Today's Stories

December 12 / 14, 2008

Michael Hudson /
Jeffrey Sommers
The End of the Washington Consensus

December 11, 2008

Patrick Cockburn
Total Defeat for U.S. in Iraq

P. Sainath
After Mumbai

Vicken Cheterian
The Zarqawi Generation

Ray McGovern
Will Obama Buy Torture-Lite?

Dedrick Muhammad
Post-Racial Racism at the Post: the Undying Obsession with Black Family Values

Lee Sustar
Victory at Republic

Peter Morici
The Big Drag

Ayesha Ijaz Khan
Must They Hate Us So?

George Wuerthner
Another Subsidy to Big Timber?

Christopher Brauchli
Mr. Berg's Strange Obsession

Worthy Group of the Day
Animal Balance

December 10, 2008

Ismael Hossein-Zadeh
Whose Interests Will Shape Obama's Change?

Mary Lynn Cramer
The Multi-Trillion Dollar Question

Manuel Garcia, Jr.
Nuclear Weapons Obsolescence

Joshua Frank
Breaking the Stranglehold on Middle East News Coverage

Jack Ely
Stop Sobbing About Free Music Downloads: a Message to the Music Industry from the Lead Singer of the Kingsmen

Steve Conn
An Obama Public Works Program?

Lee Sustar
Republic Workers Target Bank of America

Glen Ford
The Die is Cast

Stephen Lendman
The Persecution of Syed Fahad Hashmi

Nadia Hijab
The Face of America

Dave Lindorff
We All Need a Union

Website of the Day
This One's For You, Senator Dodd

December 9, 2008

Mike Whitney
Card Check

Fawzia Afzal-Khan
Us vs. Them

Ghada Karmi
The UN Resolution That Time Forgot

Dave Lindorff
A Car Dealer Explains Why the Bailout is a Raw Deal

Steve Breyman
Notes on a Green Economy: Managing Stuff in the 21st Century

Lee Sustar /
Nicole Colson
Raising the Stakes at Republic

Rev. William E. Alberts
God of Our Fathers

Martha Rosenberg
Bill Richardson: Secretary of Bloodsports

Sam Husseini
How Holbrooke Lied His Way Into a War

David Macaray
The UAW in Peril

Website of the Day
This Toxic Life

December 8, 2008

Steve Early
Is Obama Backing Off a Crucial Pledge to Labor?

Michael Hudson
Obama's Favoritism: Wall Street, Not the Auto Industry

Patrick Cockburn
Talking to a Lashkar Militant

Diane Farsetta
An Officer and a Conflicted Man: McCaffery, the Pentagon and Fleishman-Hillard

Paul Craig Roberts
Chapters in Imperial Hypocrisy

Daniel Gross
The Chicago Sit-Down Strike

Saul Landau
To Bail or Not to Bail?

Harvey Wasserman
Why John Bryson is Unfit for Energy Secretary

Mike Ferner
The New Generation of "Non-Lethal" Weapons

Norman Solomon
The Silent Winter of Escalation

David Michael Green
The Other Foot

Website of the Day
The Remains of Detroit

December 5 / 7, 2008

Alexander Cockburn
Honeymoans From the Left

Brian Cloughley
Shambles in Afghanistan

Paul Craig Roberts
Muslim Revolution: How Washington Arrogance Helped Drive the Mumbai Attacks

Liaquat Ali Khan
Mumbai and the Kashmir Tinderbox

Farzana Versey
Mumbai's Charge of the Lightweight Brigade

Peter Lee
Pakistan Nears the Breaking Point

Peter Morici
Slouching Toward a Depression?

Ralph Nader /
Toby Heaps
Junk Cap-and-Trade

Yinon Cohen /
Neve Gordon
Obama Could End the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict: Will He Meet the Challenge?

