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The Democrats Bow to Bush on War: How the Anti-War Movement Failed

Alexander Cockburn picks through the rubble after Dems vote war funds. Wars inside America: Eyewitness reports from Andrea Peacock amid a Migra raid in Arizona and from George Corsetti amid gunfire in the collapsing city of Detroit.

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Today's Stories

June 5, 2007

Michael Neumann
Canada in Afghanistan

Jonathan Cook
The Shin Bet and the Persecution of Azmi Bishara


June 4, 2007

Nizar Latif
An Interview with Moqtada al-Sadr

Diana Johnstone
Sarko and the Ghosts of May, 1968

Gregory Wilpert
RCTV and Freedom of Speech in Venezuela

Paul Watson
The Anchorage Whale Killing Bureaucrats Summit

Susan Rosenthal, MD
How Cindy Sheehan Unmasked the Democrats

Richard Ward
The Right of Return to New Orleans

Eva Liddell
Don't Support the Troops

Zali Khouri
Four Decades of Occupation

Evelyn Pringle
The FDA, GlaxoSmithKline and the Avandia Disaster

China Hand
About Those North Korean Benjamin Franklins ...

Karyn Strickler
George W. Bush: a "Ficeist" Leader

Website of the Day
The Guantanamo Files

 

June 2 / 3, 2007

Alexander Cockburn
The Last of the Texas Outsiders

Marc Levy
Iraq Dead Ahead: a Brief Military History and Civilian Guide to Arlington National Cemetery

Martin Smith
Camilo Mejía's War: From Foot Soldier for Empire to Rebel for Peace

Diana Johnstone
Great Power Meddling in Kosovo

John Ross
The Oaxaca Volcano Stews

Uri Avnery
On Generals and Admirals

Sunsara Taylor
This is Not a Story About Cindy Sheehan

Richard Neville
Were the Hippies Right?

P. Sainath
The Farm Crisis and 100,000 Indian Widows

Missy Comley Beattie
Let's Roar

Nisrine Abiad
and Victor Kattan
The Hariri Tribunal: a Fait Accompli?

Rannie Amiri
Lebanon, Bush and the Three Stooges

Margot Pepper
Deconstructing "Return to Sender"

Eric Stewart
Censorship and Cop Brutality in the New Bison Wars

Ralph Nader
The Halberstam Camp

Dan Bacher
A Victory for the Fish

Shaun Harkin
and Sandy Boyer
Irish War Protesters on Trial

Richard Rhames
Selling Five Acres in Crawford

Frederick Hudson
The Rediscovery of Ella Fitzgerald

Poets' Basement
Lindorff, Landau and Buknatski

Website of the Weekend
Gimme Shelter


June 1, 2007

Dave Marsh
The FBI and the Godfather (of Soul): James Brown's FBI Files

Saul Landau
Return to Cuba: 47 Years Later in Havana

David Phinney
How the Baghdad Embassy Was Built: Forced Labor and Worker Abuse

Robert Jensen
The Bigot and the Boycott

Stanley Heller
Arrest Robert McNamara

Yifat Susskind
Indigenous Women Fight Back

Robert Weissman
Corporate Power Since 1980

Paul Buchheit
Africa and Its Discontents

William S. Lind
The Folly of Maximalist Objectives

Sherwood Ross
78,000 Iraqis Have Been Killed by Coalition Airstrikes

Stephen Lendman
Terrorism Defined

Website of the Day
Desert Autonomous Zone


May 31, 2007

Robert Bryce
The Language Barrier

Patrick Cockburn
Killing with Impunity: Iraq's Militias Under the Surge

Gary Leupp
Appropriate Disillusionment: the Despair of Cindy Sheehan and Andrew Bacevich

Kathy Kelly
Being Hope

Marjorie Cohn
The Unitary King George

Chris Kutalik
and Tiffany Ten Eyck

Fallout from the Sale of Chrysler: Jobs, Health Care, Pensions, All in Jeopardy

Corporate Crime Reporter
Zheng Xiaoyu Meet Lester Crawford

Dave Lindorff
Our Monica: a Hero of the Constitution

Website of the Day
Know Your Rights!

 

May 30, 2007

James Ridgeway
The Bi-Partisan Con on Synthetic Fuels

Franklin Lamb
Lebanon and the Planned US Airbase at Kaleiaat

Terrence E. Paupp
Withdrawal Symptoms

Uri Avnery
To the Shores of Tripoli

Alan Maass
and Jeffrey St. Clair
The Green Masquerade: Corporate America's Latest Counter-Attack

Rock and Rap Confidential
Watching the Detectives: the Political Censorship of Hip Hop

Ralph Nader
Taming the Giant Corporation

Nirmal Ghosh
China, CITES and the Fate of the Tiger

Jean Daniels
Dealing Democrats: Folding to Mr. 28%

Tom Barry
Meet Robert Zoellick: Bush's Pick to Head World Bank

Website of the Day
Petuuche Gilbert on the Rights of Indigenous People


May 29, 2007

Stephen Soldz
Shrinks and the SERE Technique at Guantanamo

Eliza Ernshire
Refugees Forever: Inside Bedawi Camp

Ron Jacobs
The Exit of Cindy Sheehan

Dave Lindorff
Whatever Happened to Signing Statements?

