Today's Stories

May 2, 2008

David Isenberg
The Return of Limited Nuclear War?

May 1, 2008

Michael Hudson
The Fed Sinks the Dollar

Behzad Yaghmaian
Blaming the Yuan for the Deficit with China

Wajahat Ali
The Dark Knight: the Real Rise of Obama

Dedrick Muhammad
Senator Obama, Please Come to Your Senses

Cynthia McKinney
Police in America Can Kill Some People With Impunity

Corporate Crime Reporter
Farm Broadcaster Fired After Ripping Monsanto's Goon Squads

Manuel Garcia, Jr.
The Speech That Might Have Been

Reza Fiyouzat
Stop Obliterating Yourself!

Leigh Saavedra
Suspending the Federal Gas Tax

Tom Semioli
Hollywood Hypocrite: an Open Letter to Michael Moore

Website of the Day
Why Won't McCain Release His Medical Records?

April 30, 2008

William P. O'Connor
The Day I Lost My Innocence

Bob Fitrakis /
Harvey Wasserman
Did the Supreme Court Just Elect John McCain?

Tariq Ali
Storming Heaven: 1968 Revisited

John Ross
Bad Jazz in NOLA: Three NAFTA Leaders Sit It for the Last Time

Glen Ford
Pop Goes the Race-Neutral Campaign!

Joshua Frank
Election Season Piffle: Thinking Outside the Voting Booth

Ashley Smith
Iraq After Basra

Robert Weissman
Medical R&D That Works in the Developing World

Sen. Russ Feingold
Bush's Shroud of Secrecy

Website of the Day
Richard Nixon, April 30, 1970

April 29, 2008

Uri Avnery
The Military Option

Roedad Khan
Why Gen. Musharraf Must Go

Chris Floyd
The Torture Election

Paul Craig Roberts
The Iraq War Morphs Into the Iran War

Dave Lindorff
Invasion of the Pumpheads

Mats Svensson
Mental Barriers in Palestine

Peter Morici
Will the Fed Broaden Its Focus?

Mike Ferner
Inside American Royalty's Security Bubble

John Weisheit
Towing Icebergs to San Pedro

Amit Srivastava
China Olympics, Tibet Crackdown, Coke Profits

Website of the Day
Tom Friedman Gets Creamed

April 28, 2008

JoAnn Wypijewski
On Queen's Boulevard, the Night Sean Bell's Killers Got Off

Mike Whitney
Jeremiah Wright Delivers the Knockout Punch: But Will It Topple Obama?

Iris Keltz
The Fruiting Fig Tree: Memories of East Jerusalem

Steve Niva
The New Walls of Baghdad: the Israeli Model Surges Toward Iraq

David Macaray
CAFTA's Bloodtrails

John Ross
"Adelitas" Shut Down Mexico's Congress

Stephen Lendman
The Politics of Green Scare

Malou Innocent
On "Withdrawing Responsibly" from Iraq

Christopher Brauchli
Want to Learn the Ins-and-Outs of the Slumping Economy? Just Ask Ashley ...

William Kaufman
Michael Moore's Embrace of Obama: a Polemic Devoid of Politics

Website of the Day
Get Your Fix

April 26 / 27, 2008

Alexander Cockburn
Nothing Will Get Hillary Out of the Race

Ralph Nader
A World of Hunger

Peter Camejo
A Crying Shame: the Wages of Left Capitulation

Harvey Wasserman
Making You Pay for the Next Chernobyl--in Advance!

Franklin Lamb
Will U.S. Policy in Lebanon and the Middle East Ever Change?

Wajahat Ali
Fisk Fighting: an Exclusive Interview with Robert Fisk

Mike Whitney
Food Riots and Speculators

Andrew Wimmer
Obliterate Them!

