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Today's Stories

July 30 - August 1, 2010

Alexander Cockburn
Do Disclosures of Atrocities Change Anything?

Paul Craig Roberts
Let Them Eat Cake

Gareth Porter
Bomb Iran? Neocon Nutballs Ramp Up Campaign

Patrick Cockburn
Getting Out of Afghanistan

Linn Washington
Racism in the Federal Government

Jeffrey St. Clair
Paradoxical River: Down the Hanford Reach

Anthony DiMaggio
Iran Under Siege

Chase Madar
Torturing the Rule of Law at Obama's Gitmo

Bill Kauffman
Wherein We Meet Genial Radicals by the Shores of Lake Champlain

Stewart J. Lawrence
Enjoining Arizona: Why the Battle Isn't Over

John Ross
Lovefest in the Zocalo

Joanne Mariner
Forced Returns From Guantanamo: Repatriated to Torture?

John Weisheit
Strip Mining Canyon Country

Saul Landau
The Alan Gross Case

Allan J. Lichtman
Comic Strip Politics

Margaret Kimberley
Shirley Sherrod's Righteous Anger

Russell Mokhiber
Don Blankenship Hates the Police

Rannie Amiri
The Existential Threat Facing Lebanon Today

Fred Gardner
Smoking Pot Does Not Cause Lung Cancer

Jeff Ballinger
The Day FIFA Lost Its Soul

Ramzy Baroud
Why Muslims Should Rethink Palestine

Steve Roest
Toxic Whales

Christopher Brauchli
The Return of Tancredo

Sheldon Richman
Trashing the Fourth Amendment

Missy Beattie
Devil's Food Cake

Don Monkerud
A Tea Party Fairy Tale

Mitu Sengupta
The Price of Being World Class

Mark Weisbrot
Colombia-Venezuela Dispute Will be Better Resolved in South America

Eric Walberg
Russia, Afghanistan and Star Wars

Willie L. Pelote
Cut From the Top

Charles R. Larson
The Last Woman on Earth

Kim Nicolini
Class Bonding and Man-Children in LA

David Yearsley
Christian Bach's Castrato Arias

Poets' Basement
Hays, Halle and Ford

July 29, 2010

Mike Whitney
Trillions for Wall Street

Jordan Flaherty Rogue State: a Movement Rises in Arizona

Dave Lindorff
National Insecurity Complex

Ron Jacobs
The Story of Evo Morales

Mark Weisbrot
Jobs, Stimulus and Debt

Conn Haliinan
The Great Myth of Counter-Insurgency

Sheldon Richman
Government Has Run Amok Since 9/11

Brian M. Downing
Rising Tensions in the Persian Gulf

Website of the Day
An Interview with Julian Assange

July 28, 2010

Paul Craig Roberts
US Treasury is Running on Fumes

Gregory Elich
The Sinking of the Cheonan and Its Political Uses

Bruce McEwen
The Great Marijuana Boom

Jonathan Cook
Shin Bet Exposed

David Macaray
Taft-Hartley Revisited

Jeanine Molloff
The Predatory Nature of Home Loan Modifications

Barry Crimmins Sickened Ire: a Visit to St. Moneychanger's Hospital

Linn Washington
Another Reverse Racism Scam

John Grant
Letter to an American Hero: PFC Bradley Manning

Anthony Papa
Is Cameron Douglas' Life in Danger?

Website of the Day
Animal Cruelty But One CAFO Crime

 

July 27, 2010

Gareth Porter
The Afghan War Springs a Leak

Mike Whitney
A Decade of Declining Housing Prices

Chris Floyd
The Poor Must Die

Karl Grossman
Floating Chernobyls

Dean Baker
Blacking Out on the Economy

Marjorie Cohn
McCain on Iraq: "We Already Won That One"

Patrick Cockburn
Worse Than Hiroshima?