Wajahat Ali
Perverse Justice: the Holy Land Foundation Convictions

Johnny Barber
Aswad's Story: Illegal Detention and the Declaration of Human Rights

Alan Farago
Fallout from the Pass-Through Economy

Jeremy Scahill
Obama Doesn't Plan to End Occupation of Iraq

Mike Whitney
Powergrab in Ottawa

Ranjit Hoskote
Jahiliyya Versus Jihad

Carl Finamore
Thank God I'm an Atheist! (Or Boy is Bill O'Reilly in for a Big Surprise)

Marjorie Cohn
Obama and Women's Rights

Norm Kent
Tommy Chong, the Unanticipated Warrior

Missy Beattie
What Lies Ahead

Binoy Kampmark
Committing Suicide On-Line: the Briggs Case

David Macaray
The Best and the Brightest Redux: Too Many Brains, Not Enough Humility

Nancy Stohlman
Relational Activism

Ron Jacobs
Irreverent Politics Then and Now

David Yearsley
Thematics From the Golden Past

Lorenzo Wolff
Troubled Songs of Home and War

Poets' Basement
Orloski: The Door Opener

Website of the Weekend
In Prison My Whole Life

December 4, 2008

Ece Temelkuran
Inside the Ergenekon Case

Ralph Nader
Turning Crisis into Opportunity: Who Will Seize the Moment?

Harry Browne
The Bush-Obama National Security Strategy

Eamonn Fingleton
The American Car Industry: a Riposte to the Knockers

Conn Hallinan
The Syria Attack

Mike Whitney
Fiasco in Somalia: Another CIA Cock-Up

Stewart J. Lawrence
Obama and Latinos: Richardson, Alone, is Not Enough

Paul Fitzgerald /
Elizabeth Gould
Message to Obama: Stop Killing Afghanis

Karyn Strickler
Show Us the Green, Before We Show You the Money

Jennifer Matsui
Obama-Cola: the Great National Temperance Beverage

Website of the Day
"He Ain't Got Laid in a Month of Sundays..."

December 3, 2008

Andrew Cockburn
What's Wrong with the U.S. Military

Sheldon Rampton
Mormon Homophobia: Up Close and Personal

Robert Weissman
Nationalize GM

Yifat Susskind
From Mumbai to Washington

William Blum
The Obama Bummer: Vote First, Ask Questions Later

Alan Singer
The Ghost of the Defunct Economist

David Macaray
Trampled Under Foot at Wal-Mart

Martha Rosenberg
Born With a Statin Deficiency? Line Forms to the Left!

Mats Svensson
The Crimes Have No Period of Limitations

Website of the Day
Why Bill Richardson's Nomination Should be Opposed

December 2, 2008

Jeremy Scahill
Obama's Kettle of Hawks

Paul Craig Roberts
The New Arms Race

Ayesha Ijaz Khan
The Mumbai Terror Attacks: Is Pakistan to Blame?

Sarah Anderson /
John Cavanagh
Skewed Priorities: How the Bailout Dwarfs Spending on Other Global Crises

William Blum
The Mythology of the War on Terrorism

John Ross
Mexico's Drug War Goes Down in Flames

Dave Lindorff
A Tale of Two Terror Attacks

Nicola Nasser
A Peace Process That Makes Peace Impossible

Steve Conn
Operation Redskin Removal

Robert Bryce
Coal Hard Facts

Website of the Day
Country, Funk, Soul

December 1, 2008

Patrick Cockburn
From Baghdad to Mumbai, by Way of Pakistan

Damien Millet /
Eric Toussaint
Obama's Economic Team: Records of Failure

Vijay Prashad
The Fires in South Asia

Deepak Tripathi
Obama's Foreign Crises

Joshua Frank
Madam Secretary Clinton and the Middle East

P. Sainath
The Unlikely Martyrdom of Free Market Jihad

Alan Farago
The Right's War on Regulators

Binoy Kampmark
Sydney's Ball and Chain

Chris Genovali
Silent Fall

David Michael Green
Hope You Die Before You Get Old

Stephen Martin
The Chinese are Coming, the Chinese are Coming!

Website of the Day
Robert Rubin: Coward, Liar or Both?

