Today's Stories

September 26, 2008

Jonathan Cook
When Archaeology Becomes a Curse

September 25, 2008

Michael Hudson
The Insanity of the $700 Billion Giveaway

Sharon Smith
Democrats and Corporate Bailouts

Ralph Nader
Who Will Show Some Backbone Against the Bailout?

Christopher Ketcham
The Economy of Dead Sperm (or What I Learned From My Race-Car Grandpa Who Had No Bankers)

Eric Toussaint
Is Another Third World Debt Crisis in the Offing?

Robert Weissman
Getting Wall Street Pay Reform Right

David Estabrook
A Better Bailout Plan

Nikolas Kozloff
The Voyage of the SS Peter the Great

Steve Early
The High Price of Purple Dissent

Judith Scherr
Blue Helmets in Haiti

Laray Polk
South Ossetia and Abkhazia: Notes from the Inside

Website of the Day
Letterman Spanks McCain

September 24, 2008

Paul Craig Roberts
The Bitter Fruits of Deregulation

Nikolas Kozloff
Palin at the UN: a Tutorial from Uribe

Robert Weissman
The Financial Crisis: How and Why Congress Should Play for Time

Andy Worthington
The Guantánamo Trials: Govt. Says Six Years Not Long Enough to Prepare Evidence

Steve Conn
Will Nader's Warning be Acknowledged in the Presidential Debates?

Karyn Strickler
The $700,000,000,000 Power Punch

Diane Farsetta
Stealth Marketers Gone Wild

Dennis Loo
Poisoned Legacy

John Halle
Wealth Tax Now!

Khalil Nakhleh
Palestinians Under the Occupation

Website of the Day
Nader: Debate Crasher

September 23, 2008

Rev. Jesse Jackson, Sr.
Bail Out on This Bailout

Michael Hudson
Henry Paulson and the New Yazoo Land Scandal

Tariq Ali
Why was the Marriott Targeted?

Patrick Dyer
A Death Row Visit with Troy A. Davis

Franklin Lamb
Hezbollah and the Palestinians

Joshua Frank
Oppose Barack Obama? How Dare Thee!

Alan Farago
Pushing the Referees: How the Financial Crisis Occurred

Dave Lindorff
The Bailout Will Kill the Dollar

Tanya M. Kerssen /
Roger Burbach
Bolivia's Popular Upheaval

Harvey Wasserman
Nuclear Power Liabilities Dwarf Bush's Wall Street Bailout

Website of the Day
Hammered by the Irish: the Video

September 22, 2008

Michael Hudson
The Paulson-Bernanke Bank Bailout Plan: Will the Cure be Worse Than the Crisis?

Mike Whitney
Mushroom Clouds Over Wall Street

Christopher Ketcham
Let It Collapse!

Ron Jacobs
The Predators' Bailout

Anne-Marie McManus
Lost in the Rhetoric of Crisis

Robert Weitzel
The Twin Terrors of the Holy Land: a Sexy Fundamentalist and a White-Haired Zionist

Wajahat Ali
An Interview with Howard Dean

John Ross
A New Cold War Comes to Latin America

Steve Breyman
Does the U.S. Really Need Cluster Bombs?

Patrick Bond
On the Bellies of the Filth

Uri Avnery
Fly, Tzipora, Fly

Carl J. Mayer
An Open Letter to Michael Moore (AKA God's Pen Pal): Whatever Happened to Voting Your Conscience?

Website of the Day
Stop the Execution of Troy Anthony Davis

September 20 / 21, 2008

Alexander Cockburn
Is This the Stake Through Neoliberalism's Heart?

Michael Hudson
America's Own Kleptocracy

Pam Martens
The Wall Street Model: Unintelligent Design

Lila Rajiva
Putting Lipstick on an AIG

Mike Whitney
Full-Spectrum Breakdown

Richard Rhames
A Bailout to Nowhere

Bill Moyers /
Michael Winship
The NY Yankees and the U.S. Economy

Bill and Kathleen Christison
The Making of Recent U.S. Middle East Policies: a New Study of Neocon Influence

Susan Block
Palin as Venus in Furs: the Dominatrix Politics of Drilling and Killing

