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Today's Stories

November 9, 2007

Mohammed Hanif
Musharraf and the Drunk Uncle

Martha Rosenberg
The Blood Sport of Vice Presidents

November 8, 2007

Kathleen & Bill Christison
Meeting the Other in Israel and Palestine

William Loren Katz
Waterboarding in American History

Mike Whitney
The Long Fall: a Market Without Parachutes

Sheldon Richman
Why Woodstock May Have Saved John McCain's Life

Liaquat Ali Khan
Solidarity with Pakistan's Lawyers

Marc Gardner
The Victims of "Jessica's Law": Parolees Without Rights (or Homes)

Jackie Corr
The Big Fish from Whitefish: Montana, the Last Retreat of the Investment Banker?

Brenda Norrell
Between Bombs and Border Walls

Dave Lindorff
Ridiculing Impeachment at the New York Times

China Hand
Rewriting the History of the Sudan Calamity

Sen. Russ Feingold
FISA and America's Basic Freedoms: Let's Not Repeat the Mistakes of the Patriot Act

Website of the Day
The Welfare Poets Meet Hugo Chavez

 

November 7, 2007

Paul Craig Roberts
Dollar's Fall Collapses the American Empire

Russell Mokhiber
Pelosi and Me: Can't the Democrats End the War By Not Bringing the Funding Bill to the Floor?

Vijay Prashad
The Apotheosis of Bobby Jindal

Niranjan Ramakrishnan
Educating Pakistan: What Mukasey Can Teach Musharraf

Alan Farago
To Bee or Not to Bee? The Politics of Colony Collapse

David Macaray
The Writers' Guild Strike: Is There an Ice-Breaker?

Nikolas Kozloff
The Case of the Slimy Senator: Chuck Schumer Greenlights Mukasey

Charlotte Laws
What We Learned from Stephen Colbert's Presidential Campaign

Daniel White
Zahid's Story

William Cook
The Politics of Servility: Congress and the Israel Lobby

Website of the Day
Safe Lawns

 

November 6, 2007

Mike Whitney
Welcome to Year 27 of the Reagan Revolution

Ralph Nader
Who Determines the Price of Oil?

Andy Worthington
The Torture of Ali al-Marri

Pam Martens
Wall Street Metes Out Street Justice to Citigroup

Liaquat Ali Khan
Pakistan's Dark Future

William Schroder
The Return of Water Torture

Stephen Lendman
Punishing Gaza

William Blum
Cuba and Original Sin

Former US Intelligence Officers
A Memo on Torture, Intelligence and Mukasey

 

November 5, 2007

Alexander Cockburn
How I Spent the Eighth Brumaire

Russell Mokhiber
Pelosi and Me: The Democrats and Single Payer

David Macaray
How to Turn Workers Against Each Other (and Make Them All Poorer)

Gary Leupp
General Musharaff's "State of Emergency"

Dave Lindorff
Those Minot Nukes

Ludwig Watzal
Israel's Dilemma in Palestine

Patrick Cockburn
Tensions Ease in Iraqi Kurdistan

Peter Stone Brown
John Fogerty Makes Peace with His Past

Michael Simmons
Yo! What Happened to Peace?

Website of the Day
Petition: In Defense of the Morton West HS Antiwar Students

 

November 3 / 4, 2007

Tariq Ali
Pakistan Sinks Deeper into Night

David Price
Army's Price Salesman of Counterinsurgency Manual Seeks to Defend Stolen Scholarship

Jeffrey St. Clair
Splitsville

Alan Farago
The Housing Crash, Suburban Sprawl and the Crisis of the American Middle Class

Paul Krassner
He's Back! Don Imus Meets Michael Richards

Rannie Amiri
Why the U.S. is Safeguarding Iraq's War Criminals

P. Sainath
Indexing Humanity, Indian Style

Ayesha Ijaza Khan
Pakistan in a Daze

Robert Fantina
Is the Bush Administration Talking Itself Into a War With Iran?

