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Report From the Afghan Front
It's Obama's War and It's Going Very Badly

Exclusively for CounterPunch subcribers, Patrick Cockburn files a special report from Kabul: the Taliban's tightening grip on most of the country; plumetting US popularity in a bankrupt country rotted by corruption. For fifty years, Seymour Melman waged intellectual war on Pentagon capitalism, making the case for peaceful conversion. David Price brings to light decades of FBI secret surveillance. Senator Jim Webb is launching the first determined bid in forty years to overhaul the US criminal justice system at whose call is the American gulag. Alexander Cockburn reports on the prospects for his success. Get your new edition today by subscribing online or calling 1-800-840-3683 Contributions to CounterPunch are tax-deductible. Click here to make a donation. If you find our site useful please: Subscribe Now! CounterPunch books and gear make great presents.

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Today's Stories

June 17, 2009

Carl Boggs
Torture: an American Legacy

Winslow T. Wheeler
How Obama Will Outspend Reagan on Defense

Liaquat Ali Khan
Obama's Gift to Pakistan: a Civil War

Binoy Kampmark
Gordon Brown's War Inquiry

Karim Makdisi
The Lebanese Elections: a Box Office Success?

June 16, 2009

Patrick Cockburn
Iraq's Looming Peril: a Plague of Snakes

John Ross
Undermining Mexico

Afshin Rattansi
Guarding the Revolution

Marc Levy
How I Nearly Won the War

Paul Craig Roberts
Are You Ready for War with a Demonized Iran?

Behzad Yaghmaian
Iranian Youth Make History

Brian M. Downing
Democracy in Iran

Merle Lefkoff
Israel's Angels in America

David Macaray
Charles Manson and Me

Robert Jensen
Finding a Stubborn Hope to Live in a Dead Culture

David Swanson
An Exit Strategy That Keeps Wars Going

Website of the Day
Rachel Corrie Soccer Tournament Fundraiser

June 15, 2009

Michael Hudson
The Ending of America's Financial-Military Empire

Reza Fiyouzat
The Iranian Elections: Sure They Stole It...Up Front and Honestly

Patrick Cockburn
A Whole New Ballgame in Iraq

James Ridgeway
Did Composite Parts Bring Down Air France Flight 447?

Marjorie Cohn
Agent Orange Continues to Poison Vietnam

Rannie Amiri
Iran and the End of the "Obama Effect" Myth

Dave Lindorff
How Obama is Blowing the Chance for Real Health Care Reform

Ron Jacobs
The Iranian Elections and the Hysterical Media

Leonard Schwartz
The Angel of History and the Ghetto of Gaza

Martha Rosenberg
Start Your Engines, Drug Reps!

Website of the Day
Single-Payer v. Public Option

June 12-14, 2009

Alexander Cockburn
Who Needs Yesterday's Papers?

Gareth Porter
The CIA's Drone Wars

Mike Whitney
Bernanke's Next Parlor Trick

Mark Ames
Elmer Fudd Nation

Esam Al-Amin
What Really Happened in the Lebanese Elections?

Franklin Lamb
Carter in Lebanon

Patrick Cockburn
Prisoner Swap in Iraq

Andy Worthington
The Long Ordeal of Mohammed El-Gharani

Heather Gray
A New Perspective on the Confederacy: Southern Greed During the Civil War

Felice Pace
Why NPR Refuses to Report on the Single Payer Movement

Ron Jacobs
Flashback to the End of a War That Really Did End

George Wuerthner
Burning Questions: Why the National Fire Plan is a Trojan Horse for Logging

Jeffrey Buchanan /
Trinh Le
Biloxi Trailer Blues

David Ker Thomson
Americana

Renaud Lambert
Brazil: More Dependent Than Ever

Kevin Zeese
Congress and the Health Business Lobby

David Macaray
SAG Vote: A Lesson in Solidarity ... Not

Evelyn Pringle
FDA Throws Lifeline to Antipsychotic Pushers

Chris Genovali
Blood Sport Auction: Why eBay Should Stop Selling Guided Hunts for Bears, Wolves and Cougar

David Michael Green
The Rhetorical President

Brian J. Foley
Our Solar System is Not a Suicide Pact!

Charles R. Larson
No Safe Return

Kim Nicolini
Foreclosure is Hell: Sam Raimi's Frightfest

David Yearsley
Bach on Torture: Mr. Cheney, They're Playing Your Song

Lorenzo Wolff
Intent to Discord

Poets' Basement
Chris Jordan

Website of the Weekend
The Red Room

 

June 11, 2009

Kathy Kelly /
Dan Pearson
Down and Out in Shah Mansoor: With the Swat Refugees

James Bovard
The Latest Torture Cover-Up Scam

Tristan de Bourbon
The Toy Makers of Chenghai: the Financial Crisis Seen From China

Dave Lindorff
The Wheels are Coming Off the Recovery Program

Kevin Zeese
The Case for Disbarment of the Torture Lawyers

Ralph Nader
The Craft of Sam Maloof: a Visionary Woodworker

Harvey Wasserman
The GOP's Trillion Dollar Reactor Plan Goes Radioactive

Nicole Colson
The Anti-Abortion Movement's Climate of Violence

Mark Weisbrot
Showdown Over the IMF

Dan Bacher
Big Water's Big Lie Unravels

Website of the Day
Top 10 Most Absurd TIME Covers

June 10, 2009

Ismael Hossein-Zadeh
Obama's Doublespeak on Iran

Jennifer Van Bergen / Douglas Valentine
The Dangerous World of Indefinite Detentions: From Vietnam to Abu Ghraib

Kathy Kelly
Visitors and Hosts in Pakistan

Paul Craig Roberts
Fear Rules

Rev. William E. Alberts
First the Torture of Truth ...