Robert Fantina
Republicans and Subpoenas: Never the Twain Shall Meet

Heidi Walters
Hung Up on Route 36: an 18-Wheeler and a Nuclear Cask

David Yearsley
Germany's Lost Organs: When Bigger Was Better

Raymond J. Lawrence
The Politics of Tribulation: Sarah Palin and the Rapture

David Rosen
One Billion Pills Later: Viagra at 10

David Michael Green
Living in Sarah Palin's America

Anthony Papa
Imprisoned Voters and the Elections

Niranjan Ramakrishnan
Freddie, Fannie, Daddy, Nanny

Howard Lisnoff
When We Notice the Homeless

John Goekler
Leaving Every Child Behind

Missy Beattie
Impalement

Dave Zirin
Leave Josh Howard Alone

Charles R. Larson
Holden Caulfield, Rest in Peace

Tim Matson
Too Big for His Birches: Woodlot Economics

Susie Day
Attack of the Angry Fetus

Poets' Basement
Corseri, Gibbons, Jenkins and Ford

Website of the Weekend
Dylan & Baez: Deportees

September 19, 2008

Steven T. Banko
McCain's Passion Play

Mike Whitney
The Point of No Return

Michael Hudson
The Dow Jones' Wonderfully Cheesy Addition

William Kaufman
Shattering the Glass-Steagall Act: the Bi-Partisan Origins of the Financial Crisis

Brenda Norrell
The Fall of Lehman Bros.: Blowback for Black Mesa?

Keeanga-Yamatta Taylor
The New Rhetoric of Racism: Why Won't Obama Call It Out?

Clifton Ross
Bolivia: Cleaning Up the Bull Ring

Dave Lindorff
Hang On to Your Wallets: the Government's About to Rescue Us!

Cynthia McKinney
Seize the Time!

Susan Hurlich
Storm Survivors: a Dispatch from Cuba

Michael Donnelly
Let's Hand It All Over to the Democrats (They Helped Create This Mess)

Website of the Day
The Crisis Explained

September 18, 2008

Benjamin Dangl
The Machine Gun and the Meeting Table

Harvey Wasserman
The Senate's Drill, Drill, Drill Scam

Susan Abulhawa
The Lobby Has Spoken: Biden and Israel

Robert Weissman
After the Fall: the Financial Re-Regulatory Agenda

Anne-Marie McManus
McCain's Cinderella: the Fetishization of Sarah Palin

Corey D. B. Walker
The Poverty of 21st Century Progressivism

William S. Lind
Senator O'Bush: Why Obama is Wrong on Iran and Afghanistan

Ron Jacobs
Washington's False Logic of Torture

Dave Lindorff
American and China: Joined at the Hip

Binoy Kampmark
How Damien Hirst Got Away With It

Website of the Day
An Invisible Army

September 17, 2008

Stephen Conn
Palin and the Politics of Big Oil

Forrest Hylton
Reactionary Rampage in Bolivia

Patrick Cockburn
Petraeus Leaves Iraq

Gregory Elich
Inside North Korea

Ralph Nader
How the U.S. Auto Industry Wrecked Itself

Franklin Lamb
The Palestinians of Shabra-Shatila

Pam Martens
The Gang's All Here: Bush, McCain and the Old Iran/Contra Team

Dave Lindorff
The End of the Blue Chip Economy

Peter Morici
The Damage Deepens

Stanley Heller
The Killing of Count Folke Bernadotte

Douglas Valentine
Rambling David Foster Wallace

Website of the Day
Free Cindy McCain!

September 16, 2008

Paul Craig Roberts
US Economy: Rudderless and Reeling from Direct Hits

Tiphaine Dickson
Citizen Palin: Why Sarah Palin Quoted Westbrook Pegler

Stan Goff
America is Now Rome: an Open Letter to Christian Troops in Iraq and Afghanistan

Uri Avnery
Tzipi's Choice

Michael Winship
Lipstick on Polar Bears

Jeff Halper
Warehousing Palestinians

Patrick Irelan
Bolivia Versus the Empire

Oscar Gonzalez
Who's Dumber? Ike's Refugees or Wall Street's?

Binoy Kampmark
Cheney and His Records

Fatemeh Keshavarz
Muslims are at Peace with You

Sen. Russ Feingold
Restoring the Rule of Law

Website of the Day
The Next Great Rock Band?

September 15, 2008

Mike Whitney
The Tumbrils Roll at Dawn

Peter Morici
Toxic Lehman

Patrick Cockburn
Take Another Look at the Surge

Charles R. Larson
The Maverick Has No Clothes

Jonathan Cook
The Expulsion of Palestinians from Jaffa

Nikolas Kozloff
Racist Rhetoric in Bolivia

Roger Burbach
Morales Confronts the Insurrection: Bolivia and the Echoes of Allende

Helen Redmond
Where's the Health Care Bailout?

David Michael Green
The Democrats Do Poland

David Macaray
The Boeing Strike

Ralph Nader
Remembering Peter Camejo

Website of the Day
The Ballad of Sarah Palin

September 26, 2008

The Landmark Trial of Chuckie Taylor, Jr.

Passport Fraud and Torture

By JOANNE MARINER

A landmark trial is scheduled to begin this week, in which a senior government official is accused of responsibility for vicious acts of torture committed in the name of fighting terrorism.

