Today's Stories

March 5 , 2009

James G. Abourezk
This Time It's Mrs. Clinton's Term

Kathleen and Bill Christison
U.S. Military Aid to Israel

Robert Weissman
Wall Street's Best Investment: Paying for Public Policy

Patrick Cockburn
My Day at the Terror "Charity"

William Blum
Being Serious About Torture...Or Not

Robert Fantina
From Iraq to Afghanistan: Augmentation All Over Again

Saul Landau
The Unseen Crisis

March 4, 2009

Marjorie Cohn
Blueprints for a Police State

Mike Whitney
Blowing Up the Economy: How Securitization Lit the Fuse

Ron Jacobs
The Banality of Occupation: the Rand Papers

Ashley Smith
War by Another Name

Joanne Mariner
Obama's War on Terror

Dan Bacher
The California Water Wars: Why It's Not a Conflict Between Fish and People

Mark Engler
Will the Winds of Change Reach El Salvador?

Franklin Lamb
"What's Hezbollah Done for Us Lately?"

Cal Winslow
Slugging It Out in California

David Mandelzys
Apartheid Week

Website of the Day
Guantánamo: the Definitive Prisoner List

March 3, 2009

Conn Hallinan
Ethnic Cleansing and Israel

Fawzia Afzal-Khan
The Long, Dark Night of Pakistan

Brian M. Downing
The Changing Game in Afghanistan

Robert Larson
External Damnation: Companies are Designed for Destruction

Daniel P. Wirt, MD
Single-Payer Health Reform

Russell Mokhiber
Burn Your Health Insurance Bill!

William Loren Katz
Obama, One Ape and Two Newspapers

Kathy Sanborn
The Lazy Man's Guide to the Economic Crisis

Pauline Imbach
A New Start for the World Social Forum?

Christopher Ketcham
The Best Journalism You'll Write is Priceless

Website of the Day
The Surveillance Self-Defense Project

March 2, 2009

Andrea Peacock
A Poisoned Town's Shot at Justice

Paul Craig Roberts
Obama's Budget

Peter Lee
Pakistan Lurches Toward the Abyss

John Blair
Locking Down Big Coal

Peter Morici
Treasury's Flawed Plan for Citigroup

Uri Avnery
10 Ways to Kill Fatah

Michael Donnelly
Resistance to the War on the Wild

Fred Gardner
The Judge Who Ruled Marijuana is Medicine

Sonia Nettnin
Middle East Medical Mission Heroes

Andrew Lehman
A New Deal for the Web

Website of the Day
Pentagon Papers II?

Feb. 27 - March 1, 2009

Alexander Cockburn
Is Nancy Pelosi Really Against War Crimes?

Harry Browne
Where the Cheats Have No Shame

Anthony DiMaggio
From Bush to Obama: Seven Years of Wartime Propaganda

Sasan Fayazmanesh
Dennis Ross and Iran: the Fox and the Chicken Coop

Mischa Gaus
The Banks' War on Workers

Felice Pace
The Economy and the Big Picture

Mike Whitney
Is Free Market Capitalism Possible Without Accountability?

Lee Sustar
Blaming the Autoworkers

Peter Lee
The Other Side of the Coin in Afghanistan

Nicole Colson
Ruining Young Lives for Profit

Roger Burbach
Et Tu, Daniel? The Betrayal of the Sandinista Revolution

Rannie Amiri
King Abdullah Has No Robes

Missy Beattie
Owning Disaster

Dave Lindorff
America's Stupid Health Care Debate

Robert David Steele Vivas
Intelligence for the President--and Everyone Else

John Ross
Teotihuacan Gets Mickey-Moused

Ralph Nader
Civic Heroism Awards

Yves Engler
Haiti's Harsh Realities

Alan Farago
The Story of Leonard Abess, Banker

Zulfikar Majid
Understanding Kashmir

David Yearsley
Don't Stay Up Too Late, Johan!