Steve Breyman
Afghanistan: the Inside Story

Heather Gray
How Shirley Sherrod Saved a White-Owned Farm in South Georgia

Randall Amster
Climate of Fear on the Border

Manuel Garcia, Jr
Dear Democrats, 2012

Website of the Day
BP and Academic Freedom

July 26, 2010

Bill Quigley
Rampant Racism in the Criminal Justice System

Marjorie Cohn
The 30-Year Incarceration of Carlos Alberto Torres

Jonathan Cook
Israeli Police Impunity

Paul Craig Roberts
The Year America Dissolved

John H. Summers
Fly Away, Mockingbird!

Clancy Sigal
The Future is Female ... and Republican

Steve Niva
Olympia Food Co-op Boycotts Israeli Goods

Greg Moses
What Capitalism Means to the Tea Party

Dave Lindorff
BP's Don't Ask Don't Tell Policy

Harvey Wasserman
Why Stewart Brand is Wrong About Nukes

Jayne Lyn Stahl
The Skeleton in John Yoo's Closet

Website of the Day
Will There be Enough Water?

July 23 - 25, 2010

Alexander Cockburn
The Frame-Up

Mike Whitney
Shadow Banking Makes a Comeback

Rannie Amiri
The Hariri Assassination: Israel's Fingerprints Surface

Anthony DiMaggio
War on Terror or War of Terror?

John Ross
Killer Governor Falls

Sam Smith
How to End the Tea Party (and Scare Obama at the Same Time)

Clare Bayard
A Slow Motion Katrina

Ismael Hossein-Zadeh
Not Bad Policy, But Class Policy

Ellen Brown
Why "Sovereign Debt" is an Oxymoron

Saul Landau /
Nelson P. Valdes
The Media and Cuba's Prisoner Release

Ramzy Baroud
Empty Declarations

Nicola Nasser
Who's Funding the Settlements?

Carl Finamore
Labor and Money Clash in 15 Cities

John V. Whitbeck
If Kosovo, Why Not Palestine? The ICJ Opinion on Unilateral Declarations of Independence

Brian Cloughley
Psychotic Morons: "It's Fun to Shoot Some People"

Roberto Rodriguez
The Story of Leticia X: an Arizona Tragedy

Maytha Alhassen
The Liquor Store Wars

Igor Atamenenko
Spying in the Red Dawn of Wi-Fi

Tom Turnipseed
Covert Government

David Swanson
Dropping the Bomb

Missy Beattie
The Mother of All Gushers

Doug Giebel
Progressive Bribery

Christopher Brauchli
Criminalizing First-Graders

Laura Flanders
Who Has Shirley Sherrod's Back?

Stuart Jeanne Bramhall
Electoral Reform: the Issue Progressives Love to Hate

Cpt. Paul Watson
Bye, Bye Rotten Butter Bombs

Kevin Zeese
Standing With Private Bradley Manning

Dr. Susan Block
G-Thanks, Dr. Burri

Charles R. Larson
Borges: the Harsh Realities of Place

Charles M. Young Playing in the Church of the Rev. Gary Davis: an Interview with Ernie Hawkins

Poets' Basement
Three by Barbara LaMorticella

Website of the Weekend
The Killing Fields

July 22, 2010

Heather Gray
The Saga of Shirley Sherrod

Darwin Bond-Graham
Co-opting the Anti-Nuclear Movement

Gary Leupp
Obama's Afghan War in Perspective

Bruce E. Levine
How Psychologists Profit on Unending U.S. Wars

Greg Moses
Capital Strike?

Gerald E. Scorse
A Tax Cut Nobody Needs

Walden Bello
Greece and Wall Street

Paul Buccheit
The "Pursuit of Happiness" Means a Job

Website of the Day
Free and Equal

July 21, 2010

James Abourezk
Encounters With Sen. Robert C. Byrd

Mark Schuller
Opportunities in Haiti are Washing Away

David Underhill
BP Sticks Finger in Dike and All's Well ...

Jonathan Cook
Is the Israeli Right a More Credible Peacemaker?