Alas, the defendant is not one of the many Bush Administration officials who so richly deserve their moment in the dock. But the trial does mark the first application of a federal law criminalizing extraterritorial acts of torture--a law that could someday be used to prosecute "war on terror" abuses.

The defendant in this case, Charles "Chuckie" Taylor, Jr., is the Boston-born son of former Liberian President Charles Taylor, himself facing trial before an international court in The Hague. An American citizen, Chuckie Taylor was taken into U.S. custody in March 2006, when he attempted to enter the United States at Miami airport. He arrived in Miami the day after his father was handed over to the UN-backed Special Court for Sierra Leone on charges of orchestrating violence in Sierra Leone's bloody civil war.

Chuckie Taylor was initially charged with passport fraud, for lying about his father's identity on his passport application. Later in the year, after pressure from human rights groups, he was indicted on charges of torture, conspiracy to torture, and using a firearm during the commission of a violent crime. Subsequent indictments included an added count of conspiracy to use a firearm during a crime of violence.

The facts set out in the indictments are chilling. Between 1997 and 2003, when Taylor headed Liberia's notorious Anti-Terrorist Unit, he allegedly burned prisoners' body parts, subjected them to electrical shocks, imprisoned them in holes in the ground, and summarily shot three victims selected at random from a group of rebels. Information available to Human Rights Watch also suggests that the Anti-Terrorist Unit was responsible for abductions, rape, and the recruitment of child soldiers

Human Rights Abuses Committed Abroad

The Extraterritorial Torture Statute--the federal law that criminalizes torture abroad--was passed in 1994, just before the United States ratified the Convention against Torture. Its passage was meant to give effect to Article 5 of the Convention against Torture, which requires state parties to prosecute acts of torture, regardless of where they were committed, as long as the alleged perpetrators are found on the state's territory. The purpose of this requirement is to ensure that torturers have no safe haven: that no matter where they go, they will not escape prosecution for their crimes.

Under the statute, therefore, not only can acts of torture committed by American citizens be prosecuted, but so too can abuses committed by non-citizens present on U.S. soil. Until last year, the statute was unique in this respect: Other laws that criminalized human rights abuses occurring abroad only applied to U.S. nationals or members of the U.S. armed forces. (In December 2007, the Genocide Accountability Act, following the same approach as the Extraterritorial Torture Statute, made it a federal crime for any American citizen or anyone in the United State to commit genocide anywhere.)

Disappointingly, the statute, despite its breadth, sat on the books for years without being applied. One possible explanation for this is the fact that atrocities committed abroad can be difficult to investigate, and may require specialized linguistic and political expertise. Yet in analogous cases for which the political will to prosecute exists--for example, drug-trafficking cases in which the actions at issue were committed abroad--U.S. prosecutors and investigators have shown both a willingness and an ability to put together cases.

In recent years, the U.S. government has taken steps to make these prosecutions more likely. Still, groups like Human Rights Watch have urged the Department of Justice to devote greater attention to these cases and to ensure that they are investigated and prosecuted.

Crimes Such as These Will Not Go Unanswered (Unless...)

In indicting Chuckie Taylor, U.S. officials pledged that the case was not a fluke: that other perpetrators of torture would also be pursued. While acknowledging that it was the first time that federal prosecutors had brought a case for extraterritorial torture, Assistant Attorney General Alice S. Fisher promised that "[c]rimes such as these will not go unanswered."

Unfortunately, the U.S. record of prosecuting acts of torture committed abroad remains notoriously poor, at least when the torture has been ordered and committed by U.S. officials.

Despite countless testimonies of abuse and a long and revealing paper trial, no senior official or CIA operative has been held accountable for the torture of terrorism suspects in U.S. custody. Indeed, when the Department of Justice launched a formal investigation last January into the CIA's destruction of tapes showing the interrogations of detainees who were subject to torture, Attorney General Michael Mukasey insisted to the Senate Judiciary Committee that the investigation would not examine the legality of the interrogations themselves.

The Taylor prosecution is important and encouraging. Yet one cannot help but wonder whether torture is only considered deplorable when carried out by African warlords and their thuggish offspring. Were the Justice Department to announce a case involving U.S. counterterrorism abuses, the values expressed in the Extraterritorial Torture Statute would seem more secure.

Joanne Mariner is an attorney at Human Rights Watch in New York. Her discussion of the Chuckie Taylor case is based on information provided by Elise Keppler, senior counsel at Human Rights Watch's International Justice Program. A more detailed and comprehensive analysis of the case can be found in an article written by Keppler, Shirley Jean, and J. Paxton Marshall, which appeared in the spring/summer 2008 issue of Human Rights Brief.

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