Charles R. Larson
Sleeping with Dogs

Kim Nicolini
Spitting at Dark Times: Mike Leigh's "Happy-Go-Lucky"

Lorenzo Wolff
So You Wanna Be a Garage Rock Star

Poets' Basement
Puthoff, Payne, Gaffney and Gray

Website of the Weekend
Sleep Now in the Fire

February 26, 2009

Dave Lindorff
Obama's Address to Congress

Jonathan Cook
Israel's Military Mephistopheles

Patrick Cockburn
Did the US Learn Anything in Iraq?

Mike Whitney
The Geithner Put

Eamonn McCann
"Make Bono Pay Tax"

Tim Wise
Eric Holder and the Whitewashing of Racism

Tom Barry
Napolitano's Hard Line

Harvey Wasserman
Obama's Excellent Atomic Omission

Adam Turl
The Enemies of Unions and the Lies They Tell

David Macaray
When People are Fired Illegally

James McEnteer
Rush to the Rescue: Limbaugh's Secret Plan to Save the Economy

Website of the Day
The Carbon Casino

February 25, 2009

Chris Sands
Afghanistan: Chaos Central

M. Shahid Alam
Israel in 1948: Poised for Expansion

Chris Floyd
Obama's Non-Withdrawal Withdrawal Plan

Dave Lindorff
Wall Street and Bernanke: the Blind Leading the Blind

Norman Solomon
The Slow Pullout Method

Rachel Godfrey Wood
Neoliberals Do The Amazon

Niranjan Ramakrishnan
Teacher and Student: the New Class Struggle

Ron Jacobs
It Ain't Over Till It's Over

Nadia Hijab
The First Waltz

Dennis Loo
The Water Line

Website of the Day
Hitchens Gets Stomped by Syrian Nerd

February 24, 2009

Paul Craig Roberts
How the Economy was Lost

Uri Avnery
Coalition Theory

Peter Morici
Is Nationalization Inevitable?

Jonathan Cook
Arab Parties Face Most Hostile Knesset in History

Paul Fitzgerald /
Elizabeth Gould
The Man Who Shouldn't be King (of Afghanistan)

Andy Worthington
Who is Binyam Mohamed?

Brian Horejsi
Crisis Creates Hope for Reality

Julia Stein
I was a Writer for the Government

Norm Kent
How Judges Disgrace the Bench

Rachel Smolker /
Brian Tokar
Biofuels, Promise or Threat?

Dennis Loo
The Water Line: Doing What Must be Done

James McEnteer
The Oscar for Denial

Website of the Day
How to Destroy a Fox News Anchor

February 23, 2009

Michael Hudson
The Language of Looting

Mike Roselle
On Cherry Pond: Going Up Against Big Coal in W. Virginia

Patrick Cockburn
The New War in Iraq

Franklin Spinney
Obama Steps on the Pentagon Escalator

Einar Már Guðmundsson
A War Cry From the North

Ralph Nader
How Credit Unions Survived the Crash

Jordan Flaherty
A New Orleans Intifada?

Helen Redmond
Ted's Table: Kennedy and the Corporate Lobbyists Craft a Health Plan

Dennis Loo
The Water Line

Harvey Wasserman
Jet Crashes and Nuclear Reactors: Feds Ignore a Serious Risk

Terry Lodge
The Intelligence is Wrong

Website of the Day
BadCreditReport.Com

February 20 / 22, 2009

Alexander Cockburn
The Lawyer's Tale

Michael Neumann /
Osha Neumann
Remove Our Grandmother's Name from the Wall at Yad Vashem

Ismael Hossein-zadeh
Herbert Hoover Copycats

Paul Craig Roberts
Bill of Rights Under Fire

Linn Washington Jr.
The NY Post's Chimpanzee Cartoon

Saul Landau
On the Road Again

Marjorie Cohn
War Criminals Must be Prosecuted (And Their Lawyers Too)

Binoy Kampmark
Cricket and Cartels: the Fall of Sir Allen Stanford

Dave Lindorff
Using the Recession to Hammer Workers

David Yearsley
Edward Said's Greatest Musical Writings

David Macaray
A Closer Look at the Employee Free Choice Act

James McEnteer
Last Mambo in Minnehaha

Rick Salutin
A Canadian Looks at Obama

Wayne Clark
South Carolina Nears the Abyss

Richard Rhames
Got Farms?

