Today's Stories

May 6, 2009

Doug Peacock
The Fate of the Yellowstone Grizzly

May 5, 2009

William Blum
Torture and Mr. Obama

Uri Avnery
Netanyahu's Plan

Steven Higgs
Autism and Toxic Pollution

Dean Baker
Why Economists Should Learn Arithmetic

Daniel Wolff
The Education of Rachel Carson

Sibel Edmonds
The Broken Congress

Carole King Klein
A New Chance to Save the Northern Rockies

Fidel Castro
Giving One's All

Belén Fernández
Oil and Aguardiente in the Ecuadoran Elections

Dan Bacher
Schwarzenegger's Big Lie About Fish vs. Jobs

Website of the Day
"I Married Isis on the Fifth Day of May"

May 4, 2009

James G. Abourezk
The AIPAC Spy Case

Jeff Leys
Obama's War Budget

Patrick Cockburn
Afghan Ayatollahs Press Marital Rape Law

Andy Worthington
A Start on Guantánamo, But Not Enough

Jaime Avilés
Mexico's Plague-Bringers

David Swanson
An Even Worse Bybee Memo

Paul Craig Roberts
Working with Jack Kemp

P. Sainath
Celeb Crusades and the Death of Politics

Eugenia Tsao
Canada's Obama and the Cult of the Prof

Benjamin Dangl
Protest and Rubber Bullets in Paraquay

Sami Al-Arian
Mourning William Moffitt

Website of the Day
"Soldiers Are Cutting Us Down": Kent State, May 4, 1970

May 1 - 3, 2009

Alexander Cockburn
Game-Changers: Specter Jumps, Souter Quits

Gary Leupp
Dropping the AIPAC Spying Case

Peter Linebaugh
The Key to the Bastille

Jeffrey St. Clair /
Joshua Frank:
Half Life of a Toxic War: Iraq's Wrecked Environment

C. G. Estabrook
Minion of the Long War

Patrick Cockburn
Kabul's New Elite

Mike Whitney
Economy on the Ropes

Pierre Sprey /
Winslow Wheeler
What "Sweeping Overhaul" of the Pentagon?

Andy Worthington
Al-Marri's Plea Deal: Dictatorial Powers Unchallenged

Mairead Maguire
Stand Up to Israeli Apartheid: a Letter to Obama From a Nobel Peace Prize Laureate

Nadia Hijab
The Israel Boycott is Biting

Diane Farsetta
Life, Death and Water Policy

Michael Calderón-Zaks
The Déjà Vu Flu: Why Much of the Discussion About Swine Flu is Racist

Richard Rhames
When Piggies Come Home to Roost: Swine Flu and the Industrial Meat Gulags

Russell Mokhiber
Inside the Beltway Baucus

Ramzy Baroud
Clinton's Unpromising Start

Rannie Amiri
Understanding Lebanon's June Elections

Deb Reich
No Talking, Dammit!

Steven Higgs
Indiana Criminalizes Dissent: Roadblocks on the NAFTA Highway

Brian Cloughley
Malice in Blunderland

David Michael Green
The Party's Over

Farzana Versey
Sex, Swat and Susan Boyle

Jim Goodman
Think Before You Eat: Agriculture and the Environment

Carl Finamore
New Prescription for a Healthy Union Movement

Christopher Brauchli
The Sounds of Silence: the Texas Option

Susie Day
The Real Cause of Unemployment: Employees!

David Yearsley
Nuts Over Beethoven

Lorenzo Wolff
Three Minutes of Perfection

Peter Stone Brown
Dancing with Dylan

Poets' Basement Dominguez, Orloski and Springate

Website of the Weekend
May Day Europe

April 30, 2009

Ellen Cantarow
Obama and "Two States": Seamless Continuity From Bush Time

Dana L. Cloud
The McCarthyism That Horowitz Built

Paul W. Lovinger /
Jeannette Hassberg
A Nation of Laws

Binoy Kampmark
Swine at the Trough: the Business of Pandemics

Brian Downing
The Perils of Modernization in Afghanistan

Frank Snepp
Tortured by the Past

David Swanson
The Wrong Torture Question

Conn Hallinan
The Coming Asian Storm

Ron Jacobs
Not Dead Yet: an Interview with Jerry Gordon on the State of the Antiwar Movement

John Goekler
The Only Path to a Middle East Picnic?

Jasmine L. Tyler /
Anthony Papa
An End to Crack/Powder Cocaine Sentencing Disparity?

Website of the Day
Emergency Petition: Stop Coal Industry Intimidation of Activists

April 29, 2009

Joann Wypijewski
Death at Work in America

Patrick Cockburn
The Taliban's Roads to Kabul

Andy Worthington
Cheney's Twisted World

Chris Floyd
The Specter Diversion

Dave Lindorff
No More Excuses: a Specter is Haunting the Democrats

Jeremy Scahill
The Nuremberg Truth and Reconciliation Commission?

Doug Henwood
Zionist Lobby Targets Another Tenured Professor: an Interview with William Robinson

Michael Hudson
Will Iceland be Handed Over to a New Gang of Kleptocrats?

Russell Mokhiber
My Ron Pollack Problem--And Yours

Eric Toussaint
Ecuador at the Crossroads

Website of the Day
An Interview with Leslie and Andrew Cockburn on "American Casino"

April 28, 2009

Uri Avnery
A Little Red Light: On Israeli Fascism

Jeremy Scahill
Obama's Iraq: the Picture of Dorian Gray

Dean Baker
The Perfect Gift for Wall Street: a Financial Transactions Tax

Michael D. Yates
At the Factory Gate

Conn Hallinan
Georgian Plots? Saakavili's "Order No. 2"

John Stauber
Beyond MoveOn

Tom Barry
The Failed Border Security Initiative

Harvey Wasserman
Who Pays for America's Chernobyl Roulette?

