Today's Stories

May 24, 2008

Alexander Cockburn
Death-Wish Hillary Primes Manchurian Candidate

May 23, 2008

Paul Craig Roberts
War Abroad, Poverty at Home

Alan Farago
The Radical Extremists of the Building Industry

Conn Hallinan
Ballots and Bullets: From Beirut to Bolivia

Mark Engler
The World After Bush

George Wuerthner
Cars and Cows: Living Large in America

Kamran Matin
The Kurds and American Neo-Imperialism

Sandy Boyer /
Shaun Harkin
The Long Incarceration of Pol Brennan

Robert Weitzel
A "Holey" Instrument of Peace in Iraq

Cindy Sheehan
An Uphill Battle

Liaquat Ali Khan
Pakistan's Futile Constitutional Amendment

Website of the Day
A Message from the Moral Compass of the McCain Campaign

May 22, 2008

Vijay Prashad
Racist Grammar

Joanne Mariner
A Military Commissions Cheat Sheet

Sharon Smith
60 Years of Apartheid

Jeff Birkenstein
Disaster Redux: Some Early Thoughts on the Earthquake in China

Brendan McQuade
From Obama to the PRTs in Iraq

Peter Morici
The Sorry State of the Banking Industry

Niranjan Ramakrishnan
Restoration Boulevard

Dave Zirin
What I Want to Ask Mary Tillman

Ron Jacobs
CPR for the Antiwar Movement

Stephen Lendman
Immoral Hazard

Website of the Day
Hagee: God Sent Hitler to Drive the Jews to Israel

May 21, 2008

Jeffrey St. Clair
The Gothic Politics of Hillary Clinton

Nikolas Kozloff
U.S. Military Bases in South America

Alan Farago
Miami, Cuba and the Presidential Campaign

Dave Lindorff
Big John and the Scary, Scary Iran Threat

David Model
Genocide in Iraq?

Eric Walberg
Afghanistan: Who is the Enemy?

Franklin Lamb
Lebanon Gets a President

Kenneth Couesbouc
Tax Against Tyranny

Website of the Day
Child Labor and War-Affected Children: a Photo Essay

May 20, 2008

Ralph Nader
A Trip Inside Google

Uri Avnery
With Friends Like These

Patrick Irelan
The Empire and the Fleet

Ray McGovern
Come Out, Admiral Fallon, Wherever You Are

David Macaray
The UAW Strike Against American Axle

Chris Genovali
Big Oil on the Water: Skating Around the Tanker Issue

Ibrahim Fawal
Birmingham, Israel and the Nakba

Christopher Ketcham
Let Us Now Praise Famous Suicides

Andy Worthington
Guantánamo Trial Delayed

Martha Rosenberg
Merck is a Repeat Offender

Website of the Day
Defend the Students Who Pied Tom Friedman

May 19, 2008

Saul Landau
Cuba Will Live

Paul Craig Roberts
The Metamorphosis of the Conservative Movement

Brian McKenna
Brotherly Love in Philly's Badlands

Patrick Cockburn
City of the Dead: Mosul on Lockdown

B. R. Gowani
The Central Problem Pakistan Needs to Tackle

Dr. Trudy Bond
Psychologists and Torture: If Not Now, When?

Cindy Sheehan
Whose War is It?

John Mohawk
The Warriors Who Turned to Peace

Remi Kanazi
When Free Speech Doesn't Come for Free

Robert Day
I Get a Horse

Website of the Day
Evolve or Die

May 17 / 18, 2008

Alexander Cockburn
The View from the Crusaders' Castle

Tim Wise
Testosterone is Not to Blame: Why Sexism isn't the Reason for Hillary's Loss