Stephen Martin
Silver Mist Descending

Mitu Sengupta
Slumdog Millionaire's Dehumanizing View of India's Poor

Charles R. Larson
Slumdog Reality?

Richard Morse
Carnival Ramble in Haiti

Lorenzo Wolff
Desperation in an Unavoidable Groove

Poets' Basement
Three Poems of Tu Fu (Trans. K. Rexroth)

Website of the Weekend
Ron Paul: What If the People Wake Up?

February 19, 2009

Norman Finkelstein
The Cleanser: Lobbyists Whistle Up Cordesman to "Prove" Israel Waged a Clean War in Gaza

Harry Browne
How Ireland Went Bust

Robert Bryce
Why the Promise of Biofuels is a Lie

Brian M. Downing
The Winding Road: From Western Europe to Kyrgyzstan

Fred Gardner
The DEA Chief's $123,000 Flight

Andy Worthington
Obama's Uighur Problem

Wajahat Ali
Aftermath of a Beheading

Laura Carlsen
A New Attitude at the White House Toward Bolivia and Venezuela?

Deb Reich
Gaza: Choose Life!

Christopher Ketcham
Crisis? What Crisis?

Website of the Day
Taking Back NYU

February 18, 2009

Paul Craig Roberts
President of Special Interests

Mike Whitney
Trouble at Treasury

M. Shahid Alam
Afghan Pitfalls

Patrick Cockburn
A Real Surge at Last

Conn Hallinan
Death's Laboratory

Dave Lindorff
Whatever Happened to Antitrust?

Rannie Amiri
The Perils of Blogging in Egypt

Gareth Porter
Pushing Back Against Petraeus on Pullout Risks

Eric Hobsbawm
Remembering V. G. Kiernan

Christopher Brauchli
The Pope's Predicament

Martha Rosenberg
It's the Cymbalta Stupid

Website of the Day
Red Gold

February 17, 2009

Michael Hudson
The Oligarchs' Escape Plan

Mike Whitney
The Global Ditch

Ralph Nader
The One-Dimensional Congress

Joanne Mariner
Benchmarking Obama: How to Evaluate the New Administration's Counter-Terrorism Policies

John Ross
Commodifying the Revolution: Zapatista Villages Become Hot
Tourist Destinations

Belén Fernández
The Venezuelan Referendum From the Back of a Pickup Truck

Mats Svensson
Who is a Terrorist?

David Macaray
Why America Needs Labor Unions

Gregory Vickrey
$400 in Change

M. Junaid Levesque-Alam
Another Hamastan?

Michael Dickinson
Unrest in Istanbul

Website of the Day
Take a Stand for Open Access

February 16, 2009

Patrick Cockburn
Iraq Reconstruction: the Greatest Fraud in US History?

Oscar Guardiola-Rivera
The Truth About Colombia's New Emperor

Paul Craig Roberts
Who Remembers Guns and Butter?

Uri Avnery
Livni's Bitter Options

P. Sainath
The Meltdown: Whose Crisis Is It?

Dedrick Muhammad / Michael Brown
White Recession, Black Depression

Carla Blank
A New New Deal for the Arts

Patrick Irelan
Venezuela Ends Term Limits

Dan Bacher
Is Delta Pumping Driving Salmon and Orca Decline?

Fidel Castro
Chavez's Clarion Call

Harvey Wasserman
Hail to the Spleef: Did George Washington Smoke Pot?

Website of the Day
Mining Black Mesa

February 13 - 15, 2009

Alexander Cockburn
On the Rocks

Joshua Frank
The Myth of Clean Coal

Mike Whitney
Geithner's Coming Out Party

George Ciccariello-Maher
Venezuela's Term Limits: More Hypocrisy From the NYT

Nikolas Kozloff
Venezuela Beyond the Referendum

Brian M. Downing
Pakistan on the Brink

Paul Craig Roberts
Deficit Nonchalance

Christopher Ketcham
Israel's Ball Boys

Ron Jacobs
At a Campus Sit-In Against Israeli Occupation

Dave Lindorff
Why Can Judd Gregg See What Obama Can't?