Binoy Kampmark
The Secret Colossus

Dennis Bernstein
Cops Kill Again in Oakland

Jesse Jackson
The Big Disconnect

Brian J. Foley
Nice Work If You Can Get It

Tom Clifford
Political Pinups: Prague's Calendar Affair

Michael Donnelly
The Last of His Kind: Rock a While With David Vest

Website of the Day
The Scariest Unemployment Graph Yet

 

July 20, 2010

Uri Avnery
Inside the Israeli Knesset

Gareth Porter
Why the CIA is Trying to Burn Amiri

John Stanton
America's Defense Associations: Key Cogs in the War Machinery

Adam Turl
Incident at Willow Lake Mine: Peabody Coal and the Death of Thomas Brown

David Price
Disrespecting the Yellow in the Tour de France

Stewart J. Lawrence
Why Obama's "Secure Communities" Program May be More Dangerous Than Arizona

David Macaray
Made in China

Franklin Lamb
Palestinian Rights in Lebanon

Shamus Cooke
Labor Fights Back

Mark Weisbrot
Life Imitates Art

Website of the Day
Carbon Trading and Money Laundering


July 19, 2010

Russell Mokhiber Thousands Injured, 275 Dead, WR Grace Not Guilty

Dean Baker
The Path of Unemployment

Patrick Cockburn
Leaving Iraq: The Ruin They'll Leave Behind

Jonathan Cook
Netanyahu: I Deceived the US to Destroy Oslo Accords

Nicola Nasser
Selling False Hope: the US and the Palestinians

Ray McGovern
The Iranian Scientist Who Would Not Play Curveball

Dave Lindorff
Cracking the Sea Floor: Fools' Errand in the Gulf

Greg Moses
Racism Implodes Tea Party

Sheldon Richman
The Bibi & Obama Show

Mikita Brottman The Beauties and the Beasts: Hollywood, Blondes and the Slaughter Industry

Website of the Day
Study: Gulf Clean-Up Efforts Ineffective, Harming Not Helping Birds

July 16 - 18, 2010

Alexander Cockburn
The Fall of Obama

John Ross
In the Basement of Mexican Justice, No One is Innocent

Andrew Cockburn
Worth It? the Human Price of Sanctions

Gareth Porter
Was Amiri a Double Agent?

Andy Worthington
US Sought Rendition of British Nationals to Gitmo

Jonathan Cook
Israel Stops Listening to Its Judges

Ralph Nader
Delta Blues: Can the Iranian Model Save Mississippi?

Chase Madar
Keep Cops Out of Schools: New York's Failed Experiment

Saul Landau
Reality Gap in the Gulf

Ramzy Baroud
The Culture of Resistance

Iris Keltz
Off the Grid in the South Hebron Hills

Jordan Flaherty
Days of Cop Violence in New Orleans

Bill Quigley / Rachel Meeropol
The Case of the AETA Four

Dave Lindorff
Cap and Blow?

Christopher Brauchli
Homeless in Boulder

Missy Beattie
Marketing Peace and War

Michael Barker
Foundations and Social Change: an Interview with Diana Johnstone

David Swanson
Give Rove What He Wants

Stewart J. Lawrence
Is Obama Backing Away From a Sweeping Immigration Legalization Program?

Ed Emery
Camels in Crisis

Sherwood Ross
What Tea Partiers Owe Progressives

Yves Engler
The Political Roadblocks to Haiti's Reconstruction

N. H. Gordon
What the Presbyterian Statement Didn't Say About Israel

Tom Turnipseed
Killing for Fun

Cpt. Paul Watson
Saving Endangered Feces

David Krieger
Shatterer of Worlds

David Ker Thomson
Put This in Your Tailpipe and Smoke It

Dan Bacher
How Oil Lobbyists Are Writing California's Environmental Laws

Lisa Barr
Exit Security Theatre, Enter Cindy Sheehan

Charles R. Larson
The Translator and His Charge

David Yearsley
Why Bach Didn't Go Swimming

Kim Nicolini
In the Court of the Lizard King

Poets' Basement
Ahmad & Orloski

Website of the Weekend
Rachel Corrie Soccer Tournament

July 15, 2010

Paul Craig Roberts
Economics in Freefall

Mike Whitney
Why the Fed is Steering the Economy Into Deflation

Frida Berrigan
Trillion Dollar Babies: Re-examining the Pentagon's Spending Habits

