Today's Stories

Weekend Edition
November 20-22, 2009

Alexander Cockburn
CounterPunch Diary
It's Show Trial Time!

Gareth Porter
New Light on the Qom Facility

Mike Whitney
The Great Stimulus Debate of '09: Crybabies need not apply

Fred Gardner
Mammography
Pushes Back

James J. Brittain
It's Really a War on the Poor
A War on Coca Nobody Believes

Jonathan Cook
Rabbi Followers 'Terror Cell in Parliament'

Alan Farago
Bulletin from the Dark Side: Florida's Republican Ultras

David Macaray
A Hindu Version of the UAW
Labor Strife in India

Binoy Kampmark
The Israeli Exception: Gilo and East Jerusalem

Ben Sonnenberg
Ashes and Diamonds
Retirement Norwegian Style

Ron Jacobs
Judge Roy Bean Takes Manhattan

David Yearsley
200,000 Testicles Offered Up to the Gods of Song

Brenda Norrell
A Border Runs Through Them:
The Struggles of the Tohono O'odham

Ron Ridenour
The Tamils and Equal Rights of Self Determination

November 19, 2009

Christopher Ketcham
The Dumbest Newspapers at the Center of the World

Shamus Cooke
A Fraudulent Jobs Summit

John V. Walsh
Impotent in China

Saul Landau
Dissidents Make Noise--Oops, News

Ralph Nader
Exiting Afghanistan

Nikolas Kozloff
Blackout in Brazil

Fred Gardner
Reputable MDs Buy NorCal Health Care

Charles R. Larson
Voices of the Silenced

John A. Murphy
Nader v. Dodd

Jayne Lyn Stahl
Obama's Gray World

November 18, 2009

Uri Avnery
A Religious Scoundrel

John Ross
Hot Oil!

Conn Hallinan
Strategic Towns: Why Gen. McChrystal's Plan Will Fail

Mike Whitney
Obama's China Junket

Ray McGovern
The Bogus Success of the Surge

Nelson P. Valdés
Cyber Cuba: Internet, Broadband and Foreign Policy

Ramzy Baroud
Globalization Unchecked

Ron Ridenour
Tamil Eelam: the Historic Right to Nationhood

November 17, 2009

Mike Whitney
Let's Get Fiscal

Jayne Lyn Stahl
Double Crossed: War Vets Deported

Brian M. Downing
Do They Subscribe to GQ at the Pentagon?

Jonathan Cook
Israel's Two-Tiered Justice System

Joanne Mariner
A First Look at the Military Commisions Act

Dean Baker
Obama's Nuclear Option on the Yuan

Martha Rosenberg
Pig Hell at Wal-Mart Supplier

Danny Weil
Fear in Nicaragua

David Macaray
Retail Sales as Combat

Laura Flanders
Buried Bonanza for Over-Builders

Walter Brasch
Rush to Judgment on Terror Trials

November 16, 2009

Alan Nasser
Obama's Flawed Case Against Single Payer

Jonathan Cook
Campus Watch Copy Cats

Mark Weisbrot
Obama, China and the Dollar

Carol Miller
We Need Health Care, Not Insurance

Gary Leupp
The Andolan in Kathmandu and the Revolution to Follow

Harry Clark
Justice Goldstone at Brandeis

Ray McGovern
Shining a Light on the Roots of Terrorism

Norman Solomon
California Democrats Urge Obama to Leave Afghanistan

Ron Ridenour
Genocide in Sri Lanka

Norm Kent
Doctors Light Up

Brenda Norrell
Torture Resisters Arrested at Fort Huachuca

November 13-15, 2009

Alexander Cockburn
A Man in a Hundred

Patrick Cockburn
Meet Our Afghan Ally: Stealing Money, Selling Heroin and Raping Boys

Tariq Ali
Short Cuts in Afghanistan

Douglas Lummis
Obama, Hatoyama and Okinawa

Vijay Prashad
Can the Major Speak?