Seth Sandronsky
The Politics of Health Care in California

Ron Jacobs
The Bebop of Baraka

Ramzy Baroud
A Case for Arab Dignity

Heather Gray
When Capitalists Get a Free Ride

 

November 2, 2007

Dr. Mary Pipher
Acting on Conscience: Psychologists and Abusive Interrogations

Saul Landau
How Pete Stark Became a Pariah

Andy Worthington
Guantánamo as House Arrest

Sharon Smith
A Tale of Two Stadiums

Gary Leupp
Fascist Beatifications: the History and Politics of Sainthood

Gregory Harms
The Chorus of Slander on Palestine

Christopher Brauchli
Racism in High Places

Peter Morici
The Falling Dollar and the Stubborn Trade Deficit

Dave Lindorff
The Easy Way to Stop the Looming US Attack on Iran

David Penner
Zombie Nation

Website of the Day
Fall in Yosemite

 

November 1, 2007

Paul Craig Roberts
The Wages of Hegemony

Patrick Cockburn
The Most Dangerous Dam in the World

Dave Lindorff
The Air Force Report on the Minot-Barksdale Nuclear Missile Flight

Jonathan Feldman
The Strange Political Economy of Death in the South

Mike Ferner
They Met the Resistance in Iraq

William S. Lind
A Question for Would-Be Presidents

Diana Johnstone
"Fascislamism" Versus "Shoah Business"

Jacob Hornberger
The War on Telephone Privacy

A..K. Gupta
The Apocalypse will be Televised

Lyuba Zarsky /
Kevin Gallagher

The Enclave Economy of Mexico's Silicon Valley

Felice Pace
Does the SPLC Equate Anti-Zionism with Anti-Semitism?

Website of the Day
This One's for You, Ed Abbey

 

October 31, 2007

Bill Quigley
New Orleans' Broken Criminal Justice System

Rev. William E. Alberts
A Trail of American Blood: From the White House to CBS News

Ray McGovern
Attacking Iran for Israel

Eric Walberg
Poisonous Espionage: Litvinenko and the New Cold War

V. G. Smith
The Second Death of Guy Môquet

Luis J. Rodriguez
"Social Cleansing" from Guatemala to LA

Sheldon Richman
Bush has Time to Run the World

Walter Brasch
A Real Halloween Scare

Website of the Day
Boogie Rocks!


October 30, 2007

David Price
Pilfered Scholarship Devastates Gen. Petraeus's Counterinsurgency Manual

M. Shahid Alam
The Pakistan Question

Andy Worthington
The Epiphany of Matthew Waxman: a Government Insider Turns Against Gitmo

Patrick Cockburn
The Bicycle Bomber of Baquba

Anthony Papa
The Twisted Logic of Drug Laws

Floyd Rudmin
What "All Options are on the Table" Really Means

Sherwood Ross
Giuliani and Torture

Website of the Day
The Worst Lobby? You Decide

 

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

November 9, 2007

Full Spectrum Mercenaries

Blackwater Goes to Mexico

By JOHN ROSS

If and when private security contractor Blackwater USA and its heavily-armed operatives are forced to pull out of Iraq as the result of the September 16th rampage in downtown Baghdad when its employees massacred up to 28 Iraqis, Mexico could be a profitable option for the North Carolina-based company.

Actually, Blackwater is almost in Mexico already. For months, the North Carolina-based corporation has been pressuring local San Diego officials to grant it an operating license for an 824-acre training site to be known as Blackwater West in Potrero California 45 miles east of that bustling port city but only six miles from the Tecate Mexico border crossing. The site, some of which snakes through the Cleveland National Forest, is a favored transit route for undocumented Mexican workers heading north and has been recently scorched by out-of-control wildfires.

Blackwater USA's plans have drawn the ire of locals who are not happy about having 15 firing ranges in earshot and a coalition of homeowners, local farmers, environmentalists, and peaceniks has been pieced together to oppose the project. Nonetheless, Blackwater has kept up a full court press on county officials, even sailing the company yacht flying a humongous Blackwater flag, into a local marina last spring and inviting members of the planning commission aboard for cocktails.