Jeff Nygaard
Pirates, Profits and Propaganda

Frederico Fuentes
Why the U.S. Still Hates Cuba

Website of the Day
The Man Behind the Hood

April 27, 2009

Pam Martens
The Far Right's Plot to Capture New Hampshire

Patrick Cockburn
Torture? It Probably Killed More Americans Than 9/11

Andrew J. Bacevich Guardian of the Status Quo: Obama's Sins of Omission

Mitu Sengupta
The Bloodbath in Sri Lanka

Franklin Lamb
Hillary Does Beirut: The 165-Minute Swoop-In

Firmin DeBrabander
Crimes of Economic Madness

Dave Lindorff
Wide Open to Pandemic?

Russell Mokhiber
How Corrupt is That?

Mike Whitney
Pinter's Message to Obama

Mark Weisbrot
Overhauling the IMF

Rev. José M. Tirado
Iceland's New Dawn: How the Right Got Trounced

Website of the Day
American Casino

April 24-26, 2009

Alexander Cockburn
Putting the Bush Years on Trial

Marjorie Cohn
Torture Used to Try to Link Saddam with 9/11

Andy Worthington
Who Ordered the Torture of Abu Zubaydah?

Jeremy Scahill
Are Leading Democrats Afraid of a Special Prosecutor to Investigate Torture?

Chris Floyd
Top of the Heap: the Democrats' Teachable Moment on Torture

Mike Whitney
A Housing Crash Update

Anthony DiMaggio
Obama and the Housing Crisis

Chris Kromm
Democratic Lobbyists Key to Fight Against Employee Free Choice Act

Saul Landau
Seventeen Months in "the Hole:" an Interview with the Leader of the Cuban Five

Dave Lindorff
Free John Walker Lindh

Greg Moses
The Debt Looters

Joshua Frank
Calling for a Coal Moratorium: an Interview with Ted Nace

Fred Gardner
Collective Farming and the Lynch Case

Manuel Garcia, Jr.
Homework, Testing and Stealth Apartheid in Education

David Michael Green
Of Tea Parties and Teleprompters

Ramzy Baroud
Middle East Spies: a New Front in Gaza's Conflict

Rannie Amiri
MuBarack's Expanding Enemies List

Laura Carlsen
Mr. President, Calderon is Not Mexico

Richard Morse
The Haitian People Need a Lobbyist

Nikolas Kozloff
Protecting the Bald Eagle: a Task Now Falling to ... Hugo Chavez?

Kent Peterson
The Fight to Save Mexico's Mangroves

Robert Bryce
The Ethanol Scammers Rent a General

Niranjan Ramakrishnan The Financial Experts

Ron Jacobs
Torture is More Than Just "Harsh Tactics"

Richard Rhames
Roman Legends, Book Burning and History's Hunt

Stephen Martin
Wherefore Art Thou American Dream?

David Yearsley
Rodgers, Hammerstein, Michener and Nostalgia's Clammy Embrace

Poets' Basement
Khalil and Mankh

Website of the Weekend
Doug and Andrea Peacock on Grizzlies and Edward Abbey

April 23, 2009

Eamonn Fingleton
How the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times Buried the Madoff Scandal for at Least Four Years

Ray McGovern
Obama Plays Hamlet on Torture

Michael Ratner
The Torture Commission Trap

Alan Farago
The Quicksand Economy

Rob Larson
Business Gets Carded

Nadia Hijab
The Real Heroes of Durban

Fawzia Afzal-Khan
Deconstructing the Taliban

Dave Lindorff
Are Members of Congress Being Blackmailed?

Helen Redmond
Selling Out Single-Payer: the "Public Option" Con

Adam Federman
The Battle Over New York's Marcellus Shale

Website of the Day
An Interactive Map of Vanishing Employment Across the Country

April 22, 2009

Chris Floyd
The Fatal Thread: Torture, War and the Imperial Project

Joanne Mariner
Torture Evidence and Terror Blacklists

Vijay Prashad
Obama's Afghan Plan: Fracturing the Antiwar Movement

Gareth Porter
U.S. Lacks Capacity to Win Over Afghans

Dean Baker
The Tyranny of Bad Economics

Peter Morici
Housing Sales and Fixing the Economy

Winslow T. Wheeler
Eliminating Bad Pentagon Habits

Barucha Calamity Peller
The Battle to Take Back the New School

Harvey Wasserman
Chernobyl Could Happen Here

Aisha Brown /
Dedrick Muhammad
White Privilege in the Americas

Teo Ballvé
Obama's Feel Good Meeting with Colombia's Uribe

Website of the Day
Ahmedinejad's Durban Speech: What He Actually Said

April 21, 2009

Randy Rowland
Lindy Blake's Great Escape

Dave Lindorff
Jay Bybee's Conspiracy to Torture

Fidel Castro
The Secret Summit

George McGovern
Pull Out of Iraq This Year

Greg Moses
The Unemployment Channel

Benjamin Dangl
Argentina Remembers

Sonia Nettnin
Saving Lives in Gaza

Frank Barat
The Death of Bassem: a Shooting at the Wall in Bil'n

Binoy Kampmark
Legal Purgatory and John Demjanjuk

John V. Walsh
Code Red for Single Payer

David Macaray
SAG Should be Praised, Not Assailed

Website of the Day
Bonus Man: For Executive Assholes Everywhere

April 20, 2009

Mike Whitney
Housing Bust Comes Roaring Back, Worse Than Ever

Andrea Peacock
Histrionics and Legalisms in Missoula

Henry A. Giroux
Ten Years After Columbine: the Tragedy of Youth Deepens

Liaquat Ali Khan
Drone Attacks on Pakistan's Indigenous Tribes

Fred Gardner
Obama's DoJ Backs Prosecution of Medical Marijuana Providers

Stephen Soldz
Obama, Blair, Panetta and the Torture Memos: Praising Moral Cowards, Ignoring Real Heroes