Carl Ginsburg
Cornering the Market on Ambition

Manuel García, Jr.
The Purpose is Pork

Rannie Amiri
The Disastrous Presidency of Mahmoud Abbas

Mary Lynn Cramer
Death By Denial: the Militarization of Mental Health

Fred Gardner
Pot Doc Down

Dave Lindorff
Health Care Reform: DOA

Robert Jensen
How I Stopped Hating Thanksgiving and Learned to be Afraid

David Macaray
Wal-Mart Death Stampede Revisited

Corporate Crime Reporter
Exposing Timberland: Nike Foe Jeff Ballinger Zeros in on a New Target

Ron Jacobs
No More Star Spangled Eyes

David Model
NATO's Chimerical Enemy in Afghanistan

John V. Walsh
Godless China: What Obama Will Find

Jon Mitchell
Beggars' Belief

Stuart Easterling
Blaming the Narcos in Mexico

Dan Bacher
Big Oil Takes Over Marine "Protection" in California

Franklin Lamb
Lebanese Students Advise Obama on How to Get It Right

Farzana Versey
Moderns, Models and Martyrs

Charles R. Larson
War, Peace and Paramilitaries in Colombia

Saul Landau
The Coen Bros. Brutalize Job

David Yearsley
When the Cirque Meets the Beatles

Lorenzo Wolff
At the Side of the Frontman

Poets' Basement
Blaine, Rivas and Cox

November 12, 2009

Robert Weissman
Maniacal Deregulation

Franklin Spinney
The Afghan War Question

Nadia Hijab
After Fort Hood

Afshin Rattansi
Night Vision: Why US Sanctions on Syria Will Kill American Soldiers

Paul Craig Roberts
America's Dismal Future

Ralph Nader
Failing the People on Health Care

Belén Fernández
Tourists of the Honduran Counter-Revolution

Allan J. Lichtman
A National Peacemaker's Day

Dave Lindorff
President Peacenik's War

Jayne Lyn Stahl
Headline of the Year

November 11, 2009

Andrew Cockburn
The Crafting of a Loophole

Mike Whitney
A Small "d" Depression

Rev. Jesse Jackson
Where's the Jobs Stimulus?

Jeff Nygaard
Iranian Irrationality? Maybe Not

Stewart J. Lawrence
Honduran Regime Reneges on Political Deal

James Ridgeway
The End of the Little Red Cars: Memories of East Berlin

Eamonn McCann
Blood on Their Hands

Michael Ortiz Hill
Unbecoming War and Terrorism

Shepherd Bliss
From Oklahoma City to Fort Hood

Walter Brasch
"This is Jenna Bush Reporting ... "

November 10, 2009

Ellen Cantarow
Heroism in a Vanishing Landscape

Dean Baker
How to Raise $140 Billion a Year From Wall Street Banks

Rose Ann DeMoro
The Truth About the House Health Care Bill

Ramzy Baroud
Inch by Inch, House by House: How Israel Won the Settlement Battle...Again

Peter Lee
The Dalai Lama Sticks His Thumb in the Dragon's Eye

Dave Lindorff
Blaming the Workers

Roberto Rodriguez
Running Past PTSD (Or My Susto Profundo)

Winslow T. Wheeler
The Self-Dismembering F-35

Alan Farago
The Rising Tide

Joseph Grosso
The Legacy of Albert Parsons

November 9, 2009

Patrick Cockburn
Leave Afghanistan to the Afghans

Linn Washington
Fox Finds a New Black Boogeyman

Carl Ginsburg
To be Young and Unemployed Forever

Jeff Leys
War Funding, 2010

John A. Murphy
Can Lieberman Save Single Payer? Why Progressives Should Back a Filibuster

John Halle
Bard and the Lobby: Final Thoughts on the Kovel Affair

Bouthaina Shaaban
Clinton Dances With Netanyahu

James Ridgeway
Heath Care: Winning a Battle, Losing the War

Dave Lindorff
The Kafka Economy

David Macaray
The Philadelphia Transit Strike

Stephen Fleischman
The Tea Party System

Website of the Day
Cap-and-Trade: The Huge Mistake

November 6-8, 2009

Alexander Cockburn
Too Fat to Fight

Mark Grueter
Inside the American University of Iraq

Paul Craig Roberts
The Evil Empire

Patrick Cockburn
Friendly Fire

Gareth Porter
Karzai's Cabinet of Warlords

Mike Whitney
The Battle of Seattle, 10 Years Later

James Bovard
How the Media Enables Government Lies

Dean Baker
Don't Touch the Banks!

