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President Obama plans to order a sweeping overhaul of the National Security Council, expanding its membership and increasing its authority to set strategy across a wide spectrum of international and domestic issues. The result will be a "dramatically different" NSC from that of the Bush administration or any of its predecessors since the forum was established after World War II ... according to national security adviser James L. Jones, who described the changes in an interview. Jones, a retired Marine general, made it clear that he will run the process and be the primary conduit of national security advice to Obama. The new structure ... will expand the NSC's reach far beyond the range of traditional foreign policy issues. New NSC directorates will deal with such department-spanning 21st-century issues as cybersecurity, energy, climate change, nation-building and infrastructure. Many of the functions of the Homeland Security Council, established as a separate White House entity by President Bush after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, may be subsumed into the expanded NSC, although it is still undetermined whether elements of the HSC will remain as a separate body within the White House. Over the next 50 days, John O. Brennan, a CIA veteran who serves as presidential adviser for counterterrorism and homeland security and is Jones's deputy, will review options for the homeland council, including its responsibility for preparing for and responding to natural and terrorism-related domestic disasters.

A federal judge on Tuesday ordered the Bush administration to release 17 detainees at Guantánamo Bay by the end of the week, the first such ruling in nearly seven years of legal disputes over the administration’s detention policies. The judge, Ricardo M. Urbina of Federal District Court, ordered that the 17 men be brought to his courtroom on Friday from the prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, where they have been held since 2002. He indicated that he would release the men, members of the restive Uighur Muslim minority in western China, into the care of supporters in the United States, initially in the Washington area. “I think the moment has arrived for the court to shine the light of constitutionality on the reasons for detention,” Judge Urbina said. Saying the men had never fought the United States and were not a security threat, he tersely rejected Bush administration claims that he lacked the power to order the men set free in the United States and government requests that he stay his order to permit an immediate appeal. The ruling was a sharp setback for the administration, which has waged a long legal battle to defend its policies of detention at the naval base at Guantánamo Bay, arguing a broad executive power in waging war. Federal courts up to the Supreme Court have waded through detention questions and in several major cases the courts have rejected administration contentions. The government recently conceded that it would no longer try to prove that the Uighurs were enemy combatants, the classification it uses to detain people at Guantánamo, where 255 men are now held.

Note: For many disturbing reports from reliable, verifiable sources on threats to civil liberties, click here.

Thanks to the Sept. 11 interview of Sarah Palin by Charles Gibson of ABC News, the Bush Doctrine has become part of the American vocabulary. Although it has been a fateful doctrine - it was used to justify the attack on Iraq - many Americans reported that they were as clueless about it as Gov. Palin. So what is the Bush Doctrine? According to international law as generally understood since the creation of the United Nations, a pre-emptive attack is legal only if a country has certain knowledge that an attack on it is imminent - too imminent for the matter to be taken to the U.N. Security Council. Pre-emptive war is different from preventive war, in which a country, fearing that another country may become strong enough to threaten it at some time in the future, attacks it to prevent this possibility. Preventive wars are illegal under international law. This distinction, however, creates a terminological problem: Although preventive war is worse than pre-emptive war, to most ears preemption sounds worse. Many people, therefore, speak of pre-emptive war when they mean preventive war. To avoid confusion, we can use the term pre-emptive-preventive war. Neoconservatives, the most powerful of whom is Vice President Dick Cheney, had long disliked the idea that America's use of military power could be constrained by the prohibition against preemptive-preventive war. In 1992, his last year as secretary of defense, Cheney produced a draft of the Defense Planning Guidance that said the United States should use force to "pre-empt" and "preclude threats." After the 9/11 terrorist attacks, the neocons were able to turn their wish into U.S. policy.

Note: This article is by WantToKnow team member David Ray Griffin. He analyzes the significance of the 9/11 attacks for the acceptance of the Bush Doctrine in more detail in his recent book The New Pearl Harbor Revisited, pointing out that the author of the document which first made the doctrine official policy was Philip Zelikow, who then later became executive director of the 9/11 Commission.