David Yearsley
Nero, Frederick the Great, Nixon ... They All Did It Better Than Clinton

Greg Moses
Chicago: the Stupid Experiment

Ron Jacobs
Walking the Lonely Road

Robert Fantina
Bush v. Carter: Let History Judge

Missy Comley Beattie
Introducing President McCain

Linn Cohen-Cole
The Criminalization of Raw Milk: a Mennonite Farmer is Hauled Away

Paul Krassner
Remembering Ruben Salazar

Jeffrey St. Clair
Booked Up

Poets' Basement
Buknatski, Khaiyat, Lair, and Kowit

Website of the Weekend
Justice for Sean Bell

April 25, 2008

George Ciccariello-Maher
Embedded with the Tupamaros

Dave Lindorff
The Bitter and the Biased: How Clinton Courted Racists in Pennsylvania

Franklin Lamb
The Israeli Project Has Failed in Lebanon

Alan Farago
Hacking the Development Code: the Politics of Zoning in Florida

John W. Farley
Syiran Nukes: the Phantom Menace

Kathleen M. Barry
Some Questions for "Femininists for Clinton:" Is There Really Any Difference Between Hillary and Condi?

Mohammed Alireza
Cowboys and Iranians

Nick Dearden
Haiti and the Black Hole of Debt

Carmelo Ruiz Marrero
Why Biotech is Betting on Biofuels

Bruce Springsteen
Farewell to Danny

Website of the Day
It's Bigger Than Hip Hop

April 24, 2008

Linn Washington, Jr.
Duplicity Demeans Clinton Campaign (or When Bill Praised Farrakhan)

Franklin Lamb
Bush to Nasrallah: an Offer Hezbollah Cannot Refuse?

Jennifer Van Bergen
The High Crimes of John Yoo: the President's Executioner

Joanne Mariner
U.S. Hypocrisy and the Malaysian Guantánamo

Mark Engler
Trade Politics and the Battle for the Soul of the Democratic Party

Dave Lindorff
The Politics of Obliteration: Hillary's Monstrous Threat

John Blair
Obama's Missed Opportunities in Evansville: Did He Even Know It Was Earth Day?

De Clarke / Stan Goff
Politics is Food is Politics

Binoy Kampmark
Bowling for Boris: the Tories, Red Ken and the London Mayoral Race

Philippe Marlière
Sarkozy and the Specter of May 68

Peter Morici
The Bank of England Misses the Point

Website of the Day
Fair Food Nation

April 23, 2008

Cockburn / St. Clair
Straggling to Denver

Vijay Prashad
McCain's Mask

Paul Craig Roberts
What the Iraq War is About

Stephen Soldz
The Involuntary Drugging of U.S. Detainees

Laura Santina
Hillary: Another Feminist Perspective

John Stauber /
Sheldon Rampton
Pentagon News Networks

Dave Lindorff
What Double Digit Win? Media Round Up in PA

George Ciccariello-Maher
Radical Chavismo Growls a Challenge

Ralph Nader
Andy Stern's Rackets

John Weisheit
Rearranging Deck Chairs at Glen Canyon Dam

Website of the Day
Wal-Mart's "Cost of Admission"

April 22, 2008

David Isenberg
Spinning Saddam's Linkages

Stan Cox
The Political Economics of Greenwashing

David Macaray
Memo to the Clinton Campaign: They Are Still Murdering Labor Unionists in Colombia

Jeff Birkenstein
Playing the Opposite Game: Or Why Can't I Sell Out?

Mike Whitney
Memo to Bernanke: Enough With the Rate Cuts, Already!

Nikolas Kozloff
Bush's Paraguayan Fiasco

Floyd Rudmin
From Lhasa to Bilbao: Journey of a Double Standard

Carlos Villarreal
Why John Yoo Should be Dismissed From Boalt Law School--And Prosecuted

Ray McGovern
What About the War, Pope Benedict?

Michael Gould-Wartofsky
El Barrio Fights Back Against Globalized Gentrification

Robert Ovetz
A Fish Tale

Pat Wolff
Rightwing Power Grab in Cornhusker State

Website of the Day
Defend the Rutgers 3!

