Today's Stories

January 9/11, 2009

George Ciccariello-Maher
Oakland's Not for Burning?

January 8, 2009

Jean Bricmont /
Diana Johnstone
Gaza Seen From Paris

Franklin Lamb
How Dershowitz Misstates, Misrepresents and Misapplies the Law

Paul Craig Roberts
The Difficulty of Being an Informed American

Kevin Alexander Gray
Give Burris His Seat

Chris Floyd
The Enduring Priorities in Obama's Time of Change

Ewa Jasiewicz
Riding on Fire in Gaza

Steve Conn
Sanjay Gupta and Obama

Harvey Wasserman
Kill the Nuclear Stimulus!

Wayne S. Smith
An Opening to Cuba?

Linda Mamoun
Re-settling Gaza: the Real Goal of the Israeli Invasion?

Adam Turl
Unions and Young Workers

Chris Papaleonardos
Mourning Maria Dimitriadi

Website of the Day
On the Wing

January 7, 2009

Saree Makdisi
What Kind of Security Will This Barbarism Bring Israel?

Franklin Lamb
Bend Over Professor Dershowitz, It's Time for Your Check Up

William Blum
America's Other Glorious War

Belén Fernández
The Trauma Vortex: Israel's Monopoly on Psychological Suffering

Lawrence Davidson
What is New About Gaza?

Allan Nairn
Adm. Dennis Blair and the Church Killings in East Timor

Jonathan Cook
What is Israel's Objective?

Muhammad Idrees Ahmad
Watching the War on BBC

Deepak Tripathi
Bush, as He Leaves

Cal Winslow
Now is the Hour to Defend Democracy in the Labor Movement!

Manuel Garcia, Jr.
To Students Planning Careers: Be Mindful

Dr. Hannah Safran
No More Recycled Military Solutions

Website of the Day
CNN: Israel Broke the Ceasefire First

January 6, 2009

Pam Martens
It's All One Big Lie

Victoria Buch
Real Estate War in Gaza: the History and "Morals" of Ethnic Cleansing

Neve Gordon
Israel's New War Ethic

Tami Sarfatti /
Yonatan Mendel
What Silence Says: Gaza is Still Waiting on Obama

Mike Whitney
The Gaza Bloodbath

Alan Farago
After the Fall

Gary Leupp
A Hamas Coup d'Etat in 2007?

Larry Everest
Silent Partner: the US-Backed War on Gaza

Ron Jacobs
The New Iraqi Sovereignty

David Macaray
Union-Busting is Alive and Well

Stephanie Basile
Where's Anna's Money?

Stacey Warde
An Uncle's Unrest

Website of the Day
Israeli Refusenik on Gaza

January 5, 2009

Paul Craig Roberts
Will There be a Recovery?

Sousan Hammad
Phoning Home to Gaza

Wajahat Ali
Flying While Brown

Mats Svensson
Longing in Gaza

Jen Marlowe
Abeer's Baby

Muhammad Ali Khalidi
Gaza Phone Tag

Brian Cloughley
Israel is Immune From Criticism

Faheem Hussain
Gaza and India: a View From Pakistan

William Cook
Consider the Realities of Gaza

Dr. Trudy Bond
The Madness Among Us

Christopher Ketcham
The Revenge of the Blogger at the National Press Club: a Rotten Washington Interlude

Steve Early
Who Rules SEIU?

Dave Lindorff
When It Comes to Terrorism and POW Cases, Equal Justice Under Law is a Joke

Website of the Day
The Endangered Fish of the Colorado River Basin

January 2 - 4, 2009

Alexander Cockburn
Diary of 2008: an Incredible, Hope-Filled Year

Uri Avnery
Molten Lead in Gaza

Jonathan Cook
The Real Goal of the Gaza Assault

Paul Craig Roberts
Whatever Happened to Western Morality?

Brian Eno
Stealing Gaza: an Experiment in Provocation

Ralph Nader
America Must Stop Shirking Its Responsibility on Gaza

Omar Barghouti
UN Complicity in Israel's Massacre in Gaza

Graham Usher
Where Pakistan's Generals and the ISI Draw Their Lines

P. Sainath
The Economy is Worse Than It Appears

Belén Fernández
Pardon Our Dust: Israel's PR Campaign for Gaza

Deb Reich
Shiv'a in Gaza, December 2008

Gary Leupp
Defacing Mr. Jefferson's Wall: Preachers and the Inauguration

Michael Yates
Top Chef or Top Wage Thief? Tom Colicchio and the Economics of Restaurants

Joanne Mariner
How to Close Guantánamo

Seth Sandronsky
Funding the Israeli Military: the US Pipeline

Cynthia McKinney
We Lived to Tell the Story

Sonja Karkar
Israel's Dogs of War

Deepak Tripathi
Gaza in Perspective

Robert Fantina
Obama, Afghanistan and Israel

John Ross
The Year No One Can Remember

Norm Kent
The Heat on Duval Street: Why Head Shop Raids are Unfair and Unjust

Larry Portis
Syria and the Arab Barbie Doll--Before the Deluge

Richard Rhames
Is Conscience Dead?

Dee C. Lubell
We Come From the Sun: Zora Neale Hurston and Richard Wright

David Yearsley
A Gay German at the Courts of the Medici and Hanover, and of Course the BBC

Lorenzo Wolff
Joe Ely, the Fighting Rooster of Rock

Marc Catone
Looting Lennon's Legacy

Poets' Basement
Five Poems by Grzegorz Wróblewski

Website of the Weekend
Earth in High Rez

January 1, 2008

Jennifer Loewenstein
If Hamas Did Not Exist

Oren Ben-Dor
The Self-Defense of Suicide

Wajahat Ali
The U.S. Response to the Gaza Crisis: Unfair and Unbalanced

Saul Landau
In Cuba No One Man Could Steal $50 Billion From Other People

David Michael Green
What to Expect While We're Expecting

Website of the Day
Morbid Anatomy

December 31, 2008

Pam Martens
Wall Street's Collapse and the Ownership Society

Neve Gordon /
Jeff Halper
Where's the Academic Outrage Over the Bombing of a University in Gaza?