Peter Lee
Obama and North Korea: a Warm-Up in the Offing?

Carol Miller
Why We Need a Holistic, Cradle-to-the-Grave National Health Care System

Emily Ratner
Dreams of Flight in Gaza

Robert Weissman
The IMF's Accountability Moment

Dave Lindorff
The Sutra of the Crushed Volvo

Website of the Day
Starving in Gitmo

June 9, 2009

Winslow T. Wheeler
Back From the Dead: Pentagon Pork!

Mike Whitney
Is Hyper-Inflation Around the Corner?

Stan Cox
Biofuel's Drug Problem

Sibel Edmonds
The Battle Against the State Secrets Privilege

Jonathan Cook
Where the Victim is the Guilty Party

David Macaray
A Bad Time for Unions

Robert Jensen
In South Africa, Apartheid is Dead, But White Supremacy Lingers On

Nadia Hijab
The Obama Difference

Mark Weisbrot
Vulture Funds Descend on Argentina

Website of the Day
Waging Non-Violence

June 8, 2009

John Ross
Mexico: Politics as Drugs / Drugs as Politics

Paul Wright
Deconstructing Gus: How a Former Prisoner Took On and Took Down Corrections Corporation of America's Top Lawyer (and Cheney Pal)

Paul Craig Roberts
Long-Term Economic Memory Loss

Franklin C. Spinney
"Natural Growth:" Israel's Demographic Hogwash

Franklin Lamb
Lebanon's Elections: Return to the Status Quo

Uri Avnery
The Tone and the Music

Jonathan Cook
Israeli Loyalty Oaths

Eric Toussaint
/ Damien Millet

The Partisans of Capitalism Have Lost All Credibility

Jim Goodman
The Dairy Oligarchy

Norman Solomon
Words and War

Reza Fiyouzat
When Accusations Fly: the Spectacle of the Iranian Elections

Website of the Day
Latino Jobless Rate Soars

June 5 -7, 200

Alexander Cockburn
High Words, Low Truths

George Galloway
Our Convoy to Gaza

Paul Craig Roberts
Obama in Cairo

Jennifer Loewenstein
How Much Really Separates Obama and Netanyahu?

Franklin Lamb
Watching Obama's Speech in Lebanon

Mike Whitney
The Biggest Rip Off Ever?

Andy Worthington
Death at Guantánamo

Missy Comley Beattie
Peace Be Upon You?

Farzana Versey
Walk Like an Egyptian: the Oprahfication of Obama

Stanley Heller
Obama's Non-Starter

John V. Whitbeck
Nothing Comes From Nothing

Robert Weissman
GM: the Path Not Taken

Lee Sustar
The Fall of GM: Why Workers Will Pay the Price

Dave Lindorff
What a State-Run GM Could Do

William Blum
The Great, International, Truly Demonic Iran Threat

Ernest Callenbach /
Harvey Wasserman

A Green-Powered Trip Through Ecotopia

Greg Moses
By George! Austin Leads the National Recovery

Ron Jacobs
The Meaning of Yasser Arafat

David Yearsley
Art Set in Concrete:
the Desolate Urban Landscape of High Culture

Tim Stelloh
Pot Home Invasions: Bud and Blow Torches

Belén Fernández
The Joksters: Obama and Thomas Friedman

David Ker Thomson
The Academics

Karyn Strickler
Clean Coal: a Dirty Joke

Christopher Brauchli
Judicial Amnesia and the Federalist Society

Charles R. Larson
Leaving Tangier: Exile and Exploitation

Kim Nicolini
"Hunger:" Art With a Punch

Lorenzo Wolff
Good Head (Or Why the End of Hand-Crafted Music Isn't (Necessarily) the End of Music)

Poets' Basement
Jenkins, Orloski and Willson

Website of the Weekend
Tankman

June 4, 2009

Arno J. Mayer
The Future of Israel and the Decline of the American Empire

Mike Whitney
Bond Market Blowout

Gareth Porter
Report Ties Dubious Iran Nuke Documents to Israel

Ayesha Ijaz Khan
Clearing Misconceptions on Pakistan's War in Swat

Mouin Rabbani
Paradigmatic Progress?

Jordan Flaherty
Life in Gaza

Adam Turl
Is Card Check Dead?

Nikolas Kozloff
Iran's Elections: the Latin America Factor

Yifat Susskind
Obama's Double Standard

Website of the Day
Pink Floyd's Roger Waters Slams Israel

June 3, 2009

Paul Craig Roberts
As the Dollar Falls Off the Cliff...

Kathy Kelly
A Weaver's Welcome to Pakistan

Alan Farago
Bailing Out the Land Speculators

Franklin Lamb
Israeli Spies and Fake IDs

Bill Hatch
Why Congressman Cardoza Stiffed Michelle Obama

Nadia Hijab
A Stifling Embrace

Dean Baker
Reporters With Pom-Poms: Cheerleading the Recovery

Binoy Kampmark
Whither GM?

Manuel Garcia, Jr.
What Happened to Air France Flight 477?

Remi Kanazi
Oslo Redux?

Behzad Yaghmaian
The End of Idealism in China?

