Vijay Prashad looks at Afghanistan to assess the United States's war aims, to see what the US has done both with the war and with the region, to tally up the accounts of the Fifth Afghan War.

At the delegate assembly of the Professional Staff Congress--the union representing more than 20,000 faculty and staff of the City University of New York, Green Party candidate Stanley Aronowitz calls the Working Families Party's endorsement of Democrat Carl McCall "a politics of despair." Alisa Solomon reports.

FAIR reports that three days after the New York Times first report on the D.C. antiwar protests, the Times printed a much different account of the same event. National Public Radio made a similar correction of its coverage.

Naseer Aruri notes a remarkable similarity between the Middle East today and eighty years
ago. Aruri asks whether the United States, with its war plans against Iraq, is likely to succeed in reshaping this strategic landscape more
than did the British.

Rahul Mahajan, author of The New Crusade: America's War on Terrorism, Phyllis Bennis, Institute for Policy Studies, and others analyse the Draft UN Security Council Resolution proposed by the Bush Administration to justify military intervention against Iraq. Text discussed is the version as of October 23 2002.

Novelist and social critic Gore Vidal calls for an investigation into whether the Bush Administration deliberately allowed the September 11 terrorist attacks to happen. Vidal's article is published in the print version of The Observer 10/27/02.

Interview with journalist and filmmaker John Pilger on imperialism, the Bush administration, and the U.S. media's role in propaganda.

Uri Avnery asks what causes a state to bring in total strangers in order to displace the native people, who have lived there for many centuries, at the price of an eternal bloody conflict? The answer, says Avnery, touches the foundations of Israel.