November 28-30, 2008

Alexander Cockburn
In Time of Trouble

Mike Whitney
The Obama "Dream Team": Rubin Clones and Other Fakers

Ted Honderich
What is the Meaning of Obama's Election?

Tom Kerr
Preserving Filthy Lucre (Or Becoming My Dad)

Mike Ely
The Conquest of New England

David Yearsley
Hymns of the Conquest

Deepak Tripathi
Uproar in Police-State Britain

Sonja Karkar
Gaza's Death Throes

Ramzy Baroud
Salvation in a News Broadcast

Robert Weitzel
Israel's Settlement on Capitol Hill

Robert Roth
Can We Create a Movement for Change?

Carlos Fierro
Obama and the End of Racism?

David Macaray
How to Kill a Union

David Rosen
A New Sexual Agenda

James Cockcroft
Indigenous People Rising

Stan Cox
The Most Disappointing Gift

Steve Conn
Talking Turkey About College Basketball

Stephen Martin
The Electromagnetic Pulse and Economic Warfare

Richard Rhames
Busty Bimbettes, Bombs and Brand Obama

Kim Nicolini
Women as Products and Cannibalistic Achievers

Lorenzo Wolff
A Battle Cry for the Confused and Vulnerable

Poets' Basement
Woods, Harrison and Corseri

November 27, 2008

Tariq Ali
The Assault on Mumbai

Steve Hendricks
Thanksgiving We Can Believe In: Justice in Indian Country

Ralph Nader
Open Up Those Corporate Tax Returns

John Walsh
The Root Cause of the Crisis of 2008

Dave Lindorff
The Department of Homeland Lunacy

Christopher Brauchli
Thanks A Lot, Mr. Meese: How Alberto Gonzales Learned to Get You to Pay for His Legal Bills

Matthew Koehler
Giving Thanks for Burned Forests

Website of the Day
John Trudell: "Crazy Horse We Hear What You Say"

November 26, 2008

Michael Hudson
The Obama Letdown

Alan Farago
Bailouts and the New Math

Stanley Heller
Don't Bail Them Out, Take Them Over

Kevin Zeese
The Real Cost of the Bailout

Steve Conn
Now It Can Be Told (Except in North Carolina)

Ray McGovern
Kafka and Uighurs at Guantánamo

Ron Jacobs
King George is Gone: Now It's Time to Organize

Eric Walberg
Obama's Odious Entourage

Martha Rosenberg
Pay No Attention to That Turkey Being Slaughtered (Or How Sarah Palin Created a Whole New Generation of Vegetarians)

Matt Siegfried
Back to the Future With Barack

Website of the Day
"Every Time I've Compromised, I've Lost"

November 25, 2008

James Abourezk
Of Arrogance, Bailouts and the Big Three

Ralph Nader
Don't Suppress Carter

Patrick Irelan
PBS Reports for Big Oil on Venezuela

John Ross
Obama in Bedlam

Fred Gardner
Dr. Goodwin and the Infinite Con

Dan LaBotz
The Auto Crisis: a Big Caravan to Washington?

Tom Barry
Napolitano and Immigration Policy

Norman Solomon
The Ideology of No Ideology

Richard Morse
Memo From Haiti: Where the Culture of Corruption Meets the Corruption of Culture

Chris Strohm
The Missing Rules of Engagement in Cyberwar

Website of the Day
Green vs. Green?

November 24, 2008

Mike Whitney
You Ain't Seen Nothing Yet

Pam Martens
The Rise and Fall of Citigroup

Laray Polk
Bush's Library: the Kurds, Oil and Missing Records

David Ker Thomson
American Friends: With Friends Like These, Who Needs Canadians?