April 21, 2008

Bill Quigley
The U.S. Role in Haiti's Food Riots

Uri Avnery
The Lion and the Gazelle

Dave Lindorff
The U.S. Economy and the Costs of War

Wajahat Ali
Finding Osama Bin Laden with Morgan Spurlock

Andy Worthington
Hollow Gestures at Guantánamo

Robert Jensen
The Sorrows of Race and Gender

Ron Jacobs
Clampdown at Evergreen

Dan Bacher
The Great Salmon Closure

Harvey Wasserman
Where's George?

Danny Alexander
Remembering Danny Federici

Website of the Day
Save Our Taco Trucks!

April 19 / 20, 2008

Alexander Cockburn
McCain: What Really Happened When He Was a POW?

Patrick Cockburn
A New Struggle is Beginning in Iraq

Wajahat Ali
Zinn Speaks

Andrew Wimmer
Papal Benedictions

Rev. William E. Alberts
Jeremiah Wright and America's Continuing "Separate and Unequal" Societies

David Rosen
Texas Two-Step: The Polygamy Raid and the Regulation of Sexual Life

Robert Fantina
McCain Detests War?

Ramzy Baroud
The Politics of Armageddon: McCain's Pastors and the Middle East

Saul Landau
The No Escape Clause on Iraq

Dr. Susan Block
Raelians, Aliens and Evolution

David Yearsley
Suitcase Arias and Ithacan Jazz

Phyllis Pollack
On the Red Carpet with the Rolling Stones

Jeffrey St. Clair
Booked Up

Poets' Basement
Hartz, Newberry and Khaiyat

April 18, 2008

John Ross
The Bush Legacy: Losing Latin America

Dave Lindorff
Courage and Conviction: In Praise of Bill Ayers

Dan Glazebrook
An Interview with Robert Fisk

Carl Finamore
A Look Inside the Hangars

Rannie Amiri
J Street: Do We Really Need Another Pro-Israel Lobby?

Richard Morse
A Creepy Roadblock at Midnight

Ko Young-dae
CONPLAN 8022: Inside Bush's Nuclear War Plan for the Korean Peninsula

Farooq Sulehria
A Himalayan Surprise

April 17, 2008

Michael Hudson
Hillary Joins the Vast Rightwing Financial Conspiracy

Robert Bryce
The Ethanol Apologists

Kathy Kelly
Weary of War? Don't Collaborate

Madis Senner
The Carrion Feeders' Ball: How Hedge Funds Reap Billions Off Economic Misery

Peter Morici
The G7, the Banks and GE

Ron Jacobs
Washington, al-Maliki and the Militias

William S. Lind
A Confirming Moment in Basra

James Murren
Obama's Disconnect with Small Town America

Ben Terrall
Losing Haiti

Walter Brasch
Political Log Rolling in Clinton County, PA

Website of the Day
Stealth Attack: Homegrown "Terrorism" Bill

April 16, 2008

Bill Kauffman
The Candidates from Nowhere

Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz
Colonization and Massacres

Saul Landau
How to Leave Iraq

Peter Morici
McCain's Economic Plan: GOP Out of Ideas (But So are the Democrats)

Eric Toussaint /
Damien Millet
Bankers Saved, Human Rights Sacrificed

Jeff Ballinger
Inside Nike's Asian Sweatshops: Squeezed Vietnamese Workers Strike Back

David Macaray
Union Strikes and Replacement Workers

Gary Leupp
Electoral Revolution in Nepal

Richard Morse
The Food Riots in Haiti

George Ciccariello-Maher
Einstein Turns in His Grave

Dave Lindorff
Letters from the Bitter Belt

Website of the Day
Surviving Prozac

April 15, 2008

Ralph Nader
The Politics of Distraction in an Age of Gotcha Capitalism

Uri Avnery
Manifest Destiny and Israel

Brian Cloughley
Arrogant Lies

David Price
Outrageous Pre-Tour de France Ban

Joe Bageant
Bitter America: Media Shit Storms and Heartland Reality

Steve Early
The Purple Punch-Out in Dearborn

Mats Svensson
To Create Something from Nothing: the Making of a Palestinian State

Michael Donnelly
Dead-Eye Hil and the Elitist

April Howard /
Benjamin Dangl
Dissecting the Politics of Paraguay's Next President

Laray Polk
Let's Not Put the Torch in a Bubble

Charles Modiano
What Does a Woman Have to Do to Get on the Cover of Sports Illustrated?