Robert Lawless
Empires and the Sullying of Anthropology

Saul Landau
Afghanistan: a War Without Logic

Jayne Lyn Stahl
Black Ops and Fort Hood

Stephanie Westbrook
My Memories of Fort Hood

M. Shahid Alam
How Eurocentric Are You?

Marc Levy
Walking With Mr. Muhammad

Franklin Lamb
Obama's Mid-East Mess

Ron Jacobs
A New Map of Hell

David Ker Thomson
Afternoon With Tulip

John V. Whitbeck
Moment of Truth

Julien Mercille
Drugs and Afghanistan: the UN's Misleading Report

Rannie Amiri
Egypt's Next Unelected President?

John Ross
Legalize It!

David Michael Green
Can You Hear Us Now?

Carl Finamore
Strike One for Hotels in San Francisco

Farzana Versey
The Farce of Fatwas and Political Expediency

Missy Comley Beattie
No to Single Payer, Yes to Prayer?

Charles R. Larson
Business as Usual in India

David Yearsley
Anna Magdalena, Music and the Art of Dying

Kim Nicolini
"Paranormal Activity:" a DIY Horror Film

Poets' Basement
Three Poems by Devreaux Baker

November 5, 2009

Pam Martens
The Fire Sale of America

Vijay Prashad
The Great Heretic

Brian Gallagher
The Soldiers From Standard Oil: Harvard, ROTC and American Foreign Policy

Norman Solomon
The Next Phase in Health Care Apartheid

Nadia Hijab
The Battle for Palestinian Representation

Joseph Shansky
And the Winner in Honduras is ... the United States?

Andy Thayer
Questions and Answers From Maine

Tracy Rosenberg
Pacifica and the Barbarians Who Pay the Bills

Website of the Day
All Folked Up

November 4, 2009

Stan Cox
The Inflated Promise of Natural Gas

Andy Worthington From Gitmo to Palau: Who are the Uighurs?

Robert Weissman
The Medicare-for-All Moment

Susan Galleymore
Of Veterans and Volunteers

Ralph Nader
Hoh's Afghanistan Warning

Michael Leonardi
Italy's Secret Ships of Poison

Bitta Mistofi
Death to No One: Isolating and Taunting Iran Will Only Empower the Regime

Robert Bryce
From Lahore to Copenhagen

Martha Rosenberg
Is Your Doctor's Continuing Ed Funded by Drug Makers?

Dave Lindorff
Democrats Crash and Burn

Website of the Day
Single-Payer Backtrackers

November 3, 2009

Patrick Cockburn
The Delegitimization of Karzai

Mike Whitney
Why the Crisis Isn't Going Away

Franklin C. Spinney
Katrina and the Paralysis of Fear

Laura Carlsen
The Little Coup That Couldn't

Serge Halimi
Don't Blame the Internet

John Stanton
Social Decay in America

Sophia Weeks
A Guatemalan Lament

Dave Lindorff
Country Joe, Kenny Rogers and Obama

November 2, 2009

Steven Higgs
Autism Spikes, Toxins Suspected

Ishmael Reed
White in America: Behind the Scenes at CNN

David Macaray
UAW Members Vote Down Ford; and the Media Attacked the Union

Bouthaina Shaaban
Settler Colonialism: Return to the Middle Ages

David Michael Green
Coming to Get You

David Swanson
The Two Percent Robustness

Ellen Brown
Cutting Wall Street Out

Adam Federman
Trading the Watershed to Trash the Catskills

James McEnteer
Doppleganger Politics: Star Wars, Clone Wars

Stephen Fleischman
Foot in the Door: Capitalism and Health Care

Website of the Day
Secret California Park Giveaway

October 30 - Nov. 1, 2009

Alexander Cockburn
The Long Gaze of the State

Jeffrey St. Clair /
Joshua Frank
Facing Down the Machine: Mike Roselle Draws a Line

Carl Ginsburg
Living in the Shadow of Yankee Stadium

Mike Whitney
Obama Goes Wobbly Over More Stimulus

Joe Bageant
The Iron Cheer of Empire

Gareth Porter
Security By Warlords: the CIA's Afghan Payroll

Saul Landau
The Cuban Embargo

Anthony DiMaggio
Conspiracy, Inc.: Wild Tales From the Reactionary Right

Dave Lindorff
Happy Talk Amid the Wreckage: Stocks Up, Jobs Down

Rannie Amiri
The Spooks of Beirut

Niranjan Ramakrishnan
An Afghan Travelogue

Jayne Lyn Stahl
Who Will Reform the Health Care Reform?