Uri Avnery
Likud Rising

Joe Mowrey
Deprivation and Desperation in Gaza

Ramzi Kysia
An Administration in Search of a Progressive: the Team Obama Should Have Picked

Kevin Zeese
The Causes of the Auto Crisis

Dave Lindorff
Rescuing the Blob: Idiots and Bailouts

David Macaray
Seven Reasons You Should Join a Union

Howard Lisnoff
Inaugurations Past and Present

Website of the Day
I Hate the Beatles

November 21 / 23, 2008

Alexander Cockburn
The Honeymoon is Looking a Bit Wan

Michael Hudson
Paulson's Cascade of Lies

Mike Whitney
Time to Move to Plan B ... If There is One

Barbara Rose Johnston /
Holly M. Barker
Cautionary Tales From a Nuclear War Zone

Serge Halimi
The Gloom of Empire: Downhill All the Way

Alan Farago
The Suburbs March On

Ralph Nader
Changing With Retreads: the Third Clinton Administration

Saul Landau
When Old Axioms Don't Apply

Robert Bryce
From LBJ to Obama: the End of Texas Dominance

Shannon May
Ecological Crisis and Eco-Villages in China

Binoy Kampmark
The End of the Yugo

Jack Ely
The Fate of the West's Wild Horses

Ramzy Baroud
The Rights of Women in War Zones

Missy Beattie
Why Vote, Anyway?

Larry Portis
Women Soldiers Serving in (and Barely Surviving) the Israeli Army

James McEnteer
Colombia's Laboratory of Failure

Christopher Brauchli
A Tale of Two Whales

David Yearsley
Real Swords, Fire and Don Giovanni

Adam Engel
Power Down

Ron Jacobs
The Continuing Saga of the White Album

Lorenzo Wolff
Honky Tonk Heroes: When Country Got Real

Poets' Basement
Raza Ali Hasan

Website of the Weekend
Lips and Fingers

November 20, 2008

P. Sainath
The Jurassic Auto and Idea Park

Brian McKenna
How Dow Chemical Defies Homeland Security and Risks Another 9/11

Paul Craig Roberts
What Uncle Sam Has to Say to His Creditors

Andy Worthington
How Guanántamo Can be Closed

Peter Lee
India Doubles Down in Afghanistan ... Maybe

Dr. Eyad al-Serraj
At the Erez Crossing

Sen. Russ Feingold
The Bush Pardons

Lance Selfa
Who Made the New Deal?

Ray McGovern
Keeping Gates

Benjamin G. Davis
Ending Torture; Prosecuting the Torturers

Tracy McLellan
Obama's Crony Democracy: the Return of Tom Daschle

Website of the Day
Finally, a Victory for Palestinians

November 19, 2008

M. Shahid Alam
Obama and the Politics of Race and Religion in America

Mario A. Murillo
Holder, Chiquita and Colombian Death Squads

Martine Boulard
Escaping the Dollar's Shadow

Robin D. G. Kelley
Will Obama be the First "Freedom" Democrat?

Behrooz Ghamari-Tabrizi
Obama and the Iron Cage

Jonathan Cook
Who Will Stop the Settlers?

Steve Conn
Spare Change or No Change at All

George Wuerthner
The NYT and the Beetles of Mass Destruction

Michael Winship
This Just in From Middle Earth

Stephen Martin
The Other Side of the Pleasure-Dome

Website of the Day
An Important Holiday Message From Kristen Johnston

November 18, 2008

Chellis Glendinning
Cheering for Morgan Stanley

George C. Wilson
Perils of Pakistan: Will It Prove to be Obama's Cambodia?

Franklin Lamb
Who Will Evict Israel from Lebanon: Hezbollah or the UN?

Bill and Kathleen Christison
The Irresponsibility of Appointing Hillary Clinton Secretary of State

Roger Burbach
Orchestrating a Civic Coup in Bolivia: How Bush Tried to Bring Down Morales

John Ross
Drilling vs. Direct Democracy in Mexico

Wajahat Ali
Is Obama the Muslim World's Superman?

Damien Millet /
Eric Toussaint
What Really Happened in Washington? The G20 and the Inconsistent Script

Marc Gardner
When Mooning is a Sex Crime

Eric Walberg
Courting the Bear: a New Era for Russian/Western Relations?