Ted Honderich
The First Casualty of Israel's War

Brian Cloughley
Five Little Girls on a Sofa: Gaza's One-Sided Images

Ron Jacobs
What is Hamas, Really?

Vijay Prashad
Hot Rod and His Sikh Warrior: Blago's Indian Connections

Franklin Lamb
Mr. Mubarak, Tear Down That Wall!

Mike Whitney
My Brilliant Career

David Macaray
What Really Killed the Auto Bailout

Richard Thieme
The Betrayal of the Commons

Mary Lynn Cramer
Who Wins What in Gaza?

Stephen Lendman
The Troubling Case of the Fort Dix Five

Worthy Group of the Day
Western Shoshone Defense Project

December 30, 2008

Paul Craig Roberts
May We No Longer Be Silent

Tariq Ali
The Gaza Ghetto and Western Cant

Robert Bryce
The $775,000-a-Year GI

Jonathan Cook
Electioneering with Bombs

Gary Leupp
The Fishbarrel War

Dave Lindorff
Tough Guys Don't Walk: Will Cheney Seek a Pardon?

Brian McKenna
Ted Downing and Troublemaker Anthropology

John Walsh
The End of the Green Party

Ramzy Baroud
Gaza and the World

Bob Sommer
The Education of David Frost

Worthy Activist of the Day
Support Marie Mason

December 29, 2008

Jennifer Loewenstein
Israel's Attempted Endgame in Gaza

Neve Gordon
What, Exactly, is Israel's Mission?

Joshua Frank
Obama and the "Special Relationship"

George Salzman /
Manuel Garcia, Jr.
The War Against Palestine: Exception From Humanity

Norman Solomon
A Hundred Eyes for an Eye

Ewa Jasiewicz
Gaza Today: "This is Just the Beginning"

Rob Larson
The Banks Laugh All the Way to the Bank

Kenneth Libby
Arne Duncan's Dark Years in Chicago

Robert Weissman
The 10 Worst Corporations of 2008

Elsa Johnson
High Noon at Black Mesa: Bush's Farewell Gift to Peabody Coal

Nicola Nasser
Resolution 1850: Bush's Parting Gift

Belén Fernández
Hanukkah Games

Worthy Group of the Day
Nuclear Information and Resource Service

December 26-28, 2008

Alexander Cockburn
The Medusa's Head

Dr Eyad Al Serraj
The Boming of Gaza: "An Earthquake on Top of Your Head"

Jeffrey St. Clair
Cancerous Air

Bradley Simpson
Obama's New Intel Chief, Dennis Blair, Ran Interference for Indonesia's Butchers

Ralph Nader
Government Without Laws

Gary Leupp
Obama and the Graveyard of Empires

Ellen Cantarow
Richard Falk, Israel and the NYT

Matt Landon
The Great Coal Ash Flood: a Report From Swan Pond Road

David Macaray
SAG's Terrible Dilemma

Patrick Bond
End of Neoliberalism? Sorry, Not Yet

Norm Kent
Invoking Bigotry: Obama and Rick Warren

Brian T. Ketcham
Fuel Efficiency is Easy--Just Don't Let Detroit Tell You How to Do It

Rannie Amiri
War Clouds Over Gaza

Larry Portis
Changing the Ethnic Vocabulary

Richard Rhames
Welcome to Soup Kitchen America

Stephen Lendman
29 Red Flags: Early Suspicions About Bernard Madoff

James L. Secor
Unheralded Coup

Ramzy Baroud
Iraq, the Plot Thickens

Harold Pinter
Art, Truth and Politics: the Nobel Lecture

Cpt. Paul Watson
Tracking the Cetacean Death Star

Howard Lisnoff
Nixon's Cambodian Shock Treatment

Michael Dee
The Bill of Rights, Killed in Action by the War on Drugs

Steve Conn
Eight Predictions for 2009

Poets' Basement
Valentine, Kaung, Moser and Graham

Worthy Group of the Weekend
United Mountain Defense

December 25, 2008

Judy Gumbo Albert
What Were Those 1960s Terrorists Thinking, Anyway?

Rev. William E. Alberts
The Sole of Christmas

Hannah Mermelstein
Caution: Settlers Ahead

Worthy Group of the Day
Citizens' Coal Council

December 24, 2008

Bill Quigley
Five Bailout Lessons From Katrina

Saul Landau
Then and Now: Venezuela and Cuba, 1960-2008

Sam Smith
Evangelism and Politics

Brian Cloughley
Torture, Slaughter and Lies

John Ross
Where's al-Zaidi's Pulitzer?

Eric Walberg
Cold War Shivers

Norm Kent
What Will Obama Do About Marijuana?

Stephen Martin
Reasons for Cheerfulness

Worthy Group of the Day
Collateral Repair Project

December 23, 2008

Michael Hudson
The Ponzi Paradigm

Michael Yates
The Tombstone Economy

Chuck Spinney
The New York Times Flames Out in Defense Dogfight

Vijay Prashad
India's Reckless Road to Washington, Through Tel Aviv

Brian Horejsi
Interior Decorating: Obama, Salazar and the Future of America's Public Lands

David Macaray
Obama's Best Pick?