Nadia Hijab
Obama's Multi-Polar Middle East

Dave Lindorff
The Meeting in Trinidad

P. Sainath
India's Press Nixes "R" Word

Nelson P Valdés
A Modest (Transition) Proposal to Obama

Mark Engler
American Empire Foreclosed?

Belén Fernández
The FARC Can't Dance

Website of the Day
Dear Mr. Buffett...

April 17-19, 2009

Alexander Cockburn
Thin Ice From Here to the Horizon

Saul Landau
Infiltrating Alpha 66: a Conversation with Gerardo Hernandez, Leader of the Cuba Five

Franklin Lamb
Persia Rising

Ralph Nader
The Greedsters Are Back!

Fred Gardner
Obama's Chimerical Marijuana Policy: a Guide for the Perplexed

Dean Baker
A Win-Win Solution: Tax the Rich!

Rannie Amiri
The Curious Case of Benjamin Netanyahu

George Wuerthner
The War on Predators

Dave Lindorff
No Amnesty for Torturers

David Swanson
Personal Torture Laws

Jim Goodman
The Control of Food

Kathy Sanborn
Economic Fallout Hits Families Hard

Don Monkerud
Economic Recovery for Whom?

Manuel Garcia, Jr.
The People's Money

David Michael Green
Home of the Barricaded, Land of the 'Fraid

Nelson P Valdés
The OAS Charter, Cuba and the United States

Manuel Gomez
From the Bay of Pigs to Trinadad and Tobago

Dr. Susan Block
On Sex Addiction: the Deadliest Sin?

Ramzy Baroud
Non-Violence in Palestine?

Christopher Brauchli
Banning Barbie

Stephen Martin
Statelessness: the Final Frontier

Ron Jacobs
Tearing the Whole Building Down: the Dead in Greensboro

David Yearsley
Monkey Music

Lorenzo Wolff
A Song for the End of the World

Poets' Basement
Moser, McTeer and Buknatski

Website of the Weekend
New England Journal of Medicine Report on Civilian Deaths in Iraq

April 16, 2009

Mike Whitney
A Bulletin From the Captain of the Titantic

Russell Mokhiber
The Top 10 Enemies of Single-Payer

Ronald Teska
From Iraq to Appalachia

Gareth Porter
Predator Blowback

Paul Fitzgerald /
Elizabeth Gould
Thinking Like an Afghan

Benjamin Dangl
Latin America Changes

Kevin Pina
Haiti: Obama's First Foreign Policy Disaster?

Robert Bryce
Another Ethanol Producer Goes Bust

George Wuerthner
See the Forest: the Value of Dead Trees

Paul Garon, David Roediger and Kate Khatib The Surreal Life of Franklin Rosemont

Website of the Day
Socialism and the Facebook Generation

April 15, 2009

Kathleen and Bill Christison
Solving Palestine While Israel Destroys It

Ray McGovern
W, the Torture Decider

Robert Sandels
Is There a Latin American Policy?

Heather Williams /
Paul Baker
Carbon Cap and Trade: How Wall Street will Game the Regs and Trash the Planet

Jack Willoughby
The Lessons of the S & L Crisis

David Swanson
Habeas at Bagram?

Paul Craig Roberts
94 Years of Serfdom

Sara Mann
Norman Rockwell and the Perils of Nostalgia

Kenneth Couesbouc
John Maynard's Martingale: How Keynes Got Rich

Binoy Kampmark
Tax Haven Hypocrisies

Kekuni Blaisdell, Lynette Hi'llani Cruz, George Kahumoku Flores, et al.: An Urgent Letter to Obama on the Rights of Native Hawaiians

Website of the Day
Taxa: the Paintings of Isabella Kirkland

April 14, 2009

Conn Hallinan
The Afghan Rubik's Cube

Mike Whitney
Why is Goldman Sachs So Scared of Mike Morgan?

Peter Morici
Taxing Grandma to Subsidize Goldman Sachs

Greg Moses
Economic Curveballs: the Laffer Posse

Fidel Castro
Obama's Cuba Policy: Not a Word About the Blockade

Robert Weissman
No Blank Check for the IMF

Rebecca Macaux /
Philip Primeau
Somali Piracy and American Foreign Policy

Carmelo Ruiz-Marrero
The Dubious Revoution: Biofuels, the Next Generation

Dave Lindorff
Snatch-and-Jail Justice: the Ugly War on Immigrants

Walter Brasch
The Resurrection of Intolerance

Benjamin Day
Why Has the Press Failed Us in Reporting on Health Care Reform?

Website of the Day
The Appraisal Bubble

April 13, 2009

Patrick Cockburn
Iraqi Militia Fear Reprisals After US Exit

Uri Avnery
Our Dissonance

Jeremy Scahill
A Test Case for Habeas Corpus: Will Obama Prosecute the Somali Pirate in a US Court?

Martha Rosenberg
Suicide Syndrome: Are VA Protocols Behind Iraq Vet Suicides?