Wendy Williams
The Bottled Water Con

Website of the Day
Where's Zappa When We Need Him?

November 17, 2008

Michael Hudson
Bankers Shake Down Congress and the G-20

Paul Craig Roberts
When It's a Clear Day and You Can't See GM

Mike Whitney
Busted in Washington

Steve Conn
Where is Nader Country 2008? Mapping the Nader Votes

Andy Worthington
Closing Guantánamo: Advice for Obama

Jonathan Cook
The Real Goal of Israel's Blockade of Gaza: "They Are All Hamas"

Rannie Amiri
Dual Loyalties Will Doom Obama

David Macaray
Bailing Out the Automakers

David Michael Green
Twelve Victories

Charles Modiano
Sports Illustrated and Sexism: Tokenism or a New Day?

Website of the Day
The South Sea Bubble

November 14 / 16, 2008

Alexander Cockburn
Heading for the First Hundred Days

Jeffrey St. Clair
How Bill Clinton Doomed the Spotted Owl: a Cautionary Tale for Greens in the Age of Obama

Mike Whitney
Paulson the Bungler

Sasan Fayazmanesh
RIP: the Experts, 1929-2008

Moshe Adler
Keynes: China's Greatest Export?

Anthony DiMaggio
Transcending Race?

Jean Bricmont
Cats, Dogs and Creationism

Sheldon Rampton
The Eisenstadt Hoax: a Real Life Example of a "Fake Fake"

Douglas Valentine
Let the Trials Begin!

Joseph Nevins /
Timothy Dunn
Barricading the Border

Tom Barry
Rahm Emanuel's Political Pragmatism on Immigration

Ron Jacobs
Che Guevara Meets Trashman: the Genius of Spain Rodriguez

Larry Portis
The State of the Israeli State

Mary Lynn Cramer Obama's Brain Trust: Seems Like Old Times

Sherry Wolf
The Myth of the Black/Gay Divide

Peter Cervantes-Gautschi
Secretary of Greed: How Larry Summers Championed Wall Street by Impoverishing the Mexican People

Jacob Hornberger
The Conservative Malaise: Hey, Brother, Can You Spare Some Habeas Corpus?

Lance Selfa
The Center-Right Nation Con

Benjamin Dangl
Vermont Against General Dynamics

Seth Sandronsky
Lifelines in Hard Times

Russell Mokhiber
Time to Give the Friends of Big Coal the Boot

Allan Stellar
Nuke a Gay Whale for the Navy

Kelly Overton
Get Thee to a Shelter: the Obamas and the Million-Mutt March

Martha Rosenberg
Why Mink are Cheering the Economic Crisis

Richard Rhames
Palling Around with Ray the Plumber

David Yearsley
How I Played Hooky from "High School Musical 3"

Lorenzo Wolff
Zach is Back: Songs of Hurt, Rage and Resistance

Poets' Basement
Gibbons, Ford and Buknatski

Website of the Weekend
The Eyes Have It

November 13, 2008

Pam Martens
The Two Trillion DollarBlack Hole

Vijay Prashad
Guilt by Participation: Sonal Shah's Membership Has Expired

Patrick Cockburn
Who is Paying for the Iraqi National Intelligence Service?

Jonathan Cook
The Withering Palestinian Economy

Ralph Nader
Obama and the Rogue Regime

Bill Quigley
McCain Owes America an Apology

Lee Sustar
Bailing Out the Big Three

Omar Barghouti
Boycotting Israeli Settlement Products

Steve Conn
More Alaska Fun

Howard Lisnoff
The Last Bastion of Hate

Jeff Cohen
What Indy Media Heroes Can Teach Us

Website of the Day
Who are the Obamagelicals?