Neil Watkins /
Sarah Anderson
Ecuador's Conscientious Default

David Michael Green
Hey, Reagan Democrats! Now Do You Get It?

Worthy Group of the Day
Focus on the Corporation

December 22, 2008

Pam Martens
Madoff's Money Trail Leads to Washington

Gary Leupp
Base Alienation: Obama's Team of Rivals

Mike Whitney
Bail Out the Economy? More Pay is the Only Way

Karl Grossman
Lost in Space: NASA at 50

Niall Meehan
Conor Cruise O'Brien: Historian, Politician, Censor

Steve Conn
Where Would Larry Summers Dump the Guantanamo Mess?

Uri Avnery
Israeli Elections: Spot the Difference

Corey D. B. Walker
The Politics of Freedom

David Swanson
The Purloined Constitution

Worthy Group of the Day
Socialist Worker

December 19 - 21, 2008

Alexander Cockburn
An Ethnic Cleansing in America

Jeffrey St. Clair
Salazar and the Tragedy of the Common Ground

Paul Craig Roberts
Country Without Mercy

Patrick Cockburn
The Baathist "Coup Plot"

Felice Pace
Green Myopia: Obama's Appointments Reveal What's Wrong with the Environmental Movement

Diane Farsetta
The Pentagon's PR Slush Fund

George Ciccariello-Maher
By the Time I Get to Arizona: ICE Raids and Resistance in Flagstaff

Eric Bergoust
Extinct Lifestyles: Redefining Prosperity

Marjorie Cohn
Torture Without Regrets: Cheney's Unrepentent Confession

Stan Cox
Clothes and Commentaries That Don't Fit

Michael Donnelly
Clinton III: Continuity We Can Believe In

Robert Weissman
The Auto Bailout

Ralph Nader
Excluded Democracy: Scholastic and the Two Party System

Alan Farago
Shock and Awe Economics

Sam Smith
Not All Public Work is the Same

Timothy G. Hermach
What Happened on the Way to the Inauguration?

Seth Sandronsky
Who's Not Getting By and Why

Rannie Amiri
All Quiet on the Gazan Shore

David Yearsley
Bach as Jihadi

Martha Rosenberg
Wyeth's Pay-to-Play

Dave Lindorff
White House Lied About Iraqi Yellowcake Buy (But That's Not the Biggest Scandal)

Christopher Brauchli
Weekend at Bernie's: the Confinement of Mr. Madoff

Missy Beattie
President Meathead

Richard Rhames
Corporatizing the Kids

Stephen Martin
Full-Spectrum Dominance of the Big Lie

Paul Krassner
Milk and Twinkies

Lorenzo Wolff
Does Coldplay Give a Shit Anymore?

Poets' Basement
Kathwari, Halling and Payne

Worthy Group of the Weekend
Heartwood

December 18, 2008

Phillip Doe
The Man in the Hat: Salazar and the Status Quo

Ronnie Cummins
Vilsack: Another Shill for Monsanto

Jesse Sharkey
No School Left Unsold: Arne Duncan's Privatization Agenda

Saul Landau
Postcard from Venezuela

Peter Morici
What's Next for the Fed?

Dave Lindorff
Prosecuting Bush and Cheney for Torture

Panos Petrou
Days of Rage in Greece

Jeff Cohen /
Norman Solomon
The 2008 P.U.-litzer Prizes: the Stinkiest Media Performances of the Year

Worthy Group of the Day
Organic Consumer Alliance

December 17, 2008

Peter Lee
Pushing Pakistan Over the Edge

Conn Hallinan
Angels and Demons in Mumbai

Mike Whitney
Bernanke's Fatal Flaw

Jeff Halper
Obama and the Israel-Palestine Conflict

Alan Farago
The Audacity of Parkland

Peter Morici
The Big Hole

Norm Kent
Obama Lights Up

Col. Douglas MacGregor
The Price of Expediency

Margaret Kimberley
Blacks and Gay Rights

Ron Jacobs
The Myth of the Good Guy: Waiting on a President to Do the Right Thing

Worthy Group of the Day
Campaign to End the Death Penalty

December 16, 2008

Vicente Navarro
A Forgotten Genocide: the Case of Spain

Patrick Cockburn
Each Shoe was Worth a Thousand Words

Thomas Michael Power
Back to the Pump: an Economic and Environmental Dead End

Jason Hribal
Orangutans, Resistance and the Zoo: the Story of Ken Allen and Kumang

Farzana Versey
Straw Warriors and the Pantomime of Patriotism

Wajahat Ali /
Ahmed Rashid
Indian Muslims: Defining Their Loyalty

Mats Svensson
The Order to Destroy has been Given

Paul Fitzgerald /
Elizabeth Gould
Mumbai Terror's Afghan Roots

David Macaray
Workplace Violence and Termination Etiquette

Howard Lisnoff
Left Control of Academia? The Case of William Felkner

Worthy Group of the Day
AWR: the Last, Best Hope for Saving the Big Wild

December 15, 2008

Andy Worthington
Hit Me Baby One More Time: a History of Music Torture in War on Terror

Franklin Lamb
Why Hezbollah Stiffed Carter

Karl Grossman
Dr. Chu's Nuclear Prescription

Brian Cloughley
Land of the Free (To Torture and Imprison Without Trial)

Mary Lynn Cramer
Stiglitz's Foolishly Flawed Morality

Steve Early
From Nicky Pockets to Blago: Why Pay-to-Play is Bad for Labor

Thomas Christie
Pentagon Train Wreck Awaits Obama

Ken Paff
Remembering Ron Carey: a Great Labor Leader

Niranjan Ramakrishnan
What is India to Do?

