Today's Stories

May 7, 2009

Chris Floyd
A Full-Court Press for Pakistan War

May 6, 2009

Doug Peacock
The Fate of the Yellowstone Grizzly

Patrick Cockburn
Afghans to Obama: Get Out, Take Karzai With You

Richard Neville
The Torturer's Apprentice

Manuel Garcia, Jr.
To Power a Nation: Nuclear Bombs or Sunshine?

Winslow T. Wheeler
Of Pork and Baloney: Obama's Defense Budget

Deepak Tripathi
Pakistan in Crisis

Stephen Soldz
A "Natural Reaction": APA Ethics Policy-Maker Endorses Torture

Reuven Kaminer
Nice is Not Enough: Obama vs. Netanyahu and Lieberman

David Macaray
The Chrysler-UAW Deal

Kevin Zeese
Why We Were Arrested at the Senate Finance Committee Hearings

Marjorie Cohn
Stanford Antiwar Alums Call for War Crimes Investigation of Condoleezza Rice

Coalition for an Ethical Psychology
Investigate Psychologist and Health Provider Complicity in Torture

Website of the Day
Who's Behind the Financial Meltdown?

May 5, 2009

William Blum
Torture and Mr. Obama

Uri Avnery
Netanyahu's Plan

Steven Higgs
Autism and Toxic Pollution

Dean Baker
Why Economists Should Learn Arithmetic

Daniel Wolff
The Education of Rachel Carson

Sibel Edmonds
The Broken Congress

Carole King Klein
A New Chance to Save the Northern Rockies

Fidel Castro
Giving One's All

Belén Fernández
Oil and Aguardiente in the Ecuadoran Elections

Dan Bacher
Schwarzenegger's Big Lie About Fish vs. Jobs

Website of the Day
"I Married Isis on the Fifth Day of May"

May 4, 2009

James G. Abourezk
The AIPAC Spy Case

Jeff Leys
Obama's War Budget

Patrick Cockburn
Afghan Ayatollahs Press Marital Rape Law

Andy Worthington
A Start on Guantánamo, But Not Enough

Jaime Avilés
Mexico's Plague-Bringers

David Swanson
An Even Worse Bybee Memo

Paul Craig Roberts
Working with Jack Kemp

P. Sainath
Celeb Crusades and the Death of Politics

Eugenia Tsao
Canada's Obama and the Cult of the Prof

Benjamin Dangl
Protest and Rubber Bullets in Paraquay

Sami Al-Arian
Mourning William Moffitt

Website of the Day
"Soldiers Are Cutting Us Down": Kent State, May 4, 1970

May 1 - 3, 2009

Alexander Cockburn
Game-Changers: Specter Jumps, Souter Quits

Gary Leupp
Dropping the AIPAC Spying Case

Peter Linebaugh
The Key to the Bastille

Jeffrey St. Clair /
Joshua Frank:
Half Life of a Toxic War: Iraq's Wrecked Environment

C. G. Estabrook
Minion of the Long War

Patrick Cockburn
Kabul's New Elite

Mike Whitney
Economy on the Ropes

Pierre Sprey /
Winslow Wheeler
What "Sweeping Overhaul" of the Pentagon?

Andy Worthington
Al-Marri's Plea Deal: Dictatorial Powers Unchallenged

Mairead Maguire
Stand Up to Israeli Apartheid: a Letter to Obama From a Nobel Peace Prize Laureate

Nadia Hijab
The Israel Boycott is Biting

Diane Farsetta
Life, Death and Water Policy

Michael Calderón-Zaks
The Déjà Vu Flu: Why Much of the Discussion About Swine Flu is Racist

Richard Rhames
When Piggies Come Home to Roost: Swine Flu and the Industrial Meat Gulags

Russell Mokhiber
Inside the Beltway Baucus

Ramzy Baroud
Clinton's Unpromising Start

Rannie Amiri
Understanding Lebanon's June Elections

Deb Reich
No Talking, Dammit!