November 12, 2008

Johanna Berrigan
Scattered Families: the Iraq Refugee Crisis

Steve Conn
The Big Mystery Election in Alaska

Patrick Bond
Against Volcker

Bokar Ture /
Dedrick Muhammad
Remembering a Black Radical in a Barack Obama America

Alan Farago
The Hispanic Vote in South Florida: Not Dyed Blue Yet

Dave Lindorff
Rescuing Joe Lieberman

Karl Grossman
Break Up Big Oil: Tyranny in the Tank

David Macaray
An Obama Litmus Test: Will Labor Have a Seat at the Table?

George Wuerthner
Act Now to Save America's Public Forests

Susie Day
Heavy Weather

Website of the Day
Does the Planet Have a Future? an Interview with Derrick Jensen

Weekend Edition
December 12 / 14, 2008

The Ordeal of Lucia Morett

Writing a Thesis in Blood

By JOHN ROSS

At first Lucia Morett couldn't make out where she was and what had woken her up in the pitch-black jungle dark. Then the Mexican graduate student remembered. She reached for her schoolmate Veronica Velazquez's hand but Vero was not there.  She would never be there again. 

Vero and Lucia plus three boys from the National Autonomous University (UNAM) and the Polytechnic Institute, one her boyfriend Juan Gonzalez, had arrived in the camp of the Colombian Revolutionary Armed Forces (FARC) only six hours earlier, Lucia Morett told La Jornada reporter Blanche Petrich during a flight home to Mexico December 3rd. 

Lucia called out to Juan who was sleeping just meters away in another "caleta", a hut assembled from rough planks.  Again there was no answer.  Lucia felt a sharp jab of fear in her gut.  Then the bombs began to explode on the camp, ten 500-pound Paveway bombs, the same kind the United States military had dropped during the first Gulf War on Iraq.  A sudden wind gusted through the caletas.  She heard screams.  A tree erupted into flames right in front of her.  Her sleeping bag felt wet.  Lucia saw that it was drenched in blood.

Maybe Lucia Morett had not fully anticipated the risks when she chose the subject for her thesis on the uses of popular song and theater in Latin American guerilla movements: "Colombia - Theater for Revolution and Revolution For Theater."  The dean of her faculty at the UNAM, Philosophy & Letters where she was completing a doctorate in Latin American Studies, had encouraged her fieldwork and in February she and Veronica, Juan, "Chac" (Fernando Franco), and Soren Aviles had flown to Ecuador to attend a Bolivarian political congress.  Lucia had made contact with a representative of the  FARC in Quito and the five students were invited to the jungle camp.  The FARC has made street theater and revolutionary cumbias and sinuous Vallenata accordion music part of its cultural arsenal and it was rumored that "Julian Conrado" (not his real name), the most celebrated of the FARC Vallenatos who once serenaded former Colombian president Andres Pastrana during failed peace talks, was right now in the camp.  "It was a golden opportunity to gather material for my thesis," Lucia told Petrich, "I couldn't pass it up."

Morett and her four companions flew to Lago Agrio ("Sour Lake") in the Ecuadorian Amazon canton of Sucumbios, an area of the jungle destroyed by the U.S. transnational Texaco before the oil giant was forced from the country.  The comrades had walked the whole day through the bush to the Angostura camp, a pair of kilometers inside Ecuador on the ill-defined Colombian border, and were so tired that they went right to sleep.

After the big bombs had pounded the camp, Colombian military helicopters swooped in, raking the jungle with machine gun fire.  Ground troops arrived and when Lucia heard their voices she played dead, the Mexican student recounted to La Jornada during the flight from Managua after eight months in Nicaragua under the protection of the Sandanista government. 

The troops tore through the camp, flipping over the bodies of the dead until they found the one they were looking for: "Raul Reyes" (not his real name), the FARC's second in command under Manual Marulanda ("Tirofijo").  "Reyes" had just successfully negotiated the release of seven FARC hostages with Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez, reportedly infuriating Colombian president Alvaro Uribe and his U.S. handlers.  A second body was thought to be that of the Vallenata singer "Julian Conrado" but turned out to be an Ecuadoran citizen, which didn't do much to cool the fury of President Rafael Correa at the illegal Colombian incursion.