Dave Lindorff
A Hero of Our Time: Muntadar al-Zaidi

Alan Farago
The Artless Dodger

Worthy Group of the Day
Davis-Putter Scholarship Fund

December 12 / 14, 2008

Alexander Cockburn
Hail to Chicago, Beacon of American Values

Michael Hudson /
Jeffrey Sommers
The End of the Washington Consensus

David Price
The Leaky Ship of Human Terrain Systems

Jeffrey St. Clair
Nukes Up the Hudson

Frank Barat
An Israeli in Gaza: an Interview with Jeff Halper

John Ross
Writing a Thesis in Blood

Binoy Kampmark
Humanitarian Imperialism: Obama and the Genocide Task Force

David Macaray
Killing the Auto Bailout: a Dagger to the Heart of Organized Labor

Ralph Nader
Antidotes to Plunder: a Holiday Reading List

Eamonn Fingleton
Whatever Happened to Iris Chang?

Lawrence Velvel
Why Blagojevich Might Be Acquitted

Behzad Yaghmaian
The Housing Crisis: a Timebomb China Can't Defuse

Sam Husseini
Putting the Pro in Protest

Tom Barry
Incentives to Detain: How Immigrants Drive Prison Profits

Howard Lisnoff
Why I Went to Jail

Laura Carlsen
Mexico's Immigration Problem

Raj Patel
The WTO and Other Fairy Tales

Ron Jacobs
The Manufacturing of History

Paul Watson
Risky Business Down Under

David Yearsley
They Also Serve Who Only Pull or Tread

Lorenzo Wolff
So You Want Be a Rock 'n' Roll Star...

Kim Nicolini
Finally, a Vampire Movie You Can Sink Your Teeth Into

Susie Day
Proposition 1984: the Problem with Heterosexuals

Poets' Basement
Gibbons, Lerch and Crete

Worthy Group of the Weekend
Energy Justice

December 11, 2008

Patrick Cockburn
Total Defeat for U.S. in Iraq

P. Sainath
After Mumbai

Vicken Cheterian
The Zarqawi Generation

Ray McGovern
Will Obama Buy Torture-Lite?

Dedrick Muhammad
Post-Racial Racism at the Post: the Undying Obsession with Black Family Values

Lee Sustar
Victory at Republic

Peter Morici
The Big Drag

Ayesha Ijaz Khan
Must They Hate Us So?

George Wuerthner
Another Subsidy to Big Timber?

Christopher Brauchli
Mr. Berg's Strange Obsession

Worthy Group of the Day
Animal Balance

December 10, 2008

Ismael Hossein-Zadeh
Whose Interests Will Shape Obama's Change?

Mary Lynn Cramer
The Multi-Trillion Dollar Question

Manuel Garcia, Jr.
Nuclear Weapons Obsolescence

Joshua Frank
Breaking the Stranglehold on Middle East News Coverage

Jack Ely
Stop Sobbing About Free Music Downloads: a Message to the Music Industry from the Lead Singer of the Kingsmen

Steve Conn
An Obama Public Works Program?

Lee Sustar
Republic Workers Target Bank of America

Glen Ford
The Die is Cast

Stephen Lendman
The Persecution of Syed Fahad Hashmi

Nadia Hijab
The Face of America

Dave Lindorff
We All Need a Union

Website of the Day
This One's For You, Senator Dodd

December 9, 2008

Mike Whitney
Card Check

Fawzia Afzal-Khan
Us vs. Them

Ghada Karmi
The UN Resolution That Time Forgot

Dave Lindorff
A Car Dealer Explains Why the Bailout is a Raw Deal

Steve Breyman
Notes on a Green Economy: Managing Stuff in the 21st Century

Lee Sustar /
Nicole Colson
Raising the Stakes at Republic

Rev. William E. Alberts
God of Our Fathers

Martha Rosenberg
Bill Richardson: Secretary of Bloodsports

Sam Husseini
How Holbrooke Lied His Way Into a War

David Macaray
The UAW in Peril

Website of the Day
This Toxic Life

December 8, 2008

Steve Early
Is Obama Backing Off a Crucial Pledge to Labor?

Michael Hudson
Obama's Favoritism: Wall Street, Not the Auto Industry

Patrick Cockburn
Talking to a Lashkar Militant

Diane Farsetta
An Officer and a Conflicted Man: McCaffery, the Pentagon and Fleishman-Hillard

Paul Craig Roberts
Chapters in Imperial Hypocrisy

Daniel Gross
The Chicago Sit-Down Strike

Saul Landau
To Bail or Not to Bail?

Harvey Wasserman
Why John Bryson is Unfit for Energy Secretary

Mike Ferner
The New Generation of "Non-Lethal" Weapons

Norman Solomon
The Silent Winter of Escalation

David Michael Green
The Other Foot

Website of the Day
The Remains of Detroit

December 5 / 7, 2008

Alexander Cockburn
Honeymoans From the Left

Brian Cloughley
Shambles in Afghanistan

Paul Craig Roberts
Muslim Revolution: How Washington Arrogance Helped Drive the Mumbai Attacks

Liaquat Ali Khan
Mumbai and the Kashmir Tinderbox

Farzana Versey
Mumbai's Charge of the Lightweight Brigade

Peter Lee
Pakistan Nears the Breaking Point

Peter Morici
Slouching Toward a Depression?

Ralph Nader /
Toby Heaps
Junk Cap-and-Trade

Yinon Cohen /
Neve Gordon
Obama Could End the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict: Will He Meet the Challenge?