Website of the Day
A Time Comes: the Story of the KingsNorth Six

June 2, 2009

Uri Avnery
Racists for Democracy

Robert Weissman
Bankrupt Thinking

Conn Hallinan
Shadow Wars

Gideon Spiro
Obama and Israel's Nuclear Arsenal

Roger Burbach
US-Cuba Policy: "Still Stuck in the Past"

Dylan Quigley
My Experience with Dr. Tiller

Dave Lindorff
The American Taliban Claim Another Victim

Ray McGovern
Navy Vet Honored, Foiled Israeli Attack

Belén Fernández
Israel's Newfound Concern for UNIFIL

Martha Rosenberg
Give It Up, Wyeth

Willie L. Pelote, Sr.
GOP: California's for the Rich (Poor People Should Move)

Website of the Day
You Bet Your Health

June 1, 2009

Pam Martens
Wall Street Braces for New Cops on the Beat

Yitzhak Laor
Washington's Mirror

Mark Weisbrot
More Stimulus, Not Deficit Reduction

Ramzy Baroud
Netanyahu's New Quest

Saul Landau
Dancing the Afghan Jig

Eugenia Tsao
Smug Toronto Seethes as Tamils "Go Too Far"

Afshin Rattansi
Women in Darfur: "We Saw No Evidence of Genocide"

Debra Sweet
The Murder of Dr. Tiller

Abdul Malik Mujahid
Obama's Trip Egypt and American Muslims

Bill Quigley
Haiti's Revolutionary Priest Gerard Jean-Juste: Presente!

John Wright
The Tragedy of Susan Boyle

Website of the Day
Young Neo Con Anthem

May 29-31, 2009

Alexander Cockburn
Sotomayor and the Last of the WASPs

Patrick Cockburn
Iraq: The Mother of All Corruption Scandals

Vijay Prashad
Reeling Republicans

Gary Leupp
The Destabilization of Pakistan

Ray McGovern
The Impossible Rehab of Colin Powell

Rannie Amiri
Spies, Lies and Mr. Lebanon's Demise

Bill Hatch
The Mechanic's Tale: a Short Chapter in the History of Foreclosures

Chellis Glendinning, Stephanie Mills and Kirkpatrick Sale
Three Luddites Talking ... on a Computer!

Phyllis Pollack
Dosed, But Not Spiked: an Interview with Grace Slick

David Yearsley
Eros and Susan Boyle; Fakery and Simon Cowell

Jean-Christophe Servant
A River of Acid: Mined Out in Zambia

Dave Lindorff
Sotomayor's Problem Isn't That She's Too Latina

James McEnteer
Straw Dogs: the Media and Sonia Sotomayor

Missy Beattie
A Place Called Despair

James C. Faris
On Evolution: a Critique of Darwinism

David Macaray
When Workers' Rights Go Unenforced

Harvey Wasserman
The Catastrophic Economics of Nuclear Power

Adam Federman
Drilling the Marcellus Shale Through the Halliburton Loophole

David Ker Thomson
Turtle Island: Adventures in Recycling

Mark Seth Lender
Great Egrets Return

Stephen Martin
Big Trouble in Little Britain

Joseph Nevins
Sin Nombre is Only Part of the Border Story

Sophia Mihic
Star Trek and the Continuing Mission of American Imperialism

Lorenzo Wolff
Dylan Kelehan Gets What He Needs

Poets' Basement
Fleming, Shields and Greer

Website of the Weekend
Petition: Grant Parole to Leonard Peltier

May 28, 2009

Joan Roelofs
The Philanthropies and the Economic Crisis

Paul Craig Roberts
Torture and the American Conscience

Ralph Nader
Corporate Frankensteins

Mouin Rabbani
The Dangers of False Optimism in the Middle East

Joe Bageant
Plain Truths From Appalachia: a Redneck View of Obamarama

James McEnteer
America Held Hostage

Dedrick Muhammad
Obama and the Harsh Racial Reality

Richard Morse
On Speaking Out in Haiti

David Macaray
Have We Turned Into Sheep?

Harvey Wasserman
The 8 Green Steps to Solartopia

Website of the Day
Col. Peters: Just Kill the Gitmo Detainees

May 27, 2009

Joanne Mariner
Military Commissions, Round Three

Paul Craig Roberts
Doublespeak on North Korea

Walden Bello
Can China Save the World From Depression?

Dave Lindorff
Recidivism and Guantánamo

Brian M. Downing
Along the Durand Line

Carlos Villarreal
Separate But Equal Just Fine in California?

Nadia Hijab
Israel's Next Move: Armageddon Now?

Adam Federman
The PCBs of the Hudson River

Laray Polk
RadWaste and Texas' Future

Isabella Kenfield
The Fall of a Brazilian Financier

David Michael Green
Overcoming the Poverty of Ambition

Website of the Day
The Case Against Shell

May 26, 2009

Manuel Garcia, Jr.
Fearful Pride: North Korea's Second Nuclear Test

Mike Whitney
The Next Leg Down: When Deflation Becomes Entrenched

Sharon Smith
Obama and Abortion Rights: What We Learned at Notre Dame

Marjorie Cohn
The Gitmo Appeasment Plan: Obama Buckles on the Constitution

Dean Baker
Waterboard the Fed

Deepankar Basu
Was the Indian Election a Debacle for the Left? If So, Why?