Yifat Susskind
Children of War

Dave Lindorff
How Bank of America Got Away With a Huge Swindle

Paul Krassner
Tuli is Better Off Dead

David Macaray
Three Cheers for the Post Office

Sebastian Walker
In Haiti the Sense of Urgency Has Been Lost

Anthony Papa
A Mentor to Men Behind Walls

Website of the Day
Phone Fight: Christian Bale v. Mel Gibson

July 14, 2010

Janan Abdu
A Prisoner's Wife

Ellen Brown
How Brokers Became Bookies

Anthony DiMaggio
Afghanistan in Ruins

Greg Moses
The Snitches of Utah

Sherwood Ross
The Living Legacy of James Meredith

Tolu Olorunda
Play the Music: One Record Store Owner Refuses to Go Out of Business

Mark Weisbrot
Exacerbating the Crisis in the Eurozone

Laura Flanders
Do Ask, Don't Tell

Sam Smith
How Progressives and Liberals are Different

Phil Rockstroh
A Heap of Broken Images

Website of the Day
Evil Bible

July 13, 2010

Jonathan Cook
Remote-Controlled Killing

Greg Dropkin Blockade! Dockworkers, Worldwide, Respond to Israel's Flotilla Massacre and Gaza Siege

Dean Baker
Reckless Drilling: BP's Carnage

George Wuerthner
Financial Entanglements: Wolves, Oil, Bureaucrats and Judges

Deepak Tripathi
The Dwindling of Afghanistan's Coalition of the Willing

Firmin DeBrabander
The Escalating Chemical War on Weeds

Billy Wharton
Obama and ACORN: a Post-Mortem

Roberto Rodriguez
A Crack Law By Any Other Name

Brian J. Foley
From Russia With Lovers

Sasha Kramer
Haiti: Frozen in Time

Website of the Day
Gitmo: the Definitive Prisoner List

July 12, 2010

James Abourezk
The Unchallenged Power of the Israel Lobby

Harry Browne
World Cup Finale: "They Didn't Have to Deserve It ... They Were Just Playing"

George Ciccariello- Maher
Oakland's Verdict

Neve Gordon
Boycotting Israel: a Strategy, Not a Principle

Jonathan Cook
An Education Witchhunt

Linn Washington
Dispatch From Soweto

Dr. Susan Block
Bonobo Handshakes: Ape Sex, Chimp War, Human Ignorance and Some Hope

Jean Casella /
James Ridgeway

Supermax Takes a Hit

Dave Welsh
After 75 Years, Is It Time to Revive the WPA?

Bouthaina Shaaban
The Road to South America

Website of the Day
Chez Sludge: How the Sewage Industry Bedded Alice Waters

July 9 - 11, 2010

Alexander Cockburn
The Worst of Times, the Best of Times

Joanne Mariner
The Worst Supreme Court Decision of the Term

Mike Whitney
EU Banking System on the Brink

Rannie Amiri Business as Usual: Behind Turkey and Israel's Not-So-Secret Meeting

Ramzy Baroud
Cluster Bombs and Civilian Lives

Michael Hudson
Latvia's Third Option

Jeffrey St. Clair / Joshua Frank Beyond Gang Green

Joe Bageant
Waltzing at the Doomsday Ball

Jesse Strauss
Streets of Rage: Searching for Justice in Oakland

James Ridgeway
Congress and the Oil Spill: Hot Rhetoric, Hollow Reform

Charles Hirschkind
The Myth of Impasse

M. Shahid Alam
Israel: a Failing Colonial Project

Ralph Nader Summer Reading: 10 Books That Might Change America

Carl Finamore Runaway Recession: How Did It Happen, How Bad Will It Get?

David Ker Thomson
What Toronto Tells Us About Our Lust for Leaders

John Ross
Drug Cartels Win Mexico's Super Sunday Elections

Rev. William E. Alberts
The General and the Bomber

Julie Hilden
Elena Kagan and the 1st Amendment: Reasons for Concern

Jefferson Chase
Hard Facts About Israeli/Palestinian Peace Peace Possibilities

Dave Lindorff
Just Business

Christopher Brauchli
Blackwater's Nine Lives

Gregory Vickrey
For the Want of Three Votes: Why Did Anti-War Democrats Vote For War Funding?