Wajahat Ali
Perverse Justice: the Holy Land Foundation Convictions

Johnny Barber
Aswad's Story: Illegal Detention and the Declaration of Human Rights

Alan Farago
Fallout from the Pass-Through Economy

Jeremy Scahill
Obama Doesn't Plan to End Occupation of Iraq

Mike Whitney
Powergrab in Ottawa

Ranjit Hoskote
Jahiliyya Versus Jihad

Carl Finamore
Thank God I'm an Atheist! (Or Boy is Bill O'Reilly in for a Big Surprise)

Marjorie Cohn
Obama and Women's Rights

Norm Kent
Tommy Chong, the Unanticipated Warrior

Missy Beattie
What Lies Ahead

Binoy Kampmark
Committing Suicide On-Line: the Briggs Case

David Macaray
The Best and the Brightest Redux: Too Many Brains, Not Enough Humility

Nancy Stohlman
Relational Activism

Ron Jacobs
Irreverent Politics Then and Now

David Yearsley
Thematics From the Golden Past

Lorenzo Wolff
Troubled Songs of Home and War

Poets' Basement
Orloski: The Door Opener

Website of the Weekend
In Prison My Whole Life

December 4, 2008

Ece Temelkuran
Inside the Ergenekon Case

Ralph Nader
Turning Crisis into Opportunity: Who Will Seize the Moment?

Harry Browne
The Bush-Obama National Security Strategy

Eamonn Fingleton
The American Car Industry: a Riposte to the Knockers

Conn Hallinan
The Syria Attack

Mike Whitney
Fiasco in Somalia: Another CIA Cock-Up

Stewart J. Lawrence
Obama and Latinos: Richardson, Alone, is Not Enough

Paul Fitzgerald /
Elizabeth Gould
Message to Obama: Stop Killing Afghanis

Karyn Strickler
Show Us the Green, Before We Show You the Money

Jennifer Matsui
Obama-Cola: the Great National Temperance Beverage

Website of the Day
"He Ain't Got Laid in a Month of Sundays..."

December 3, 2008

Andrew Cockburn
What's Wrong with the U.S. Military

Sheldon Rampton
Mormon Homophobia: Up Close and Personal

Robert Weissman
Nationalize GM

Yifat Susskind
From Mumbai to Washington

William Blum
The Obama Bummer: Vote First, Ask Questions Later

Alan Singer
The Ghost of the Defunct Economist

David Macaray
Trampled Under Foot at Wal-Mart

Martha Rosenberg
Born With a Statin Deficiency? Line Forms to the Left!

Mats Svensson
The Crimes Have No Period of Limitations

Website of the Day
Why Bill Richardson's Nomination Should be Opposed

December 2, 2008

Jeremy Scahill
Obama's Kettle of Hawks

Paul Craig Roberts
The New Arms Race

Ayesha Ijaz Khan
The Mumbai Terror Attacks: Is Pakistan to Blame?

Sarah Anderson /
John Cavanagh
Skewed Priorities: How the Bailout Dwarfs Spending on Other Global Crises

William Blum
The Mythology of the War on Terrorism

John Ross
Mexico's Drug War Goes Down in Flames

Dave Lindorff
A Tale of Two Terror Attacks

Nicola Nasser
A Peace Process That Makes Peace Impossible

Steve Conn
Operation Redskin Removal

Robert Bryce
Coal Hard Facts

Website of the Day
Country, Funk, Soul

December 1, 2008

Patrick Cockburn
From Baghdad to Mumbai, by Way of Pakistan

Damien Millet /
Eric Toussaint
Obama's Economic Team: Records of Failure

Vijay Prashad
The Fires in South Asia

Deepak Tripathi
Obama's Foreign Crises

Joshua Frank
Madam Secretary Clinton and the Middle East

P. Sainath
The Unlikely Martyrdom of Free Market Jihad

Alan Farago
The Right's War on Regulators

Binoy Kampmark
Sydney's Ball and Chain

Chris Genovali
Silent Fall

David Michael Green
Hope You Die Before You Get Old

Stephen Martin
The Chinese are Coming, the Chinese are Coming!

Website of the Day
Robert Rubin: Coward, Liar or Both?

November 28-30, 2008

Alexander Cockburn
In Time of Trouble

Mike Whitney
The Obama "Dream Team": Rubin Clones and Other Fakers

Ted Honderich
What is the Meaning of Obama's Election?

Tom Kerr
Preserving Filthy Lucre (Or Becoming My Dad)

Mike Ely
The Conquest of New England

David Yearsley
Hymns of the Conquest

Deepak Tripathi
Uproar in Police-State Britain

Sonja Karkar
Gaza's Death Throes

Ramzy Baroud
Salvation in a News Broadcast

Robert Weitzel
Israel's Settlement on Capitol Hill

Robert Roth
Can We Create a Movement for Change?

Carlos Fierro
Obama and the End of Racism?

David Macaray
How to Kill a Union

David Rosen
A New Sexual Agenda

James Cockcroft
Indigenous People Rising

Stan Cox
The Most Disappointing Gift

Steve Conn
Talking Turkey About College Basketball

Stephen Martin
The Electromagnetic Pulse and Economic Warfare

Richard Rhames
Busty Bimbettes, Bombs and Brand Obama

Kim Nicolini
Women as Products and Cannibalistic Achievers

Lorenzo Wolff
A Battle Cry for the Confused and Vulnerable

Poets' Basement
Woods, Harrison and Corseri

Weekend Edition
January 9-11, 2009

Meltdown Memo to Come?