Seven years later, it remains conventional wisdom [in Cairo] that Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda could not have been solely responsible for the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, and that the United States and Israel had to have been involved in their planning, if not their execution, too. “Look, I don’t believe what your governments and press say. It just can’t be true,” said Ahmed Issab, 26, a Syrian engineer who lives and works in the United Arab Emirates. “Why would they tell the truth? I think the U.S. organized this so that they had an excuse to invade Iraq for the oil.” Again and again, people said they simply did not believe that a group of Arabs — like themselves — could possibly have waged such a successful operation against a superpower like the United States. But they also said that Washington’s post-9/11 foreign policy proved that the United States and Israel were behind the attacks, especially with the invasion of Iraq. “Maybe people who executed the operation were Arabs, but the brains? No way,” said Mohammed Ibrahim, 36, a clothing-store owner in the Bulaq neighborhood of Cairo. “It was organized by other people, the United States or the Israelis.” Zein al-Abdin, 42, an electrician, [said] “What happened in Iraq confirms that it has nothing to do with bin Laden or Qaeda. They went against Arabs and against Islam to serve Israel, that’s why.”

Note: For a two-page summary of many reports from reliable, verifiable sources that highlight unanswered questions about what really happened on 9/11, click here.

Igniting a provocative new debate, senior military officials are pushing the Pentagon to go on the offensive in cyberspace by developing the ability to attack other nations' computer systems, rather than concentrating on defending America's electronic security. Under the most sweeping proposals, military experts would acquire the know-how to commandeer the unmanned aerial drones of adversaries, disable enemy warplanes in mid-flight and cut off electricity at precise moments to strategic locations, such as military installations, while sparing humanitarian facilities, such as hospitals. An expansion of offensive capabilities in cyberspace would represent an important change for the military. But a new National Military Strategy for Cyberspace Operations, declassified earlier this year, fueled the Pentagon debate and gave the military a green light to push for expanded capabilities. "As we go forward in time, cyber is going to be a very important part of our war-fighting tactics, techniques and procedures," said Michael W. Wynne, a former Air Force secretary. Under Wynne, the Air Force established a provisional Cyber Command in 2007 and made operating in the cyber domain part of its mission statement, on par with air operations. Wynne clashed with superiors over the Air Force approach to cyberspace and other issues and was fired in June after breakdowns in U.S. nuclear weapons security procedures. New Air Force leaders now are reassessing plans for a permanent Cyber Command, which under Wynne's leadership would have included some offensive capabilities.

The United States this year will have spent [at least] $100 billion on contractors in Iraq since the invasion in 2003, a milestone that reflects the Bush administration’s unprecedented level of dependence on private firms for help in the war, according to a government report to be released [on August 12]. The report, by the Congressional Budget Office ... will say that one out of every five dollars spent on the war in Iraq has gone to contractors for the United States military and other government agencies. The Pentagon’s reliance on outside contractors in Iraq is proportionately far larger than in any previous conflict, and it has fueled charges that this outsourcing has led to overbilling, fraud and shoddy and unsafe work that has endangered and even killed American troops. The role of armed security contractors has also raised new legal and political questions about whether the United States has become too dependent on private armed forces on the 21st-century battlefield. The budget office’s report found that from 2003 to 2007, the government awarded contracts in Iraq worth about $85 billion, and that the administration was now awarding contracts at a rate of $15 billion to $20 billion a year. At that pace, contracting costs will surge past the $100 billion mark before the end of the year. Through 2007, spending on outside contractors accounted for 20 percent of the total costs of the war, the budget office found. The dependence on private companies to support the war effort has led to questions about whether political favoritism has played a role in the awarding of multibillion-dollar contracts.

Note: For many disturbing reports on the realities of the Afghan and Iraq wars from major media sources, click here.

The Dark Side, Jane Mayer’s gripping new account of the war on terror, is really the story of two wars: the far-flung battle against Islamic radicalism, and the bitter, closed-doors domestic struggle over whether the president should have limitless power to wage it. The war on terror, according to Ms. Mayer, ... was a "political battle cloaked in legal strategy, an ideological trench war" waged by a small group of true believers whose expansive views of executive power she traces from the Nixon administration through the Iran-contra scandal to the panicked days after 9/11. Ms. Mayer’s prime movers and main villains are Vice President Dick Cheney and his legal counsel (now chief of staff) David Addington, who after the terrorist attacks moved to establish "a policy of deliberate cruelty that would’ve been unthinkable on Sept. 10." As the leader of the self-styled "war council," a group of lawyers who took the lead in making the rules for the war on terror, Mr. Addington startled many colleagues with the depth of his fervor and the reach of his power. The war council settled on a "pre-emptive criminal model," in which suspects would be used — more or less indefinitely — to gather evidence of future crimes rather than held accountable for previous ones. There would be minimal oversight from Congress. The C.I.A. would take the lead, developing aggressive new interrogation methods that would be described as “enhanced,” “robust,” “special.” What they were not, a series of secret memos issued by John Yoo and others at the Office of Legal Council would attempt to certify, was “torture.”