David Macaray
The Beer Summit Revisited

Soha Al-Jurf
The Boundaries of Delusion

Missy Beattie
Something Quite Atrocious

Laura Flanders
Who Fights and Why: Winter Bone, War and the Economic Crisis

Clare Hanrahan
Confronting Rendition to Torture in North Carolina

Patrick Bond
FIFA Forbids Free Speech at World Cup Fan Fest

Billy Wharton
Another Detroit is Happening!

Shamus Cooke
Andy Stern Joins the Corporate Elite

Lee Sustar
Teachers' Unions at the Crossroads

Harvey Wasserman
Losing LeBron: Has Chief Wahoo Cursed Cleveland Again?

Farzana Versey
Kashmir's Inner Demons

Binoy Kampmark
Population Panic Down Under

Winslow Myers
Best Practices

Charles Larson
Parallel History

David Yearsley
World Cup Anthems

Poets' Basement
Three by Eric Chaet

Website of the Weekend
Gulf Spill News

 

July 8, 2010

Carl Ginsburg
Life in the Low to Mid-Teens

Paul Craig Roberts
Hillary Clinton's Latest Lies

Patrick Cockburn
The Chronic Failure of Israeli Leadership

Brian Cloughley
Pakistan and the Afghan Taliban

Sakura Saunders
Mining Through Roots

Jayne Lyn Stahl
Jump Starting the First Amendment

Eric Walberg
Wooing the West: US / Russian Relations

Chris Genovali /
Elizabeth Farries
Popping Grizzlies

Harry Browne
The Best Teams Got There and I Hope Catalunya Wins

Robert Bloom
A Presidential Tour Guide to Israel (Formerly Palestine)

Website of the Day
Mearsheimer: "No Accountability for Israel on Any Issue"

July 7, 2010

Anthony DiMaggio
Child Poverty: Forgotten Casualties of the Recession

Patrick Cockburn
No Woodshed for Netanyahu

Dean Baker
The Party of Unemployment

Gareth Porter / Ahmad Walid Fazly
"I Saw Them Taking the Bullets Out of the Body of My Daughter"

Nadia Hijab
Addressing the Settlements

Marjorie Cohn
Losing Afghanistan

William Blum
Some Thoughts on "Patriotism" Written on July 4th

Peter Gelderloos
Supporting the Prisoners of the G20 Police State

Carla Blank
When Kabuki is Not Kabuki

John Grant
Long Wars, Violence and Change in America

Website of the Day
Police State Canada

 

 

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Weekend Edition
July 30 - August 1, 2010

CounterPunch Diary

Do Disclosures of Atrocities Change Anything?

By ALEXANDER COCKBURN

The hope of the brave soldier who sent 92,000 secret U.S.  documents to Wikileaks was that their disclosure  would prompt public revulsion and increasing political pressure on Obama to seek with all speed a diplomatic conclusion to this war.  The documents he sent Wikileaks included  overwhelming documentary evidence – accepted by all as genuine, of:

* the methodical use of a death squad made up of US Special Forces, known as Task Force 373,

* willful, casual  slaughter of civilians by  Coalition personnel, with ensuing cover-ups,

*the utter failure of “counter-insurgency” and “nation building”,

*the venality and corruption of the Coalition’s Afghan allies,

*the complicity of Pakistan’s Intelligence Services with the Taliban,

Wikileaks’ founder, Julian Assange, skillfully arranged simultaneous publication of the secret material in the New York Times, the Guardian and Der Spiegel.

The story broke on the eve of a war-funding vote in the U.S. Congress. Thirty-six hours after the stories hit the news stands,  the U.S. House of Representatives last Tuesday evening voted  Aye to a bill already passed by the Senate that funds a $33 billion, 30,000-troop escalation in Afghanistan. The vote was 308 to 114. To be sure, more US Reps voted against escalation than a year ago when the Noes totted up to only 35. That’s a crumb of comfort, but the cruel truth is that in 24 hours  the White House and Pentagon, with the help of  licensed members of the Commentariat and papers like the Washington Post, had finessed the salvoes from Wikileaks.