Evelyn Pringle
What Qualifies Bush to Lead Iraq War

Mike Whitney
Bush's New Middle East

David Swanson
How We Got Here: The Democrats and the Antiwar Movement

John Holt
Gating Montana, Part Two: the Feedback Loop

Cynthia McKinney
Dreaming of a True Memorial Day

Martha Rosenberg
Mad Cows, Mad Pigs and the Horse Slaughter Lobby

Website of the Day
The Ruminant


May 28, 2007

Bill Quigley
Katrina Activists: "Less Meeting, More Fighting"

Col. Dan Smith
The Paranoid and the Dead

Cindy Sheehan
Why I Am Leaving the Democratic Party

Dr. Susan Block
Dr. Laura's Little Monster

Jeeni Criscenzo
What I Learned About Being a Dickhead

Douglas Valentine
Memorial Day: a Poem

Website of the Day
Peace TV

 

 

May 26 / 27, 2007

Alexander Cockburn
The Greenhousers Strike Back and Out

Michael Donnelly
Green Sabotage as "Terrorism"

Patrick Cockburn
Sadr's Dramatic Reappearance

Franklin Lamb
Inside Nahr el-Bared: "Another Waco in the Making"

Jean Bricmont
The Moral Collapse of the Moral Left

Gary Leupp
Cheney, Israel and Iran

James Petras
Imperial Rot: The Beginning of the End of the American Empire?

William Peace
Ashley Unlawfully Sterilized

Judith and John Sharpe
The Saga of Our Son, Lt. Commander John Sharpe: Under Investigation for Antiwar Sentiments

Saul Landau
Four Dead in Ohio: From Kent State to Tiannamen Square

Paul Craig Roberts Democracy in Iraq, Tyranny at Home?

Jonathan M. Feldman
Congress and the Iraq War Vote

Dave Lindorff
Democratic Blood Money

Missy Beattie
Congress Plays Dead

Mike Whitney
Swan Song of the Democrats

Badruddin Khan
AIPAC Intervenes on Iran and Congress Folds, Again

Ron Jacobs
The Crime of Silence

Zoe Blunt
The Antidote to Despair

Arjun Chowdhury,
Mark Hoffman
and Kevin Parsneau
The Can-Do Troops and the New Anti-Politics

Heather Gray
The 1969 Riots Against the Chinese in Malaysia: a New Explanation

N. D. Jayaprakash
Disarmament Negotiations: A History and Prospectus

Joe Allen
and Paul D'Amato

Cartoons with Class

Poets' Basement
Gowani, Ford, Anderson and Simon

Website of the Weekend
Addicted to War



May 25, 2007

Robert Jensen
What the Finkelstein Tenure Fight Tells Us About the State of Academia

David Vest
So You Thought They'd End the War

John Stauber
Democratic Spin Won't End the War in Iraq

Evelyn Pringle
Congress Gives War Profiteers Another $100 Billion

Corporate Crime Reporter
Why Corporate Social Responsibility Programs are a Fraud

Susan Rosenthal, MD
What's Missing from the Health Care Debate

Roberto Rodriguez
Us vs. Them in the Immigration Debate

Steve Fournier
Goodie, Goodie Goodling

Patrick McElwee
Venezuela and RCTV: Is Free Speech Really at Stake?

Robert Weissman
Resisting the Commercialization of Public Schools

Website of the Day
New DNC Motto: "We Suck"

 

 


May 24, 2007

Franklin Lamb
Who's Behind the Fighting in North Lebanon

Corporate Crime Reporter
House Democrats Buckle to Big Oil: Strip Down Price Gouging Bill

Robert Fantina
Giuliani: Righteous, Indignant and Wrong

Norman Solomon
Deadly Illusions, Rest in Peace

Dave Lindorff
Kerrycrats All!: Now It's a Democratic War

Sen. Russell Feingold
We are Moving Backwards on Iraq

Fred Gardner
Doctor of Last Resort

Mike Whitney
Paulson in China

Kevin Parsneau, Arjun Chowdhury and Mark Hoffman
Becoming Imperialist: a Warning to Iraq War Critics

Caroline Paul
My Brother the "Terrorist": Animal Liberation and Prosecutorial Overkill

Eva Liddell
In Defense of Lying on Job Applications

Website of the Day
Johnny's Jumped the Shark


May 23, 2007

Patrick Cockburn
Opium: Iraq's Newest Export

Rev. William Alberts
Faith-Based Imperialism

Joe DeRaymond
Colombia's Civil War and the US

Sudhanva Deshpande
and Vijay Prashad

The Political Economy of a Crisis

Paul Craig Roberts
Republicans in Self-Destruct Mode

Glen Ford
A Less "White" USA

Rannie Amiri
The Great Bank Heist of Tripoli

China Hand
China's Great Wall of Cash?

Zoe Blunt
Tales from the Tree Tops: Veteran Tree Sitter Tells All

Nivien Saleh
Who's to Blame for Iraq?

Website of the Day
Debating the Israel Lobby


May 22, 2007

Robert Fisk
A Front Row Seat for the Bloodbath in Lebanon

Joshua Frank
Hillary Clinton's Achilles Heel?

Harvey Wasserman
Drop Dead, New Yorkers: Giuliani and the Toxic Fallout from 9/11

David Mos Masumoto
An Orchard Without Workers

Sonja Karkar
Israeli Forest Named After Australian Prime Minister

Conn Hallinan
The Afghan Quagmire

Dave Lindorff
A Widening Chasm on Impeachment

Jeffrey Kolakowski
Meet Us in Detroit: an Open Letter to John Konyers

Evelyn Pringle
A Misleading Suicide Warning

Jim Baumer
Politics Gary, Indiana-Style

Website of the Day
Should the Democrats Fear Mike Gravel?