Karl Grossman
A Radioactive Extension for Aging Nuclear Plants

Nadia Hijab
Still Waiting: Obama and American Muslims

Sam Smith
America's Cultural Bear Market

James McEnteer
Peru's Shining Example

Sean McMahon
Globalizing Politicide: Israel's Strikes on Sudan

Namihei Odaira
Makota's "Campaign Against Poverty"

John V. Walsh
Bossnapping

Website of the Day
Declining IRS Audits for Big Financial Houses

April 10 / 12, 2009

Alexander Cockburn
Resurrection and Revenge

Chris Floyd
Hope Abandoned: Obama Protects CIA Torture Memos

Mike Whitney
"Liquidate the Banks; Fire the Executives!" Warren's Devastating Report to Congress

Saul Landau
How the Media Bought the Surge

M. Reza Pirbhai
Obama's Afghanistan Plan and India-Pakistan Relations

Franklin Spinney
The Art of the Scam: Wall Street and the Pentagon

Rannie Amiri
Iran's Elections: Why Arab Leaders Want Ahmadinejad to Win

William Blum
The Ideology of Barack Obama

Matt Vidal
Why Card Check Would Help the Economy

Jeff Howison
Death of the Square Deal

Jeff Leys
Resisting the Af-Pak War: the Creech Air Base Arrests

Dave Lindorff
America's Imperial Wars: Why We Need to See the Horrors

Ramzy Baroud
Israel Investigated: But Will It Repent?

Missy Beattie
The Grateful Dead, Wounded and Displaced

Fred Gardner
Fakes Left, Goes Right: Obama's Crossover Dribble on Marijuana Policy

Harvey Wasserman Another $50 Billion for Rust Bucket Nukes?

Suzan Mazur
A Revolution in Biology: an Interview with Nobel Laureate Paul Nurse

Bernard Umbrecht
German Capitalists Take Fire

David Macaray
A Word Clooney, Hanks and Baldwin Should Learn: Solidarity

Janet Kauffman
How to Starve (or Feed) a River

Ron Jacobs
Daring to Struggle, Failing to Win

Norman Solomon
Getting a Death Grip on Memory

Michael Winship
Let the Railsplitter Awake!

Richard Rhames
Empire, Ennui and Extra Cheese

Wanda Fucha
Brother, Can You Spare a Million Bucks?

David Yearsley
My Journey to the Heart of Rahman

Lorenzo Wolff
Getting Beyond the Black-and-White: Jason Isbell's Challenging New Album

Ben Sonnenberg
Rossellini's Louis XIV: "Neither the Sun Nor Death Can be Gazed Upon Fixedly"

Jeffrey St. Clair
Savage Incongruities: the Photographic Life of Lee Miller

Poets' Basement
Corseri and Corzett

Website of the Weekend
The Palestine Chronicle Needs Your Help!

April 9, 2009

Mike Whitney
The Decade of Darkness

Patrick Cockburn
What It Would Take to Mend Fences with Islam

Stephen Soldz
Caught on Tape: Diagnostic Abuse of Veterans

P. Sainath
The Rise of the Shoe-cide Bomber

Ellen Cantarow
Israel's Master Plan for Transfer

Gareth Porter /
Jim Lobe
Obama and Israel's Threat to Strike Iran

Jeremy Scahill
How Many Democrats Will Stand Up Against Obama's Bloated Military Budget?

Jerry Kroth
Saving GM From Bankruptcy--With the Stroke of a Pen

Binoy Kampmark
Fujimori Convicted: A Measure of Justice in Latin America

Fidel Castro
My Meeting with the Black Caucus

Website of the Day
Bird Song Radio

April 8, 2009

John Prados
The Af-Pak Paradox

Bill Moyers /
Michael Winship
Changing the Rules of the Blame Game

Winslow T. Wheeler
The Tooth Fairy and the Defense Budget

Russell Mokhiber
PBS Lashes Back

Kathy Sanborn
Depression Fury

Rev. William E. Alberts
If the Shoe Fits: Bush and Al-Zaidi

James McEnteer Rashomon and the Binghamton Shooter: the Rush to Interpret Jiverly Wong's "Statement"

Nadia Hijab
Olmert's Nightmare

Adam Turl
Card Check on the Ropes

Kevin Zeese
Escaping the Drug War Quagmire

Website of the Day
Walk Score Your Neighborhood

April 7, 2009

David Price
Counterinsurgency's Free Ride

Uri Avnery
Who's the Boss?

Chris Floyd
Talking Peace in Prague, Dropping Bombs in Pakistan

Winslow T. Wheeler Defense Cuts: Gates and the System

Marjorie Cohn
Prosecuting the Bush Torture Team: Spain Leads the Way

Dean Baker
Hands Off Social Security

Diana Johnstone
NATO, Strasbourg and the Black Block

Dave Lindorff
Politicizing Accounting

Martha Rosenberg
Life on HBO's Factory Hog Farm

Evelyn Pringle
Motherhood and the Psycho-Pharmaceutical Complex

Website of the Day
Gaza: Closed Zone

April 6, 2009

Michael Hudson
The IMF Rules the World

Andy Worthington Bagram: Guantánamo's Dark Mirror

Ray McGovern
Profiles in Cowardice: Eric Holder and Colin Powell

Deepak Tripathi
The Pakistan Enigma

Mike Whitney
Bernanke's Financial Rescue Plan: a Glide-Path to Destitution

Norman Solomon
Meet the New Escalators: the Democrats and the Afghan War

Jonathan Cook
Israel Railways Accused of Racism in Firing of Arab Workers

Judith Bello
Justice for the Developmentally Disabled

Deena Metzger Blackwater in Liberia

Dr. M. Kamiar
"There's No 'Eye' in Iran:" Obama's Pronunciation Problem

Website of the Day
Prison Talk

April 3-5, 2009

Alexander Cockburn
From Twin Towers to Twin Camelots

Kathy Kelly /
Brian Terrall
Getting a Closer Look at the Killer Drones

Sue Sturgis
Fooling with Disaster? Startling Revelations About Three Mile Island Raise New Doubts Over Nuclear Plant Safety

Peter Morici
Girding for a Depression

Kathy Sanborn
Homeless in Tent City, USA

Andy Worthington
Britain's Guantánamo: Fact or Fiction?