Fred Gardner
The Vindication of Sgt. Northcutt

Jordan Flaherty
New Orleans for Sale

Josh Ruebner
Rethinking the Costs of Peace

Brian Cloughley
The Man Who Murdered Count Foulke Bernadotte

Website of the Day
The Montana Town That Wants to Become the New Gitmo

May 25, 2009

Diane Christian
Looking at Torture

John Ross
Mexico's Shock Doctrine

Kenneth Hartman
The Trouble With Prison

Uri Avnery
Netanyahu Goes to Washington

Fred Gardner
"War on Pot" Overrides "Support Our Troops": the Punishment of Sgt. Northcutt

Cindy Sheehan
Day of the Dead

Sen. Russell Feingold
Prolonged Detention and the Rule of Law: a Letter to Barack Obama

Sibel Edmonds
Two Sides of the Same Coin: From State Secrets to War to Wiretaps

Franklin Lamb
Der Spiegel Tries Again

Dave Lindorff
Memorial Day in the Land of the Weak and Wussy

Daniel Wolff
Learning to Read in the Pacific Northwest

Website of the Day
Decoration Day

May 22-24, 2009

Alexander Cockburn
How Long Does It Take?

Michael Teitelman
Obama, Torture and John Walker Lindh

Mike Whitney
Credit Default Swaps: the Poison in the System

Ray McGovern
Cheney Breaks the Taboo: Support for Israel Feeds Terrorism

Sonia Cardenas /
Andrew Flibbert
Why We Love to Hate Pirates

Clive Hamilton
Biblical Prophesy and the Iraq War: Bush, God, Iraq and Gog

Conn Hallinan
Swine Flu Fallout

Fred Gardner
Sgt. Northcutt's Homecoming

Carlo Cristofori
The Latest AfPak War

Dean Baker
A Friendly Financial Intervention

Rannie Amiri
King Abdullah's 57-State Solution

Andy Worthington
A Message to Obama: No Military Commissions; No Preventive Detentions

David Macaray
Democrats Betray Labor: Card Check is Pronouced Dead

Nadia Hijab
What Kind of State?

Franklin Lamb
How Not to Win Votes for Team USA

Ted Newcomen
The Forgotten Casualties

David Ker Thomson
Joy (Or How Hope, the Thing With Feathers, Gets Plucked)

David Rosen
Porn Wars

Mark Weisbrot
Climate Change and Intellectual Property Rights?

Robert Fantina
Gitmo, Democrats and Business as Usual

Heather Gray
Some Positive Directions in Public Health?

Farzana Versey
The Myth of Manmohan Singh

Chris Genovali
A Paler Shade of Green

Ron Jacobs
His Terrible Swift Sword: the Legacy of John Brown

Jay Diamond
Why the Left Should Cheer Hannity and Limbaugh

Dr. Susan Block
The Binds That Bond

Ben Sonnenberg
"Ballast": An Endlessness of Almost Ending

David Yearsley
Handel's Ghost ... Again

Lorenzo Wolff
My Problem with Led Zeppelin

Poets' Basement
Corseri and Bohm

Website of the Weekend
Bob Graham's CIA Notebooks

May 21, 2009

Jeffrey St. Clair /
Joshua Frank
The Politics of Bait-and-Switch: Obama and the Environment

Paul Craig Roberts
Morphing Dick Cheney

Chris Floyd
In Defense of George W. Bush

Gerald Paoli
Inside Iraqi Kurdistan: Life and Death in the Qandil Mountains

Zach Mason
Something's Gotta Give: Obama and the Hustler

Uri Avnery
A Quarrel on the Titanic

Andy Worthington
Out of Guantánamo

Niranjan Ramakrishnan
India: Two Funerals and a Wedding

Norman Solomon
The Afghanistan Escalation

Dave Lindorff
A Corporate Crime Wave of Labor Law Violations

Website of the Day
Swine Flu: The Panic That Wasn't

May 20, 2009

Michael Hudson
The Toll Booth Economy

Gary Leupp
Courting Hekmatyar: Obama and the Warlord

Michael D. Yates
Work is Hell

Jonathan Cook
Netanyahu Adviser Steps Out of the Shadows

Peter Lee
The World Doesn't Have a Pakistan Nukes Problem ... It Has a David Albright Problem

Binoy Kampmark
The End of the Tamil Tigers?

Peter Zinn
Eulogizing Lawyers

William Loren Katz
Tortured Reasoning; Tortured Results

Gary Lapon
Why Women Need Single Payer

Trudy Bond
Torture, Shrinks and a Groundhog's Day Moment

Website of the Day
Meet the Climate Change Lobby

May 19, 2009

Kristoffer Rehder
Check Point Iraq: a Soldier's Tale

Mike Whitney
The Real Lesson of the Financial Crisis

Ray McGovern
How Colin Powell Got Duped by the CIA

Vijay Prashad
The Indian Elections: a Game Changer?

Mirjam Hadar Meerschwam
Intimidation and Interrogation in Tel Aviv

Mustafa Barghouthi
Is Obama Up to the Challenge of Dealing with Netanyahu?

Andy Worthington
Gitmo: A Prison Built on Lies

Binoy Kampmark
Britain's Speaker Crisis

John Walsh
John Kerry vs. Single-Payer

David Macaray
Alcohol as Metaphor: Zero Tolerance in the Workplace

Website of the Day
So You Think That Veggie Burger is Organic...

May 18, 2009

Dave Lindorff
The US is Using White Phosporous in Afghanistan

Abdul Malik Mujahid
Thirty Years of Tragedy in Afghanistan

Jonathan Cook
How Many Secret Prisons Does Israel Have?

Ben Rosenfeld
Police Violence: How Many Kicks to the Head Does It Take?