Andy Worthington
Gitmo Trials: Betrayal, Backsliding and Boycotts

Robert Fantina
The Double-Talk Express Derails

Karim Makdisi
In the Wake of the Doha Truce

Harry Browne
Only Ireland Can Vote on EU's Future

John Ross
Suicide by Taco? The Demise of Mexico's PRD

Dave Lindorff
Fear at the Pump

Robert Weissman
Pharmaceutical Payola

Laray Polk
Bush Family Appeasement

David Yearsley
Puritans in Seattle

Ron Jacobs
Riot Squads, Privatization and the National Front

Paul Quinnett
My Last Flight

Sam Bahour
Refugees are the Key

Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor
Poverty Wages

Dr. Susan Block
The Groom May Kiss the Groom

Kim Nicolini
Paranoid Park: Inside the Fractured Landscape of Male Adolescence

Jeremy Scahill
John Cusack's War

Jeffrey St. Clair
Booked Up

Poets' Basement
Dominguez, Gerard and Davies

May 16, 2008

Stephen Soldz
Involuntary Drugging of Detainees

Jonathan Cook
Police Attack Al-Nakba March

Paul Craig Roberts
Lies of Aggression

Christopher Brauchli
A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Pharmacy

James L. Secor
Olympic Torch China: the View from Shaoxing

Franklin Lamb
Did Hezbollah Thwart a Bush/Olmert Attack on Beirut?

Linn Washington, Jr.
The Price of Protecting Racist Cops

Dave Lindorff
What West Virginia Means

May 15, 2008

Stan Cox
Big Brother Close Up

Jeff Halper
Rethinking Israel After 60 Years

Greg Moses
Living for the Children of Palestine

John Ross
Why Mexican Justice is a Euphemism

Ron Jacobs
Go to Work, Go to Jail

Binoy Kampmark
Indian Jailbirds: the Case of Binayak Sen

Eve Spangler
We Should Not Celebrate Dispossession

Martha Rosenberg
Meat Wars with South Korea

Website of the Day
Idaho Wolf Killers

May 14, 2008

Ismael Hossein-Zadeh
Oil Wars

Reza Fiyouzat
Torture, a Bully's Creed

Felice Pace
California Water Politics: Of Dams and Water Buffaloes

Hamdan A. Yousuf / Dania S. Ahmed
A Generation Defined by War

Robert Weitzel
Hillary's "Final Solution" to the Persian Problem

Ralph Nader
You're Either with the American People or the Big Auto Bosses

Dave Lindorff
Hillary, McCain and the Stupid Vote

Missy Comley Beattie
White Heaven: Hillary's W. Virginia Idyll

Neve Gordon
Israel as a Site of Struggle

Dr. Susan Block
A Washington Witch Hanging

Website of the Day
Hillary's Downfall

May 13, 2008

David Rosen
Sexual Terrorism: the Sadistic Side of Bush's War on Terror

Alan Farago
Nuclear Florida: Beachfront Reactors in an Age of Rising Sea Levels?

Saul Landau
The Crisis at Home

Saree Makdisi
Forget the Two-State Solution

Paul Craig Roberts
How Empires Fall

Andy Worthington
Gitmo's Suicide Bomber

Brother Bede Vincent
The Problem with Rev. Wright--There are Too Few Like Him

Linda Mamoun
Marketing Ethnic Cleansing

David Macaray
The Myth That Won't Die

Website of the Day
Burning the Future: Coal in America

May 12, 2008

St. Clair / Frank
The Pentagon's Toxic Legacy

Ziga Vodovnik
Rebels Against Tyranny: an Interview with Howard Zinn on Anarchism

Gary Leupp
Why All of Our Efforts Won't Stop an Attack on Iran

Frankln Lamb
Choufeit's Bloody Pentacost

Suzanne Baroud
The Ambition of Hillary Clinton

Martha Rosenberg
Farmer Ernie's Chamber of Horrors

Dave Zirin
The Boss's Boycott

Carl Finamore
I Ain't Gonna Work No More

Peter Morici
Recession Watch

Richard Rhames
The Third Way to Nowhere

Website of the Day
The Untold Story of Black New Orleans

May 10 / 11, 2008

Alexander Cockburn
Real Clear Numbers: 101,000 Casualties a Year

Franklin Lamb
Hezbollah Eases Up and Beirut Opens Its Shutters

Ciara Gilmartin
A Surge in Iraqi Detainees

Diane Farsetta
Inside a Nuclear Industry Soirée

Kent Paterson
Mother's Day in Ciudad Juarez

Alan Farago
The Social Engineers

Rannie Amiri
Beirut on the Brink

Patrick Irelan
Bolivia, Morales and the Red Ponchos

Robert Fantina
The Lexicon Legacy of George W. Bush

Nikolas Kozloff
El Salvador 2009: Another Feather in the Cap of Chavez?