Website of the Day
The $3 Trillion Shopping Spree

April 14, 2008

Carl Finamore
Airline Deregulation Makes a Hard Landing

Michael Hudson
A Trillion Dollar Rescue for Wall Street Gamblers

M. Shahid Alam
Hizbullah's Big Win: Has Israel Finally Met Its Match?

Patrick Cockburn
A Cleric, a Pol and a Warrior

Paul Craig Roberts
Petraeus Sets Up Iran

Joanne Mariner
Redition to Jordan: What Happens When the Gloves Come Off?

Martha Rosenberg
Suicide and Cymbalta

Dave Lindorff
The Bitterness Thing: Is Obama Channeling Nader

P. Sainath
Hot Messages to Sex Dancer Doom Condi's New Finnish Pal

John V. Whitbeck
On Hypocrisy Over Tibet: a Personal Reflection

Website of the Day
Spying on Environmental Groups

April 12 / 13, 2008

Alexander Cockburn
Olympic Torch Toasts US Candidates

Patrick Cockburn
Warlord: the Rise of Muqtada al-Sadr

Mike Whitney
Want to Save the Economy?

David Yearsley
Film Scores and Westerns: the Stealth Cavalry of Empire

Robert Fantina
Bush's Brand of Morality

Conn Hallinan
Another Defining Moment in Iraq

Bill Hatch
In Praise of Hippies and the Counter-Culture

Ramzy Baroud
The Basra Battles

George S. Hishmeh
Back to Square One

Ron Jacobs
The New New Left in Latin America

Nikolas Kozloff
Olympic Torch in Buenos Aires

Charles Thomson
The British Prime Minister and the Tate's Tin of Shit

Alexander Billet
The Disney-fication of CBGB

Missy Beattie
Huffing and Puffing to Failure

David Michael Green
America's Jones for War

Seth Sandronsky
Education Entrepreneurs

Prairie Miller
Meeting David Wilson

Jeffrey St. Clair
Booked Up

Poets' Basement
Ko Un, Ibn Salma and Greaves

Website of the Weekend
Americans United for Palestinian Human Rights

April 11, 2008

Nikolas Kozloff
The Clintons and Their Sordid Colombia Advocacy

Wajahat Ali
Revenge of the Ghetto Nerd: an Exclusive Interview with Junot Diaz

Sharon Smith
Let Them Eat Ethanol!

Yigal Bronner / Neve Gordon
Digging for Trouble: the Politics of Archaeology in East Jerusalem

Alan Farago
Eating South Florida

Dave Lindorff
On Waking Sleeping Giants: Lessons for America from China

George Wuerthner
Money for Nothing? The Problems with the Conservation Reserve Program

Christopher Brauchli
Prostitutes Don't Do Funerals

Website of the Day
Animals Explain the Insurance Industry: a Health Care Video

April 10, 2008

Mathieu Vernerey
Tibet for the Tibetans!

Elizabeth Schulte
Slavery in the Fields

David Macaray
Labor Unions Will Never Get a Fair Shake

Ashley Smith
The Rise of Muqtada al-Sadr

Peter Morici
Driving Up Debt and Dragging Down Growth

Jacob Hornberger
The Military's Distintegrating Family Life

Harold Austin
Snitch or Else: Prison Officials Threaten Gang Drop Outs

Website of the Day
Hillary: the Wal-Mart Videos

April 9, 2008

Paul Craig Roberts
The Fading American Economy

Winslow T. Wheeler
Congressional Theater: the Petraeus / Crocker Hearings

C. Hand
Why Dave Marash Left Al Jazeera

Paul Krassner
Sex and Violins

Paul Wolf
Colombian "Magnicidio" Remains a Mystery After 60 Years

Wajahat Ali
Alien Invasion!