Steven Higgs
Indiana Criminalizes Dissent: Roadblocks on the NAFTA Highway

Brian Cloughley
Malice in Blunderland

David Michael Green
The Party's Over

Farzana Versey
Sex, Swat and Susan Boyle

Jim Goodman
Think Before You Eat: Agriculture and the Environment

Carl Finamore
New Prescription for a Healthy Union Movement

Christopher Brauchli
The Sounds of Silence: the Texas Option

Susie Day
The Real Cause of Unemployment: Employees!

David Yearsley
Nuts Over Beethoven

Lorenzo Wolff
Three Minutes of Perfection

Peter Stone Brown
Dancing with Dylan

Poets' Basement Dominguez, Orloski and Springate

Website of the Weekend
May Day Europe

April 30, 2009

Ellen Cantarow
Obama and "Two States": Seamless Continuity From Bush Time

Dana L. Cloud
The McCarthyism That Horowitz Built

Paul W. Lovinger /
Jeannette Hassberg
A Nation of Laws

Binoy Kampmark
Swine at the Trough: the Business of Pandemics

Brian Downing
The Perils of Modernization in Afghanistan

Frank Snepp
Tortured by the Past

David Swanson
The Wrong Torture Question

Conn Hallinan
The Coming Asian Storm

Ron Jacobs
Not Dead Yet: an Interview with Jerry Gordon on the State of the Antiwar Movement

John Goekler
The Only Path to a Middle East Picnic?

Jasmine L. Tyler /
Anthony Papa
An End to Crack/Powder Cocaine Sentencing Disparity?

Website of the Day
Emergency Petition: Stop Coal Industry Intimidation of Activists

April 29, 2009

Joann Wypijewski
Death at Work in America

Patrick Cockburn
The Taliban's Roads to Kabul

Andy Worthington
Cheney's Twisted World

Chris Floyd
The Specter Diversion

Dave Lindorff
No More Excuses: a Specter is Haunting the Democrats

Jeremy Scahill
The Nuremberg Truth and Reconciliation Commission?

Doug Henwood
Zionist Lobby Targets Another Tenured Professor: an Interview with William Robinson

Michael Hudson
Will Iceland be Handed Over to a New Gang of Kleptocrats?

Russell Mokhiber
My Ron Pollack Problem--And Yours

Eric Toussaint
Ecuador at the Crossroads

Website of the Day
An Interview with Leslie and Andrew Cockburn on "American Casino"

April 28, 2009

Uri Avnery
A Little Red Light: On Israeli Fascism

Jeremy Scahill
Obama's Iraq: the Picture of Dorian Gray

Dean Baker
The Perfect Gift for Wall Street: a Financial Transactions Tax

Michael D. Yates
At the Factory Gate

Conn Hallinan
Georgian Plots? Saakavili's "Order No. 2"

John Stauber
Beyond MoveOn

Tom Barry
The Failed Border Security Initiative

Harvey Wasserman
Who Pays for America's Chernobyl Roulette?

Jeff Nygaard
Pirates, Profits and Propaganda

Frederico Fuentes
Why the U.S. Still Hates Cuba

Website of the Day
The Man Behind the Hood

April 27, 2009

Pam Martens
The Far Right's Plot to Capture New Hampshire

Patrick Cockburn
Torture? It Probably Killed More Americans Than 9/11

Andrew J. Bacevich Guardian of the Status Quo: Obama's Sins of Omission

Mitu Sengupta
The Bloodbath in Sri Lanka

Franklin Lamb
Hillary Does Beirut: The 165-Minute Swoop-In

Firmin DeBrabander
Crimes of Economic Madness

Dave Lindorff
Wide Open to Pandemic?

Russell Mokhiber
How Corrupt is That?