May 21, 2007

Patrick Cockburn
The Secret US Plot to Kill Sadr

Nicole Colson
Much Ado About the Fort Dix Pizza Plot

John Ross
Shooting for the Top: Mexico's Drug Gangs Take Aim at Calderon

Stephen Fleischman
Werewolf of Washington: Wolfowitz Comes Full Circle

M. Shahid Alam
Chosenness and Israeli Exceptionalism

Ron Jacobs
Green Mountain Days: Return to Vermont

Peter Rost, MD
Pfizer CFO Resigns

Alan Farago
Can the Everglades Save Florida?

Paul Buchheit
The Dark Side of Democracy Promotion

Website of the Day
Code Monkey: Live!


May 19 / 20, 2007

Andrew Cockburn
Why America Lost the War in Iraq

Uri Avnery
The Next War

Peter Gelderloos
My Arrest in Spain: The Easy Road from Tourism to Terrorism

Saul Landau
Bush's Accomplishments

Robert Fantina
Iraq's History: Lessons for the Present and the Future

Fred Gardner
Hemp vs. Pot, a False Dichotomy

Ralph Nader
Timid Democrats and the Antiwar Movement

Jean Daniels
Waiting for Obama

Reza Fiyouzat
Vietnam Syndrome: Dead or Alive?

Missy Beattie
Ron Paul, Rudy Giuliani and Osama's Fatwah

Robert Alvarez
Magical Thinking About Nuclear Waste

Sonja Karkar
The Palestinians of Iraq

Dave Lindorff
Mumia Case on Hold

Jeff Sher
Keep Workers Healthy and Reduce Health Care Cost: Eliminate Co-Pays

Julian C. Holmes
Torture, Maine Style

Clancy Sigal
Red Mutiny: 11 Fateful Days on the Battleship Potemkin

Prairie Miller
The Murder of Fred Hampton

James Murren
The Dog Ate Karl Rove's Homework: When Turd Blossom Met the Teachers of the Year

Poets' Basement
Davies, Valentine and Engel

Website of the Weekend
Yellowstone's Shame: Harassing Newborn Bison

 

May 18, 2007

Adam Jones
When Does Genocide Purify? Ask the Pope

Sharon Smith
The Death of Triangulation Politics?

Christopher Brauchli
Cheney's Middle East Adventure

Peter Rost, MD
Bribes and Spies in the Drug Industry

Denise Maloney Pictou
The Murder of Our Mother, Anna Mae Pictou Aquash: After 31 Years, It is Time for Justice

David Swanson
Of Snoops and Dupes

Ali Khan
The Lawyers' Mutiny in Pakistan

Susan Rosenthal, M.D.
Cho Seung-Hui Delivers His Message

Samer Assad
Israel and the Refugees: Fifty-Nine Years of Dispossession

CP News Service
Bidding for Extinction: Ivory Trade on eBay Threatens Survival of Elephants

Website of the Day
Another War Criminal Goes to Harvard

 

May 17, 2007

Tariq Ali
The General vs. the Judge

Yifat Susskind
Honor Killings in the New Iraq: The Murder of Du'a Aswad

Dave Zirin
Being Ali or Being Owned: an Open Letter to LeBron James

Brian J. Foley
Hell, No, Harry Won't Go!

W. John Green
The Godfather of Colombia: Uribe and the Para Scandal

Eric Johnson-DeBaufre
Challenges for the New Sanctuary Movement

Badruddin Khan
Rebirthing the Neocons: Bernard Lewis' Latest Call to Arms

Martha Rosenberg
From Cockfighting to Foie Gras: On the Menu and on the Docket

China Hand
Pope Rat in Brazil: "The Amazon Tribes Longed for Christianity!"

Dan Vojir
Falwell's Tinky Winky Legacy: Who Will Battle the Telebubby Threat Now?

Website of the Day
Welcome to the Terrordome


May 16, 2007

Patrick Cockburn
Chalabi Speaks

Ashley Dawson
Who's Afraid of Wolfowitz?

Joshua Frank
Obama's Cash Flow: Maverick or Kidder?

Corporate Crime Reporter
Corporate Drug Pushers

Ray McGovern
A Four-Letter Word for Tenet

Glen Ford
Black Labor and the Big Mission

Joe Bageant
The Ghosts of Timothy Leary and Hunter S. Thompson

Sonja Karkar
The 59-Year Catastrophe

Mickey S. Huff
Preaching Hate: Farewell, Falwell

John Chuckman
Falwell's Lone Act of Kindness

Kaz Dziamka
What Ever Happened to Rogerian Argument?

Website of the Day
We're All Going to Hell

 

May 15, 2007

Michael Neumann
Two States, One State and Snake Oil

Patrick Cockburn
An American Nightmare

Ashley Smith
How the US Set Iraq on Fire

Marc Gardner
Parole and the Long-Distance Trucker

Dave Lindorff
and Linn Washington, Jr
Mumia Case Reaches Its Climax

Ben Terrall
Benchmark as Theft: Iraq Oil Workers Strike to Stop Privatization

Ron Jacobs
Cheney Threatens More War

Harvey Wasserman
The Legacy of Seabrook

Marcus Mabry
Shopping During Katrina

Dr. Susan Block
Cheney and the DC Madam's Cookie Jar

Website of the Day
Save Jean Klock Park from the Mega-Developers!

