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Today's Stories October 30, 2007 David Price Pilfered Scholarship Devastates Gen. Petraeus's Counterinsurgency Manual   October 29, 2007 Lisa Hajjar Inside Israel's Military Courts Joe DeRaymond The Politics of Lethal Injections Patrick Cockburn The High Stakes in Iraqi Kurdistan Isabella Kenfield / Roger Burbach Corporate Murder in Brazil Fred Gardner The Frivolous Investigation of Dr. Sterner Farzana Versey Caricaturing Islam Stephen Fleischman The Greening of the Oligarchy Marcelle Cendrars The Congressional Rip Cord Eamonn McCann Dan Keating, the Last of the Republican Irreconcilables Martha Rosenberg For Halloween, Ann Coulter Dresses as .... Ann Coulter! Website of the Day Campaign 2008   October 27 / 28, 2007 Alexander Cockburn So Much for Islamo-Fascism Awareness Jeffrey St. Clair The Dam That Isn't There James Bovard Breaking Down an Innocent Man: The FBI's Right to Threaten Torture Ralph Nader Beyond the Rule of Law M. Reza Pirbhai The Wahhabis are Coming, the Wahhabis are Coming! Robert Sandels Pay the Invaders! Cuba, Claims and Confiscations Jacob G. Hornberger Ruling By Decree Missy Beattie The Arsonists in the West Wing John Ross U.S. Eyes on Oaxaca Robert Fantina Condi Rice, the Imperial Cheerleader Ron Jacobs Labor at the Crossroads Ali Moayedian In Search of Logic About Iran David Michael Green What If We Had a President Who Didn't Give a Damn About Terrorism? Poets Basement Block, Davies and Ford Website of the Day Bring 'Em Home: a Music Video   October 26, 2007 Brian Cloughley Revenging Bloodshed Saul Landau Portrait of Rudy Ahmad Al-Akras Getting Justice in the HLF Case Franklin Lamb Does "Loving" Lebanon Mean Never Having to Say You're Sorry? Mike Whitney Murdoch's Cuckoo's Nest Dave Lindorff Home of the Brave? Reducing US Casualties By Killing More Civilians Alan Farago A Castro Behind Every Bush Yifat Susskind Conscripting Feminism into the War on Terror Website of the Day Dead Life in a Political Prison October 25, 2007 Jeffrey St. Clair / Joshua Frank Iraq's Environmental Crisis Manuel Garcia, Jr. Homes of the Crash Test Dummies Paul Craig Roberts The Fraudulent War on Terror Col. Dan Smith The Politics of Paranoia: Jane Harman's War on the First Amendment Alan Farago The Way to Paradise? Chris Kutalik The Lesson of the Chrysler Rebels Brian McKinlay John Howard and the Curse of Bush Cindy Sheehan Pete, Nancy, George and WW III Website of the Day Support the America's Program!   October 24, 2007 Natalie Washington-Weik White Fantasies About Race-Based Intelligence Andy Worthington The Guantánamo Suicides Michael Birmingham What Happened in Nahr Al Bared? Corporate Crime Reporter The Nuclear Democrats Tariq Ali Bush's Cuba Detour Farzana Versey Imagining Serfdom in a Scarf Dave Zirin White Noise James Murren What "Support Our Troops" Means Todd Chretien Looking Reality in the Face Martha Rosenberg What Came First, the Chicken or the Cage? Website of the Day Hillary Clinton on Nuclear Power   October 23, 2007 Ralph Nader Bush's Catastrophic Rhetoric Lawrence R. Velvel Goldsmith Stands Convicted--By His Own Mouth: How a Harvard Law Professor Justified Rendition at the Bush Justice Dept. Vijay Prashad The Nuke Deal is Dead Bonnie Bricker / Adil E. Shamoo The True Cost of War for Oil Dave Lindorff Christopher Dodd's Make or Break Moment Mike Whitney The Big Squeeze Farzana Versey Race with the Devil Stanley Heller / Ben George Something New from the Antiwar Movement Marcelle Cendrars You Too Can Confront the Holy Executive Regan Boychuk Burma and Haiti: Comparing the Media Response Website of the Day King Corn   October 22, 2007 Ishmael Reed Should Blacks Go Green? Marjorie Cohn Mukasey and the Constitution: Another Loyal Bushie Rannie Amiri Is There a Method to Bush's Middle East Madness? Diane Farsetta Time to Pay for Payola: the FCC and Pundit-for-Hire Armstrong Williams Todd Alan Price Renewing No Child Left Behind: A Hurricane Katrina Aimed at Public Education Robert Jensen The Quagmire of Masculinity Stephen Lendman The UAW Leadership Sells Out Its Workers Jemima Khan The Kleptocrat in an Hermes Headscarf Sunsara Taylor David Horowitz Can't Handle the Truth Binoy Kampmark No Ideas, Please: the Australian Elections Website of the Day Support the Center for International Policy     October 20 / 21, 2007 Alexander Cockburn The Man Who Builds Hillaryworld Tariq Ali A Massacre Foretold Jeffrey St. Clair Greetings from Echo Park Andy Worthington The Shame of Diego Garcia Mike Whitney Housing Flameout Daniel Wolff Play It As It Lays David Rosen Deviants on Parade: Folsom St. Fair and America's 4th Sexual Revolution Saul Landau David and Goliath in Iraq Ron Jacobs COINTELPRO and the Panthers Robert Fantina The Strange Love of Mitt Romney and Bob Jones David Heleniak Erring on the Side of Hidden Harm Joe Allen Hoffa Brown-Nosing at UPS Prairie Miller Lions for Lambs Poets' Basement Gibbons, Holt and Buknatski Website of the Weekend Crash!   October 19, 2007 John Ross Che's Mexican Legacy Sheldon Rampton Shared Values Revisited: a Case Study in the Limits of Propaganda Rahul Mahajan A Tale of Two Atrocities: Blackwater and Haditha Devra Davis Deadly Secrets: Chemical Pollution and Cancer Christopher Brauchli Blasphemous Science Wadner Pierre Haiti After the Deluge Bill Quigley Jailed for Justice Website of the Day Textbook Sticker Shock   October 18, 2007 Saree Makdisi Academic Freedom is at Risk Meg Dwyer What I Learned from 9/11: Who Wouldn't Want Us Dead? Alevtina Rea Sketches of Russian Life Norman Solomon The United States of Violence Kristoffer Larsson Something is Rotten in Sweden Harvey Wasserman Nukes are Back and So are We Website of the Day Eve Ensler: "A Filibuster Would Stop This War"   October 17, 2007 Steve Niva Counter-Insurgency, American-Style Andy Worthington The Case of Mohamed Jawad Alan Farago The Credit Shock Russell Mokhiber The New Billionaire-Criminal Class Sharon Smith Democrats, AWOL When It Mattered Mike Whitney Time for the Banks to Face the Hangman Robert Fantina Iraq, Iran and the US: Business as Usual Chris Irwin Where Have All the Rednecks Gone? Website of the Day Sex Ed at Oral Roberts University October 16, 2007 Peter Linebaugh Doris Lessing and the Dynamite Prize Paul Findley Follow the Leader: The Open Secret About the Israel Lobby Robert Bryce Inconvenient Corrections: Al Gore's Wacky Facts Uri Avnery The Mother of All Pretexts Paul Craig Roberts The Iraqi Genocide Ray McGovern What Did Nancy Pelosi Know About NSA Spying and When Did She Know It? Norman Solomon The Pro-War Undertow of the Blackwater Scandal Martha Rosenberg The Curse of Cymbalta William S. Lind Out of the Frying Pan Joel S. Hirschborn Time to Boycott Voting Website of the Day Pipeline Through Paradise: Big Oil's Arctic Play         Subscribe Online

October 31, 2007 28 Dead, 20 Wounded The Bicycle Bomber of Baquba By PATRICK COCKBURN A suicide bomber riding a bicycle detonated explosives packed with iron balls in a crowd of police recruits in Baquba yesterday, killing 28 people and wounding at least 20 others. "I saw many bodies covered in blood," said Ali Shahine, a shopkeeper in the city in Diyala province, north-east of Baghdad. "Some were dying, some had arms and legs blown off." He saw the bomber cycle through a gap in a concrete security wall before blowing himself up. The Iraqi police also announced yesterday that they had found the decapitated corpses of 20 unidentified