Mike Whitney
Pinter's Message to Obama

Mark Weisbrot
Overhauling the IMF

Rev. José M. Tirado
Iceland's New Dawn: How the Right Got Trounced

Website of the Day
American Casino

April 24-26, 2009

Alexander Cockburn
Putting the Bush Years on Trial

Marjorie Cohn
Torture Used to Try to Link Saddam with 9/11

Andy Worthington
Who Ordered the Torture of Abu Zubaydah?

Jeremy Scahill
Are Leading Democrats Afraid of a Special Prosecutor to Investigate Torture?

Chris Floyd
Top of the Heap: the Democrats' Teachable Moment on Torture

Mike Whitney
A Housing Crash Update

Anthony DiMaggio
Obama and the Housing Crisis

Chris Kromm
Democratic Lobbyists Key to Fight Against Employee Free Choice Act

Saul Landau
Seventeen Months in "the Hole:" an Interview with the Leader of the Cuban Five

Dave Lindorff
Free John Walker Lindh

Greg Moses
The Debt Looters

Joshua Frank
Calling for a Coal Moratorium: an Interview with Ted Nace

Fred Gardner
Collective Farming and the Lynch Case

Manuel Garcia, Jr.
Homework, Testing and Stealth Apartheid in Education

David Michael Green
Of Tea Parties and Teleprompters

Ramzy Baroud
Middle East Spies: a New Front in Gaza's Conflict

Rannie Amiri
Mubarak's Expanding Enemies List

Laura Carlsen
Mr. President, Calderon is Not Mexico

Richard Morse
The Haitian People Need a Lobbyist

Nikolas Kozloff
Protecting the Bald Eagle: a Task Now Falling to ... Hugo Chavez?

Kent Peterson
The Fight to Save Mexico's Mangroves

Robert Bryce
The Ethanol Scammers Rent a General

Niranjan Ramakrishnan The Financial Experts

Ron Jacobs
Torture is More Than Just "Harsh Tactics"

Richard Rhames
Roman Legends, Book Burning and History's Hunt

Stephen Martin
Wherefore Art Thou American Dream?

David Yearsley
Rodgers, Hammerstein, Michener and Nostalgia's Clammy Embrace

Poets' Basement
Khalil and Mankh

Website of the Weekend
Doug and Andrea Peacock on Grizzlies and Edward Abbey

April 23, 2009

Eamonn Fingleton
How the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times Buried the Madoff Scandal for at Least Four Years

Ray McGovern
Obama Plays Hamlet on Torture

Michael Ratner
The Torture Commission Trap

Alan Farago
The Quicksand Economy

Rob Larson
Business Gets Carded

Nadia Hijab
The Real Heroes of Durban

Fawzia Afzal-Khan
Deconstructing the Taliban

Dave Lindorff
Are Members of Congress Being Blackmailed?