Both "Reyes" and "Conrado" were trophies of targeted assassinations: the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) had posted a $7 million USD reward for the two men dead or alive and the Colombians needed the cadavers to collect.

The soldiers approached Lucia and saw that she was still alive.  She tried to get to her feet and run but she could not move.  She was still bleeding heavily from shrapnel wounds and feared the Colombians would finish her off. But the soldiers had what they had come for and were not all that interested.  Lucia and her friends were just collateral damage.  The Colombians warned her that police would soon be coming and left the destroyed camp.

Colombian police fine-combed the shattered caletas, collecting evidence.  They tied Lucia's hands and screamed questions at her.  Lucia tried to tell them that she was a Mexican, a student, a "civil."  She told the police about her thesis but she had lost her passport and there was no reason for them to believe her anyway.

23 had been killed in the March 1st cross-border raid, "Operation Phoenix" the Colombian military had named it - 18 rebels, the Ecuadorian, and four Mexican students.  Only Lucia and two Colombian women had survived this first application of the Bush Doctrine of preventative attack on suspected terrorist targets, in Latin America.  Until last March, the U.S. had limited such targeted assassinations to the war zones of the Islamic world: Pakistan, Yemen, Syria, Somalia, and Iraq. 

The Colombian police pulled out in the morning.  Lucia begged them for water but they just laughed.  All day she lay there immobilized in the jungle heat, bitten by fierce fire ants, the flies settling on her open wounds.  The stench of her dead comrades' decomposing bodies filled her nostrils.  Buzzards circled overhead.  Lucia thought she was going to die.  Or was she already dead?

Towards nightfall, Morett again heard helicopter blades fanning the trees and was terrified the Colombians had come back for her.  But this time it was the Ecuadoran army looking for survivors.  The young soldiers brought her water and bound up her wounds.  One boy slept by her that night and held her hand when she whimpered in pain.  In the morning, Lucia and the two badly wounded Colombians, Marta Perez and Doris Bojorquez, were hoisted up on rough board stretchers and airlifted to the military hospital at Lago Agrio. 

The Mexican graduate student remembers being grilled for hours in a darkened room at the hospital there.  The blinds were drawn.  The two interrogators asked the same questions over and over again: Who was she? Had she and her friends been training with the FARC or were they trainers themselves?  Meanwhile, the doctors were cutting shrapnel from Lucia's ankle without anesthesia.  She finally passed out. Ecuadoran human rights groups report that Lucia's interrogators are under investigation for torture

Morett awoke in a Quito hospital, her wrist handcuffed to the bed frame.  For days, she drifted in and out of consciousness unaware that she was at the center of the Bush-Uribe terror war and the focus of CNN and other 24-hour news cycle attentions. 

Ecuador's Correa was outraged by the invasion of his nation's airspace and withdrew his ambassador from Bogotá.  Hugo Chavez condemned the March 1st raid as "an act of war" and broke off diplomatic relations with Uribe.  Nicaragua's Daniel Ortega followed suit.  Uribe, on the other hand, was insisting that the bombing had been a legitimate act of "self defense." Mexico through its foreign minister expressed concern that one of its citizens had been found in a terrorist camp.

Washington which controls Uribe through the $6 billion USD Plan Colombia counter-insurgency boondoggle backed up the Colombian president.  The FARC charged that the attack had been cooked up by the U.S. SOUTHCOM in Tampa Florida and the logistics coordinated by gringo drugfighters at the Manta Ecuador advance base that Correa is pledged to close down early next year. 

An emergency meeting of the all-Latin Group of Rio was called for Santo Domingo to tamp down the international furor but two weeks later at an Organization of American States huddle in Washington, U.S. Under Secretary of State John Negroponte, a diplomat with a malodorous history in Latin America, ripped open the wounds by supporting the Bush-Uribe hypothesis of "legitimate defense." 