“WikiLeaks disclosures unlikely to change course of Afghanistan war” was the Washington Post’s Tuesday morning headline. Beneath this headline the news story said the leaks had been discussed for only 90 seconds at a meeting of senior commanders in the Pentagon.  The story cited “senior officials” in the White House even brazenly claiming that that it was precisely his reading of  these same raw secret intelligence reports a year ago that prompted Obama “to pour more troops and money into a war effort that had not received sufficient attention or resources from the Bush administration.” (As in: “Get that death squad operating more efficiently” – an order consummated  by Obama’s appointment of General McChrystal as his Afghan commander, transferred from his previous job as top U.S. Death Squad general in charge of the Pentagon’s world-wide operations in this area.)

There’s some truth in the claim that long before Wikileaks released the 92,000 files the overall rottenness and futility of the Afghan war had been graphically reported in the press. Earlier this year, for example, reporting by Jerome Starkey of The Times of London blew apart the U.S. military’s cover-up story after Special Forces troops killed two pregnant Afghan women and a girl in a February, 2010, raid, in which two Afghan government officials were also killed.

It’s oversell to describe the Wikileaks package as a latterday Pentagon Papers. But it’s undersell to dismiss them as “old stories”, as disingenuous detractors have been doing. The Wikileaks files are a damning, vivid series of snapshots of a disastrous and criminal  enterprise. In these same files there is a compelling series of secret documents about the death squad operated by the US military known as Task Force 373. an undisclosed "black" unit of special forces,  which has been hunting  down targets for death or detention without trial. From Wikileaks we learn that  more than 2,000 senior figures from the Taliban and al-Qaida are held on a "kill or capture" list, known as Jpel, the joint prioritized effects list.

There are logs showing that Task Force 373 simply killed their targets  without attempting to capture. The logs reveal that TF 373 has also killed civilian men, women and children and even Afghan police officers who have strayed into its path.

One could watch Assange being interviewed on US news programs where he would raise the fact that the US military has been – is still – running a death squad along the model of the Phoenix Program. His  interviewers simply changed the subject. Liberal gate-keepers complained that the Wikileaks documents were raw files, unmediated by responsible imperial journalists such as themselves. This echoed the usual ritual whines from the Pentagon about the untimely disclosures of “sources and methods”. (I recommend to CounterPunchers Doug Valentine's pieces on this site -- try the one from August 11, 2003 -- on the fundamental objective of big assassination programslike Phoenix in instilling general social terror in the target population.)

The bitter truth is that wars are not often ended by disclosures of their horrors and futility in the press, with consequent public uproar.

Disclosures from the mid-1950s  that the French were torturing Algerians amid the war of independence were numerous.  Henri Alleg’s famous 1958 account of his torture, La Question,  sold 60,000 copies in a single day. Torture duly  became more pervasive, and the war more savage, under the supervision of a nominally Socialist French government.

After Ron Ridenhour and then Seymour Hersh broke the My Lai massacre in 1968 in Vietnam with over 500 men, women and babies methodically, beaten, sexually abused, tortured and then murdered by American GIs,  -- a tactless disclosure of “methods” -- there was public revulsion, then an escalation in slaughter. The war ran for another seven years.

It is true, as Noam Chomsky pointed out to me last week, when I asked him for positive examples, that popular protest in the wake of press disclosures  “impelled Congress to call off the direct US role in the grotesque bombing of rural Cambodia.  Similarly in the late 70s, under popular pressure Congress barred Carter, later Reagan, from direct participation in virtual genocide in the Guatemalan highlands, so the Pentagon had to evade legislation in devious ways and Reagan had to call in terrorist states, primarily Israel, to carry out the massacres.” 