Note: For lots more on the realities behind the "war on terror", click here.

Peace campaigners have welcomed reports that the US military has withdrawn its last nuclear weapons from Britain. The Federation of American Scientists said in a report 110 nuclear bombs were removed from RAF Lakenheath in Suffolk. The US military said it was policy not to confirm or deny the presence of nuclear weapons at Lakenheath. Kate Hudson, from the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND), said: "We would like official confirmation from the government that this has happened." She added: "We believe an open admission will be a confidence-boosting measure for future disarmament initiatives." The report's author, Hans Kristensen, said the move had happened in the past few years. Mr Kristensen, an expert on the US nuclear arsenal, said the withdrawal of the bombs [is] part of a general strategic shift since the end of the Cold War. The Suffolk base has been the site of many protests over the years, mainly due to the claims that nuclear bombs were stored at the base.

Four Western oil companies are in the final stages of negotiations this month on contracts that will return them to Iraq, 36 years after losing their oil concessions to nationalization as Saddam Hussein rose to power. Exxon Mobil, Shell, Total and BP — the original partners in the Iraq Petroleum Company — along with Chevron and a number of smaller oil companies, are in talks with Iraq’s Oil Ministry for no-bid contracts to service Iraq’s largest fields. The deals, expected to be announced on June 30, will lay the foundation for the first commercial work for the major companies in Iraq since the American invasion, and open a new and potentially lucrative country for their operations. The no-bid contracts are unusual for the industry, and the offers prevailed over others by more than 40 companies, including companies in Russia, China and India. The contracts [would] give the companies an advantage in bidding on future contracts. There was suspicion among many in the Arab world and among parts of the American public that the United States had gone to war in Iraq precisely to secure the oil wealth these contracts seek to extract. The Bush administration has said that the war was necessary to combat terrorism. Sensitive to the appearance that they were profiting from the war and already under pressure because of record high oil prices, senior officials of two of the companies, speaking only on the condition that they not be identified, said they were helping Iraq rebuild its decrepit oil industry.

Note: For many revealing reports from reliable sources on the real reasons behind the war in Iraq, click here.

When Khalid Shaikh Mohammed and his alleged collaborators in the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks appear before the war crimes tribunal here today, ousted chief prosecutor Col. Morris D. Davis will not be celebrating. Davis, who has spent half of his life in the military justice system, still considers it "the most ethical process in the world." But the Pentagon's push to prosecute the so-called 9/11 Five is tainted, in his view, by political intrusions, illegal influence applied by more-senior officers and reliance on evidence obtained through coercion or torture. Davis drew the wrath of many in the Pentagon hierarchy when he objected last fall to pressures from Bush administration political appointees to prosecute Mohammed, known in intelligence circles as KSM, ahead of other war crimes suspects whose cases were already researched and on whom vital evidence was declassified. Unless the evidence prosecutors have against Mohammed and his codefendants is declassified, much of their prosecution will be conducted behind closed doors, depriving the American media and public of a clear view of the proceedings, he says. Davis ran afoul of superiors ... when he advised his prosecutors against relying on evidence obtained through waterboarding and other interrogation techniques that have been deemed coercive or tantamount to torture. Davis resigned after political appointees at the Pentagon rejected his judgment on the choice of cases to be tried in the months leading up to this November's election, as well as his advice against building prosecutions on coerced and potentially unreliable confessions.

An audit of US-funded reconstruction projects for Iraq has found millions of dollars have been wasted because many schemes have never been completed. The Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction blamed delays, costs, poor performance and violence for failure to finish some 855 projects. Many other projects had been falsely described as complete, found the audit of 47,321 reconstruction projects. Iraq reconstruction has cost US taxpayers more than $100bn so far. USAID, the body responsible for overseeing Iraqi reconstruction, has responded that the database used for the review was incomplete. The audit by Senator Stuart Bowen found US officials had terminated at least 855 projects before completion. Of this number, 112 were ended because of the contractors' poor performance. Danielle Brian, executive director of the watchdog group Project on Government Oversight, said: "The report paints a depressing picture of money being poured into failed Iraq reconstruction projects. Contractors are killed, projects are blown up just before being completed, or the contractor just stops doing the work." Last year, congressional investigators said as much as $10bn (Ł5bn) charged by US contractors for Iraq reconstruction had been questionable.