George Ciccariello-Maher
The Yumare Massacre, 22 Years On

David Yearsley
Bacharach at 80

Ron Jacobs
Rosa Luxemburg's Shock Doctrine

John Holt
Can Yellowstone Survive?

David Michael Green
It's So Over

Ben Terrall
Dealing Sleep

Kim Nicolini
The Best Film of the Bush Era?

Jeffrey St. Clair
Booked Up

Poets' Basement
Gibbons, Orloski, Frisella, Gladstone-Gelman

May 9, 2008

Franklin Lamb
A Wild Day in Beirut

Andy Worthington
The Afghans of Gitmo

Benjamin Dangl
Polarizing Bolivia

Mark A. Huddle
Remembering Mildred Loving, an Unsung Hero of the Civil Rights Movement

David Macaray
Hollywood Gives SAG the Brush Off

Dave Lindorff
Team Clinton: Going Down Ugly

C.G. Estabrook
The Way We Live Now

Matt Kosko
McCain, Clinton, Obama and the Wages of Lesser-Evilism

Robert Weissman
Big Business is not the Solution to Global Poverty

Michael Dickinson
Jailing the Joint

Website of the Day
The Role of Third Parties in the U.S.A.

May 8, 2008

Sharon Smith
Rockefeller Family Fables

Saul Landau
The NATO Axiom

Laura Carlsen
A Primer on Plan Mexico

Binoy Kampmark
Food Riots are Coming to the U.S.

Kenneth Couesbouc
China's Paper Feet

Liaquat Ali Khan
Pakistan's Constitutional Shenanigans

Franklin Lamb
Blindsided, Hezbollah Mulls Its Response

Sen. Russ Feingold
Government in Secret

George Wuerthner
The Problems with Conservation Easements

Richard W. Behan
A Brief Exposé of a Fraudulent War

Adam Federman
Marching for Sean Bell

Website of the Day
State of the Air

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Business As Usual in the U.S.

Justice Department's Revelations on Torture

By ROBERT FANTINA

It has long been an accepted fact of life that the U.S. not only condones but also practices the torture of political prisoners. While President George Bush, Cabinet members and members of Congress decry the human rights violations of other nations, they are not nearly so critical of those violations when perpetrated under their orders.

When pictures of Iraqi prisoners being tortured by smiling U.S. soldiers at Abu Gharib first became public in 2004, the world was outraged. Mr. Bush proclaimed that such situations were an aberration, the willful violation of U.S. policy by a few rogue soldiers. Some of those soldiers were arrested, tried and convicted while their ‘superiors’ shook their heads and went on their merry way. While the controversy surrounding the apparently fairly common use of waterboarding, a technique of torture dating back at least to the Spanish Inquisition and outlawed by U.S. law and the Geneva Conventions, kept rearing its ugly head, Mr. Bush steadfastly stated “This government does not torture people.”

Yet the world learned that ‘this government’ does indeed utilize ‘harsh interrogation techniques,’ techniques that the civilized world defines as torture. And now Mr. Bush’s empty words are exposed for the lies that they are: the Justice Department (one of the U.S.’s many oxymora) itself has disclosed this fact. A forthcoming Justice Department report states that hundreds of agents of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) reported to that department ‘interrogation techniques’ that they felt were in violation of U.S. law and the Geneva Conventions. The report further states that, when the FBI agents reported these horrendous violations of  basic human rights, they were told not to participate in them, apparently because they violated FBI regulations, but nothing was done to stop them. Those FBI witnesses also stated that torture is ineffective in procuring any valuable information, a direct contradiction of Mr. Bush’s repeated statements about the benefits of ‘harsh interrogation techniques.’