Blackwater USA is attracted to the San Diego area because of the heavy concentration of military bases such as Camp Pendleton in the environs that could produce a windfall of security and training contracts from its pals in the Pentagon. Blackwater USA was founded by ex-Navy Seal Eric Prince who cultivates close ties with the military.

One of Blackwater's most rah-rah backers in the Potrero venture is local congressman Duncan Hunter, ranking republican on the House Armed Services Committee and a dark horse candidate for his party's presidential nomination. Hunter is considered one of the most virulent anti-Mexican immigration voices in congress and is a political architect of the separation wall that now lines California's border with Mexico.

The dispute over Blackwater's proposed Potrero training camp is not just a NIMBY-type confrontation. Siting the facility a stone's throw from the Mexican border internationalizes the proposition. By any stretch of the imagination, Mexican president Felipe Calderon ought to be nervous about the encampment of the world's largest private army on his conflictive northern border, particularly one that is not accountable to either the Geneva Convention or U.S. and Mexican military and civil law. Yet Calderon has not publically protested the proposal.

Situated in rugged high desert terrain, Potrero is an idyllic hideaway to train a new generation of Rambos - one can imagine guest motivational appearances by Sylvester Stallone and California's action figure governor Arnold Schwarzenegger. The camp which, in addition to multiple shooting ranges, will house an armory and feature both a 33,000 square feet urban counter-insurgency set and a course where armed vehicles seek to evade a paint ball barrage, is expected to train military and law enforcement personnel as well as private paramilitary security forces.

Blackwater USA has trained dozens of police forces at its Moyock North Carolina complex in the heart of that state's Great Dismal Swamp, including big city (New York, Washington DC, Los Angeles and Chicago) officers as well as rural forces like the Maricopa County Arizona sheriff's department. Maricopa County, which includes Phoenix, is a first stop for undocumented Mexican migrants and the local police have been deputized to assist the Department of Homeland Security's Immigration & Customs Enforcement (ICE) to corral the "indocumentados."

Blackwater USA's strategic position overlooking the Mexican border in Potrero presents inviting economic opportunities. Testifying before congress in 2005, then-Blackwater president Gary Jackson said that the North Carolina enterprise was prepared to provide assistance on border security and long-time connections inside DHS could generate lucrative contracts training increasingly heavily-armed ICE agents. San Diego congressperson Bob Filner, a Democrat told Salon Magazine's Elaine Zimmerman last month that he believes Blackwater is positioning itself to move into the border security business.

As the National Guard troops brought back from Iraq by George Bush to patrol the border and appease fellow-republicans like Hunter are drawn down (3000 have already been pulled back), Blackwater USA is poised to fill in the gap. Blackwater would also be useful in strengthening security at troubled immigration detention centers along the border, more than half of which have already been privatized.

In an October 15th Wall Street Journal interview Prince indicated that Iraq-type operations were no longer at the top of Blackwater USA's business agenda and that he saw his company as going more "full spectrum." Now, as they move into their new facility on the Mexican border, Eric Prince & Company appear to be set to expand into both border enforcement and the Bush White House drug war with an operational role in Plan Mexico, the $1.5 billion U.S.-Mexico drug war scheme to fuse drug-fighting agencies on both sides of the border under Washington's control.

Despite repeated advisories from the White House that Plan Mexico is a done deal, Bush and Calderon have yet to formalize the pact, pending approval by the U.S. Congress.

The request for three half billion dollar Plan Mexico pay-outs through 2009 was sent on to congress folded into a near $50 billion supplemental spending bill to finance Bush's wars in Iraq and Afghanistan but given Democratic aversion to funding these failed military escapades in an election year, passage is not assured. Plan Mexico has spread widespread suspicion south of the border with many Mexicans condemning the project as a grievous violation of national sovereignty.