 

May 14, 2007

Jennifer Roesch
Giuliani Time: the Mussolini of Manhattan

Jeffrey St. Clair
Humans, CO2 and Climate Change

George Bisharat
For Palestinians, Memory Matters

Diane Wachtell
The Real Imus Lesson

Ramzy Baroud
From Palestine to Rotterdam

Rosemary and Walter Brasch
When the National Guard Goes Missing: An Ill Wind and American Policy

Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed
Blair's Exit

Roberto Rodriguez
The Elusive Bars of Justice

Jonathan Culp
Cutting Out Collage: Copyright and Art in Canada

Website of the Day
Uranium Rock


May 12 / 13, 2007

Alexander Cockburn
Who are the Merchants of Fear?

Patrick Cockburn
State of Surge

Jeffrey St. Clair
High Line Fever: a Trip Across the Dark Side of Montana

Diane Farsetta
Untold Stories from the Pat Tillman / Jessica Lynch Hearings

Ralph Nader
Strip Mining the Newsroom: Mr. Zell and the Tribune Company

Jean Bricmont
The Great Illusion: Sarkozy and the "Decline" of France

Marcus Breen
Cheering Sarkozy: the US Media and the Rightwing Takeover of France

Joe Bageant
Rising Above Politics

Conn Hallinan
European Missiles and the Camel's Nose

Fred Gardner
The Unreported I-880 Fire

Juan Santos
and Leslie Radford

Public Terror: Escalating the War on Migrants

Eve Bachrach
Inside Colombia's Flower Industry

Missy Comley Beattie
Shame

Ron Jacobs
The Bitterness of Regis Debray

Niranjan Ramakrishnan
The Sepoy Mutiny After 150 Years

Susie Day
Jesus Christ Weds Pat Robertson

Poets' Basement
Newberry, Engel, Landau, Katz and Davies

Website of the Weekend
The Shipyard: Recycling as Art

May 11, 2007

Patrick Cockburn
Blair's Depature: the View from Baghdad

Kathleen Christison
Playing at Peace

Mike Ferner
Collateral Genocide

John Holt
Gating Montana: A Ghastly Disneyland with High Rise Outhouses

Laurie Hasbrook
This Minute and Then the Next: a Plea from an Antiwar Mother

Christopher Brauchli
The Children of Limbo: Will the Pope Finally Set Them Free?

Margaret Kimberley
GOP Openly Embraces Gipper Values: Racism, Violence and Control

Dave Lindorff
Use It or Lose It: The Democrats and the Impeachment Clause

Nicole Colson
Anger Erupts at Conditions in For-Profit Indiana Prison

John V. Walsh
Beware the Do-Gooders in Body Armor

Website of the Day
Take the Terrorist Quiz!

 

May 10, 2007

Tariq Ali
Adieu, Blair, Adieu

Patrick Cockburn
Killing of Teachers Turns Iraqi Sunnis Against al--Qa'ida

Neve Gordon
and Yigal Bronner
In Israel Not All Blood is the Same: The Death of Samir Dari

Marjorie Cohn
Fighting Terror Selectively: Washington and Posada Carriles

David Rosen
The New Disappeared: Sex Offenders, Civil Confinement and the Resurrection of "Evil"

Alan Farago
Why the Everglades Have Dried Up: Developers and the South Florida Drought

John Hellman
France: From Pétain to Sarkozy

Kathy Rentenbach
A 100 Days of Rafael Correa

BANCO
The Stage is Set for Sentencing Another Innocent Black Man

Richard Rhames
Is Paris Burning?

Website of the Day
Tame the Corporation


May 9, 2007

Jeff Leys
Iraq and Afghanistan Supplemental Spending, 2008

Patrick Cockburn
An Interview with Iraq's Foreign Minister on Iran and Iraq

Glen Ford
No Black Plan for America's Cities

Paula Rothenberg
Feminism Then and Now

Kathryn Weber
A Conversation with Norman Finkelstein

John Chuckman
The Likely Historical Significance of the War in Iraq

Jordan Flaherty
Looking for Justice in Jena, Louisiana

Dave Lindorff
Pelosi's Toothless Threat to Sue Bush

Stephen Lendman
Criminalizing Speech: the War on Free Expression in a Post-9/11 World

Website of the Day
"Fifth and Market": a Short Film About the Iraq War

 

 

May 8, 2007

Dave Lindorff
The Great Oil Robbery

Patrick Cockburn
The Horrific Stoning Death of a Yazidi Girl Sparks Waves of Revenge Killings

Corporate Crime Reporter
Snuff Politics: Democrats Escalate Attack on Single Payer

Ralph Nader
The People's Crusade of Mike Gravel

Malini Johar Schueller
Decoding Harlan Ullman: Shock and Awe as Sexual Fantasy

Juan Santos
The Hate Equation: Targeting Migrant Children in LA

Dave Zirin
Jason Whitlock, the Clarence Thomas of Sportswriters?

Joshua Frank
The Price of Fire in Latin America

Evelyn Pringle
Serotonin Syndrome

Eamonn McCann
Irish Peace Dividend for Discredited Premiers

Website of the Day
The Pagan Science Monitor

 

 

May 7, 2007

Patrick Cockburn
The Great Wall of Baghdad Rises

Monica Benderman
Land of Opportunity

Greg Moses
Hutto Prison Rebuffs UN Rapporteur

Rannie Amiri
The Sham at Sheikh: Iraq Regional Conference a Flop

Fitrakis / Wasserman
Media Silence on Kent State Revelations

Fred Wilhelms
Another Royalty Forfeiture From SoundExchange: And This Time It's Secret!

Ramzy Baroud
The Hourglass of Blood: Darfur Revisited

Bruce K. Gagnon
The Democrats Don't Own the Antiwar Movement

T. W. Croft
Home Movies from a Weekend in Paris--And Related Dreamscapes

Sonja Karkar
Prizes for Supporting Israel?