Patrick Cockburn
These Killings Will Only Strengthen the Taliban

Ralph Nader
They Want It All: New Tricks From the Old Energy Lobby

Stephen Soldz
Psychologist Bryce Lefever Clarifies Defense of Torture

Eugenia Tsao
On the Devaluation of Labor

Walter Brasch
Cheney's Magical Mystery Media Tour

Roberto Rodriguez
War and Torture

Charlotte Laws
Politics and American Idol

Website of the Day
Disbar the Torture Lawyers

May 15-17, 2009

Alexander Cockburn
King of the Hate Business

Jeffrey St. Clair
The Case of the Missing H-Bomb

David Rosen
Sexual Torture: What is Acknowledged and What Remains Unknown

Mike Whitney
From My Lai to Bala Baluk: Obama Picks Up Where Bush Left Off

Bruce Page
A Real History of Rupert Murdoch

Jeremy Scahill
The Black Shirts of Guantánamo

Fred Gardner
Tortured Reasoning: Judge Bybee Rules Against Brian Epis

Tom Barry
Fighting the Drug War at Homeland Security

Mats Svensson
On the Beach in Tel Aviv

Ramzy Baroud
The Drones Are Coming

Mark Engler
Science Fiction From Below

Mark Weisbrot
Stealth Move by IMF to Get $100 Billion Without Congressional Debate

Farzana Versey
Of Scapegoats and Separatists

Ron Jacobs
It's Up to You to Save Troy Davis

Hannah Wolfe
What to Tell the Children

Cal Winslow
Fresno, the New Ground Zero in the Battle Between the SEIU and NUHW

David Macaray
Labor Needs a Southern Strategy

Christopher Brauchli
Involuntary Baptism

Mark Seth Lender
The Lion Tamer's Story

Robert Fantina
Lapel Pins, Arugula and Mustard

David Ker Thomson
Last Man Walking

Stephen Martin
Lipstick Nightmare for Spin Merchant

Charles R. Larson
Double Exile

Chase Madar
"Angels & Demons" and the Extraordinary Power of Imaginary Heretics

Kim Nicolini
Vaginas From Outer Space! Boldly Sitting Through Star Trek

David Yearsley
Handel's Ghost

Lorenzo Wolff
Killer Virtues

Poets' Basement
Gibbons, Jordan and Moser

Website of the Weekend
Catch F-22

May 14, 2009

Michael Hudson
Where Russia Went Wrong

Andy Worthington
The Poisoned Mosaic: Judge Condemns Guantánamo Evidence

Paul Craig Roberts
The Impotent President

Jonathan Cook
The Pope's Pilgrimage: Legitimizing Netanyahu?

Ray McGovern
See No Evil: Ugly Questions for General Myers

Lance Selfa
The Limits of Liberalism

David Green
The Deportation of Demjanjuk

Dave Lindorff
Obama Channels Cheney

Frida Berrigan
Nuclear Options

Sue Udry
The Bybee Question

Website of the Day
Our Bombs: Tracking US Air Strikes

May 13, 2009

Brian M. Downing
The Road Out of Iraq

Gareth Porter
Gen. McChrystal and Afghanistan

Robert Sandels
Obama and Latin America: No Light, All Tunnel

Ricardo Alarcón
Cuba: Measure of a Revolution

Eric Walberg
NATO in Georgia: Fun and Games

Dave Lindorff
The Sinking of GM: When Captains of Industry Don't Go Down with the Ship

Deepak Tripathi
A Culture of Abuse

William S. Lind
Back to the Balkans: Hillary and the Sleeping Dragon

Kevin Zeese
A Populist Health Care Rebellion

Franklin Lamb
Lebanon: From Perdition to Redemption?

Website of the Day
Beth McIntosh: The Wild Ride

May 12, 2009

Gary Leupp
The Bomb Iran Faction

Richard Neville
The AfPak Blues: Corpses of the Kids by the Truckload

Wajahat Ali
Obama Chooses a Reliable Dictatorship

Dean Baker
The Banker Boys Are Alright! Time to End the Bailouts

Franklin Lamb
What Palestinian Refugees Need From Lebanon's Elections

Norman Solomon
A Progressive Challenge to Jane Harman

Paul Craig Roberts
Beware the Hate Crimes Bill

Lisa M. Hamilton
Let's Grow a New Crop of Farmers

Bob Fitrakis /
Harvey Wasserman:
Why Isn't Obama Turning to Credit Unions?

David Macaray
Wading Through the Grassroots

Website of the Day
Electronic Police States

May 11, 2009

Andrea Peacock
No Justice for Libby

Michael Hudson
Gordon Brown Spills the Beans on the IMF

Patrick Cockburn
Who Killed 120 Civilians?

Ralph Nader
The Single-Payer Taboo

John Kelly
Pseudoscience and Wrongful Convictions in the War on Drugs

Saul Landau
Cuba's Biggest "Crime"

Dave Lindorff
Blaming the Dead Victims

David Michael Green
Get Obama

Anthony Papa
Gov. David Paterson Does the Right Thing

Paul Krassner
Jon Stewart and Truman, the War Criminal

Website of the Day
Generational Homelessness

 

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June 17, 2009

A Pattern of (Not Deviation From) Empire

Torture: an American Legacy

By CARL BOGGS

As Bush-era episodes of torture have became almost daily hand ringing fare for establishment politicians and the media, calls for national soul-searching and reform arrive with a predictable litany of myths and illusions.  Mainstream scrutiny peaked with the April release of incriminating “torture memos” issued by the Office of Legal Council spanning the years 2002 to 2005 – memos that involved clear violation of the Geneva and Torture Conventions.  The issue has touched a raw nerve in the political culture, with government and military leaders – echoed by media pundits – quick to parrot two comforting discourses: abuses were the product of a few wayward (low-level) military personnel, a violation of sacred U.S. practices and values including the “rule of law”.   The first myth necessarily disappeared from view after several reports (including one conducted by the U.S. Army) had shown culpability extending all the way to the summits of power.  But the fiction about torture being a radical departure from American traditions persists.