The Dying Days of the Guantánamo Trials

By ANDY WORTHINGTON

Since the last blowout at Guantánamo on December 8, when dozens of reporters and relatives of victims of the 9/11 attacks watched as Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (KSM) and his alleged co-conspirators tried -- and failed -- to plead guilty so that they could die martyr’s deaths, few observers have witnessed the Commissions go through the motions in the Bush administration’s last days, like a preprogrammed machine, unaware that major changes are afoot, or, less charitably, like a decapitated chicken on its last round of the farmyard.

“We serve the sitting president and will continue to do so until the president-elect is inaugurated, at which time we will implement whatever policies are enacted by the next president,” Navy Cmdr. J.D. Gordon, a Pentagon spokesman, explained last month.

An ignoble history

The Military Commissions have rarely attracted the media attention that a novel, flagship program to try “terror suspects” should have attracted, even though the administration has persistently tried to sell Guantánamo as a place full of the world’s toughest terrorists, rather than what it really is: a place where a few dozen members of a small, fanatical and deeply secretive terror network have been vastly outnumbered by Taliban foot soldiers, recruited to fight an inter-Muslim civil war in Afghanistan that began long before 9/11 and had no connection to al-Qaeda or the 9/11 attacks, or completely innocent men, sold for bounty payments by the United States’ opportunistic allies in Afghanistan and Pakistan.

The rot was there from the beginning, as military defense lawyers, appointed by the government, realized to their horror that the Military Commissions were designed to secure convictions and to facilitate the use of evidence obtained through torture. The entire system should have died in June 2006, when the Supreme Court ruled it illegal, but when Congress revived the monster that fall, its new-found legitimacy was soon punctured when the first prisoner to face a trial, the Australian David Hicks, was repatriated in May 2007 following a plea bargain negotiated by Vice President Dick Cheney as a political favor to his ailing ally, Prime Minister John Howard.

Such cynicism has always been readily apparent when it comes to releasing prisoners from the general population, but for the first trial by Military Commission to be undermined in such a manner appeared to take hypocrisy to a new level, even though a trial, had it proceeded, would have been hard-pushed to present Hicks as a terrorist. Hyperbole of this kind was possible in the early days of the “War on Terror,” when the “American Taliban” John Walker Lindh received a 20-year sentence, but as John Howard found to his chagrin, by 2007 the public was less willing to indulge such hyperbole. As I discovered while writing The Guantánamo Files, far from being caught on the battlefield, Hicks was actually betrayed by an Afghan van driver as he fled northern Afghanistan, trying in vain to hide his blue eyes and blond hair, and was then brutalized mercilessly in U.S. hands.

In the last seven months, as the Bush administration sought to construct a “War on Terror” legacy that would not consist solely of hubris and ridicule, the pressure on the Commissions to press ahead with trials intensified. To a small degree, the ploy was successful. The arraignment and pre-trial hearings of KSM et al. attracted widespread attention in June, September and December, and the trial of Salim Hamdan, a driver for Osama bin Laden, also drew a flurry of interest in the summer -- although this was largely mitigated when Hamdan received an extraordinarily lenient sentence (freeing him by the end of the year), which effectively destroyed Guantánamo’s rationale.

There was further bad news in September, when, as a result of his crusading pro-prosecution bias, the Commissions’ legal adviser, Brig. Gen. Thomas Hartmann, was sacked after being disqualified by three military judges, and Lt. Col. Darrel Vandeveld, a prosecutor and a previously staunch supporter of the regime, resigned after seeking advice from a Jesuit peace activist, and left cursing the administration for its deliberate suppression of evidence vital to the defense in the case of the Afghan prisoner Mohamed Jawad. Although Jawad was accused of a grenade attack on a jeep containing U.S. soldiers, it transpired that he was a juvenile when seized, was drugged at the time of the attack by the insurgents who had tricked him into being recruited, and had been tortured in Afghan custody until he confessed. One of Vandeveld’s discoveries was that two other men, neither of whom is held at Guantánamo, had also confessed to the attack.

However, while these stories were widely reported -- and there was also sporadic interest in the baleful saga of the Canadian Omar Khadr, the other juvenile facing a trial by Military Commission -- the media as a whole (with the valiant exceptions of the Miami Herald’s Carol Rosenberg, the Toronto Star’s Michelle Shephard and Jane Sutton of Reuters) showed little appetite for covering the cases of the other 16 prisoners put forward for trial. This ability to find almost anything else more newsworthy was aptly demonstrated on the eve of the Presidential election when a prisoner named Ali Hamza al-Bahlul received a life sentence -- ostensibly to be served in Guantánamo in total isolation -- after a one-sided show trial in which, under the Commissions’ deeply flawed rules, he had been allowed to mount no defense whatsoever.

Derailing the cases of Mohamed Jawad and Omar Khadr

Just two days after the last appearance of the KSM circus, when most of the reporters had gone home, Army Col. Stephen Henley, the judge in Mohamed Jawad’s case, “indefinitely delayed” Jawad’s trial, as Jane Sutton explained. The trial had been scheduled to begin on January 5, but Henley gave the prosecution an unspecified amount of time to work out how to appeal his earlier decision to exclude the confession obtained by the Afghan authorities shortly after Jawad’s capture in Kabul in December 2002, because it was “obtained through death threats that constituted torture,” and another confession, which he made to U.S. interrogators the following day, because that too was the “fruit of that torture.” Whether the prosecution can come up with any further evidence is doubtful. As Lt. Col. Vandeveld explained in November, Jawad’s confession to Afghan officials was “among the most important evidence for his upcoming war crimes trial.” Vandeveld added, “To me, the case is not only eviscerated, it is now impossible to prosecute with any credibility.”