Rev. William E. Alberts
God's Favorite Team (and Nation and Religion)

Alvaro Huerta
The Abominable Mr. Dobbs

Martha Rosenberg
Marketing Drugs to Psychoneurotics

Binoy Kampmark
Don't Give Us Your Wretched: Refugee Policy in OZ

Norm Kent
Not Just Zig-Zag Any More: Medical Marijuana Goes Mainstream

Charles R. Larson Roth's "The Humbling:" Nothing Like a Novel From an Old Pro

Ron Jacobs
One Man's Truth, Another Man's Lies

David Yearsley
Not Loud Enough by Half

Lorenzo Wolff
The Vulnerability of Lauryn Hill

Kim Nicolini
"Big Fan:" Football, Class and Sexuality in America

Poets' Basement
Davies, Heyen and Orloski

Website of the Weekend
Coal Country Music

October 29, 2009

Michael Neumann
Criticism of Israel: a Wonderful Hiding Place

Mike Whitney
Housing Rebound? Not So Fast

Gary Leupp
Matthew Hoh Speaks Truth to Power

Conn Hallinan
Roman Roads and Modern Emperors

Marshall Auerback
Obama's Bogus Populism: Pay Curbs and Bank Loans

Laura Flanders
Palin's Pet Doug Hoffman Has Taliban Ties

Eamonn McCann
The War Criminal Vote: Blair or Karadzic for EU President?

David Macaray
Strange Invaders: Can Ignorance and Arrogance Win Hearts and Minds?

Mark Weisbrot
When Small Countries Lead the Way

Stephen Soldz
Psychologist Complicity in Torture Challenged

Christopher Brauchli
Will the Pope Bring the Taliban Into His Flock?

Website of the Day
The USS Liberty Affair and the Problem of Truth in History

October 28, 2009

Moshe Adler
How to Reduce Unemployment, Rebuild the Middle Class and Free Ourselves From Wall Street

Dave Lindorff
America's Drug Crisis: Brought to You by the CIA

Frank Joseph Smecker
Agaisnt Prometheus: an Interview with Derrick Jensen on Science and Technology

Alexandra Early
What a "Jobless" Recovery Means for Young Workers

M. Shahid Alam
Israeli Exceptionalism

Vijay Prashad
Sahelian Blowback: What's Happening in Mali?

John Ross
Three Years Later, Brad Will is Still Dead

Franklin Lamb
A Rare Victory for Lebanon's Palestinians

Gregory Travis
The Dismal Science: Elinor Ostrom's Nobel

Susan Galleymore
Peace Cycle to Palestine

Website of the Day
Newspaper Decline, a Graphic Display

October 27, 2009

Mike Whitney
Black Tuesday and How We Got Out of It

Patrick Cockburn
Bombs Will Go Off in Baghdad, Whether the US is There or Not

Stewart J. Lawrence
Honduran Coup Myths Dispelled

Alan Farago
Power Plays in Florida: Rate Increases, Nukes and Deception

Ralph Nader
Obama: Form Letters and Business as Usual

Dave Lindorff
Pentagon Dirty Bombers: DU in America

Bouthaina Shaaban
The Danger of Towing the Line Behind Israel

Brian M. Downing Elections in Afghanistan, the Second Time Around

Iain Boal
How You Can Save Pacifica

Carl Finamore
Hotel Workers and the Law of Momentum

Jayne Lyn Stahl
Here Comes That Third Party: Palin and the Constitutionalists

Website of the Day
How Bank of America Charges for Perfect Credit

October 26, 2009

Bill Quigley /
Deborah Popowski
When Gitmo and Abu Ghraib Come Home

Paul Craig Roberts
Are You Ready for the Next Crisis?

Uri Avnery
A Tsunami Called Goldstone

Mike Whitney
Will the Dollar Remain the World's Reserve Currency in Five Years?

Michael Snedeker
The Execution of Cameron Willingham

Shamus Cooke
Obama's Dirty War on Immigrants

David Michael Green
Paranoia for Breakfast

Martha Rosenberg
Gagging Michael Pollan

Patrick Bond
Gridlock on the Way to Copenhagen

Binoy Kampmark
Heading for the Tiber

Website of the Day
Goldman Sachs Abandons Kittens

Weekend Edition
November 20-22, 2009

CounterPunch Diary

It’s Show Trial Time!

