of what was in the 1929-1930 Germany happening in America. I'm waiting for the Bush Youth Brigades to be organized any day now!

A cache of files recovered from the bombed-out headquarters of Iraq's intelligence agency shows Saddam Hussein's regime had links to an Islamist terror group in Africa - and had corresponded about opening a Baghdad training camp for the group.

The documents, pulled by a reporter from a tangle of wires and shredded paper, may be important evidence of the relationship between the Hussein regime and Osama bin Laden's Al Qaeda network - something the Bush administration has long sought to prove.

steissd, guess it depends on which side of the fence you live on -- looks pretty fascist around here to me!

IMO hatred for Bush has made many from the left irrational. You would think that we are now in the throws of a dictatorship and have lost all our civil rights. I would note that the radical right and the irrational left present the same level of danger to our liberties.