Today's Stories

July 15, 2008

Michael Hudson
Why the Bail Out of Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae is Bad Economic Policy

July 14, 2008

Uri Avnery
Will Israel and / or the US Attack Iran?

Paul Craig Roberts
Enabling Tyranny

Trish Schuh
Talking to Iran's Only Jewish Member of Parliament: an Interview with Morris Motamed

Patrick Cockburn
Immunity in Iraq

Mike Whitney
Betancourt Unbound

Alan Farago
Will Miami's Cubans Vote Blue?

Seth Sandronsky
Taxing U.S. Stocks and Bonds

Phyllis Pollack
Stones Paint It Black

Website of the Day
Our Pal in Butte, Jackie Corr, RIP

July 12 / 13, 2008

Alexander Cockburn
Lock and Load--It's the Law!

Jeffrey St. Clair
The Origins of the Western Greens

James Abourezk
Talking World War III Blues: From Dylan to Iran

Nicole Colson
The Ethanol Scam

Stan Cox
Fixing a Broken Agriculture

Ismael Hossein-Zadeh
Is There an Oil Shortage?

Wajahat Ali /
Omid Safi
The Future of Iran: an Interview with Iranian Nobel Laureate Shirin Ebadi

John Stauber
There May be a Left, But is it Moving? An Interview with David Sirota

Alan Farago
The Crash of the King of Liquidity

Missy Beattie
Dark Neighborhoods

Robert Fantina
Bush's Last Yes Man: Canada, Guantanamo and Yankee Poodles

Rannie Amiri
Mubarak Hires the Mosque

Gregory Kafoury
After the Obama Betrayal

Fran Shor
The Audacity of Hype

Martha Rosenberg
Why Heifer International is Rolling in Dung

David Macaray
Will There be an Actors Strike?

Andrew Wimmer
No Lies! No War!

Ron Jacobs
They Call Me the Seeker

Farzana Versey
The Kashmir Chiaroscuro

Kim Nicolini
Angelina Jolie's Wanted: Taking the M-Fers Down with Guns and Exploding Rats

Poets' Basement
Wright, Fleming, Solomon and Birnbaum

Website of the Weekend
Parsing Jesse Ventura

July 11, 2008

Kevin Alexander Gray
Why Does Barack Obama Hate My Family?

Sasan Fayazmanesh
Historical Amnesia and the Shoot Down of Iran Air Flight 655

Peter Morici
Breaking Down the Trade Deficit

Mike Whitney
Worse Than McCain?

Manuel Garcia, Jr.
Oiling the War Machine

Robert Weissman
Crime, Punishment and ExxonMobil

Ramzy Baroud
The Not-So-Historic Barak-Talabani Handshake

Kelly Overton
If There is a Chimp Heaven

Adrian Burgos
In Praise of Jules Tygiel

Website of the Day
Wendell Berry on Mountaintop Removal

July 10, 2008

Brian McKenna
McCain's Melanoma Cover-Up

Paul Craig Roberts
Watching Greed Murder the Economy

Saul Landau
Mississippi River Blues

Ron Jacobs
Who Will Leave Iraq First?

Joshua Frank
Cutting Deals with Big Timber's Darth Vader

Peter Morici
What's Driving the Wall Street Rout

Alan Maass
Jesse Helms Finally Does the Right Thing

Robert Weissman
Humanitarian Failure at the G8

William Blum
Dr. Strangelove

Alan Farago
Coral Reef Meltdown

Website of the Day
Lieberman Must Go!

July 9, 2008

Ismael Hossein-Zadeh
Are They Really Oil Wars?

Luis Rodriguez
The Deadly Fallout from Gang Injunctions

Sheldon Richman
What's Wrong with Selling Your Vote?

Fatemeh Keshavarz
Lessons from Sa'di of Shiraz on "Enhanced Interrogation Techniques"

Chad Hanson
Blowing Smoke: Logging Industry Lies on Forest Fires and Climate Change

Sen. Russ Feingold
The Problems with the FISA Bill

Niranjan Ramakrishnan
Defining Deviancy Down with FISA

Dave Lindorff
Paul Krugman's Blind Spot

Stanley Heller
A Damned Good Assembly

Philip Rizk
Sick at the Gaza Crossing

Website of the Day
Mumia on Nader

July 8, 2008

Nikolas Kozloff
Riding the Colombia Gravy Train

Laura Carlsen
North America Doesn't Exist: the New Geography of Trade

Mike Whitney
Bush's Rampage in Somalia

Andy Worthington
Scandal at Diego Garcia

Patrick Irelan
The Empire Goes to the Movies

Chellis Glendinning
The Un-tied States of America

David Macaray
A Union Story

Dave Lindorff
Mumia's Long-Shot Appeal

John Chuckman
The Myths of Independence Day

Phillip Doe
FISA and the Decline of America

Website of the Day
Daniel Ellsberg on Warrantless Wiretap Bill

July 7, 2008

Patrick Bond
Can Reparations for Apartheid Profits be Won in US Courts?