Website of the Day
Posada Carriles: the Declassified Record



May 5 / 6, 2007

Alexander Cockburn
Trying to Catch Up with the Voters

William Blum
How America Has Changed Iraq

Uri Avnery
Exercise in Escapism

Franklin Lamb
Harvard's Twisted Report on Israel's Invasion of Lebanon

Fred Gardner
Elective Surgeries Kill

Lawrence R. Velvel
The American Moral Meltdown Accelerates

Missy Beattie
Lying and Dying: The Moral Sensibility of Military Recruiters

Robert Fantina
Bush's Veto: Hypocritical Words and Actions

Carla Blank
American Massacres and the Media

Linn Washington, Jr.
The Long Ordeal of Harold Wilson

Stephen F. Jackson
Taking It to Drummond: Paramilitaries and Mining Companies in Colombia

P. Sainath
The Jailing of Indian Farmers

Anthony Papa
Time to End New York's War on Itself

James T. Phillips
Blather Cancer

John Ross
Last Days of the Willie Loman of the EZLN

Stephen Lendman
Chavez's Oil Policy Sparks Panic at Wall Street Journal

Ben Terrall
Iggy Pop at 60

CounterPunch Newswire
Advice from a Geezer Assassin

Poets' Basement
Valentine, Engel and Davies

Website of the Weekend
Mountain Justice Summer

 

May 4, 2007

Patrick Cockburn
How the Surge is Failing

Col. Dan Smith
From Watergate to Gonzogate

Norman Solomon
FOX on Wall Street

Azmi Bishara
Why is Israel After Me?

Ron Jacobs
Sitting in on Senator Kohl and the War

Dave Lindorff
Clinton and Byrd are Calling for Revocation of the Wrong AUMF

Kevin Zeese
The Democrats Cave to Bush

Bob Fitrakis
Why Four Died in Ohio: Kent State, Gov. Rhodes and the FBI

Janet Kauffman
"Stop the Mudness!" Bare Earth is Scorched Earth

Website of the Day
Let Us Gather in Missouri!

 

May 3, 2007

Jeff Halper
The Livni-Rice Plan for the Middle East: a Just Peace or Apartheid?

Christopher Brauchli
Bush's Best and Brightest: From Dr. Keroack to Bernard Kerik

Dave Zirin
Talking Sports from Death Row: an Interview with Kevin Cooper

Corporate Crime Reporter
Big Pharma Gets Its Hooks into Seton Hall Law School

Robert Fisk
Olmert Comes Undone

Mike Ferner
Bush Veto, Right for the Wrong Reasons?

Mike Whitney
A Stock Market Post-Mortem

Pham Binh
The Democrats and War Funding

Dave Lindorff
Kucinich's Impeachment Train: Look Who Just Stepped Aboard

Michael A. Johnson
Tenet on 60 Minutes

Website of the Day
Olivia Wilde: the Interview

 

May 2, 2007

Saul Landau
Would Jesus Wear a Rolex on His TV Show?

Dr. Susan Block
Hookergate II: Madame Julia's Big Black Book of Cheesy Republican Sex Acts

Carla Blank
Historical Amnesia: Worst U.S. Massacre?

Margaret Kimberly
The Candor of Mike Gravel: "These People Frighten Me"

Kevin Zeese
Durbin Gives Edwards More to Apologize For

Carlos Villareal
How "Law and Order" Covers for Bigotry in the Immigration Debate

Michael Dickinson
Trouble in Turkey: Criminalizing Political Art

Tim Shorrock
A Raw Deal Between Washington and Seoul: Corporate Interventionism as Trade Policy

Alevtina Rea
The Myth-Makers of Estonia

William S. Lind
General Incompetence: Col. Yingling and the Military Brass

Website of the Day
Good News: Rost's "ZubeGate Exposé Prompts Congressional Inquiry


May 1, 2007

Andrew Cockburn
How Rumsfeld Micromanaged Torture

Fred Gardner
Affirmative Abstinence: Adios, Randall Tobias, the Man Who Turned His Wife's Suicide into a Sales Pitch for Prozac

Chase Madar
Are Working Class Jobs Bad for Your Health?

Ralph Nader
Cheney and the BYU 25: Faith, Accountability and Protest in Utah

John V. Walsh
Edgy Dems Snarl at Their Antiwar Base

Joshua Frank
Obama, Incorporated

Leslie Radford
The Migrant Trap and the Migrant's Way Out

Shaun Harkin
An Interview with Nativo López on Immigration Bills and Protests

Dave Lindorff
Murtha Talks Impeachment

Peter Rost, MD
Inspector General Requests Meeting with Pfizer Whistleblower

Peter Linebaugh
May Day and Magna Carta

Website of the Day
Impeachment? Why Bother?

 

 

 

 

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June 5, 2007

The Shin Bet and the Persecution of Azmi Bishara

Defending Israel from Democracy

By JONATHAN COOK

Nazareth.

The second Palestinian intifada has been crushed. The 700km wall is sealing the occupied population of the West Bank into a series of prisons. The "demographic timebomb" -- the fear that Palestinians, through higher birth rates, will soon outnumber Jews in the Holy Land and that Israel's continuing rule over them risks being compared to apartheid -- has been safely defused through the disengagment from Gaza and its 1.4 million inhabitants. On the fortieth anniversary of Israel's occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, Israel's security establishment is quitely satisfied with its successes.