Karyn Strickler
Lost in the Fumes: the Sierra Club Sells Out to Clorox

Dan La Botz
Confronting the Economic Crisis

Eric Walberg
The Shadow of Munich: Another NATO Flop

Robin Millenthal
Enough Already! Growth and the Tar Sands Economy

Website of the Day
Conservative Nanny State

April 8, 2008

Mike Whitney
Should Khalid Sheikh Mohammed be Set Free?

Nikolas Kozloff
Bush Bullies Congress on Colombia Deal

Greg Moses
Migrant Detention in South Texas

Joshua Frank
The Other Military Draft

John Ross
Mexico City's Urban Tribes Go on the Warpath Against EMOS

Michael Donnelly
Hillary's Western Swing

John V. Walsh
Why Obama Lost Massachusetts

Jeff Nygaard
Health, Security and Mandates

Bill Piper
Last Shot for a Bush Legacy?

Sen. Russ Feingold
Legal Representation and the Death Penalty

Website of the Day
Catonsville 9, Forty Years Later

April 7, 2008

Ishmael Reed
The Irish Black Thing

Harry Browne
Irish Peace Activist Acquitted; Deported

Uri Avnery
Tibet and Palestine

Lenni Brenner
Obama's Constitution, His Pastor and His Unbelieving Mom in Heaven

Ayesha Ijaz Khan
America Must Respect Pakistan's Democracy

Robert Fisk
Fearful Lives in the Land of the Free

Edwin Krales
Ensuring the Success of Fascism in Spain: the US Corporate Role

Chris Genovali
Vancouver Island's Dwindling Ancient Forests

Website of the Day
LA Artists Against War

April 5 / 6, 2008

Alexander Cockburn
Did the Elites Want MLK Dead?

Ramzy Baroud
There are No Checkpoints in Heaven

Ralph Nader
Runaway Bailouts

David Yearsley
How Scott Joplin Had Wall Street Down

Saul Landau
Sex Politics in America

Paul Craig Roberts
The Petraeus and Crocker Show

Lawrence Korb / Ian Moss
Rev. Jeremiah Wright, a True Patriot

Seth Sandronsky
Meet America's Promise Alliance: Colin Powell's New Gig

John Ross
La Cumbia de la Doctrina Bush: Colombia Kills Four Mexican Students in Ecuador Bombing

Robert Fantina
McCain, Republicans and Family Values

David Michael Green
Back to Disaster: Hoover at Home, Tet Abroad

Missy Beattie
McCan't

Patrick Bond
Vultures Circle Zimbabwe

Dr. Susan Block
The New American Pot Dealers

Phyllis Pollack
The Stones Meet the Press

Adam Engel
The Boobus in the Lie

Jeffrey St. Clair
Booked Up

Poets' Basement
Diamand and St. Clair

Website of the Weekend
Richard Pryor Goes to the Gun Shop

Subscribe Online

The Case of the Lackawana Six

Driven to Terror

By VIJAY PRASHAD

If you have no business there, it is unlikely that you would find your way to Lackawanna, New York. A major freeway, the Interstate-90, goes by the small suburb of Buffalo, and one could easily exit from there on to Ridge Road and drive towards this town that was built around the Lackawanna Steel Company. But the steel company, founded in 1899, has long since closed its foundry. Little remains for the outsider. The town has less than 20,000 residents, but it has 24 churches – 14 Protestant and 10 Catholic – and one mosque (the Masjid Alhuda Guidance Mosque). Jobs vanish, but God remains.