Kathy Kelly
Cold Shoulders

Andy Worthington
Repatriation as Russian Roulette

Clifton Ross
A Rescue Staged for the Screen

Elizabeth Schulte
Obama's War Room

Ralph Nader
The Patriotism of Deeds

Dave Lindorff
Keeping Count

Binoy Kampmark
The World According to Jesse Helms

Stephen Fleischman
Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Change

Website of the Day
Time for a Change

July 5 / 6, 2008

Alexander Cockburn
Could Anyone be "Worse" Than Bush?

Jeffrey St. Clair /
Joshua Frank
Preliminary Notes from No Man's Land

Patrick Cockburn
Blowback from a Strike on Iran

Mike Whitney
Hunkering Down in Afghanistan with Field Marshall Obama

Robert Fantina
Obama, Iraq and Change

Binoy Kampmark
The Anwar Case: Snitching and Sodomizing

Rannie Amiri
Can Nasrallah Unite Lebanon?

Eric Ruder
Hidden Casualties

Brian Cloughley
Israel Flexes Its Muscles

William Blum
Some Thoughts on Patriotism

Frank Barat
The One-Word Solution

Christopher Brauchli
Bush's Phony Pollution Accounting

David Yearsley
Rubbert Shines, as US Envoy Puts Foot in His Mouth

Ron Jacobs
U.S. Blues

Karim Makdisi
On Soccer and Politics in Lebanon

Wendy Thompson /
Chris Kutalik
What Can We Learn from the American Axle Strike?

N.D. Jayaprakash
The NPT as a Roadblock to Disarmament

Ramzy Baroud
Journalistic Imperatives

Kelly Overton
Animal Rights and Obama

Richard Neville
Bitch Fights and Tomorrow's Top Model

Poets' Basement
Anderson, Gibbons, Matson and Buknatski

Website of the Weekend
Ginsberg and Cassady on "Extremists"

July 4, 2008

Kathy Kelly
Istiklal

Dave Lindorff
My War Story

Paul Krassner
Confessions of a Barista

Jackie Corr
In the Footsteps of Evel Knievel: Obama Heads Back to Butte

Laray Polk
Military-Industrial Convergence

Dan Bacher
Dead Runs: Salmon Fishing Banned in Central Valley Rivers

Walter Brasch
The Rocket's Red Glare--May be Chinese

Charles Modiano
Hall of Fame Hypocrisy

Website of the Day
Springsteen: Independence Day

July 3, 2008

Sharon Smith
Exxon's Legal Guardians

Andy Worthington
Another Torture Victim Gets Charged

Laura Carlsen
NAFTA and the Elephant in the Room

Peter Morici
Crisis Grips the Jobs Market

Ramzi Kysia
Breaking Into a Prison

Martha Rosenberg
Mandatory School Milk and the Early Death of Football Players

Anne Landman
Who Really Benefits From Voluntary Codes of Corporate Conduct?

Dave Zirin
Grand Theft Hoops

Kristin Bricker
US Contractor Leads Torture Training in Mexico

Website of the Day
Bush Tours America to Survey Damage from His Presidency

July 2, 2008

Patrick Irelan
Holy Obama

Vijay Prashad
Lunch with Karzai

Brian Cloughley
Sense of Honor, French and US Style

Ralph Nader
Economic Domino Theory

Robert Fantina
General Stupidity: McCain, Obama and Clark

Dave Lindorff
What's So Special About Veterans?

Parvez Ahmed
Obama and Those Pesky Muslim Rumors

Robert Bryce
The Democrats and Off-Shore Drilling

Website of the Day
King Corn: Q&A

July 1, 2008

Alexander Cockburn
Two Months Later, Seymour Hersh Strains to Catch Up With CounterPunch

Mike Whitney
Getting to the Heart of America's Economic Crisis: an Interview with Michael Hudson

Douglas Macgregor
Obama's General?