Helen Redmond
Selling Out Single-Payer: the "Public Option" Con

Adam Federman
The Battle Over New York's Marcellus Shale

Website of the Day
An Interactive Map of Vanishing Employment Across the Country

April 22, 2009

Chris Floyd
The Fatal Thread: Torture, War and the Imperial Project

Joanne Mariner
Torture Evidence and Terror Blacklists

Vijay Prashad
Obama's Afghan Plan: Fracturing the Antiwar Movement

Gareth Porter
U.S. Lacks Capacity to Win Over Afghans

Dean Baker
The Tyranny of Bad Economics

Peter Morici
Housing Sales and Fixing the Economy

Winslow T. Wheeler
Eliminating Bad Pentagon Habits

Barucha Calamity Peller
The Battle to Take Back the New School

Harvey Wasserman
Chernobyl Could Happen Here

Aisha Brown /
Dedrick Muhammad
White Privilege in the Americas

Teo Ballvé
Obama's Feel Good Meeting with Colombia's Uribe

Website of the Day
Ahmedinejad's Durban Speech: What He Actually Said

April 21, 2009

Randy Rowland
Lindy Blake's Great Escape

Dave Lindorff
Jay Bybee's Conspiracy to Torture

Fidel Castro
The Secret Summit

George McGovern
Pull Out of Iraq This Year

Greg Moses
The Unemployment Channel

Benjamin Dangl
Argentina Remembers

Sonia Nettnin
Saving Lives in Gaza

Frank Barat
The Death of Bassem: a Shooting at the Wall in Bil'n

Binoy Kampmark
Legal Purgatory and John Demjanjuk

John V. Walsh
Code Red for Single Payer

David Macaray
SAG Should be Praised, Not Assailed

Website of the Day
Bonus Man: For Executive Assholes Everywhere

April 20, 2009

Mike Whitney
Housing Bust Comes Roaring Back, Worse Than Ever

Andrea Peacock
Histrionics and Legalisms in Missoula

Henry A. Giroux
Ten Years After Columbine: the Tragedy of Youth Deepens

Liaquat Ali Khan
Drone Attacks on Pakistan's Indigenous Tribes

Fred Gardner
Obama's DoJ Backs Prosecution of Medical Marijuana Providers

Stephen Soldz
Obama, Blair, Panetta and the Torture Memos: Praising Moral Cowards, Ignoring Real Heroes

Nadia Hijab
Obama's Multi-Polar Middle East

Dave Lindorff
The Meeting in Trinidad

P. Sainath
India's Press Nixes "R" Word

Nelson P Valdés
A Modest (Transition) Proposal to Obama

Mark Engler
American Empire Foreclosed?

Belén Fernández
The FARC Can't Dance

Website of the Day
Dear Mr. Buffett...

May 7, 2009

Rolling Out the Product Again

A Full-Court Press for Pakistan War

By CHRIS FLOYD

We asked for signs,
And signs were sent.

-- Leonard Cohen, "Anthem"

I.

We are now in the midst of a full-blown campaign to "roll out the product" for a new war: this time, in Pakistan. Anyone who lived through the run-up to the invasion of Iraq should be able to read the signs -- anyone, that is, who is not blinded by partisan labels, or by the laid-back cool of a media-savvy leader far more presentable than his predecessor.

This week brings yet another bumper crop of panic buttons and alarm bells from the powers-that-be, with ever-increasing emphasis on the "Taliban kooks with Muslim nukes" theme: one more variation on the old "mushroom clouds rising in American cities" ploy that has worked like a charm for our militarists lo these 60 years or more.

Some of the war-pushing powers-that-be are public figures in the Obama Administration (including Obama himself, who has dutifully taken on the Bushian mantle of Fearmonger-in-Chief), and some of them are shadowy, unnamed eminences in the military-security apparat, clearly aiming to act for Obama as those daggers of the mind did for Macbeth: "Thou marshall'st me the way that I was going."

The first story to greet America's political class as they sat down to their prunes and Post Toasties this morning was a big New York Times spread with one loud, clanging message: You cannot defeat the Taliban in Afghanistan without going deep into Pakistan.

It seems the Times has discovered an unusually loquacious "Pakistani logistics tactician" who for some reason has spent the last six months spilling the beans on the Taliban's strategy to the leading newspaper of  the American establishment. The anonymous 28-year-old guy from somewhere in Pakistan's tribal lands told a harrowing tale of the "workings and ambitions of the Taliban" as they prepare to defeat Obama's Afghan surge from their safe havens in Pakistan, then seize Islamabad's nuclear arsenal.

What's more, the "logistics tactician" has provided his American enemies with a ready-made, pre-positioned "justification" for the mass civilian slaughter that will inevitably accompany Obama's surge:

"He acknowledged that the Americans would have far superior forces and power this year, but was confident that the Taliban could turn this advantage on its head. 'The Americans cannot take control of the villages,' he said. 'In order to expel us they will have to resort to aerial bombing, and then they will have more civilian casualties.'"