Even though New York Times editors edited out the word “indiscriminate” from Thomas Friedman’s news report of Israel’s bombing of Beirut in 1982, tv news footage  from Lebanon  prompted President Reagan to  order Israeli prime minister Begin to stop, and he did.  (On one account, which I tend to believe,  the late Michael Deaver, was watching live footage of the bombing in his White House office and went into Reagan, saying "This is disgusting and you should stop it.")

It happened again when Peres's forces bombed the UN compound in Qana in 1996, causing much international outrage, and Clinton ordered it ended. There was a repeat once more in  2006, with another bombing of Qana that aroused a lot of international protest.  But as Chomsky concludes in his note to me, “I think one will find very few such examples, and almost none in the case of really major war crimes.”

So one can conclude pessimistically that exposure of war crimes, torture and so forth, often leads to  intensification of the atrocities, with government and influential newspapers and commentators  supervising a kind of hardening process. "Yes, this - murder, torture, wholesale slaughter of civilians - is indeed what it takes." Even though this pattern is long-standing, it often comes as a great surprise. A friend of mine was at a dinner with the CBS news producers, shortly before they broke the Abu Ghraib tortures. Almost everyone at the table thought that Bush might well be impeached.  

The important constituency here is liberals, who duly rise to the challenge of unpleasant disclosures of imperial crimes.  In the wake of scandals such as those revealed at Abu Ghraib, or in the Wikileaks files, they are particularly eager to proclaim that they “can take it” – i.e., endure convincing accounts of monstrous tortures, targeted assassinations by US forces, obliteration of wedding parties or entire villages, and emerge with ringing affirmations of the fundamental overall morality of the imperial enterprise. This was very common in the Vietnam war and repeated in subsequent imperial ventures such the sanctions and ensuing attack on Iraq, and now the war in Afghanistan. Of course in the case of Israel it’s an entire way of life for a handsome slice of America’s liberals.

What does end wars? One side is annihilated, the money runs out, the troops mutiny, the government falls, or fears it will. With the U.S. war in  Afghanistan none of these conditions has yet been met. The U.S. began the destruction of Afghanistan in 1979, when President Jimmy Carter and his National Security Advisor Zbigniev Brzezinksi started financing the mullahs and warlords in the largest and most expensive operation in the CIA’s history until that time.  Here we are, more than three decades later, half buried under a mountain  of horrifying news stories  about a destroyed land of desolate savagery and what did one hear on many news commentaries earlier this week? Indignant bleats often by liberals, about Wikileaks’ “irresponsibility” in releasing the documents; twitchy  questions such as that asked by The Nation’s Chris Hayes on the Rachel Maddow Show:  “I wonder ultimately to whom WikiLeaks ends up being accountable.”

The answer to that last question was given definitively in 1851 by Robert Lowe, editorial writer for the London Times.  He had been instructed by his editor to refute the claim of a government minister that if the press hoped to share the influence of statesmen, it “must also share in the responsibilities of statesmen.”

“The first duty of the press,” Lowe wrote, “is to obtain the earliest and most correct intelligence of the events of the time, and instantly, by disclosing them, to make them the common property of the nation… The Press lives by disclosures… For us, with whom publicity and truth are the air and light of existence, there can be no greater disgrace than to recoil from the frank and accurate disclosure of facts as they are. We are bound to tell the truth as we find it, without fear of consequences – to lend no convenient shelter to acts of injustice and oppression, but to consign them at once to the judgment of the world.”

How the Gulf of Mexico Was Sold

In our latest newsletter,  we lay out the full story of the collusion between BP and the Obama Administration. This is a major investigation by Jeffrey St. Clair, with details of the revolving door relationship between BP and the Obama Administration that shatter Obama’s claims of transparency. PLUS Frank Bardacke reports from Watsonville on the real border-crossing economy. How much does it cost to be driven past a corrupt border patrol agent at an official port of entry to the U.S. from Mexico?  Bardacke describes  the real border-crossing economy.

PLUS JoAnn Wypijewski, Daniel Wolff and myself,  remembering Ben Sonnenberg.

I urge you to  subscribe now!

Alexander Cockburn can be reached at alexandercockburn@asis.com.

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