In the 1940s, the Lackawanna steel mills employed over 20,000 people. It was the world’s largest steel factory. The company mostly hired immigrants – people from Ireland and Poland and also Yemen. It brought in Arabs to stoke the vast furnaces, whose heat, the company surmised, they would be able to bear as they were used to the desert heat. The Lackawanna Yemenis created their own world in a part of the new town, converting a church into a mosque and creating their own shops.

When these giant steel factories rusted into decrepitude by the early 1980s, the children of the Yemeni workers found that they could not follow their fathers into these union jobs. They inherited joblessness and uncertainty (the rate of unemployment is upwards of 40 per cent). Neither the factory nor the mosque provided them with stability. The former closed in 1983 and the latter had spent too much time on the project of assimilation to be useful when there was little to assimilate into. The promise of integration crumbled, and these young people turned elsewhere for their succour.

A few of the young Yemeni American men found their inspiration in young men like themselves who returned home after their adventures in the jehads of the 1990s (in Afghanistan, Bosnia and Chechnya). In her recent book The Jihad Next Door, reporter Dina Temple-Raston writes of one of these inspirational men, Kamel Derwish, who returned to his childhood home of Lackawanna after a long sojourn in the jehad lands. “It was easy for Derwish to attract the young men. With his stories, Derwish seemed like a modern-day swashbuckler. He talked of fighting in the hills of Bosnia and sleeping under the stars with fellow Muslims. He spoke with conviction that came with fulfilling a religious duty and a sense of purpose.” What Derwish offered these disjointed, aimless young men was not only meaning (through religion) but adventure.

When Derwish asked them if they wanted to come with him to the jehad camps in Afghanistan, they passively agreed. None of the half a dozen Lackawanna men had any real conviction about jehad. After they had begun to trust Derwish, he started to criticise their way of life. “You’re going to have problems on Judgment Day,” he told them. He promised purity alongside excitement. The men went along with him, and in mid-2001 eight of them came to al-Farooq, one of Al Qaeda’s camps west of Kandahar. They hated it. The conveniences of their lives in New York State had not prepared them for the rigours of the camp. Nor did they find comforting the ease with which their trainers moved between religion and brutality.
One day, Osama bin Laden came to the camp and addressed the trainees, telling them that about 40 men were ready to strike the United States, to “take their souls in their hands”. The Lackawanna men trembled, for this visit revealed to them the enormity of their error. They had not sought to become hardened jehadis; they wanted some release from their torpid lives. The men left al-Farooq in a hurry, hoping, Temple-Raston writes, that “their jihad adventure was over”.

Yasser Taher’s reaction to the attacks of September 11, 2001, was not his alone. Muslims across the U.S. shared them. Taher, who had just returned from al-Farooq, closed the blinds in his flat, went into a panic and told his wife, “For Muslims in this country, it is all over.” The local office of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) had kept an eye on the Lackawanna men, but they had no cause to go after them. After 9/11, the rules changed.

The Patriot Act gave the FBI more power of surveillance, and the power to arrest someone on the suspicion that they will commit an illegal act. The Bush administration’s aggressive move overseas (in Afghanistan, and later Iraq) was matched domestically. The FBI looked across the country to arrest anyone who it deemed might be a security risk. Part of this was for the security of the population, but most of it was for political reasons. The U.S. Justice Department needed to show that the new draconian laws had indeed produced some results. The Lackawanna Six, as they came to be called, were arrested on September 9, 2002. About three weeks later, on November 3, the U.S. fired a missile at a small convoy of SUVs (sports utility vehicles) in the Yemeni desert and killed Kamel Derwish.

The extra-judicial killing of Derwish and the overreached arrests of the Lackawanna Six showed the country that the Bush administration was willing to be aggressive against anyone who dared threaten the U.S. It did not matter that the young men got to Afghanistan in error and had made no plans to do anything against the U.S. Indeed, they recoiled when confronted by anti-Americanism while at al-Farooq.