Note: Why is the U.S. spending over $100 billion to "reconstruct" Iraq? That's over $500 for each taxpayer in the U.S., with little to show for it. For more, see what a highly decorated U.S. general has to say on all this by clicking here.

The only United States Army officer to face a court-martial over the scandal at Iraq’s Abu Ghraib prison has been cleared of any criminal wrongdoing in the case. A court-martial convicted Lt. Col. Steven Jordan in August of disobeying an order not to discuss the investigation of abuse at the jail and issued him a criminal reprimand as penalty. But Maj. Gen. Richard Rowe, commanding officer for the Army Military District of Washington, disapproved of both the conviction and the reprimand. The decision by General Rowe wipes Colonel Jordan’s record clean of any criminal responsibility. Colonel Jordan had once faced a maximum punishment of five years in prison and dismissal from the Army over the Abu Ghraib scandal, which unleashed a wave of global condemnation against the United States when images of abused prisoners surfaced in 2004. The photos included scenes of naked detainees stacked in a pyramid and other inmates cowering in front of snarling dogs. Colonel Jordan, who was in charge of an Abu Ghraib interrogation center, said he had played no part in the abuse and complained that the military was trying to make him a scapegoat. His defense team also argued that he held no command authority at the prison. The judicial panel of 10 officers that convicted him in August of disobeying the order also acquitted him of any responsibility for the cruel treatment of Abu Ghraib detainees. Eleven lower-ranking soldiers have been convicted in military courts in connection with the physical abuse and sexual humiliation of Abu Ghraib detainees. Two other officers have been disciplined by the Army, but neither faced criminal charges or dismissal.

Doubts intensified last night over the nature of an alleged aggressive confrontation by Iranian patrol boats and American warships in the Persian Gulf on Sunday, after Pentagon officials admitted that they could not confirm that a threat to blow up the US ships had been made directly by the Iranian crews involved in the incident. Several news sources reported that senior navy officials had conceded that the voice threatening to blow up the US warships in a matter of minutes could have come from another ship in the region, or even from shore. The concession came on the day that a formal American complaint was lodged with Iran over the incident, and just 24 hours after President George Bush ... warned Tehran to desist from such aggression and said any repetition would lead to "serious consequences". On Tuesday, the US administration released video footage that it said showed the Iranian speedboats harassing the American vessels. A voice in English with a strong accent was heard to say: "I am coming at you - you will explode in a couple of minutes." Yesterday the Iranians put out their own four-minute video that showed an Iranian patrol officer in a small boat communicating with one of the US ships. "Coalition warship number 73, this is an Iranian navy patrol boat," the Iranian said. An American naval officer replied: "This is coalition warship number 73 operating in international waters." The voice of the Iranian sailor in Tehran's footage was different [from] the deeper and more menacing voice threatening to blow up the warships in the US version. Nor was there any sign of aggressive behaviour by the Iranian patrol boats. The mystery remains of where the voice that apparently threatened to bomb the US ships came from. The Pentagon has said that it recorded the film and the sound separately, and then stitched them together - a dubious piece of editing even before it became known that the source of the voice could not, with certainty, be linked to the Iranian patrol boats.

Note: Gulf of Tonkin, anyone?

When previous Republican administrations were accused of illegality in the FBI and CIA spying abuses of the 1970s or the Iran-Contra affair of the 1980s, Democrats in Congress launched investigations or pushed for legislative reforms. But last week, faced with admissions by several telecommunication companies that they assisted the Bush administration in warrantless spying on Americans, leaders of the Senate intelligence committee took a much different tack -- proposing legislation that would grant those companies retroactive immunity from prosecution or lawsuits. The proposal marks the second time in recent years that Congress has moved toward providing legal immunity for past actions that may have been illegal. The Military Commissions Act, passed by a GOP-led Congress in September 2006, provided retroactive immunity for CIA interrogators who could have been accused of war crimes for mistreating detainees. Legal experts say the granting of such retroactive immunity by Congress is unusual, particularly in a case involving private companies. "It's particularly unusual in the case of the telecoms because you don't really know what you're immunizing," said Louis Fisher, a specialist in constitutional law with the Law Library of the Library of Congress. Civil liberties groups and many academics argue that Congress is allowing the government to cover up possible wrongdoing and is inappropriately interfering in disputes that the courts should decide. The American Civil Liberties Union [said] in a news release Friday that "the administration is trying to cover its tracks."