Rob Larson
Subprime Supreme Court: The Roberts Court Has Become a Powerful New Tool for Business

Saul Landau
Biden and Nixon: a Tale of Two Latin American Experiences

Steve Early
An Evening with Andy Stern

John Goekler
Was Gaza Israel's Waterloo?

Rannie Amiri
Arab League Reconciliation Summit a Bust

Dave Lindorff
Hooray for Juries! A Courtroom Victory for Ward Churchill and Academic Free Speech

Lee Ballinger
Sound Garden: Tom Morello at the Grammy Museum

Ron Jacobs
Artifacts for Survival

David Macaray
AIG Plays the Sympathy Card

John Wight
G20: Capital's New World Symphony

Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor
Race in the Obama Era

Mychal Bell
Surviving Jena Six

Missy Beattie
Hoop Hopes, War and Peace

Reza Fiyouzat
The Iran/US Rapproachment Dance

Michael Boldin
The War on Drugs is a War on You

Christopher Brauchli
The Pope's Batting 50-50

Charles R. Larson
Too Much Stuff

Susie Day
Bernie Breakout Shocker!!

Stephen Martin
Gordon Brown's Chicken Run at the G20

Kim Nicolini
"Last House on the Left:" Vigilantes of the Bourgeoisie

David Yearsley
Homage to Moog and Mallards

Phyllis Pollack
An Interview with Legendary Rock Producer Chris Kimsey on Working with the Stones, Ronnie Wood, Jimmy Cliff, Peter Tosh and Saint Jude

Poets' Basement
Foley, Valentine and Kozak

Website of the Day
The Corner Store

April 2, 2009

Robert Weissman
What If Obama Had Treated Detroit Like Wall Street?

Eric Toussaint /
Damien Millet
A G20 Meeting for Naught

George Bisharat
Israel's Impunity Must End

Russell Mokhiber
Something is Rotten at PBS

Franklin Lamb
Has Washington Lost Lebanon?

Gareth Porter
Settling Scores in Iraq: Maliki Draws US Troops into Crackdown on Sunni Rivals

David Macaray
Obama and the Ruling Class: "Only the Little People Pay Taxes"

Chris Genovali
B.C.'s Bloody Grizzly Hunt

Sam Smith
The Politics of Adulation

Suzan Mazur
Is Neo-Darwinism Dead?

Website of the Day
Fighting for Change in St. Louis

April 1, 2009

Chris Floyd
Surging Further Into the Afghan Abyss

Stanley Heller
Israeli War Crimes: Thank God, It Was Only Rumors

Mark Brenner, Mischa Gaus and Jane Slaughter Obama's Perilous Plan for Detroit: Restructure the Big 3, But Not With Bankruptcy

Jonathan Cook
The Slow Demise of Ehud Olmert

Eric Walberg
EU in Tatters: Only the Protesters Have Any Vision

Richard Morse
Why Haiti Can't Forget Its Past

Don Fitz
Guess Who Came to Dinner with a Match? Green Mayoral Candidate's Van Firebombed in St. Louis

Laray Polk
Texas and Evolution

Belén Fernández
12 Años de Soledad?

Harvey Wasserman
Cracking the Media Silence on Three Mile Island

Website of the Day
Pentagon Fraud Investigations Fell, While Contracts Soared

March 31, 2009

Uri Avnery
The Deception Tango

Peter Lee
Ghosts in the Machine: the World's Hottest Cyberwar Battlefield

Nicholas Dearden
A New Global Debt Crisis

Dave Lindorff
The Obama Betrayal

Joanne Mariner
"We'll Make You See Death"

Ron Jacobs
Obama's Pakistan Gambit

Wiliam S. Lind
Another Lost War

David Michael Green
Who Says the GOP Doesn't Have a Plan?

Benjamin Dangl
Beyond Elections in the Americas

Johnny Barber
Meditation in Orange

Dedrick Muhammad
Economic Inequality: the Foundation of the Racial Divide

Website of the Day
How the Obama Dems Took Over the Peace Movement

March 30, 2009

Michael Hudson
Financing the Empire: Do US Face G20 Mutiny?

Patrick Cockburn
What Next in Afghanistan?

Henry A. Giroux
Hard Lessons

Mike Whitney
Where's Eliot Spitzer Now That We Need Him?

Ralph Nader
Where's All the Money Coming From?

Paul Craig Roberts
Obama's War on the (Upper) Middle Class

Jeremy Scahill
The Logistical Nightmare in Iraq

Robert Bryce
The Cellulosic Ethanol Delusion

Jonathan Cook
Remembering Land Day in Palestine

Ray McGovern
Obama Bombs

Website of the Day
Hersh: Syria Calling

May 6, 2009

"They Can't Even Protect Themselves, So What Can They Do For Me?"