But like a shark whose physiology requires that, to stay alive, it never sleeps or stops moving, Israel must remain restless, constantly reinventing itself and its policies to ensure its ethnic project does not lose legitimacy, even as it devours the Palestinian homeland. By keeping a step ahead of the analysts and worldwide opinion, Israel creates facts on the ground that cement its supremacist and expansionist agenda.

So, with these achievements under its belt, where next for the Jewish state?

I have been arguing for some time that Israel's ultimate goal is to create an ethnic fortress, a Jewish space in expanded borders from which all Palestinians -- including its 1.2 million Palestinian citizens -- will be excluded. That was the purpose of the Gaza disengagement and it is also the point of the wall snaking through the West Bank, effectively annexing to Israel what little is left of a potential Palestinian state.

It should therefore be no surprise that we are witnessing the first moves in Israel's next phase of conquest of the Palestinians. With the 3.7 million Palestinians in the occupied territories caged inside their ghettos, unable to protest their treatment behind fences and walls, the turn has come of Israel's Palestinian citizens.

These citizens, today nearly a fifth of Israel's population, are the legacy of an oversight by the country's Jewish leaders during the ethnic cleansing campaign of the 1948 war. Ever since Israel has been pondering what to do with them. There was a brief debate in the state's first years about whether they should be converted to Judaism and assimilated, or whether they should be marginalised and eventually expelled. The latter view, favoured by the country's first prime minister, David Ben Gurion, dominated. The question has been when and how to do the deed.

The time now finally appears to be upon us, and the crushing of these more than one million unwanted citizens currently inside the walls of the fortress -- the Achilles' heel of the Jewish state -- is likely to be just as ruthless as that of the Palestinians under occupation.

In my recent book Blood and Religion, I charted the preparations for this crackdown. Israel has been secretly devising a land swap scheme that would force up to a quarter of a million Palestinian citizens (but hardly any territory) into the Palestinian ghetoes being crafted next door -- in return Israel will annex swaths of the West Bank on which the illegal Jewish settlements sit. The Bedouin in the Negev are being reclassified as trespassers on state land so that they can be treated as guest workers rather than citizens. And lawyers in the Justice Ministry are toiling over a loyalty scheme to deal with the remaining Palestinians: pledge an oath to Israel as a Jewish and democratic state (that is, one in which you are not wanted) or face being stripped of your rights and possibly expelled.

There will be no resistance to these moves from Israel's Jewish public. Opinion polls consistently show that two-thirds of Israeli Jews support "transfer" of the country's Palestinian population. With a veneer of legality added to the ethnic cleansing, the Jewish consensus will be almost complete.

But these measures cannot be implemented until an important first battle has been waged and won in the Knesset, the Israeli parliament. One of Israel's gurus of the so-called "demographic threat", Arnon Sofer, a professor at Haifa University, has explained the problem posed by the presence of a growing number of Palestinian voters: "In their hands lies the power to determine the right of return [of Palestinian refugees] or to decide who is a Jew In another few years, they will be able to decide whether the state of Israel should continue to be a Jewish-Zionist state."

The warning signs about how Israel might defend itself from this "threat" have been clear for some time. In Silencing Dissent, a report published in 2002 by the Human Rights Association based in Nazareth, the treatment of Israel's 10 Palestinian Knesset members was documented: over the previous two years, nine had been assaulted by the security services, some on several occasions, and seven hospitalised. The report also found that the state had launched 25 investigations of the 10 MKs in the same period.

All this abuse was reserved for the representatives of a community the Israeli general Moshe Dayan once referred to as "the quietest minority in the world".

But the state's violence towards, and intimidation of, Palestinian Knesset members -- until now largely the reflex actions of officials offended by the presence of legislators refusing to bow before the principles of Zionism and privileges for Jews -- is entering a new, more dangerous phase.

The problem for Israel is that for the past two decades Palestinian legislators have been entering the Knesset not as members of Zionist parties, as was the case for many decades, but as representatives of independent Palestinian parties. (A state claiming to be Jewish and democratic has to make some concessions to its own propaganda, after all.)

The result has been the emergence of an unexpected political platform: the demand for Israel's constitutional reform. Palestinian political parties have been calling for Israel's transformation from a Jewish state into a "state of all its citizens" -- or what the rest of us would call a liberal democracy.

The figurehead for this political struggle has been the legislator Azmi Bishara. A former philosophy professor, Bishara has been running rings around Jewish politicians in the Knesset for more than a decade, as well as exposing to outsiders the sham of Israel's self-definition as a "Jewish and democratic" state.

Even more worryingly he has also been making an increasingly convincing case to his constituency of 1.2 million Palestinian citizens that, rather than challenging the hundreds of forms of discrimination they face one law at a time, they should confront the system that props up the discrimination: the Jewish state itself. He has started to persuade a growing number that they will never enjoy equality with Jews as long as they live in ethnic state.

Bishara's campaign for a state of all its citizens has faced an uphill struggle. Palestinian citizens spent the first two decades after Israel's creation living under martial law, a time during which their identity, history and memories were all but crushed. Even today the minority has no control over its educational curriculum, which is set by officials charged with promoting Zionism, and its schools are effectively run by the secret police, the Shin Bet, through a network of collaborators among the teachers and pupils.

Given this climate, it may not be surprising that in a recent poll conducted by the Israel Democracy Institute 75 per cent of Palestinian citizens said they would support the drafting of a constitution defining Israel as a Jewish and democratic state (Israel currently has no constitution). Interestingly, however, what concerned commentators was the survey's small print: only a third of the respondents felt strongly about their position compared to more than half of those questioned in a similar survey three years ago. Also, 72 per cent of Palestinian citizens believed the principle of "equality" should be prominently featured in such a constitution.