By ALEXANDER COCKBURN

You can’t please all of the people all of the time, but  President Obama and his Attorney General, Eric Holder, have  got nearer than most to pulling it off. A week ago Holder announced that  Khaled Shaikh Mohammed  and four alleged co-conspirators will  soon  go on trial in federal court in New York for planning the attacks of September 11, 2001. After a week’s uproar it’s fair to conclude that  this was smart politics on the part of the Obama team. The fact that Holder, a man with famously sensitive political antennae, told the press that political considerations played “no part” in his decision only buttresses this judgment. The prime function of all US Attorneys General is to loyally undertake the political requirements of  their President.

The scenario envisaged by Obama, his chief of staff Rahm Emanuel and Holder is presumably that somehow a jury of unprejudiced citizens will be convened, and ultimately – hopefully sometime  before the election of  2012, at least Khaled Sjhaikh Mohammed  will step into the execution chamber, thus vindicating Obama’s oft-advertised commitment to track down the perps of 9/11 and kill them. So eager is Obama to underline this point that last Friday he declared in Japan that those offended by the trial will not find it “offensive at all when he’s convicted and when the death penalty is applied to him.”. This remark came right after his assertion that the trial would be “subject to the most exacting demands of justice.” Realising that the latter remark might be construed by some pettifogging civil libertarians as prejudicial to a fair trial , Obama  then added that he was “not going to be in that courtroom. That’s the job of the prosecutors, the judge and the jury.”

So, in this prospectus,  even if the Great War on Terror does not prosper in Afghanistan it will proceed satisfactorily in execution chambers here in the Homeland, with the possible lagniappe of  Major Hasan, the  alleged Fort Hood shooter, also   getting a lethal injection  after conviction in a military court.

It’s certain that the legal team mustered  to defend KSM and the other four will be reviewing mountains of documents amassed by the prosecution, setting forth the evidentiary chain that led to the indictments of the Ground Zero Five. Of course most of these will no doubt be classified top secret, to be reviewed by defense lawyers only under conditions of stringent security, but it’s certain that enough will be leaked to portray  the Bush Administration and Republicans in general  in a harshly unflattering light,  ignoring profuse indications of the unfolding  conspiracy.

For their part – though the smarter among them may worry about disclosures of Bush and Cheney’s incompetence or worse --  the Republicans also exult at the opportunity offered them by Holder’s decision to savage the Obama administration as  soft on terror by the mere fact of haling KSM and the others into a U.S. courtroom, as opposed to giving them a  drumhead trial by military “commission” outside the jurisdiction and dispatching them without the contemptible procedures of a formal trial inside the borders of the United States. Memories of the O.J. Simpson jury trial and the verdict of not guilty beyond a reasonable doubt are a strong undercurrent here. In many of the berserk  commentaries from the right this last week one can smell the panic fear that somehow a  slimeball defense attorney in the Johnny Cochran mould will dupe a jury (composed, remember, of people solemnly swearing they have an open mind on the case)  into letting KSM and the others slip off the hook and stride from the courtroom,  free men.

Of course there’s not the remotest chance of that, though it is true, as CounterPuncher Peter Lushing points out, that “a single eccentric juror could hang the jury necessitating a re-trial. Eleven-to-one deadlocks in long trials are not unknown. The jury pool comes from Manhattan, the Bronx, and a few minor counties north of New York City, fertile ground for cranks, revolutionaries, Bush and/or America haters, crypto-Islamists, and what-have-you. Courtroom procedures designed to screen out these outlaws have obviously been proven not to be perfect. And if the jury 'hangs' on the death penalty, there is no do-over, and a life sentence is imposed.”

No doubt the  Ground Zero Five will have accomplished and dedicated attorneys. There are scores of trial lawyers itching to step into history as intrepid defenders of due process and the requirements of a proper trial. They will urge dismissal, on grounds that a fair trial is impossible, that the evidence was obtained under torture, that the constitutional requirement of a speedy trial has been flouted, that the shielded identities of the informants providing the prosecution’s evidence  similarly flout the defendants’ right to confront their accusers.

They will offer these and scores of other persuasive arguments, and it is impossible to imagine they will prevail. As David Feige, a public defender in the Bronx,  presaged in a smart piece on the Slate site, these efforts by the defense team will fail and produce bad law.

“Ever deferential to the trial court, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit will affirm dozens of decisions that redact and restrict the disclosure of secret documents, prompting the government to be ever more expansive in invoking claims of national security and emboldening other judges to withhold critical evidence from future defendants. Finally, the twisted logic required to disentangle KSM's initial torture from his subsequent ‘clean team’ statements will provide a blueprint for the government, giving them the prize they've been after all this time—a legal way both to torture and to prosecute.”