Afghans to Obama: Get Out, Take Karzai With You

By PATRICK COCKBURN

When President Hamid Karzai drove to Kabul airport to fly to America earlier this week, the centre of the Afghan capital was closed down by well-armed security men, soldiers and policemen. On his arrival in Washington he will begin two days of meetings, starting today, with President Barack Obama and Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari about their joint efforts to combat the Taliban. Karzai is also to deliver a speech at the Brookings Institution think tank on “effective ways of fighting terrorism.”

The title of his lecture shows a certain cheek. Karzai’s seven years in power since the overthrow of the Taliban in 2001 have been notable for his failure to prevent their resurgence. Suppose the president’s motorcade this week had taken a different route and headed, not for the airport, but for the southern outskirts of Kabul, he would soon have experienced the limits of his government’s authority. It ends at a beleaguered police post within a few minutes’ drive of the capital. Drivers heading for the southern provincial capitals of Ghazni, Qalat and Kandahar nervously check their pockets to make sure that they are carrying no documents linking them to the government.

They do so because they know that they will not have travelled far down the road before they are stopped and their identity checked by black turbaned Taliban fighters. Moving swiftly on their motorcycles, squads of six to eight men set up temporary checkpoints along the road. Sometimes they even take a traveller’s mobile phone and redial numbers recently called. If the call is answered by a government ministry or, still worse, a foreigner, then the phone’s owner may be executed on the spot. The jibe that Mr Karzai is only “mayor of Kabul” has some truth to it. It is not only when travelling south that the Taliban is in control. I wanted to go to Bamyan, the province in central Afghanistan which is inhabited by the Hazara, a minority ethnic group who are central-Asian in appearance and Shia by religion, and who were savagely persecuted and massacred by the Sunni fundamentalist Taliban during their years in power.

I last went there in December 2001 to look at the shattered remains of the giant 6th-century Buddhist statues which the Taliban had dynamited because they portrayed the human form and were “idols”. I wanted to see what had changed. If anybody benefited from the end of Taliban rule it should have been the Hazara. It turned out, however, that the biggest change was that I could no longer travel there by road. Mohammed Sarwar Jawadi, a member of the Afghan parliament representing Bamyan, who spent two years in a Taliban prison before escaping, told me that Bamyan itself was safe enough. The problem was the route.

“There are two roads going there,” explained Mr Jawadi, “but do not take the southern one because it is controlled by the Taliban.” He said there was an alternative, more northerly road and this was safe enough so long as, he added with the hint of a smile, “you bring plenty of armed guards.” He explained that a few weeks ago “men dressed in police uniforms” had stopped two vehicles belonging to a local bank, shot dead six guards and stolen the money on board. The best experts on the dangers of the road in most countries are not the police or the army, but the truckers, whose lives and livelihoods depend on correctly assessing the risks.

“The situation got really bad a year-and-a-half ago,” Abdul Bayan, the owner of a transport company in Kabul called Nawe Aryana, told me. His trucks carry goods all over Afghanistan, but they face ever increasing danger, particularly if they are carrying supplies for NATO troops or other foreign forces. He added that these days his drivers need armed protection even if they are carrying onions. The threat comes from both Taliban and bandits who are sometimes difficult to tell apart. If a truck worth $70,000 is captured, it costs Mr Bayan $10-12,000 to get it back. “A convoy of 20 trucks going to Kandahar [carrying goods for foreign troops or the government] will need four or five SUVs, each with four armed men on board,” he said. “We reckon it costs us $1,000 a truck just to protect them, which doesn’t leave much profit.”

Even hiring one’s own security men is not necessarily a guarantee of safety. On the same morning that Mr Karzai was leaving Kabul for Washington, the Taliban attacked a squad of armed security men in Qalat, a poor dusty city that is the capital of Zabul province in the far south. Hired to protect road construction workers, they were slaughtered in a gun battle in which seven of them were killed and three captured. Asked why he did not look for help from the Afghan army or police to protect his truck convoys, Mr Bayan looked bemused. “Get help from the soldiers and policemen?” he replied scornfully. “Why, they can’t even protect themselves, so what can they do for me?”

The question goes to the heart of the crisis in Afghanistan. It is not so much that the Taliban is strong and popular, but that the government is weak, corrupt and dysfunctional. “Security has not deteriorated because of what the Taliban has done,” says Daoud Sultanzoy, a US-trained commercial pilot who is a highly respected MP from Ghazni province, south-west of Kabul, “but because people feel the government is unjust. It is seen as the enemy of the people, and because there is no constitutional alternative to it, the Taliban gain.” He is angered by a misconception common in the West that Afghans do not like any form of central government or authority. “It is not true that we do not like good government,” he says, “but for 267 years we have been misruled.”

He believes that unless there is an Afghan government deemed just and legitimate by the Afghan people, “military gains will mean nothing” and the Taliban will keep up their fight for decades. Support for the Taliban is not very high, but it has increased since 2006, when their rebellion effectively resumed with Pakistani aid. Over the last three years, backing for both the US and the Afghan government have plummeted.

Some 45 per cent of Afghans in the south and east of the country, where most of the fighting is now taking place, say that violence against the US or Nato/Isaf can be justified, according to an opinion poll carried out for ABC News, BBC and ARD at the start of this year. The poll shows that the Afghan desire for retribution is significantly boosted by shelling or bombing of civilian targets. Ominously for President Obama’s surge, the increase in the number of US troops in Afghanistan is opposed by most Afghans. They say they are convinced that their presence will simply lead to more fighting.