By April, the Colombian military was claiming that it had rescued two undamaged laptops and a zip drive from the Angostura camp although the site had been blasted by ten 500-pound bombs and nothing else had survived in tact.  The Uribe government released the purported contents of the magic laptops in daily doses that read like a spy novel.  Among the sensational tidbits excerpted from the 38,000 word files, 210,000 photographs, and 7000 e-mails "rescued" from the laptops (experts said it would take a hundred years plus for one person to read them all): Hugo Chavez was financing the FARC by diverting $300 million USD in Venezuelan oil revenues to the rebels - the magical laptops were said to contain 16 years of correspondence between the FARC and Chavez, a span that predates the Venezuelan's presidency. 

Other items "proved" that the FARC had been a heavy contributor to Correa's successful presidential bid and that the rebels were seeking to buy uranium to build a "dirty bomb."  El Tiempo, the Bogotá daily owned by the Santos family - Juan Manuel Santos is Uribe's defense minister - displayed a front page photo, of Ecuadoran security minister "Gustavo Larrea" meeting with "Raul Reyes" that had been allegedly culled from the dead Comandante's computers but "Larrea" turned out to be an Argentinean communist who had once interviewed the FARC chieftain. 

Later, Interpol would examine the laptops and rule that the files had not been tampered with but could not determine if the material had been pre-edited and loaded into the computers by Colombian intelligence agencies to coincide with the bombing.             

Lucia recovered slowly.  Her parents and the parents of the dead students came to Ecuador and told her a little of all of this.  The Colombians were pressing Ecuador to allow their interrogators to question Lucia.  Uribe scoffed at her claim that she was in the camp doing fieldwork on her thesis: "Research?  That's what the Internet is for!" the Colombian tyrant was quoted as snorting.
    
Despite the solidarity of Ecuadoran human rights groups, Lucia Morett felt uneasy, fearing that the Colombians would try and kidnap her from the hospital.  She could not return to Mexico - Uribe had wired President Felipe Calderon urging her extradition to Colombia if she came home.  Two ultra right-wing members of Calderon's PAN party had filed a complaint with the Attorney General demanding Morett's arrest as an international terrorist because she had supposedly received guerilla training during her six hours in the camp.   When Daniel Ortega offered sanctuary in Nicaragua, Lucia and the two Colombian women took him up on his offer.

Lucia Morett spent the next eight months in Managua under close scrutiny by the Ortega government.  She was instructed to keep a low profile and avoid all contact with the press.  When Petrich flew to Managua for a promised interview, the Jornada correspondent was met by Daniel's son, Rafael Ortega, who told her the interview had been canceled.  Blanche finally got to talk with Morett on the plane ride back to Mexico City.

Lucia Morett is taking a big chance by returning to Mexico.  The Attorney General's anti-terrorism desk has informed her lawyers that the complaint filed by the PANistas is still active. Both Guillermo Arzac and Jose Antonio Ortega (no relation) are thought to be members of the secretive Catholic extremist "El Yunque" or The Anvil.  The two accompanied their filing with clips from a tape shot on the night of the March 1st massacre by Colombian police and uncorroborated testimony from one Arturo Gomez that his ex-wife had received firearms and explosives training from Morett who he identified as a FARC commander.

Lucia Morett was met by 81 year-old leftist senator and human rights fighter Rosario Ibarra de Piedra and the parents of her dead comrades when she touched down at Benito Juarez International Airport on December 3rd.  Lucia explained to them that she had come home to "quintuple" her activism in honor of her slain classmates. 

Then she visited the Philosophy & Letters faculty at the UNAM where she was showered with flowers by her fellow students.  Lucia vowed to Dean Ambrosio Velasco that she would finish her thesis "Colombia: Theater for Revolution and Revolution for Theater."  "Alvaro Uribe doesn't know what he's talking about," Velasco offered.  "You have to go to the place where what you are studying is happening to know about it.  You can't do field work on the Internet."  

John Ross has El Monstruo on the canvas and is awaiting the decision of the judges.  These dispatches will continue at ten-day intervals until the word is in.  If you have further info write johnross@igc.org.

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