The  liberal-left is  appreciative of Holder’s decision too, since it takes prosecution of KSM and his supposed co-conspirators out of the hands of the awful military “commissions”. Anthony Romero, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union, called the announcement “an enormous victory for the rule of law.”  Actually, it was demonstrably  a partial victory since that same Friday Holder simultaneously announced that a military commission will try five others, also being held in Guantanamo,  including Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, who is accused of planning Al Qaeda’s 2000 bombing of the Navy destroyer Cole in Yemen. 

Mayor Bloomberg of New York is pleased. In the short term it takes the focus off his embarrassingly close victory in the mayoral race. In the midterm there will be endless opportunities for mayoral announcements ranging from dramatic bulletins on security deployments around the Foley courthouse to compassionate photo ops with the relatives of those killed in the 9/11 attack. And the attitude of these relatives? Mixed, as one might readily imagine.

Delighted too must be Khaled Sheikh Mohammed who has already declared he exults at the prospect of the execution chamber and the martyrdom it will bring, preluded by the platform offered by the trial. But perhaps even more delighted than KSM are the beleagured newspapers of New York to whom Holder’s announcement has came like a  snort of methamphetamine up the nose of a fading  tweaker: ahead lie months of searing headlines, blood-curdling editorial howls for vengeance in the Post and the Daily News, plus graver but copious coverage in the New York Times.

Of course there are those who gravely lament the impending spectacle, the fakery of judicial “impartiality”, the pompous sermons about the rule of law, the hysteria, the howls for vengeance. Bring them on, say I. Let's face it, we could do with some drama and American political life is at its most vivid amid show trials. Their glare discloses the larger political system in all its pretensions and   its disfigurements. The show trial is as American as cherry pie , as  the former Black Panther H. Rap Brown – currently serving life without the possibility of parole in the Supermax in Florence, Colorado – famously said about violence.

Major Hasan: Victim or Soldier of Islam?

From: Ismael Hossein-zadeh
(ismael.zadeh@drake.edu)
Subject: Your Essay on Fort Hood
Date: November 14, 2009

Alex,

I am writing to express my utter disappointment and dismay at your shabby, Islam/Muslim-bashing commentary on the Fort Hood tragedy in your last CounterPunch Diary. Had your analysis/explanation been written anonymously, I would have thought it was written by a bigoted Right-winger from, let’s say, the Fox News. Indeed, in a roundabout way, you do side with the Right on this issue when you criticize General George Casey Jr., the Army chief of staff, for “bristling at demands from the Christian right that there should be some sort of loyalty review or even winnowing.” You lament that, in so doing, “The general obviously doesn’t have Edward Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire on his bedside table.” Had General Casey read Gibbon’s book, you continue, he would have learned “that the introduction of foreigners ‘into Roman armies became every day more universal, more necessary and more fatal. Rome was captive before she was taken.’” So, why don’t you, Alex, as an apparently concerned citizen, in the role of a volunteer journalist advisor, send the General a copy of Gibbon’s book before it is too late, that is, before US imperialism is corroded from within, by foreign/Muslim members of the US armed forces, as you insinuate!

Please do yourself a favor and read/re-read Vijay Prashad’s “Can the Major Speak?” article that appeared in the same issue of counterpunch.com that also contained your reprehensible article. And please don’t tell me, “you have misunderstood me,” because I ran your essay by two friends to make sure that there was no misunderstanding, as I simply could not believe what I was reading when I first read your essay.

Ismael Hossein-zadeh
Drake University (Economics)
From: alexandercockburn@asis.com
               Subject: To Hossein-zadeh - Re: Your Essay on Fort Hood
Date:        November 15, 2009

Ismael - 

Contrary to your mistaken view, buttressed by your compliant friends, I neither criticized nor endorsed Gen. Casey's remarks. I offered them as a significant statement from the  top uniformed commander, which it obviously was. Your rather childish sarcasms about Gibbon leave me wondering what your position on America's imperial army actually is.  Is the source of your indignation that I raised the issue of "loyalty" in connection with a militant Muslim?  It's obvious in my piece that I sympathize entirely with Muhammad Ali's famous expression of disloyalty  to Empire (expressed as a Muslim convert)  and indeed leftists in general take that stance, in organizing on campuses and communities against recruiting drives by the US armed forces, and in expressing full solidarity with soldiers who refuse to fight or specifically resist deployment to Iraq and Afghanistan. Back in the 1960s the antiwar movement certainly was in overall sympathy with the mutinies in Vietnam - though with  the murders  of officers  approval was mostly demure or tacit. 