The problem for Obama is similar to that facing Afghans. His administration can see the failings of Karzai and his government, but they can’t see an alternative that would offer an improvement. The strong criticism of the Karzai government coming out of Washington several months ago has subsided for the moment. In recent weeks Obama’s administration has devoted its energies to getting Pakistan to reverse the local Taliban’s advances in the Swat valley and Buner district. Karzai is increasingly likely to win the presidential election on August. Just before departing for Washington, he registered as a candidate and persuaded his most dangerous possible challenger, the governor of south-western Nangarhar province, Gul Agha Sherzai, to withdraw his candidacy. Mr Karzai’s re-election looks increasingly likely.

***

The problem for Afghanistan is that its political landscape was created by the events of late 2001. In the preceding months, the Taliban, backed by Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, had been extending its grip over the whole country. The Northern Alliance was being squeezed by Taliban offensives into the mountainous north-east of the country.
Many of its adherents believed it faced ultimate defeat, particularly after its leader, Ahmad Shah Massoud, was assassinated on  September 9, 2001,  by two members of al-Qa’ida pretending to be a television crew. The movement might have collapsed. But two days later came the September 11th atacks in New York and Washington.

Everything changed.

The US was determined to overthrow the Taliban in retribution for hosting al-Qa’ida, and the Northern Alliance, previously regarded with suspicion by the US because of its Iranian and Russian connections, was the only local ally available. Northern Alliance forces were victorious because they were backed by American B-52 bombers and small teams of US military advisers. The CIA paid large sums of money to local commanders to persuade them to go home. It is probable that the Pakistani military intelligence, the ISI, whose support had been crucial to the rise of the Taliban, was telling them not to fight to the end, but to wait until the US lost interest in Afghanistan. Many of the Afghan leaders who rule Afghanistan today won power during this completely unexpected turnaround in Afghan politics.

“The political, religious and economic mafia are all Northern Alliance people,” says Sultanzoy. “Nobody outside the Northern Alliance is in the government.” This is something of an exaggeration, but the warlords of the Northern Alliance treated their takeover of government as a plundering expedition. There was a shift of power away from the Pashtun, the community to which 42 per cent belong and towards the Tajiks (27 per cent), Hazara (9 per cent) and Uzbeks (9 per cent). In the newly-built Kabul district of Sherpoor, their palaces, heavily fortified and often rented out for large sums to foreign aid agencies, were built on land seized by them or handed over to them by the government.

In one part of Sherpoor there is a remarkable pink palace belonging to the Uzbek warlord General Rashid Dostum who has since had to take refuge in Istanbul. In registering for re-election this week, Mr Karzai chose as his vice-presidential candidate the Tajik leader Mohammad Qasim Fahim, whom Human Rights Watch has described as “one of the most notorious warlords in the country, with the blood of many Afghans on his hands from the civil war.”

***

A measure of the failure of Mr Karzai, his government and his Western supporters is that I was able to drive from Kabul to Kandahar eight years ago. But if I tried to make the same journey today, I would be killed or kidnapped soon after leaving Kabul. Even then, in 2001, it was a dangerous road – though the word flatters the rutted track and smashed asphalt on which we had to drive – since the exact state of disintegration of the Taliban and the mood of their fighters was uncertain. In a heavily-guarded palace in the ancient city of Ghazni, the newly appointed governor, Qari Baba, a portly man of about 60 who looked like Sidney Greenstreet, had benignly stated that all was secure in his province, but he was so new to his post that he had not even bothered to tear old Taliban propaganda posters off the walls of his office.

One showed Afghanistan, inspired by a verse from the Koran, bursting the chains the Americans had placed around it. Though the Taliban had gone, they had not gone very far, and there were plenty of menacing-looking men in black with assault rifles slung over their shoulders in the courtyard of the governor’s palace. For all Qari Baba’s show of confidence, he himself only moved in a convoy of 20 armoured vehicles. New men were taking over. I met Dr Mohammad Shajahan, the leader of the Harekat-e-Islami party which represented the Hazara minority in Ghazni. “The Taliban control about 50 per cent of the province,” he said. “I have just had a meeting with them and they have promised to surrender by 3pm today. If they surrender their weapons and cars and go home, then we guarantee their security.”

Shajahan, who was a dentist by profession, was astonished by the swift change in his fortunes. “Just three months ago, I was working in a gas station in Virginia in the US,” he said. “After September 11th, I came back here, where I used to be a commander, with a plan for raising 1,000 men.” The same scenes were being repeated all the way to Kandahar. The Taliban might be surrendering on terms, but they had not been defeated. Most of the country had become a frightening no-man’s land. Afghan houses were dun-colored mud brick fortresses with windowless 20ft-high walls that could contain innocent families or several hundred soldiers. There were no checkpoints. We asked one man, pointing up the road, how far we were from the Taliban frontline. “About 10km,” he said, which sounded comforting – until we noticed that he was pointing down the road behind us.

The speed of the implosion of the Taliban was such that I though they would be back in business in a few months. I was right in thinking they would return, but wrong about the timing, and it was three or four years before they began to reassert their grip. Hamid Karzai, who had just been appointed head of an interim government, was not regarded wi th much respect. Abdul Ahmed, a tough-looking warlord from the village of Maydanshar, just outside Kabul, was vocally contemptuous of him, saying that he had been appointed “because of pressure from the outside world. He has done no fighting against the Taliban.” It was an opinion held by many.

The war against the Taliban in 2001 produced winners and losers who did not change very much in subsequent years. What has changed is security, which Bayan the truck owner says is now worse than at any time since the Communists were in power. It is no longer possible to drive to Ghazni. Even Sultanzoy, who is a member of parliament for the province, says it is too dangerous for him to go there “though I am more afraid of the government shooting me than the Taliban.” In any case, most of the winners in the war live north of Kabul. After 9/11 like many other correspondents, I had wanted to get into Afghanistan and had flown from Moscow to Dushanbe in Tajikistan in the hope of crossing the Amu Darya river to reach opposition-held territory.