The [US] didn’t set out to eradicate the Mandeans, one of the oldest, smallest and least understood of the many minorities in Iraq. This extinction in the making has simply been another unfortunate ... consequence of our invasion of Iraq — though that will be of little comfort to the Mandeans, whose 2,000-year-old culture is in grave danger of disappearing from the face of the earth. The Mandeans are the only surviving Gnostics from antiquity, cousins of the people who produced the ... Gospel of Thomas, a work that sheds invaluable light on the many ways in which Jesus was perceived in the early Christian period. The Mandeans have their own language ... an impressive body of literature, and a treasury of cultural and religious traditions amassed over two millennia of living in the southern marshes of present-day Iraq and Iran. Practitioners of a religion at least as old as Christianity, the Mandeans have witnessed the rise of Islam; the Mongol invasion; the arrival of Europeans, who mistakenly identified them as “Christians of St. John,” because of their veneration of John the Baptist; and, most recently, the oppressive regime of Saddam Hussein. They have withstood everything — until now. Like their ancestors, contemporary Mandeans were able to survive as a community because of the delicate balance achieved among Iraq’s many peoples over centuries of cohabitation. But our reckless prosecution of the war destroyed this balance, and the Mandeans, whose pacifist religion prohibits them from carrying weapons even for self-defense, found themselves victims of kidnappings, extortion, rapes, beatings, murders and forced conversions carried out by radical Islamic groups and common criminals. When American forces invaded in 2003, there were probably 60,000 Mandeans in Iraq; today, fewer than 5,000 remain.

Note: A fascinating introduction to the culture and history of this ancient people is Edmondo Lupieri's The Mandaeans: the Last Gnostics.

For years, the [Bush] administration has been quietly auctioning off U.S. foreign policy to the highest corporate bidder -- and it may be too late for us to buy it back. Look at Blackwater. Blackwater increasingly promises to do everything the U.S. government can do, but better. Blackwater's facility in North Carolina is the world's largest private military facility -- it's so good that the U.S. military uses it for training. Since its founding, it has trained 50,000 "consultants" who can be deployed anywhere in the world. With no geographical limits, the company is eager to prove its value. Blackwater has trained police in Afghanistan and naval commandos in Azerbaijan, and it sent heavily armed employees to New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. They started off offering their services as volunteers -- or vigilantes, some critics said. FEMA, playing catch-up, followed with contracts, as did a number of other agencies. Increasingly, Blackwater looks like a miniature government. It has people, infrastructure and hardware. For instance, it is buying Brazilian-made fighter bombers -- great in combat but not really necessary if you're merely providing civilian bodyguards. Blackwater is unusual, but it's not entirely unique. Other corporations ... are also eagerly filling the vacuum as the U.S. government retreats worldwide from the business of governing. The White House's motives are obvious. Why fight another war, with all the bother of convincing Congress, if you can quietly hire a private military company to fight it for you? Why interrogate suspected insurgents if you can outsource the whole messy business? As for the corporations so eagerly lapping up the contracting dollars, there's no conspiracy -- it's just the good old profit motive.

For half a century, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency - a low-profile but vital division of the Defense Department - has ... been the force behind dozens of weapons, from the M-16 rifle and night-vision goggles to smart bombs and stealth aircraft. Now, DARPA is planning for a long war in which U.S. troops will be expected to face guerrilla adversaries. And just as during the Cold War, DARPA is counting on high-tech Silicon Valley to give U.S. forces the edge. More than 3,000 scientists, entrepreneurs and military leaders ... gathered in Anaheim ... for the agency's 50th anniversary conference. The agency is operating on a $3.1 billion budget, up 8 percent from fiscal 2006. Virtually every Silicon Valley company, from the obvious candidates like Lockheed Martin Missiles and Space to ... Google, has been touched in some way by DARPA. "Almost every great digital oak has a DARPA acorn at the bottom," said futurist Paul Saffo. During three days in Anaheim, DARPA and Pentagon officials made 60 presentations, painting a picture of a future in which the United States will have to spend $1 million on countermeasures for every dollar shelled out by bomb-building guerrillas like those U.S. forces are encountering in Iraq. But DARPA's high-tech dreams have their critics, who view its "visions" as boondoggles the nation can't afford. "I think it (DARPA) is basically a jobs program," said Chalmers Johnson, a retired University of California political scientist. Thomas Barnett, author of The Pentagon's New Map, one of the treatises that lay out the scenario for these asymmetrical wars that planners expect, [said] "The million-to-one (ratio) is unsustainable."

