Today's Stories

June 10, 2008

James G. Abourezk
Deadly Fallout From Obama's Groveling Before Israel Lobby

Saree Makdisi
Banned in the U.S.A. (Almost)

June 9, 2008

Uri Avnery
No, I Can't: Obama, Israel and AIPAC

Nikolas Kozloff
McCain & the Republican Insitute: Promoting Iraqi Occupation for "a Million Years"

Allan Nairn
Drawing Your Last Breath Hungry

Dennis Loo
Threats on Iran and the "Batterer's Defense"

Harry Browne
Irish Euro Vote Comes Down to the Wire

C. Hand
U. S. Bid to Hike Iran's Gas Prices Seems Doomed

Peter Morici
An Unsustainable Trade Deficit

Kenneth Couesbouc
A Ripe Time for Inflation

Martha Rosenberg
The Inconvenient Senator Grassley

James L. Secor
Chinese Superstition or Unconscious Oracle?

Website of the Day
Pay Bo Diddley!

June 7 / 8, 2008

Alexander Cockburn
Obama Goes Over the Top

Ishmael Reed
How Miles Davis Changed My Life

Jeffrey St. Clair
What a Miner's Life is Worth

Nikolas Kozloff
Meet the King the Beers: John McCain and Latin America

Dave Lindorff
The High Cost of a Single War-Like Remark: Oil Prices, Israel, Iran and the U.S.

Robert Fantina
When Truth is the Casualty

Conn Hallinan
Iran and Rumors of War

Neve Gordon
The Occupation and the Politics of Death

Tom Barry
The Deterrence Strategy of Homeland Security

Patrick Irelan
Raiding the Packing House

Tim Wise
Your Whiteness is Showing

David Ker Thomson
The Hard Question

Joshua Frank
"Socialist" Wins Republican Nomination in Montana

David Yearsley
Disaster Music

James T. Phillips
1968: Year of the Rat

Joe Allen
The Real Bobby Kennedy

P. Sainath
Making Life Brighter in Kondapur

David Macaray
Should Unions be More Democratic?

B.R. Gowani
Experience and the Two-for-One

Fred Gardner
What Happened (at the DA's Office)

Peter Harley
Technology to the Rescue? Kurzweil and the Human Machines

Michael Dickinson
Surrender the Bones of Geronimo!

Jen Roesch
Where are the Real Women in Sex and the City?

Poets' Basement
Gibbons, Landau, and Buknatski

Website of the Day
Partying with the Waltons

June 6, 2008

Frank Barat
An Interview with Ilan Pappé and Noam Chomsky on the Future of Israel / Palestine

Patrick Cockburn
U.S. Extorts Iraq to Approve Military Deal

Gary Leupp
Cheney Enrages Iraqis Over Security Deal

James Abourezk
Name That Terrorist

Peter Morici
Recession Grips the Jobs Market

Faheem Hussain
What is NATO Doing in Afghanistan?

Andy Worthington
Guantánamo's Britons Go on Hunger Strike

Ayesha Ijaz Khan
How Will Musharraf Go? Impeachment or Safe Exit?

Dave Lindorff
Congress Needs to Defend Itself

Website of the Day
Backstage with Bo Diddley

June 5, 2008

Patrick Cockburn
Bush's Secret Deal Would Ensure Permanent U.S. Occupation of Iraq

Sharon Smith
Hillary's Wreckage

Nikolas Kozloff
Obama's Electoral Dilemma: Latinos or Reagan Democrats?

Linn Washington, Jr.
Police Brutality and Cover-Up in Philly

Omar Barghouti
60 Years of Nakba, 41 Years of Occupation ...

Scott Pellegrino
Jim Crow Radio: Bob Grant's Lifetime Achievement Award

John Walsh
Obama Woos AIPAC

Dan Bacher
The Parching of California

DC Larson
Nazi Rockers ... F-Off

Robert Jensen
Masculine, Feminine or Human?

Website of the Day
Ohio Cops Attack Long Walkers

June 4, 2008

Eric Walberg
Princess Patricia and the Taliban

Gary Leupp
Iran and EFPs: Chronology of a Lie

Ralph Nader
Disenfranchised Youth

Dave Lindorff
Of Whiners and Poor Losers

George Wuerthner
Farm Economics

Victor M. Rodriguez
The Puzzle of Race and Politics

Remi Kanazi
Why a Cultural Boycott of Israel is Needed

Stephane Luçon
Renault's Romanian Fairyland Suspended

Farzana Versey
The Tablighi Jamaat Movement

Laray Polk
The Militarization of Space

Website of the Day
Red State Rebels

June 3, 2008

Paul Craig Roberts /
Lawrence M. Stratton
Legislating Tyranny

Mike Whitney
The Withering Economy

Steve Early
San Juan Showdown

Manuel Otero
Why Hillary Won Puerto Rico: the View from the Colony

George Bisharat
The Hope of a Victimized People

Nikolas Kozloff
Obama's VP Quandry

Dan Bacher
Death on the Salmon Highway

Website of the Day
Censoring Bill Knott?