These shifts of opinion are at least partly a result of Bishara's political work. He has been trying to persuade Israel's Palestinian minority -- most of whom, whatever the spin tells us, have had little practical experience of participating in a democracy other than casting a vote -- that it is impossible for a Jewish state to enshrine equality in its laws. Israel's nearest thing to a Bill of Rights, the Basic Law on Freedom and Human Dignity, intentionally does not mention equality anywhere in its text.

It is in this light that the news about Bishara that broke in late April should be read. While he was abroad with his family, the Shin Bet announced that he would face charges of treason on his return. Under emergency regulations -- renewed by the Knesset yet again last week, and which have now been in operation for nearly 60 years -- he could be executed if found guilty. Bishara so far has chosen not to return.

Coverage of the Bishara case has concentrated on the two main charges against him, which are only vaguely known as the security services have been trying to prevent disclosure of their evidence with a gagging order. The first accusation -- for the consumption of Israel's Jewish population -- is that Bishara actively helped Hizbullah in its targeting of Israeli communities in the north during the war against Lebanon last summer.

The Shin Bet claim this after months of listening in on his phone conversations -- made possible by a change in the law in 2005 that allows the security services to bug legislators' phones. The other Palestinian MKs suspect they are being subjected to the same eavesdropping after the Attorney-General Mechahem Mazuz failed to respond to a question from one, Taleb a-Sana, on whether the Shin Bet was using this practice more widely.

Few informed observers, however, take this allegation seriously. An editorial in Israel's leading newspaper Haaretz compared Bishara's case to that of the Israeli Jewish dissident Tali Fahima, who was jailed on trumped-up charges that she translated a military plan, a piece of paper dropped by the army in the Jenin refugee camp, on behalf of a Palestinian militant, Zacharia Zbeidi, even though it was widely known that Zbeidi was himself fluent in Hebrew.

The editorial noted that it seemed likely the charge of treason against Bishara "will turn out to be a tendentious exaggeration of his telephone conversations and meetings with Lebanese and Syrian nationals, and possibly also of his expressions of support for their military activities. It seems very doubtful that MK Bishara even has access to defense-related secrets that he could sell to the enemy, and like in the Fahima case, the fact that he identified with the enemy during wartime appears to be what fueled the desire to seek and find an excuse for bringing him to trial."

Such doubts were reinforced by reports in the Israeli media that the charge of treason was based on claims that Bishara had helped Hizbullah conduct "psychological warfare through the media".

The other allegation made by the secret police has a different target audience. The Shin Bet claim that Bishara laundered money from terrorist organisations. The implication, though the specifics are unclear, is that Bishara both helped fund terror and that he squirrelled some of the money away, possibly hundreds of thousands of dollars, presumably for his own benefit. This is supposed to discredit him with his own constituency of Palestinian citizens.

It should be noted that none of this money has been found in extensive searches of Bishara's home and office, and the evidence is based on testimony from a far from reliable source: a family of money-changers in East Jerusalem.

This second charge closely resembles the allegations faced by the only other Palestinian of national prominence in Israel, Sheikh Raed Salah, head of the Islamic Movement and a spiritual leader of the Palestinian minority. He was arrested in 2003, originally on charges that he laundered money for the armed wing of Hamas, helping them buy guns and bombs.

As with Bishara, the Shin Bet had been bugging Salah's every phone call for many months and had supposedly accumulated mountains of evidence against him. Salah spent more than two years in jail, the judges repeatedly accepting the Shin Bet's advice that his requests for bail be refused, as this secret evidence was studied in minute detail at his lengthy trial. In the closing stages, as it became clear that the Shin Bet's case was evaporating, the prosecution announced a plea bargain. Salah agreed (possibly unwisely, but understandably after two years in jail) to admit minor charges of financial impropriety in return for his release.

To this day, Salah does not know what he did wrong. His organisation had funded social programmes for orphans, students and widows in the occupied territories and had submitted its accounts to the security services for approval. In a recent interview, Salah observed that in the new reality he and his party had discovered that it was "as if helping orphans, sick persons, widows and students had now become illegal activities in support of terrorism".

Why was Salah targeted? In the same interview, he noted that shortly before his arrest the prime minister of the day, Ariel Sharon, had called for the outlawing of the Islamic Movement, whose popularity was greatly concerning the security establishment. Sharon was worried by what he regarded as Salah's interference in Israel's crushing of Palestinian nationalism.

Sharon's concern was two-fold: the Islamic Movement was raising funds for welfare organisations in the occupied territories at the very moment Israel was trying to isolate and starve the Palestinian population there; and Salah's main campaign, "al-Aqsa is in danger", was successfully rallying Palestinians inside Israel to visit the mosques of the Noble Sanctuary in the Old City of Jersualem, the most important symbols of a future Palestinian state.

Salah believed that responsibility fell to Palestinians inside Israel to protect these holy places as Israel's closure policies and its checkpoints were preventing Muslims in the occupied territories from reaching them. Salah also suspected that Israel was using the exclusion of Palestinians under occupation from East Jerusalem to assert its own claims to sovereignty over the site, known to Jews as Temple Mount. This was where Sharon had made his inflammatory visit backed by 1,000 armed guards that triggered the intifada; and it was control of the Temple Mount, much longed for by his predecessor, Ehud Barak, that "blew up" the Camp David negotiations, as one of Barak's advisers later noted.

Salah had become a nuisance, an obstacle to Israel realising its goals in East Jersualem and possibly in the intifada, and needed to be neutralised. The trial removed him from the scene at a key moment when he might have been able to make a difference.