In the event, the Northern Alliance provided an ancient Soviet helicopter which flew us over the Hindu Kush to the war-battered town of Jabal Saraj at the southern end of the Panjshir valley just north of Kabul. It was a strategically vital area which put the Northern Alliance within striking distance of Kabul. The Taliban repeatedly tried to capture it and for years had fought for the well-watered Shomali plain, one of the most fertile parts of Afghanistan, through which ran the front line.

The people of Shomali are Tajiks and supporters of the Northern Alliance. They have done well out of the peace. Once again their fruit and vegetables can reach the markets in Kabul. New schools and housing have been built. Almost all the bridges that had been blown up in the fighting have been replaced. The main trade route through the Salang tunnel, which pierces the Hindu Kush and connects southern and northern Afghanistan is open once again. But it is the local warlords like General Bashir Salangi, who commanded Northern Alliance forces in the Salang Valley, or General Baba Jan, who was in command of the front north of Bagram airport who have done best for themselves in terms of government jobs and private business. The Afghan government may be weakened by jobs for the boys, particularly when the boys in question are ruthless warlords who inflicted a devastating civil war on Afghanistan in the 1990s.

But it is corruption rather than patronage which is discrediting the legitimacy of the government at a moment when it is facing a new challenge from the Taliban. In Transparency International’s list of the most corrupt countries in the world, Afghanistan ranks fourth, out  of 180. In few countries is corruption so widespread or so open as it is in Kabul. There are the notorious “Poppy Palaces”, supposedly built by the profits of the heroin and opium trade. Government ministers with small salaries are somehow able to afford to spend over £1m each on constructing mansions. The former finance minister, Ashraf Ghani, says “the whole country is criminalized.” An anonymous official is quoted as aptly saying that  Afghanistan “is not a tribal society, but a mafia society.” “You have to pay $10,000 in bribes to get a job as a district police chief,” says General Aminullah Amarkhail, former head of security at Kabul airport, “and up to $150,000 to get a job as chief of police anywhere on the border because there you can make a lot of money.”

He believes that what happens in Afghanistan should be compared to looting, rather than simple corruption. The outcome of his campaign against smuggling, mostly of drugs, at Kabul airport explains why corruption is so difficult to eradicate. An army general transferred to the Interior Ministry, he was put in charge of security at Kabul airport in 2005 where he had soon arrested more than 100 heroin smugglers, most of them en route to Dubai.

“When I took over Kabul airport was a garbage dump,” he recalls. “I had 320 policemen, though I had to fire some for co-operating with smugglers.”He noticed that some travellers had “an extraordinary number of visas in their passports which they could not explain.” Bribes of $1,000 per kilogram of heroin were offered to his staff if they would help the smugglers. He did not have any X-ray machines, but he was able to detect smugglers who had ingested drugs by their dry lips and the bottles of oil they always carried. He began to receive death threats.

One woman whom he stopped had eight bags of heroin with her: her overall contract was to carry 1,000 kilos. She threatened him when he arrested her. “I will have you sacked from your job because I am more powerful than you,” she told him. “And I will get my heroin back as well.” She was as good as her word. Two hours later, instructions came from the Interior Ministry to let her go and return her heroin.The smuggler’s other prediction also turned out to be true. General Aminullah was suddenly sacked and charged with a minor offence. A new official took over security at the airport and smugglers were no longer arrested. General Aminullah’s case became well known in Afghanistan and abroad, but this was not enough to get him reinstated, despite a court order to do so. Recently he was made adviser on security to the minister of education, a job he says he was given purely to get him out of the way. He is still demanding his old job back.

***

The US troop reinforcements sent this year might make Afghanistan’s roads safer. The American military will also have a lot of money to spend, as in Iraq, to carry out aid projects immediately. The Afghan police would perform a lot better if they were paid more than $120 a month (Taliban fighters are believed to get $200). The US is sending 4,000 extra military trainers, as well as more combat brigades. But these reinforcements will lead to more violence and more air strikes. These will inflict civilian casualties which infuriate Afghans and lead in turn to a rise in support for the Taliban. Given the government’s lack of legitimacy, and its inability to provide basic services, the Taliban does not have to do much to destabilize the country.

Withdrawal of Pakistani support and a denial of safe refuge in Pakistan would be a crippling blow to the Taliban. But this is not likely to happen along the long mountainous border between Afghanistan and Pakistan. President Zardari may want to do it, but policy on the Taliban is decided by the Pakistani military. They are not likely to cast off a movement they have fostered for so long. The Taliban may not be a very effective military unit, but it has shown that it is prepared to fight for a long time, longer probably than the US will want to keep so many troops in Afghanistan.

In Iraq, the US occupation was always going to end badly. The occupation was never popular among Iraqis.In Afghanistan there were greater opportunities. The Taliban regime was always hated by the great majority, who were glad to see it fall. Here, the American presence was, at first, welcomed by most. There may not have been enough foreign aid, but there was enough to make a real difference to the lives of Afghans. It was Karzai’s dysfunctional state of warlords and criminals which opened the door for the Taliban’s return.

Patrick Cockburn is the author of 'The Occupation: War, resistance and daily life in Iraq', a finalist for the National Book Critics' Circle Award for best non-fiction book of 2006. His new book 'Muqtada! Muqtada al-Sadr, the Shia revival and the struggle for Iraq' is published by Scribner

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