Today, the reaction of Muslims here -- including at least one fairly radical CounterPuncher  - has been to say it's outrageous to raise the issue of loyalty and that thousands of Muslims in the Forces capably discharge their duties in the service of Empire, that Hasan was just a bad apple. But shouldn't the anti-imperial left - which presumably includes you - want Muslim  as well as the soldiers in general, to be mutinous, to challenge by all means necessary the imperial missions to Iraq and now Afghanistan and Pakistan? Hasan's young friend  refused to condemn, expressing this in phrases of admirable clarity. So what is your position overall? What do you tell your students? That the wars are wrong - that they should be resisted and that Hasan was right in his expressions of resistance down the years, at least until but not including the moment he opened fire in Fort Food. Suppose he had waited to open fire until he was in a unit on the front lines in Afghanistan rounding up villagers? 

Overall, the left doesn't like these questions and finds them embarrassing. They tend to retreat like you into hasty assertions of Muslim bashing, and cautious identification of Hasan as a wounded soul, somehow a victim of pre-traumatic stress syndrome. In my column I wanted to show how a gigantic imperial-bureaucratic institution like the Army dealt with an officer who clearly and explicitly on many occasions announced his disloyalty, and gave enough signals that some of his colleagues concluded he might take a violent turn. The Army did nothing.  CounterPuncher David Price suggests to me that as a bureaucratic institution the Army was reluctant to confront Hasan because it would have then raised the far larger issue of militant Christianity, now saturating the Imperial armed forces. 

To your evident disapproval, the historian Gibbon raised the issue of recruitment in Rome's armies, and said that the necessity of bringing in recruits who were not cives Romani (he actually called them barbarians, in the usage of Herodotus) was a major factor in the Empire's collapse.

Personally, I think the Roman Empire was ripe for collapse and applaud that irony of history. Today, a considerable number of all recruits to America's "volunteer" forces are legal residents promised accelerated citizenship.(A promise frequently betrayed when numbers of these volunteers have found themselves facing deportation after military service.)These are developments leftists should note and discuss. The fact that the right notes them too should not be an inhibition.

But alas, the left - not really a left when it comes to the crunch - is understandably nervous when it comes to issues of loyalty, active disloyalty and propaganda of the deed. Witness its fury if one argues, as I have, that Lee Harvey Oswald was a leftist who wanted to take the pressure off Castro and who somewhat succeeded in that endeavor, or its embarrassment if one mentions that Sirhan was a Palestinian who was infuriated at Robert Kennedy's pro-Israel statements in California and his endorsement of impending sale of some US fighter planes to Israel.

From: Ismael.Zadeh@drake.edu
               Subject: Re: Your Essay on Ft. Hood
Date:        November 17, 2009

Alex,

I agree with you that, in committing the Fort Hood mass murder, Hasan acted out as a religious/Muslim extremist/militant. But that’s where our agreement ends. While you blame the Ft. Hood brutal shooting on his disloyalty and/or religious beliefs, thereby de-contextualizing the madness that drove Hasan to embark on that lethal rampage, I look beneath the surface, into the more complex factors and forces that gradually drove him to religious extremism, or to lose faith in military service. From 2003 until last summer Hasan worked as a liaison between wounded soldiers and the hospital’s psychiatric staff. In that capacity he witnessed, and obviously internalized, some of the most harrowing and traumatizing instances of the brutalities of war. His aunt told the Washington Post that on the rare occasions “when he spoke of his work in any detail … Hasan told her of soldiers wracked by what they had seen. One patient had suffered burns to his face so intense ‘that his face had nearly melted,’ she said.

As his anxiety and aversion to war increased, it became increasingly obvious that he was no longer suited for the military service. It also increasingly became clear that he needed help/counseling. Instead, he was pushed from Walter Reed to Fort Hood, where he learned that he was going to be deployed to Afghanistan. He had hired a military lawyer and had been attempting to avoid being sent overseas and to leave the Army since September. Hasan’s aunt also told the Post that the military “would not let him leave even after he offered to repay” the cost of his medical training.