That now is the fate of Bishara.

Indications that the Shin Bet wanted Bishara's scalp over his campaign for Israel's reform to a state of all its citizens can be dated back to at least the start of the second intifada in 2000. That was when, as Israel prepared for a coming general election, the departing head of the Shin Bet observed: "Bishara does not recognise the right of the Jewish people to a state and he has crossed the line. The decision to disqualify him [from standing for election] has been submitted to the Attorney General." Who expressed that view? None other than Ami Ayalon, currently contesting the leadership of the Labor party and hoping to become the official head of Israel's peace camp.

In the meantime, Bishara has been put on trial twice (unnoticed the charges later fizzled out); he has been called in for police interrogations on a regular basis; he has been warned by a state commission of inquiry; and the laws concerning Knesset immunity and travel to foreign states have been changed specifically to prevent Bishara from fulfilling his parliamentary duties.

True to Ayalon's advice, Bishara and his political party, the National Democratic Assembly (NDA), were disqualified by the Central Elections Committee during the 2003 elections. The committee cited the "expert" opinion of the Shin Bet: "It is our opinion that the inclusion of the NDA in the Knesset has increased the threat inherent in the party. Evidence of this can also be found in the ideological progress from the margins of Arab society (such as a limited circle of intellectuals who dealt with these ideas theoretically) to center stage. Today these ideas [concerning a state of all its citizens] have a discernible effect on the content of political discourse and on the public 'agenda' of the Arab sector."

But on this occasion the Shin Bet failed to get its way. Bishara's disqualification was overturned on appeal by a narrow majority of the Supreme Court's justices.

The Shin Bet's fears of Bishara resurfaced with a vengeance in March this year, when the Ma'ariv newspaper reported on a closed meeting between the Prime Minister, Ehud Olmert, and senior Shin Bet officials "concerning the issue of the Arab minority in Israel, the extent of its steadily decreasing identification with the State and the rise of subversive elements".

Ma'ariv quoted the assessment of the Shin Bet: "Particularly disturbing is the growing phenomenon of 'visionary documents' among the various elites of Israeli Arabs. At this time, there are four different visionary documents sharing the perception of Israel as a state of all citizens and not as a Jewish state. The isolationist and subversive aims presented by the elites might determine a direction that will win over the masses."

In other words, the secret police were worried that the influence of Bishara's political platform was spreading. The proof was to be found in the four recent documents cited by the Shin Bet and published by very diffrerent groups: the Democratic Constitution by the Adalah legal centre; the Ten Points by the Mossawa political lobbying group; the Future Vision by the traditionally conservative political body comprising mostly mayors known as the High Follow-Up Committee; and the Haifa Declaration, overseen by a group of academics known as Mada.

What all these documents share in common is two assumptions: first, that existing solutions to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict are based on two states and that in such an arrangement the Palestinian minority will continue living inside Israel as citizens; and second, that reforms of Israel are needed if the state is to realise equality for all citizens, as promised in its Declaration of Independence.

Nothing too subversive there, one would have thought. But that was not the view of the Shin Bet.

Following the report in Ma'ariv, the editor of a weekly Arab newspaper wrote to the Shin Bet asking for more information. Did the Shin Bet's policy not constitute an undemocratic attempt to silence the Palestinian minority and its leaders, he asked. A reply from the Shin Bet was not long in coming. The secret police had a responsibility to guard Israel "against subversive threats", it was noted. "By virtue of this responsibility, the Shin Bet is required to thwart subversive activity by elements who wish to harm the nature of the State of Israel as a democratic Jewish State -- even if they act by means of democratically provided tools -- by virtue of the principle of 'defensive democracy'.

Questioned by Israeli legal groups about this policy when it became public, the head of the Shin Bet, Yuval Diskin, wrote a letter clarifying what he meant. Israel had to be protected from anyone "seeking to change the state's basic principles while abolishing its democratic character or its Jewish character". He was basing his opinion on a law passed in 2002 that charges the Shin Bet with safeguarding the country from "threats of terror, sabotage, subversion".

In other words, in the view of the Shin Bet, a Jewish and democratic state is democratic only if you are a Jew or a Zionist. If you try to use Israel's supposed democracy to challenge the privileges reserved for Jews inside a Jewish state, that same state is entitled to defend itself against you.

The extension in the future of this principle from Bishara to the other Palestinian MKs and then on to the wider Palestinian community inside Israel should not be doubted. In the wake of the Bishara case, Israel Hasson, a former deputy director of the Shin Bet and now a right-wing Knesset member, described Israel's struggle against its Palestinian citizens as "a second War of Independence" -- the war in 1948 that founded Israel by cleansing it of 80 per cent of its Palestinians.

The Shin Bet is not, admittedly, a democratic institution, even if it is operating in a supposedly democratic environment. So how do the state's more accountable officials view the Shin Bet's position? Diskin's reply had a covering letter from Attorney-General Menachem Mazuz, the country's most senior legal officer. Mazuz wrote: "The letter of the Shin Bet director was written in coordination with the attorney general and with his agreement, and the stance detailed in it is acceptable to the attorney general."

So now we know. As Israel's Palestinian politicians have long been claiming, a Jewish and democratic state is intended as a democracy for Jews only. No one else is allowed a say -- or even an opinion.

Jonathan Cook is a writer and journalist based in Nazareth, Israel. He is the author of the forthcoming "Blood and Religion: The Unmasking of the Jewish and Democratic State" published by Pluto Press, and available in the United States from the University of Michigan Press. His website is www.jkcook.net

 

 


 

 

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