Two days later, on December 12, there was a further shock in the case of Omar Khadr. Although the U.S. government has always claimed that Khadr was responsible for throwing a grenade that killed U.S. Sgt. Christopher Speer during the firefight that led to Khadr’s capture in Afghanistan in July 2002, it was revealed in November 2007 -- just 36 hours before Khadr’s trial was supposed to begin -- that a previously undisclosed “U.S. government employee,” who was an eye-witness to the gunfight, had “potentially exculpatory evidence” proving that another man was alive at the time, and that this other man may have thrown the grenade.

At another pre-trial hearing in March last year, Khadr’s military defense lawyer, Lt. Cmdr. William Kuebler, revealed that the report of the circumstances that led to Khadr’s capture, written by an officer identified only as “Lt. Col. W.,” had been altered after the event to implicate Khadr, and on December 12 another witness, identified only as “Soldier No. 2,” produced further evidence indicating that Khadr could not have thrown the grenade, explaining, as Michelle Shephard described it, that the teenager “was buried under rubble from a collapsed roof before he was captured.”

In a motion submitted by Khadr’s lawyers, the soldier explained that he “thought he was standing on a ‘trap door’ because the ground did not seem solid.” He then “bent down to move the brush away to see what was beneath him and discovered that he was standing on a person; and that Mr. Khadr appeared to be ‘acting dead.’” Speaking to reporters, Lt. Cmdr. Kuebler explained that photographs taken at the scene, which were not shown to observers of the trial proceedings, “show a pile of rubble from the collapsed roof, and then show the debris moved aside to reveal Khadr lying facedown in the dirt,” which “make it abundantly clear Omar Khadr could not have thrown the hand grenade that killed 1st Sgt. Speer.”

A new chief judge

As prosecutors vowed to press ahead with Khadr’s trial on January 26, brushing off the defense team’s perennial cry that juveniles should not be prosecuted for war crimes, and apparently secure that they have other evidence of Khadr making and planting roadside bombs in Afghanistan which will prove that he “knowingly” carried out crimes, the next example of the Commissions’ blinkered view of reality came on December 15, when the Pentagon announced that Army Col. James Pohl, who had presided over the courts martial of several soldiers in the Abu Ghraib scandal, had been appointed as the new chief judge.

Pohl replaced Marine Col. Ralph Kohlmann (whose retirement plans had enabled KSM to mock him for his lack of commitment in September), and had already established himself as an independent-minded judge at Guantánamo. As Carol Rosenberg explained, in March, he “sternly informed” prosecutors in the case of Ahmed al-Darbi, a Saudi seized in Azerbaijan and accused of “plotting a never-realized attack on an unnamed ship in the Strait of Hormuz,” that defense lawyers “should have easy access to their clients.” Lawyers for the 33-year old father of two maintain that al-Darbi was tortured in U.S. custody and that the government’s allegations are reliant on 119 self-incriminating statements.

Col. Pohl also refused to endorse a request from prison commanders to approve violent “Forced Cell Extractions” when prisoners refused to come to the courtroom, and on his first day in his new job, at a pre-trial hearing for al-Darbi, allowed the Saudi to make an appeal to Barack Obama. “Waving a copy of an American Civil Liberties Union poster with a pensive Obama and his campaign's closure pledge on it,” as Rosenberg explained, al-Darbi said, “I hope this location will be closed as he promised. He will earn back the legitimacy the United States has lost as a world leader.”

This was the last hearing before the eve of Barack Obama’s inauguration, when final pre-trial hearings are supposed to begin in Omar Khadr’s case, and a mental competency hearing is scheduled for alleged 9/11 co-conspirator Ramzi bin al-Shibh, but although Col. Pohl acknowledged that he was “aware that on Jan. 20 there will be a new commander-in-chief, which may or may not impact on these proceedings,” he advised everyone connected with the Commissions to stay focused “unless and until a competent authority tells us not to.”

While this was a fair warning, Col. Pohl’s awareness of political realities was not reflected elsewhere in the Pentagon, nor, I suspect, in the Office of the Vice President, where, as I explained in my article in October that also looked at the sacking of Brig. Gen. Hartmann and the resignation of Lt. Col. Vandeveld, the architects of the Commissions -- Dick Cheney and his chief of staff David Addington -- seem determined to continue playing out their deranged fantasies until the moment they leave office.

A new prisoner is charged: the story of Tarek El-Sawah

On December 16, just as three Bosnian Algerians flew home from Guantánamo, after Judge Richard Leon, a Bush appointee, threw their cases out of his habeas court for lack of evidence, the Pentagon announced that another Bosnian prisoner, Tarek El-Sawah (aka Tariq al-Sawah), a 51-year old originally from Egypt, was the 27th prisoner to be put forward for trial by Military Commission. The Pentagon also reinstated the charges (pdf) against the Sudanese prisoner Noor Uthman Muhammed, allegedly the deputy emir of the Khaldan training camp, which had been dropped in October.

In El-Sawah’s charge sheet (pdf), in which he was charged with conspiracy and providing material support for terrorism, it was alleged that, between October 2000 and November 2001, he had trained at al-Farouq (the main training camp for Arabs in the years before the 9/11 attacks), had taught “the fundamentals of how to use explosives to members of al-Qaeda, the Taliban and others,” and had “developed and successfully tested a remote controlled limpet mine for use against U.S. warships” at the Tarnak farms training camp, which he had undertaken “at the direction of a member of al-Qaeda’s Shura Council.” It was also alleged that he had written a 400-page manual on bomb-making, and had fought against US and coalition forces in the Tora Bora mountains, until he was wounded and captured.