Steven Higgs
Fighting the NAFTA Super-Highway

Andy Worthington
Guantánamo as Alice in Wonderland

Binoy Kampmark
The Global Seed Police

Dave Lindorff
Blood Money Democrats

Roger Burbach
Fighting Food Fascism

Richard W. Behan
The Story Behind George Bush's Lies

Gary Leupp
The McCain Edge Among Voters on Iraq

Website of the Day
Mountaintop Removal and the Fight for Coalfield Justice

July 15, 2008

The Stockades of Fort Dix

When Torture Was Practiced on U.S. Soil

By HOWARD LISNOFF

Four years before I was brought to Fort Dix, New Jersey, shackled on a civilian bus that was filled with soldiers who had gone either AWOL or were wanted as deserters, a riot had taken place at the stockade on that base.*   The riot was in response to brutality against prisoners in the brig.  Thirty-eight men charged as rioters were starved, beaten, and caged.  Tensions had been growing for months between the military brass and some of the MPs who guarded the soldiers in the brig.  The population of the stockade had grown from over 200 to more than 700 as the Vietnam War became more and more unpopular among soldiers and the larger society.  By the time the war was over in 1975 (direct U.S. military involvement ended in 1973), more than 500,000 men had either gone AWOL or deserted.

Originally named the Fort Dix Thirty-Eight, soldiers who were charged with rioting faced courts-martial, resulting in the sentencing of some men to three years in military prison. About the same time official representatives of the U.S. traveled to Vietnam to investigate the use of the infamous tiger cages used against the Vietnamese.  In October 1969, just before the huge nationwide antiwar rally on October 15, thousands of demonstrators flooded the streets of Wrightstown, New Jersey where Fort Dix is located in support of the antiwar soldiers.

All of the detainees who exited the bus I traveled on were placed in several two-story white clapboard World War II-era barracks.  The stockade was located just beyond these barracks, now a cinder-block building surrounded with barbed wire, replacing the clapboard buildings where prisoners had been housed when the 1969 riot took place.

When I arrived at Dix, I knew about the conditions at the stockade and the riots and courts-martial that had taken place.  I was frightened by the prospect of being placed in this stockade. The conditions that led to the riot and the resulting trials had been publicized in antiwar literature.  Similar to the present, however, trying to determine the truth about military issues was difficult to find in the mainstream press. Much information had either been self-censored by writers who dealt with the war, censored by editors, or reported through the filter of what the government wanted known. There was no such thing as “imbedded journalists” during Vietnam, in the sense of how reporters are used today, but self-censorship and censorship by media outlets was the same during the Vietnam War as it is today. Only a few brave writers challenged the status quo.

I was lucky.  I was able to afford a lawyer who argued before the company commander to keep me out of the brig.  I had appealed orders to report for active duty and was savvy about not speaking to military brass without my lawyer present. Many, however, who were not so fortunate were immediately sent to the prison.

In 1977 I applied to the Carter amnesty program, and my discharge was retroactively upgraded to 1973.  I had balked at using the Ford clemency program of 1974, its guidelines punitive toward military resisters, clearly favoring draft resisters. Military resisters, under the Ford program, were given “bad” discharges that could later be upgraded to clemency discharges, discharges that offered no benefits. While the Carter program was seen as more “liberal” in its treatment of military resisters, only about 16,000 benefited from this amnesty out of about 430,000. Few veterans received a discharge “under honorable conditions,” and nearly all who received upgraded discharges were barred from receiving any benefits.  The latter was seen as vindictive and reflected the nation’s and government’s disdain for those who had opposed the war from within the military.  Technically, a soldier who received a so-called “bad” discharge, and did not oppose the war, could receive veterans’ benefits, but those who opposed the war from within the ranks of the military were barred by law from receiving any benefits. Many soldiers who resisted the Vietnam War were in dire need of benefits.

When cases of torture were reported at the Guantanamo Bay Detention Camp, opened in 2002 to house over 700 prisoners from the war in Afghanistan, I was not surprised.  When detainees there were originally denied Constitutional rights and rights under the Geneva Conventions, I was not shocked, knowing just how far the government and military could go in inflicting punishment at bases in the U.S. and around the world. The military had inflicted abuse on its own soldiers during the Vietnam War, targeting those who did not fit the mold of military discipline.

In 2004, when reports of torture and abuse by the military at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq were reported, once again I knew that none of this was new and had been practiced on U.S. soil.

The U.S. is supposed to be a beacon of democracy to the world.  I was naïve enough to believe this ideal during the Vietnam War, and thought that the lessons of that war would humanize the society.  Instead, the government has sought to extend its neo-liberal economic agenda around the globe and to project raw military power in preemptive wars.  It has been a long, long time since the nation actually has had to defend itself against an enemy. With the outbreak of World War II, the nation had to act.  Following the Cold War, intelligence agencies and the military were not able to stop the terror attacks of September 11, 2001.  Instead they launched a war against the people of Afghanistan, stole rights from U.S. citizens in the name of security, and launched a war against Iraq, leaving that nation in ruins.

Howard Lisnoff is an educator and freelance writer.  He can be reached through his Web site at www.notesofamilitaryresister.net. 

*Crowell, Joan.  Fort Dix Stockade Our Prison Camp Next Door. New York: Links Books, 1974.

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