This is of course the precise "reason" trotted out every time American-led occupation forces kill a group of civilians in Afghanistan: the Taliban made us do it. This happened just yesterday, in the village of Gerani, where village leaders tried to shield children, women and elderly men in housing compounds far away from fighting between Taliban forces and Afghan troops with American "advisors." But the advisors called in an airstrike that destroyed the civilians' safe haven, killing between 70 and 100 innocent people, as two of the New York Times' non-stovepipe reporters, Taimoor Shah and Carlotta Gall, report:

"Mohammad Nieem Qadderdan, the former top official in the district of Bala Baluk, said he had seen dozens of bodies when he visited the village of Gerani. 'These houses that were full of children and women and elders were bombed by planes. It is very difficult to say how many were killed because nobody can count the number, it is too early,' Mr. Qadderdan, who no longer holds a government position, told The A.P. by telephone. 'People are digging through rubble with shovels and hands.'"

The outraged and grieving villagers gathered up at least 30 of the slain and took them to officials in the provincial capital as proof of the massacre: a grisly, desperate measure forced on them by the American's constant denials and denigrations of reports of civilian casualties, as we saw last year, when an American air assault killed up to 90 civilians in Azizabad.

But now the great and good can turn from this disturbing story to the convenient divulgings of the unnamed 28-year-old guy from an unnamed place in Pakistan, and see that such slaughters are all just part of the Taliban's fiendish plan. In fact, he provides grist for the PR mill of the great imperial blood libel of them all: There no "civilians."

"The tactician says he embeds his men in what he described as friendly Afghan villages, where they will spend the next four to six months with the residents, who provide the weapons and succor for the missions against American and NATO soldiers."

There, you see? Every villager is a two-faced sneak, working to kill Americans.  If they die -- then they deserve it. Boy, that makes the prunes and Post Toasties a little easier to digest, doesn't it!

But Anonymous Guy is not done toting water for the militarists yet. Not only does provide cover for collateral damage, and red-flag the hot-button issues of the new roll-out -- Pakistan as the true epicenter of the Good War in Afghanistan, and kooks with nukes -- he also praises the effectiveness of their most beloved new toy: the robot drones that rain remote-control death on Pakistani villages:

"The one thing that impressed him were the missile strikes by drones — virtually the only American military presence felt inside Pakistan. 'The drones are very effective,' he said, acknowledging that they had thinned the top leadership of Al Qaeda and the Taliban in the area. He said 29 of his friends had been killed in the strikes."

Of course, they have also killed almost 700 Pakistani civilians (as of last month), according to the Pakistani government. But what of that, when the remarkably top-heavy leadership of Al Qaeda and the Taliban has been pruned a bit -- at least, according to some anonymous guy from somewhere in Pakistan. (Surely no organizations in history have ever had so many "top leaders" as America's Terror War enemies, who, according to Washington, have been felled in their hundreds over the years in Iraq, Afghanistan and now Pakistan.)

In any case, the anonymous guy from somewhere or other could hardly have put the militarists' case for war in Pakistan any better even if they had, you know, paid him to do it or something.  

II.

But the New York Times is only one front in the new campaign. On the same day as Anonymous Guy was working his militarist mojo, McClatchy Newspapers fired off a resounding fusillade of largely unnamed "experts" from the military-security apparat, all of them, remarkably enough, with the same message: Pakistan is falling to the Muslim kooks who want them nukes.

It is an astounding performance. The story, by Jonathan Landy, marshall'st a multitude of nightmare scenarios now coming true before our very eyes. But this is not to say the story is unbalanced in any way: there are two short passages, buried in the middle and at the end of the story, that take a different view. Such as this one:

"Many Pakistanis, however, dismiss such warnings as inflated. They think that the militants are open to dialogue and political accommodation to end the unrest, which many trace to the former military regime's cooperation with the U.S. after 9/11."