The cover on the U.S. as the world’s beacon of morality has long since been blown, yet Mr. Bush and his cohorts continue to act as if it were a reality, and many Americans, like lemmings, follow his lead. The facts that are such an anathema to Mr. Bush seem to receive the same reaction from many U.S. citizens. Yes, they might say, the U.S. invades sovereign nations; indiscriminately slaughters the men, women and children of those nations; tortures their captured prisoners; ignores the needs of its own soldiers and their loved ones, often causing their families at home to live in poverty, and discarding wounded soldiers to a more or less indifferent veterans’ health care system; bankrupts the nation as it destroys another one, but it is still the greatest country in the world. The story of the emperor’s new clothes quickly comes to mind. When, one wonders, will the citizens of the U.S. hear the child proclaim that the emperor is naked or, in this case, that the U.S. government is totally lacking in moral values?

So once again the world is faced with the atrocities of the U.S. Once again Congress will be called upon by the few voices not yet silenced by corporate American buyouts to investigate the lies of the Bush Administration, and the perpetration of human rights violations that are universally condemned by Congress whenever the torturers are either not Americans or not under American orders. And once again the world can expect a few press conferences where it will be subjected to tired old men jawing indignantly and meaninglessly about this latest abuse of presidential powers. They will proclaim that such behaviors are beneath the ‘greatest nation in the world,’ and vow that such human rights violations will never again be committed by the U.S. This farce will continue for a few days, perhaps as long as the pseudo-indignation over the horrific conditions injured soldiers face at the Walter Reed Medical Center. That story broke in early 2007 and members of Congress got weeks of good public relations mileage from it. Little changed for the victims, but a few good press conferences and U.S. citizens were soon lulled back into their stupor of nationalist superiority.

And what, one wonders, will the presidential candidates have to say about these new revelations of torture? Arizona Senator John McCain, soon to be officially anointed as the Republican candidate, has expressed his hatred for the Vietnamese people due to his war experiences in that catastrophic chapter of U.S. imperialism. Perhaps he will be sympathetic to the hatred America’s leaders apparently feel toward the Iraqi people who have the gall to show reluctance to turn their natural resources over to the U.S., and the Afghanistan people who also resist U.S. imperial designs. So what if such people are tortured?

And what will Senators Barrack Obama and Hillary Rodham Clinton, the still- contending Democratic candidates, say about this situation? As Democrats they have the traditional dread of appearing to be soft on whatever the threat du jour to the U.S. happens to be. A generation ago it was the ‘Red Menace,’ a Communist hiding in every closet and under every bed, just waiting to take over the U.S. and enslave its hapless citizens. Anyone who had ever watched a special television program about Russia, it seemed, was suspect.

Today, with the ‘Red Menace’ passé (whether it was defeated, deflated or basically, like weapons of mass destruction, never existed, is not often discussed), a new threat for Democrats to flex their jingoistic muscles on has come into play. ‘The threat of terrorism,’ whatever on earth that means, must be defeated. Mr. Bush tells us that the war in Iraq is the central front in the war against terrorism; those who wish to extricate the U.S. from this national disaster are weak, spineless, anti-U.S., etc., etc. So as Mr. Obama and Mrs. Clinton craft reactions to the Justice Department’s revelations about common, systematic and ubiquitous torture, they must walk a fine line between alienating thinking people who are appalled by the crimes the U.S. commits, and still appearing to be ‘strong on terrorism.’ If they could convert their verbal gyrations in doing so into physical ones they could be champions on ‘Dancing with the Stars.’

But the outcome is far too predictable: some huffing and puffing about human rights violations, coupled with bellicose statements about defeating the terrorists, and then an eerie silence as the nation turns its eyes back to the latest Hollywood scandal or some equally trivial nonsense. Members of Congress will breathe a sigh of relief that, once again, they didn’t really have to do anything in order to keep their easy, high-paying jobs. And more innocent people will be victims of horrific torture committed in the name of the U.S.’s twisted version of freedom.

Robert Fantina is author of 'Desertion and the American Soldier: 1776--2006.   

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