people near the city. The bicycle attack was one of the deadliest against the security forces for months and comes as Iraqi and US casualties are falling sharply. The Iraqi health, interior and defence ministries say that, before the suicide bombing in Baquba, 285 Iraqi civilians and security personnel had been killed so far this month, the lowest figure since February 2006. US military casualties are also down. Some 33 US soldiers have been killed in October, compared to 65 in September and 126 in May. American military fatalities had been averaging three to four a day and have dropped to just over one a day. But it is still unclear whether the decrease in violence is temporary, since none of the disputes between Iraqi communities and between Iraqis and the American occupation forces have been resolved. The attack in Baquba is likely to have been the work of al-Qa'ida and shows it still has the ability to carry out suicide bombings despite much of the Sunni community turning against it. In Anbar and Diyala provinces, US-backed Sunni tribal militias have inflicted heavy losses on al-Qa'ida and the Sunni insurgency has split, with a consequent reduction in US losses. Al-Qa'ida has also failed in recent months to carry out one of its massive vehicle-borne suicide bombings against Shia markets and gathering places in Baghdad. These used to inflict hundreds of casualties at a time and provoke retaliation by Shia death squads, which would kill equivalent numbers of Sunni. Many Sunni turned against al-Qa'ida when it overplayed its hand in 2006 by setting up the Islamic State of Iraq umbrella group that tried to force all Sunni families to send at least one son to join al-Qa'ida. But the level of violence in Iraq remains very high. On Sunday, 10 anti-al-Qa'ida sheikhs ñ seven Shia and three Sunni ñ from Diyala were kidnapped in the Shia district of Shaab in Baghdad after meeting with the government. The body of one of the Sunni sheikhs, Mishaan Hilaan, was found 50 yards away and the US military says that a dissident Shia militia leader, Arkan Hasnawi, a former commander in the Mehdi Army, was responsible. The kidnappers offered to release the Shia sheikhs, but they refused to go unless the surviving two Sunni sheikhs were freed with them. Eventually all the sheikhs were freed. Muqtada al-Sadr, the Shia cleric who leads the Mehdi Army, has stood down his militiamen for six months in order to assert his previously uncertain control over them and to avoid confrontation with the US Army. The US claims that special units of the Mehdi Army are in fact controlled and paid by Iran, an allegation Iran denies. The American military said that Hasnawi's actions showed that he had "joined forces with Iranian-supported special groups that are rejecting Muqtada al-Sadr's direction to embrace fellow Iraqis". The US handed over security in the Shia province of Kerbala to the Iraqi government yesterday, making it, in theory, the eighth province in Iraq where military rule has ended. In reality, the Iraqi security forces in Kerbala are dominated by the Badr Organisation, the militia of the Shia party, the Supreme Islamic Iraqi Council, which is the rival of the Mehdi Army in southern Iraq. The Mehdi Army's strength is mostly in Baghdad, where one of its commanders said recently that it controls "50 per cent of the city and 80 per cent of Shia neighbourhoods". The long-term impact of US successes and the implosion of al-Qa'ida may be exaggerated. An ABC News/BBC/ NTV poll in August showed that 93 per cent of Sunni and 50 per cent of Shia say it is acceptable to attack coalition forces. 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.   Your Ad Here

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