The Defense Intelligence Agency is preparing to pay private contractors up to $1 billion to conduct core intelligence tasks of analysis and collection over the next five years, an amount that would set a record in the outsourcing of such functions by the Pentagon's top spying agency. The proposed contracts ... reflect a continuing expansion of the Defense Department's intelligence-related work and fit a well-established pattern of Bush administration transfers of government work to private contractors. Since 2000, the value of federal contracts signed by all agencies each year has more than doubled to reach $412 billion, with the largest growth at the Defense Department. Outsourcing particularly accelerated among intelligence agencies after the [Sept. 11] 2001 terrorist attacks. The DIA's action comes a few months after CIA Director Michael V. Hayden, acting under pressure from Congress, announced a program to cut the agency's hiring of outside contractors by at least 10 percent. The DIA is the country's major manager and producer of foreign military intelligence, with more than 11,000 military and civilian employees worldwide and a budget of nearly $1 billion. It has its own analysts from the various services as well as collectors of human intelligence in the Defense HUMINT Service. DIA also manages the Defense attaches stationed in embassies all over the world. Unlike the CIA, the DIA outsources the major analytical products known as all-source intelligence reports, a senior intelligence official said.

When Joe Darby saw the horrific photos of abuse at Abu Ghraib prison he was stunned. So stunned that he walked out into the hot Baghdad night and smoked half a dozen cigarettes and agonised over what he should do. Darby was a ... soldier with US forces at Abu Ghraib prison when he stumbled across those images which would eventually shock the world in 2004. They were photographs of his colleagues, some of them men and women he had known since high school -- torturing and abusing Iraqi prisoners. His decision to hand them over rather than keep quiet changed his life forever. He fears for the safety of his family. Joe Darby knew what he saw was wrong, but it took him three weeks to decide to hand those photographs in. When he finally did, he was promised anonymity and hoped he would hear no more about it. But he was scared of the repercussions. And then he was sitting in a crowded Iraqi canteen with hundreds of soldiers and Donald Rumsfeld came on the television to thank Joe Darby by name for handing in the photographs. "I don't think it was an accident because those things are pretty much scripted," Mr Darby says. "I really find it hard to believe that the secretary of defence of the United States has no idea about the star witness for a criminal case being anonymous." Rather than turn on him for betraying colleagues, most of the soldiers in his unit shook his hand. It was at home where the real trouble started. His wife ...had to flee to her sister's house which was then vandalised with graffiti. Many in his home town called him a traitor. But he does not see himself as a hero, or a traitor. Just "a soldier who did his job - no more, no less. I've never regretted for one second what I did when I was in Iraq, to turn those pictures in," he says.

When the United States invaded Iraq more than four years ago, war opponent David Gross asked his bosses for a radical pay cut, enough so he wouldn't have to pay taxes to support the war. "I was having a hard time looking at myself in the mirror," Gross said. "I knew the bombs falling were in part paid with my tax dollars. I had to actually do something concrete to remove my complicity." The San Francisco technical writer was making close to $100,000 a year. He ... later figured out he would have to make less than minimum wage. In any event, his employer turned him down and he quit. Gross, 38, now works on a contract basis, and last year he refused to pay self-employment taxes. War tax resistance, popularized by Henry David Thoreau in the 19th century and by singer Joan Baez and others during the Vietnam War, is gaining renewed interest among peace activists upset over the Iraq war. "We definitely had more people calling, sending e-mails about how they decided to start resisting," said Ruth Benn, coordinator of the National War Tax Resistance Coordinating Committee in New York. Benn estimates 8,000 to 10,000 Americans refuse to pay some or all of their federal taxes over war objections. Many tax protesters say they redirect the money they withhold to charities. Some, like Joanne Sheehan of Norwich, keep their income below taxable levels. "I don't see the point of working for peace and paying for war," Sheehan said.

Note: See the letter WantToKnow.info founder Fred Burks wrote to the IRS on why he is withholding war taxes. For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing war news articles from reliable major media sources.

Important Note: Explore our full index to revealing excerpts of key major media news articles on several dozen engaging topics. And don't miss amazing excerpts from 20 of the most revealing news articles ever published.