In a recent speech at UCLA, former NATO commander and 2004 presidential candidate General Wesley Clark denounced torture as an evil blight conflicting with the well-known American dedication to international rules and laws.  “Law is sacred to the American system”, pronounced Clark.  “A retreat from Geneva means nothing less than abandoning American values.”   In the aftermath of the 2004 Abu Ghraib revelations, President George W. Bush said that prisoner abuse was an embarrassing exception to time-honored national precedents, for “that’s not the way we do things in America” – a sentiment repeated by politicians and commentators across the ideological spectrum.  Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, speaking in December 2005, claimed: “With respect to detainees the United States government complies with its Constitution, its laws, and its treaty obligations.  Acts of physical or mental torture are expressly prohibited.  The United States government does not authorize or condone torture of detainees.  Torture, and conspiracy to commit torture, are crimes under U.S. law, wherever they may occur in the world.”  She described atrocities at Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib as sickening aberrations from the norm, thus unlikely to be repeated.    More recently, Rice denied altogether that the U.S. practiced torture in a heated exchange with Stanford University students.

In the midst of these platitudes, liberals, more troubled by the Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib events, have simply added their own myths.  Media figures like Rachel Maddow, Randi Rhodes, and Ron Reagan have denounced Bush-era crimes as counter to the American character: the torture of detainees is a uniquely wicked invention of Bush, Cheney, and the neocons.  A major problem, according to the liberals, is that harsh interrogation methods “never work” since they undermine intelligence-gathering, eliciting nothing but false information.  This contention only reveals a shallow understanding of how torture has historically “worked”.  Commenting on her April 22nd MSNBC show, Maddow roundly condemned torture carried out by the CIA and Pentagon, intoning “We have been doing things [torture] we have never done before in the United States.  We never did that stuff before.  How did that ever happen?”  Human-rights abuses, like the doctrine of preemptive war, were the brainchild of the Bush clique.  “It was the Republican Party that gave us torture as practiced by the U.S. government”, Maddow informed her April 27th audience, adding “either we have a Constitution or we don’t”.

It takes little investigation to see that such views have little basis in actual U.S. history.  Torture has always been a staple of U.S. military interventions, built into its very logic of imperial agendas.  A nation that has launched warfare dozens of times, repeatedly attacked civilian populations, destroyed entire societies, used weapons of mass destruction, and deployed massive armed force to crush popular movements around the world – killing millions and displacing tens of millions more in the process – could hardly be expected to shy away from smaller-scale criminality in its pursuit of Manifest Destiny.  Illegal detentions, denial of due process, kidnappings, assassinations, death-squad murders, and cruel interrogation techniques have long been just another valuable (if illegal) tool of imperial power.  U.S. exterminationist policies against Native Americans throughout the nineteenth century, involving widespread torture, served as a prelude to later barbarism in the Philippines, Mexico, the Pacific Theater in World War II, Korea, Vietnam, Central America, and the Middle East.  Decades of Indian Wars brought not only the Sand Creek, Washita, and Wounded Knee massacres but unspeakable acts of everyday brutality: beatings, scalpings, mutiliations, sexual assaults, kidnappings, prisoner mistreatment, and shootings, often along with larger-scale attacks on civilian encampments.   Captives were often summarily executed, including women, children, and elderly.  Dwellings were routinely burned to the ground, food stores destroyed, ponies and buffalo slaughtered by the thousands.  Dying Indians were frequently tortured, killed, and mutilated.  Such atrocities reached new heights when General George Armstrong Custer attacked a defenseless settlement of Cheyenne women and children at the Washita River in Oklahoma in 1868, a massacre solidifying Custer’s credentials as heroic Indian fighter.

At Sand Creek, Colorado in 1864 the carnage wrought by the fanatically pious Colonel John Chivington was especially savage.  Reflecting on Chivington’s God-ordained massacre, a lieutenant from the New Mexico Volunteers wrote: “Of from five to six hundred souls [killed] the majority of which were women and children . . . I did not see a body of a man, woman, or child but was scalped, and in many instances their bodies were mutilated in a most horrible manner – men, women, and children’s privates cut out.  I heard one man say that he had cut out a woman’s private parts and had them for exhibition on a stick.  I heard another man say he had cut the fingers of an Indian to get the rings on the hand . . .”   According to this and many similar reports, soldiers used knives to rip apart bodies, and none were spared.   Torture, butchery, mutilation – there seemed to be no limits to U.S. military barbarism on the frontier.  Those horrors were repeated time and again, culminating in the Wounded Knee massacre of 1890 where hundreds of defenseless women and children were slaughtered, many tortured before the last fatal assaults.

Slavery?  That was an institutionalized system of torture – indeed terrorism – from beginning to end.  The “war to end slavery”?  Well, the Civil War produced four years of unbelievable butchery and torture on both sides, both within and outside the many notorious prison camps maintained North and South.