Alan Maass
Lincoln at 200

Chuck Spinney
Grassley Sounds Off on Obama's Man at the Pentagon

Phil Gasper
Mr. Darwin's Reluctant Revolution

Stephen Lendman
A Short History of Business Handouts

Charles Thomson
Tate Cruises: Caveat Emptor on the High Seas

Kathy Sanborn
The Suicide Rush

Saul Landau
Bowled Over

Len Wengraf
The Nightmare in Somalia

Harvey Wasserman
Striking a Blow Against Nuclear Power

David Macaray
An Easy Call for Obama on Joining a Union

Tom Stephens
Four Freedoms, Four Changes

Seth Sandronsky
Lincoln and the Collective Mind

David Yearsley
On the Road Again

Lorenzo Wolff
Freaking Out With Danny Barnes

Kim Nicolini
The Body of the Worker: What "The Wrestler" Says About the State of America

Poets' Basement
Anderson, Buknatski and French

Website of the Weekend
The Iranian Revoution and the US Dual Containment Policy: a Presentation

March 5 , 2009

One More Farcical Tour of the Middle East by a Secretary of State

This Time It's Mrs. Clinton's Turn

By JAMES G. ABOUREZK

It was almost dreamlike, watching Secretary of State Clinton make her visit to Israel, one that can be called the first of many trips pretending to encourage peace talks between Israel and the Palestinians.  It’s a dream I’ve had several times over; one needs only to simply fill in the names of the various U.S. Secretaries of State, say that they’ve met with the Israeli leadership and with Mahmoud Abbas, (who is about as popular with the Palestinians as Rush Limbaugh is with Democrats), and that no progress was made.

Aside from saying that Abbas heads the only legitimate government of Palestine, Mrs. Clinton did say that the building of new settlements was, “unhelpful,” or maybe it was the demolition of several Palestinian apartment blocks in Jerusalem that was unhelpful.  It’s hard to remember which one did not help.  She did conveniently forget that Abbas’ term as President of the Palestinian Authority has expired, and she also forgot that Hamas won the Parliamentary elections big time.  It’s not that the Parliament has been meeting regularly, mostly because Israel arrested most of the Hamas members of Parliament, all of them still behind bars.  It was the kind of election that the U.S. did not believe iin. It was legal, and showed the preferences of the Palestinian public, something which the U.S. chose to ignore.

Mrs. Clinton did send two diplomats to talk to the Syrians, which is as hopeful as it is interesting.  Syria has been on the bad, bad guy  list since George W. Bush decided to act on Israel’s dislike of Syria and withdraw the U.S. Ambassador, Margaret Scobey.  It was Syria’s support of  US and Israeli-designated “terrorists” that caused that diplomatic rupture.

I had lunch in Damascus a few years ago with Ms. Scobey, who told me that the problem “we” had with Syria was that the country was not stopping insurgents from crossing into Iraq to fight the U.S. military.  “Why don’t you just put American troops on the border to stop them?” I asked, “Why do you blame Syria for not policing the long border?’

“Well, we don’t have enough troops to do the job,” was her honest answer.

By publicly denouncing Syria,  George W. accomplished his goal of making Israel happy, but he also trashed a valuable ally in his “war on terrorism.” 

A few years ago, in the early part of Bush’s first term, I was in a meeting with Syria’s president Bashar al Asad.  He mentioned that he had given the U.S. information he had uncovered on an attack planned by Al Qaeda on U.S. interests in the Middle East.  That early warning allowed our people to disrupt the terrorists’ plans to do harm to us.  (I assumed it was an attack planned on the U.S. Naval base in Bahrain, but I was never told exactly where it was).  I saw the U.S. Ambassador, Ted Kattouf, shortly after that and asked him if it was true.  His response was that, not only was it true, but Syria’s intelligence personnel had uncovered and had stopped more than one planned attack on Americans in the Middle East.

What a visibly irritated President Al Asad told me that day was that if George Bush continued to call Syria a “terrorist” country, he would never again give us warning of an attack.

News sources now tell us that Syria is playing around with the development of nuclear weapons.  If that’s true, it’s not good news.  But here again we are our own worst enemy with respect to nuclear proliferation.  While our politicians loudly denounce Iran’s nuclear ambitions, nothing at all is said about Israel’s possession of over 200 nuclear warheads.  The reason Israel’s nuclear arsenal should be openly discussed is that, not surprisingly, it is the cause of  its neighbors’ drive to develop their own nukes.  Self Defense is a powerful motivation. 