Modeled on Washington's flawed Plan Colombia, which has pumped billions into that South American nation to bolster the right-wing regime of Alvaro Uribe, one of Bush's few allies in the hemisphere, Plan Mexico will supply this not-so-distant neighbor nation with upgraded military hardware and cutting edge technological savvy - the New York-based Verint Technology is already installing a voice-activated "communication interruption" system that will audit all phone and e-mail traffic in Mexico and to the U.S. The surveillance technology, which is being bankrolled by a U.S. State Department grant, appears to be as much in violation of the Mexican constitution as Bush's massive, secret surveillance dragnet of his own citizens violates the U.S. magna carta.

Unlike Plan Colombia, Plan Mexico does not contemplate the stationing of U.S. troops on Mexican soil. Such an adventure would be universally unpopular here - the U.S. has invaded Mexico eight times since this country won its independence in 1821. To insure that U.S. military personnel stays on their side of the line, Mexican drug fighters are trained out of country, mainly at the Center for Special Forces in Fort Bragg North Carolina (100 miles as the crow flies from Blackwater's Moyock complex.)

Nonetheless, as the military pares itself down and outsources its services, training Mexican troops is a role that a new "full-spectrum" Blackwater USA seems perfectly positioned to assume at the Potrero site. Because it is not formally a part of the U.S. military, Blackwater could also infiltrate personnel across the border for on-site engagement inside Mexico.

Coincidentally, according to a recent report in the Army Times (Sept. 14th), Blackwater USA has just been handed a sizeable chunk of a $15 billion USD drug war grant by the Department of Defense (Raytheon is another big winner.) Part of the Blackwater boodle is slated for the design of an unmanned aerostat surveillance platform that has been subcontracted with the Maryland-based Arinc Corporation. The "blimp" project (if that what is being proposed) marks a radical departure for Eric Prince's conglom, which has never before been a supplier of technology to the military.

According to the Army Times report, the DOD grant mandates Blackwater USA "to deploy surveillance techniques, train foreign security forces, and provide logistical and operational support" for drug war initiatives.

Founded in 1996 by Prince and a handful of ex-Navy Seal buddies, Blackwater USA's business boomed in the wake of 9/11 and it is heavily invested in Bush's War on Terror. Drug war operations represent a field in which Blackwater has little experience but which, logistically at least, is not much different from the security firm's terror war duties. In recent years, the White House has done its damndest to conflate the War on Drugs with the War on Terror.

Blackwater USA's enlistment in the drug war is a direct challenge to its stiffest competitor, DynCorp - up until now, the Dallas-based corporation has locked up 94% of all private drug war security contracts.

Blackwater USA's move into combating narco-terrorism will give the North Carolina outfit a foot up in Latin America where the private security industry is flourishing. Blackwater now employs 1200 Chileans, ex-members of dictator Augusto Pinochet's military, in its international operations - in addition to its contracts in Iraq and Afghanistan, Blackwater provides security for high officials in Azerbaijan, Jordan, and Bokano Faso among other governments.

But Blackwater USA's Colombian subsidiary, ID Systems, ran into a storm of criticism when it recruited 20 ex-military officers for the company's Iraq operation - the recruits now claim that they were paid less than half of what their contracts called for and were kept by Blackwater USA in Iraq against their wills.

Under the U.S.'s post 9/11 security redesign, military protection of the homeland has become the province of the newly created North Command, now housed in a Colorado bunker. Within the North Command's schema, Mexico forms a major portion of the U.S.'s southern security perimeter but with the U.S. military severely restricted in its abilities to put Special Forces on Mexican soil to combat the terrorists, narco or otherwise, Blackwater USA, perched as it is on the border at its Potrero California training camp and equipped with multi-million dollar DOD grants, stands ready to provide logistical and operational support to further Washington's designs on Mexico and the South.

Friends and Enemies of John Ross are cordially invited to attend "Eye on Mexico", a celebration of the 97th anniversary of the Mexican revolution and a benefit to buy the author a new eye. "Eye on Mexico" is set for Friday Nov. 16th, 7 PM at New College, 777 Valencia Street in San Francisco's Mission District.



 

 

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