As international law became refined since the early twentieth century, following the two Hague Conventions, prohibitions against torture and similar abuses were established and codified, but U.S. global behavior took no heed, persisting in its earlier criminal pattern.  By the 1890s U.S. imperialism and outlawry was expanding outward, shifting its targets to Latin America, Asia, and later the Middle East.  In World War II, the fabled “good war”, torture became routine practice in the Pacific Theater were the U.S. carried out a war of attrition against the Japanese culminating in months of saturation bombing raids and two nuclear horrors.  In what John Dower calls a “war without mercy” (on both sides) the Japanese were irredeemably evil, a monolithic race apart, so subhuman that the most extreme barbarism could be justified.  Racial stereotypes of savage Asian hordes permeated U.S. media both in the military and home front, sustaining a racially-charged milieu in which rules of engagement were thrown to the wind.  Aside from incendiary aerial bombardments of every Japanese city, repeated smaller atrocities were common: shooting of prisoners, torture, lifeboat strafings, attacks on hospitals, civilian abuse, wounded buried alive, mutilated corpses.   When such criminality became known to general military and political circles, it was fiercely defended, even celebrated in an atmosphere of vengeful racial hatred.

In the aftermath of World War II and Korea (laden with even more atrocities), the Vietnam War produced near-total collapse moral and social constraints as U.S. criminality behavior achieved new records.  Testimony of first-hand witnesses at the 1971 Winter Solider Hearings and elsewhere showed that rules of engagement applied only in military textbooks.  There were no limits to the barbarism.  Vietnamese running from combat, taking evasive action, or giving the “appearance” of combatants were regularly detained, kept captive, and more often than not tortured – when not immediately fired upon.  American troops rarely tried to distinguish civilians from combatants, a difficult task in any event under conditions of guerrilla insurgency.  The prevailing idea was that, in the midst of combat and “free-fire zones”, any Vietnamese encountered was a “gook” who, by definition, was the enemy.   The Vietnam brutality was never-ending – burning homes, mass killings, torture, rape, murder of wounded prisoners, beatings, destruction of animals and life-support systems, use of chemical weapons, all fueled by some combination of revenge, sadism, combat stress, intimidation, and in certain instances sexual pleasure.    Such practices were routinely tolerated or even sanctioned at the very top of the command structure.

In Vietnam ordinary troops, as well as military intelligence personnel, soon became well-versed in methods of harassment, intimidation, and torture as they detained, questioned, and punished North Vietnamese and Vietcong troops in the field.  Methods included throwing people out of helicopters, electric shock treatment, severe beatings, and mutilation.  Prisoners were often taken for “flying lessons” or “half a helicopter ride” as interrogators kept throwing people out until someone “cooperated”.  Other creative torture methods were employed to break down possible informants.  When a captive proved stubborn, according to one U.S. soldier, “the answer is invariable, you take a field telephone, wire it around a man’s testicles, you ring him up and he always answers.  It’s known as the Bell Telephone Hour.  You won’t find it in the curriculum.”   Torture could be randomly used, the assumption being that civilians were likely to be “VC supporters” or at least hostile to American troops.  Those captured were tortured not only to gain information but more often out of hatred, sadism, or sexual pleasure.  No U.S. military figure in Vietnam was likely to argue that torture somehow “didn’t work”. 

Rape became a medium of combining sex and violence.  According to one macabre account: “ . . . maybe four or five of us would go into a village and take a girl and bring her out to the jungle. .  . .  Explain to her to lie on the ground and don’t scream, otherwise she’ll be killed immediately, and however many guys there are – well, they all do what they want.  And if the guys are in a good mood, they let her go.  If not they kill her.”   Sexual assault was often followed by torture. According to widespread testimony and reports, some women were burned to death after gasoline was poured over their body and troops stood around and sadistically watched.   Routine sexual encounters between GIs and Vietnamese women frequently grew violent, leading to rapes, beatings, and murder.

None of this could be dismissed as the isolated or aberrant behavior of a few undisciplined soldiers, nor was it related manly to intelligence operations.  Recycling racist imagery that gave wars against Native Americans, Japanese, and Koreans added savagery, military leaders called the Vietnamese gooks, thugs, and vermin, with General William Westmoreland preferring the label “worthless termites” – the same “termites”, presumably, that were to be given the blessings of freedom and democracy.  Extreme racist attitudes permeated the military culture from top to bottom, as would later be the case in Iraq.    According to one participant in the field, “the voices of authority in the company – the platoon sergeants and officers – acknowledged that [executing prisoners] was a proper way to behave.      Who were the grunts to disagree with it?  We supported it . . .”

By late 1960s the CIA Phoenix Program had been responsible for the illegal detention and torture of untold thousands of captives.  Under this program U.S. operatives assassinated an estimated 21,000 Vietnamese officials in the South.  As the war expanded, Navy SEALs and other units mounted raids to destroy homes, capture and torture people, and conduct summary executions at random. Many hundreds of thousands (mostly civilians) were rounded up, detained, and subjected to unspeakable brutality – all condoned or at least ignored all the way to the top of the military and government leadership.   