But this nugget of genuine insight gleaned from, you know, the actual people who live in the actual country in question, is swamped by waves of heavy-duty doomsaying from anonymous Washington savants. Such as:

"A growing number of U.S. intelligence, defense and diplomatic officials have concluded that there's little hope of preventing nuclear-armed Pakistan from disintegrating into fiefdoms controlled by Islamist warlords and terrorists, posing a greater threat to the U.S. than Afghanistan's terrorist haven did before 9/11.

'It's a disaster in the making on the scale of the Iranian revolution,' said a U.S. intelligence official with long experience in Pakistan who requested anonymity because he wasn't authorized to speak publicly...

'Pakistan has 173 million people and 100 nuclear weapons, an army which is bigger than the American army, and the headquarters of al Qaida sitting in two-thirds of the country which the government does not control,' said David Kilcullen, a retired Australian army officer, a former State Department adviser and a counterinsurgency consultant to the Obama administration."

Significantly, one of the few people named in the article is directly connected to the White House, giving an official seal of approval to the other, anonymous alarmists:

"The experts McClatchy interviewed said their views aren't a worst case scenario but a realistic expectation based on the militants' gains and the failure of Pakistan's civilian and military leadership to respond.

'The place is beyond redemption,' said a Pentagon adviser who asked not to be further identified so he could speak freely. 'I don't see any plausible scenario under which the present government or its most likely successor will mobilize the economic, political and security resources to push back this rising tide of violence.

'I think Pakistan is moving toward a situation where the extremists control virtually all of the countryside and the government controls only the urban centers,' he continued. 'If you look out 10 years, I think the government will be overrun by Islamic militants.'

Are you scared to death yet? Or even better: are you scared enough to give your approval to "whatever it takes" to save us? After all, the president himself says that the situation in Pakistan is a "mortal threat" to the sacred Homeland; a view reiterated by his special "Af-Pak" envoy, Richard Holbrooke, who told Congress yesterday (on yet another front in the roll-out campaign) that "our most vital national security interests are at stake," in Pakistan. A mortal threat to our most vital interests -- can there be a greater, more urgent, more noble casus belli?

Again, Pakistanis have a different view of their own country, which is large, diverse, cosmopolitan, and made up overwhelmingly of adherents of Sufi Islam, as well as non-violent, non-militant Sunnis and Shiites. These ordinary human beings enjoy the arts, popular entertainment, sports, technology eating out, running businesses, pursuing scientific research and intellectual studies, raising their families. As Ahsan Iqbal, a top aide to opposition leader and former Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif, told McClatchy:

"While militants will overrun small pockets, most Pakistanis embrace democracy and will resist living under the Taliban's harsh interpretation of Islam, he said.

'The psychology, the temperament, the mood of the Pakistani nation does not subscribe to these extremist views,' Iqbal said."

But of course, the anonymous unipolar dominationists of the American power structure know better:

"The U.S. intelligence official, however, said that Pakistan's elite, dominated since the country's independence in 1947 by politicians, bureaucrats and military officers from Punjab, have failed to recognize the seriousness of the situation.

'The Punjabi elite has already lost control of Pakistan, but neither they nor the Obama administration realize that,' the official said. 'Pakistan will be an Islamist state — or maybe a collection of four Islamic states, probably within a few years. There's no civilian leadership in Islamabad that can stop this, and so far, there hasn't been any that's been willing to try.'"

Of course, Islamabad has been carrying out military operations against insurgents for many years, losing hundreds of soldiers in the campaigns. But this history is being erased and rewritten to accommodate the new narrative: The United States will be forced to intervene directly in Pakistan because the Pakistanis are too stupid to realize the danger posed by the militants, and too weak and cowardly to even try to stop them. The whole damned place was "beyond redemption," so we have to step in.

We have been here before, and not so long ago either. The signs are there -- for anyone who wants to see them.

Chris Floyd is an American writer and a frequent contributor to CounterPunch. His blog, Empire Burlesque, can be found at www.chris-floyd.com

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