The FBI operated almost as if it had a quota. Government informants worked aggressively among vulnerable people, pushing them to plan violent acts. Osama Eldawoody earned $100,000 to turn Shahawar Matin Siraj, a young and susceptible man who shied away from any violence (his story is told in Amitava Kumar’s forthcoming book, A Foreigner Carrying in the Crook of His Arm a Tiny Bomb).

FBI agent Foria Younis, meanwhile, went among young Muslims in New York, trawling for disaffection, which she converted into imputed action. As a result of her work, the U.S. government deported 16-year-old Tashnuba Hayder to Bangladesh. It claimed that Hayder would have been the first female suicide bomber in the U.S. (the evidence: a one-page doodle around the word suicide, which Hayder claimed was part of her class notes on why religions opposed taking one’s own life). Prodding FBI informants and agents converted disgruntlement at the rise of Islamaphobia and of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, as well as the ongoing U.S. support for the Israeli occupation of Palestine, into the appearance of terrorism.

The FBI called these young people “Pepsi jehadists”, those who “saw redemption in religious violence”, writes Temple-Raston. But most of the Lackawanna Six, Siraj and even Hayder developed their sense of outrage without any instinct for or study of religion or with any genuine religious motivation. The growth of what they saw as Islamaphobia, and their experiences of racism, as well as their shock at the unfathomable excesses of U.S. imperialism threw them into psycho-social turmoil. Without a well-developed anti-war movement to offer an alternative theory, most of them were prey to people like Kamel Derwish or Foria Younis, one who worked against the government and the other who worked for it.

Between 2001 and 2006, more than 400 people were indicted for all kinds of crimes (mostly petty immigration infractions) as a result of terror investigations. Less than half of them faced charges of being terrorists. Among them is the Portland Six. Patrice Lumumba Ford, son of a Black Panther leader, went to China as an undergraduate. There he met some of the 18 million Chinese Muslims, found succour in their faith and converted to Islam. He returned to Portland State University, where, a professor remembered, “He was devout, but he was not a missionary.” A few weeks after 9/11, a Sheriff’s deputy saw Ford and five other Muslims in a gravel pit at target practice. He took their names and let them off. Some weeks later, the group left the U.S. for Afghanistan, where, they claimed, they wanted to make contact with the Red Crescent and help their Muslim brethren.

Mistreatment of Muslims in the U.S. after 9/11 and the wars in Asia distressed them. When they returned to the U.S. without getting to Afghanistan, the FBI arrested them.

The Portland Six and the Lackawanna Six are groups of young people who bear within them the histories of imperialism, and who take refuge in Islam not for its doctrinal or theological aspects, but for the platform it provides in solidarity with Muslims who face the brunt of the war machine. African Americans (such as in the Portland Six) or British Asians (such as in the Tipton Three, who were imprisoned in Guantanamo Bay for two years) turn to political Islam in response to Atlantic racism and to the sustained campaigns against lands where the populations are largely Muslim (and whose land bears rich resources coveted by the Atlantic world).

Neither Europe nor the U.S. has come to terms with its imperial past, and they still see their “minority” population as outsiders, as immigrants; neither Europe nor the U.S. accepts that the world’s resources cannot be simply seized without the generation of anger and resentment. The Tipton Three and the Lackawanna Six went to Afghanistan out of curiosity perhaps or by accident, just as the Portland Six tried to go there to do humanitarian work (as another British Asian Guantanamo prisoner, Moazzam Begg, did).

Their intentions are irrelevant to the Atlantic powers, who are invested in fear-mongering about their co-citizens, the imputed Fifth Column, whose presence engenders fear and silences the democratic impulses of a population that pays for these wars with blood and treasure.

Vijay Prashad is the George and Martha Kellner Chair of South Asian History and Director of International Studies at Trinity College, Hartford, CT His new book is The Darker Nations: A People's History of the Third World, New York: The New Press, 2007. He can be reached at: vijay.prashad@trincoll.edu 

This article was originally published by Frontline, India's national magazine.