The U.S. criminal record in Central America, while perhaps less egregious than that in Asia, spans a lengthier historical period during which the CIA, Pentagon, and U.S. proxy groups detained, tortured, and killed tens of thousands of people in Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, Panama, and Nicaragua.  Such atrocities flowed from official policies at a time when U.S.-supported corporate and oligarchical interests were being challenged or overturned by popular forces.  As Jennifer Harbury shows in her well-researched study of torture across Central America, Truth, Torture, and the American Way: “A review of the materials leads relentlessly to just one conclusion: that the CIA and related U.S. intelligence agencies have since their inception engaged in the widespread practice of torture, either directly or through well-paid proxies.”   Counterinsurgency campaigns gave rise to regular kidnappings, detentions, torture, and executions.  The U.S., often through its infamous School of the Americas and other domestic military bases, provided finances, training, logistics, and weapons – the work of mostly secret projects organized by the CIA.   In Guatemala, El Salvador, and Nicaragua local atrocities reach their peak during the 1980s as the linkage between the U.S. and Central American agencies of death and destruction intensified, leading to a wave of abductions, torture, and murder.   

As in Vietnam, torture and related atrocities in Central America were rarely the outgrowth of excesses, mistakes, or the work of a few renegade troops; nor were they usually motivated by the quest for reliable intelligence.  They were rooted in the logic of control and repression. What was understood as necessary “dirty work” took years to plan and refine, much of it carried over from the Vietnam experience.  Such methods as solitary confinement, beatings, electric shocks, stress positions, and sexual humiliation – to be replicated later at Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib – had been de rigeur in Vietnam.  One difference in Central America was that the U.S. chose to work through local military units and death squads, that is by proxy, so that atrocities could never be traced by the the guilty Washington operatives.  Still, as Harbury points out, there were few doubts in the field as to who was calling the shots: “The Yankees in the torture cells were not working for local military officials at all.  To the contrary, they were very much in charge, and had clear authority over the torturers themselves.  The Americans were not taking orders, they were giving them.  At times they were even supervising the entire torture session.”    

The postwar years witnessed a wide U.S. legacy of illegal detentions, torture, assassination, and other mayhem as tried-and-proven instruments of imperial power, from Latin American to Indonesia, Iran, Central Asia, and the Balkans as well as Korea and Vietnam – not only through the CIA but Special Forces units, Navy SEALs, Delta Force operatives, and other military actions.  “Harsh interrogation methods” were always just one facet of this worldwide terror apparatus. 

The events at Abu Ghraib were thus simply one more episode in the overall trajectory of U.S. imperialism, subordinate to a brutal military occupation bringing endless horrors to the Iraqi population.  Prison abuse was built into the general mosaic of domination, set up in Washington and pursued with cruel rationality in the field where U.S. troops, as in Vietnam, were constantly surrounded by “enemies” or “terrorists”.  Not only detention centers but homes, checkpoints, urban neighborhoods, and roadways served as arenas of armed combat, leading to recurrent arrests, beatings, home invasions, shootings, bombings, and massacres (as at Hadditha in 2006).  Reports of U.S. military officers ordering beatings of Iraqis were common from the 2003 invasion onward.  Troops were ordered to “crank up the violence level” in the struggle to quell insurgency – violence that included assaults, torture, and random killings, both in and out of the many prisons – little of it designed to secure “intelligence”.  Following a procedure called “dead-checking”, it was a recurring practice for American troops to murder wounded Iraqis according to the maxim “if somebody is worth shooting once, they’re worth shooting twice.”

One instigator of the Abu Ghraib torture, Pfc. Lynndie England, said in an interview that such practices were essentially business-as-usual – just troops behaving “normally” in a combat environment filled with stress,anger, and fear.  No moral scruples or rules of engagement entered the picture. Others described the events as a matter of bored soldiers simply passing time, having fun.  That so many prisoners were stripped naked, sexually intimidated or violated, beaten, hooded, shackled, handcuffed, and forced into stress positions – not to mention sleep and food deprived – provoked little if any outrage at the scene.

In the film Ghosts of Abu Ghraib, one convicted soldier, Specialist Sabrine Harman, spoke at length about the atrocities as if she were describing a movie or tennis match: it was all in a day’s work, nothing special.  Photographed laughing next to an Iraqi corpse, she was unapologetic, explaining that she always liked to smile for photos.  What emerges from Abu Ghraib and other U.S. gulags like Guantanamo and Baghram Air Base in Afghanistan is a bleak and frightening picture of sadistic military behavior devoid of moral, legal, or social restraints, with virtually nothing to do with procuring information.  (The CIA and military did try to force some prisoners to supply “information”, under duress, that would justify the fraudulent basis of U.S. intervention in Iraq – a miserable failure – but that is another tale.  Accused terrorist Khalid Shaikh Mohammed recently admitted that he had lied to the CIA after being harshly treated.)   Still, recent atrocities at Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib – waterboarding, sleep and food deprivation, sensory abuses – hardly compare to the routine barbarism practiced in Vietnam and earlier U.S. wars.

History shows that present-day U.S. torture and other similar outlawry has deep roots in the past, the byproduct of an ever-expanding imperial apparatus of control and repression.   In hundreds of pages of long-classified but recently-disclosed files, CIA documents alone describe an immense variety of illegal activities: secret holding cells around the world, unlawful detentions without due process, vast surveillance, plots to assassinate foreign leaders, severe interrogation methods.  Such outrages are outgrowth of established patterns rather than deviations from (romanticized) historical norms, integral to the far greater savagery of aggressive warfare.  U.S. militarism has routinely embraced criminal behavior sanctioned, more often than not, at the highest levels of Washington officialdom.  The CIA torture networks in place across several decades, but only recently a focus of mainstream political concern, represents just one cornerstone of U.S. imperial efforts to maximize its global surveillance, intelligence, and control potential. 

Carl Boggs is the author of The Hollywood War Machine (Paradigm) just and Imperial Delusions: American Militarism and Endless War, which appeared last year. He can be reached at: cboggs@nu.edu  

 

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