How much truth there is to these charges is difficult to ascertain. El-Sawah was certainly a militant, but in 2004, at his only appearance before a tribunal at Guantánamo, there was no mention of the bomb-making manual or the limpet mine, and he insisted that both his military commitment -- and the training he briefly gave to others in August 2001 -- was directed exclusively at the Northern Alliance.

El-Sawah explained that he had traveled to Bosnia as an aid worker in 1992, had married a Bosnian woman and had only gone to Afghanistan to see if it was suitable place to take his family. Once there, however, he clearly succumbed to the most virulent Taliban propaganda against Ahmed Shah Massoud, the leader of the Northern Alliance, who was assassinated by al-Qaeda agents on September 9, 2001. He told his tribunal, “One time in a jihad, Massoud killed about 10,000 Muslims in an hour.” Reiterating that it was his intention solely to support those who were being oppressed by the Northern Alliance, he said, “There are no rules in the United States to prevent it if you want to fight for religion. There are no rules to direct me not to defend people.” He also pointed out that he went to Afghanistan to fight the Northern Alliance before 9/11, when it was no business of the Americans, and asked, “If Massoud and Dostum are American allies, they were not an alliance before September 11th, were they?”

El-Sawah also denied an allegation that he had admitted being a member of al-Qaeda, denied an allegation that he met Osama bin Laden, saying that he saw him once at a meeting of about 250 people, but had no opportunity to actually meet him, and also denied an allegation that he had engaged in hostilities against the United States. In a comment that cut to the heart of what was essentially a proxy war, fought by Afghans with U.S. air support, he said, “There was no fighting against Americans. If there were any American soldiers saying they were fighting in Afghanistan, bring them here to me and show the evidence.”

He also explained that he was sold for money, telling his tribunal, “because the Americans offered $5,000 to anyone who captured us, they [the Northern Alliance] were fighting us and they kept us alive to get the $5,000,” and gave a poignant description of his departure from Jalalabad into the Tora Bora mountains, in which he emphasized that the war in Afghanistan and the fall of the Taliban had triggered an exodus of all kinds of people, not just al-Qaeda and Taliban fighters. “We left everything,” he said. “We were moving through mountains and caves; there were hundreds of families, children, women and people were climbing through the mountains. What were we to do? Some people were escaping from other fronts, near Jalalabad and Kabul. There were too many people there.”

Charges referred in the case of torture victim Abdul Rahim al-Nashiri

The administration’s final gesture, before the Christmas break, was for Susan Crawford, the Commissions’ “Convening Authority” -- and a close friend of both Dick Cheney and David Addington -- to confirm the charges that were filed last July against Abdul Rahim al-Nashiri. A Saudi, and one of 14 “high-value detainees” transferred to Guantánamo from secret CIA prisons in September 2006, al-Nashiri, who was seized in the United Arab Emirates in November 2002, was charged for his alleged role in the attacks on the USS The Sullivans and the USS Cole in 2000, and the French tanker Limburg in 2002.

Al-Nashiri faces the death penalty if convicted, although his trial, should it proceed, will undoubtedly be complicated by the fact that he is one of three “high-value detainees” whom CIA director Michael Hayden admitted last February had been subjected to waterboarding in secret CIA custody. In his tribunal at Guantánamo in 2007, al-Nashiri made a point of mentioning that he had made up false confessions after being tortured. “From the time I was arrested five years ago,” he said, “they have been torturing me. It happened during interviews. One time they tortured me one way, and another time they tortured me in a different way. I just said those things to make the people happy. They were very happy when I told them those things.”

Charges dropped against Abdul Ghani, a minor Afghan insurgent

On the same day that the charges against al-Nashiri were confirmed, there was better news for Abdul Ghani, an Afghan prisoner put forward for trial at the end of July. Without providing any explanation, Susan Crawford dismissed the charges “without prejudice,” which meant, as the Pentagon explained, “that the government has the option of charging Ghani at a later date,” but it would surely be better for the 36-year old to sent back to Afghanistan instead, where the Afghan authorities can work out if he actually constitutes a threat.

At best a minor Afghan insurgent, Ghani was charged with firing rockets at US forces, planting “land mines and other explosive devices on more than one occasion for use against U.S. and coalition forces,” attacking Afghan soldiers, and “accept[ing] monetary payments, including payment from al-Qaeda and others known and unknown, to commit attacks on U.S. forces and bases.” As I wrote at the time, however, “Apart from the inclusion of the magic words ‘al-Qaeda,’ there was nothing in Abdul Ghani’s charge sheet to indicate that he should find himself in the same trial system as those accused of involvement in the 9/11 attacks, the African embassy bombings of 1998 or the bombing of the USS Cole in 2000, or even, in fact, that he should have been sent to Guantánamo at all.”

Time for change

With less than two weeks until Dick Cheney and David Addington are obliged to leave the White House, when a new broom will also no doubt sweep the corridors of the Pentagon, it remains possible that the architects of the Commissions will indulge in a final round of last-minute tinkering, hoping that their failed experiment will live on, but for the rest of us, Barack Obama’s inauguration cannot come soon enough, nor, indeed, can the fulfillment of a promise that he made in August 2007:

As President, I will close Guantánamo, reject the Military Commissions Act, and adhere to the Geneva Conventions. Our Constitution and our Uniform Code of Military Justice provide a framework for dealing with the terrorists … The separation of powers works. Our Constitution works. We will again set an example to the world that the law is not subject to the whims of stubborn rulers, and that justice is not arbitrary.

Andy Worthington is a British historian, and the author of 'The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America's Illegal Prison' (published by Pluto Press). Visit his website at: www.andyworthington.co.uk

He can be reached at: andy@andyworthington.co.uk

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