This is of course not to justify his brutal mass murder, but to show the context that led him to religious extremism and the madness that, in turn, led to those monstrous crimes…. I believe that a principled position on this issue must reject the reductionist, simplistic and scapegoating explanations such as loyalty or religious beliefs. Such diversionary, obfuscationist explanations have always been used by flag-waving war mongers at the expense of more complex explanation ns that would put the ultimate blame where it belong: brutal wars of aggression and multiple deployments that have brought many members of the armed force to the breaking point. Thus, the issue of loyalty/disloyalty was used to send Japanese-Americans to internment camps, to justify the which-hunting of McCarthyism, or to accuse presidential candidate John Kennedy as a puppet of the Pope.

From: alexandercockburn@asis.com
               Subject:        To Hossein-Zadeh 2 Re: Your Essay on Ft. Hood
Date:        November 17, 2009

Ismael , There it is - you, like almost every liberal and progressive, take the line that Hasan's  killings were   some variant of pre-traumatic or intra-traumatic stress syndrome, committed as the old legal phrase goes,  "while the balance of his mind was disturbed", whereas I do Hasan the favor of taking him seriously in terms of his frequently expressed religious and ideological commitments.

As regards your comments on the larger issue of justifiable mutiny and active resistance (as opposed to going  to live in Toronto or simply disqualifying oneself from service by getting hugely fat at McDonalds) I don't understand them - as I often don't when academics  start talking about "more complex explanations".  On this issue too you seem to prefer victimhood to heroism - though some of the most heroic pages in history belong to mutineers, whether Spartacus or the mutineers on the Nore in 1797, the sepoys in the Indian mutiny of glorious memory. In these cases I do  favor --  to use your words --  "reductionist, simplistic and scapegoating explanations such as loyalty or religious beliefs"  -- loyalty here being to values superior to the Flag.

Your last chance! Join the surge! 
As you know, assuming that you are among the tens of thousands of people around the world who check in at this  CounterPunch site every day or two, these past three weeks we’ve been featuring our annual appeal for donations and saying that without the necessary $70,000 to be raised in these weeks, we’ll have to cut back drastically on what we do and what all you site readers who don’t subscribe to our newsletter, get every day for free. Now there only  a few days left. Many CounterPunchers have rallied magnificently. Have you? No? Please DO believe our forecasts that times will be grim indeed for CounterPunch and CounterPunchers if you don’t reconsider seriously and click on the donation link.

Will Laura Visit George in Prison?
Our latest newsletter is now available. It’s a crackerjack package.Read Stephen Green’s authoritative  chronicle of the crimes that opened the Bush gang to arrest warrants and sealed indictments. Eamonn McCann describes how a secret state scheme saw 150,000 children  “exported” to Australia to stock that continent with white Christians. And responding to Mark Rudd in our last newsletter,  Mike Miller writes on  movement building in the 1960s and today. Subscribe today!

Alexander Cockburn can be reached at alexandercockburn@asis.com

Inside the New Print Edition of Our Subscriber-Only Newsletter!

Why the Bush-Cheney Gang
Shouldn't Leave the Jurisdiction

Stephen Green details the crimes that opened the Bush gang to arrest warrants and sealed indictments. Eamonn McCann describes how a secret state scheme saw 150,000 children  “exported” to Australia to stock that continent with white Christians. No, Barack Obama isn’t the best guide to Saul Alinksy’s ideas on organizing.  Mike Miller on movement building in the 1960s and today. 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 t-shirts make great presents.

Order CounterPunch By Email For Only $35 a Year !

Now Available from CounterPunch Books!

Yellowstone Drift:
Floating the Past
in Real Time
by John Holt
Introduction by Doug Peacock

Click here to Buy!

Born Under a Bad Sky:
Notes from the Dark Side
of the Earth
By Jeffrey St. Clair

2010 Country Mamas of Petrolia
Calendar Now Available!

"Powerful and shocking ..
see this film"
-- Joseph Stiglitz on American Casino

Waiting for Lightning
to Strike:
The Fundamentals
of Black Politics
Kevin Alexander Gray

Click Here to Buy!

Spell Albuquerque:
Memoir of a
"Difficult Student"
By Tennessee Reed

Click Here to Buy!

The Inside Story of the Shannon Five's Smashing Victory Over the
Bush War Machine
By Harry Browne

Buy End Times Now!

Click Here to Buy!

Click Here to Order!

Humanitarian Imperialism
By Jean Bricmont