When we look back at history, outside of Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, Israel is the only country in that neighborhood that has attacked its neighbors.   Iran has not, in the last two or three hundred years, attacked anybody.  Nor has Syria.  Even Syria’s misadventure in Lebanon was the result of initially being invited into Lebanon to help settle the Civil War back in the 1970s, but it was not a real invasion, not like the ones Israel has specialized in.  Syria’s sin was to clumsily overstay its welcome in Lebanon.

What is not widely known, (and one wonders why?) is that both Syria and Iran have proposed a “nuclear weapons free Middle East,” -- proposals that were immediately scoffed at both by Israel and by the United States.

This double standard also applies to the Arab militias—Hizbollah and Hamas--that arm themselves to defend from Israel’s assaults on them and their freedoms.  Calling Hamas and Hizbollah terrorist groups is, as Mrs. Clinton might say in another context, “unhelpful.”  They are, under any definition, except for definitions by the U.S. and by Israel, “liberation groups.”  They are trying to liberate their lands from foreign occupiers — namely Israel — an action which we here in the U.S. normally applaud.  But Israel has asked our government to identify them as terrorist groups, which our government happily did.  Doing Israel that favor was very much like the favor done by Bush’s invasion of Iraq, which was greatly encouraged by Israel’s fear of Iraq’s policies toward them.  Of course, the influence of the neocons in the Bush Administration made the decision to go to war much easier to make.

The double standard is so glaring that it would be embarrassing if the American public were ever made aware of it.  President  Obama is now on record as supporting a multibillion dollar arms gift to Israel over the next ten years.  Both Israel and the U.S. decry — in the loudest terms --arms being slipped into Gaza so the people there can defend themselves.  The same is true for Hizbollah.  Much is made about weapons “smuggling” to Hizbollah, which, like Hamas, does whatever it can to defend their people from Israel’s  armed might.  But American politicians and American journalists dutifully read Israeli talking points when the time comes to explain their feelings.  Hamas’ crude weapons do not quite match the fighter jets, modern tanks, pilotless drones, cluster bombs, phosphorous shells and bombs that Israel inflicted on the civilians in the Gaza Ghetto.  The new DIME weapon, which severely burns anything it touches, was particularly effective when used on the civilians of Gaza.

The most prominent talking point handed out by the Israeli propaganda machine during the assault on Gaza was, “We would not stand by and allow our families be targets of someone shooting rockets into our cities.”
 
Totally unexamined, that was a brilliant piece of propaganda explaining the slaughter of some 1,500 people in Gaza, most of them women and children.  Like the Nazis trying to eradicate the Warsaw Ghetto, Israel willfully and deliberately slaughtered civilians who were unable to escape because of the fences that surrounded them.  When they were caught doing so, the Israeli military merely said it would investigate.  Nothing has ever come from such an investigation, if, in fact, it was ever investigated.

It is embarrassing to see the Lobby for such a small country cause our politicians to quake in their boots.  Despite all the demolitions of Palestinian homes, despite the expansion of the settlements in occupied territories, despite the devastating invasions of Lebanon in 1982 and in 2006, the brutal invasion of the Gaza ghetto last year, and despite the holding of thousands of Palestinians in their prisons, most without benefit of charges or trials, we hear not one word of criticism from our Congress or our President.   Amazing, is it not?

I have said this before, but it bears repeating—there will be no peace deal between Israel and the Palestinians unless and until the President of the United States tells Israel that they must remove the settlers from the West Bank, thereby allowing a Palestinian state to be formed.  If he does not do that, Mrs. Clinton and George Mitchell will tire themselves out traveling to the Middle East under the pretense that they are sponsoring peace talks.

James G. Abourezk is a lawyer practicing in South Dakota. He is a former United States senator and the author of two books, Advise and Dissent, and a co-author of Through Different Eyes. This article also  runs in the current issue of Washington Report For Middle East Affairs.  Abourezk  can be reached at georgepatton45@gmail.com

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