June 2, 2008

Uri Avnery
The Olmert Scandal

Nikolas Kozloff
Obama's Latino Problem Getting Worse

Allan J. Lichtman
Revisionist History: Bush, Borah and Hitler

Malini Johar Schueller
The Color of Randomness: Returning to the US From Beirut Via Syria

Robert Weissman
What's Driving Skyrocketing Oil Prices?

Peter Morici
Bailing Out Wall Street

Manuel Garcia, Jr.
Don't Get Burned: How to Protect Yourself From Raytheon's Pain Gun

John Ross
Celebrating Catholic Fanaticism in Mexico

Ahmad Al-Akhras
Encounters with the Watch List

Website of the Day
Man on Earth

May 31 / June 1, 2008

Alexander Cockburn
The Worst is Yet to Come

Jeffrey St. Clair
Arkansas Bloodsuckers

Gary Leupp
How McClellan Prettifies Bush

Stan Cox
Broken Agriculture

Rannie Amiri
Lebanon: the Domino That Wouldn't Fall

P. Sainath
A Guaranteed Day's Work--in the Fields, at 110 Degrees, for $2 a Day

Binoy Kampmark
Going Bankrupt in Vallejo

Robert Fantina
Bush, Rice and McClellan

Seth Sandronsky
Will There be Water Riots, as Sacramento Goes Dry?

Corporate Crime Reporter
Death Penalty for Bush?

Anthony DiMaggio
Gaming the Ghetto: Grand Theft Auto IV, Racist Media and the Concrete Jungle

Karl Grossman
A Half-Trillion for Nukes

Matt Reichel
From Vegas to the Heartland and Back Again

Paul Myron Hillier
Of Gas and God

Andy Worthington
Suicide at Guantánamo

David Yearsley
And the Winner is ... Wayne Shorter

Daniel Cassidy
Free Lunch

Charles Thomson
If Hitler Had Been a Hippy ...

Gary Corseri
A Dream Deferred: Activism and the Arts

Wajahat Ali
Sex and the City Through a Man's Eyes

Ron Jacobs
Robins Weep

Poets' Basement
McNeill and Davies

Website of the Day
Last Charge of the Light Horse

May 30, 2008

Bassam Aramin
Here's the Truth You've Been Running From

Andrew Cockburn
Petraeus' Iran Obsession

Saul Landau
How We Got Into This Mess

Nikolas Kozloff
Meet South America's New Secessionists

Robert Sandels
Turning Back the Clock on Cuba

Dave Lindorff
Talk is Cheap

Martha Rosenberg
Raiding Big Meat; Arresting the Wrong People

Harvey Wasserman
Lieberman & McCain: Linking Internet Censorship and Atomic Reactor Terror

Doug Giebel
A Plague on Both Your Houses (of Congress)

Shaun Harkin
The Trial of the Raytheon 9

Website of the Day
The Once and Future Environmental Movement

May 29, 2008

Jeffrey St. Clair
Bill Clinton and the Rich Women

Nikolas Kozloff
Puerto Rico, Obama and the Politics of Race

Col. Dan Smith
Deceiving the Dead

Karl Grossman
The Most Lucrative Incentive for Nuclear Power in the History of the United States

William S. Lind
Inside the Washington Game

Robert Weissman
What to do About the Price of Oil

Dave Lindorff
Why Puerto Rico Won't Matter

David Macaray
A Union Fable

Chris Genovali
Fear and Loathing in the Northern Rockies

Laura Carlsen
Mexico's Battle Over Oil

Website of the Day
Support Antiwar.com

May 28, 2008

Wajahat Ali
The Libertarian Dark Horse: An Exclusive Interview with Ron Paul

Ralph Nader
What's Really Driving the High Price of Oil?

Brian McKenna
Why I Want to Teach Anthropology at the Army War College

Corporate Crime Reporter
Why Vincent Bugliosi Wants to Prosecute George W. Bush for Murder

Brian Cloughley
The Attack on Damadola

Eric Walberg
Opium for the Masses from Afghanistan

Michael Dickinson
Raytheon's Pain Ray: Coming to a Protest Near You

Ijaz Khan
Opening Windows in Pakistan

Website of the Day
Older Than America

May 27, 2008

Alexander Cockburn
In Her Mind She's Killed Before: the Plot to Assassinate Ralph Nader

Greg Kafoury
Is Obama Turning (Further) Right?

Jean Bricmont
Western Delusions

Tim Wise
Farrakhan is not the Problem

Ricardo Alarcón
Puerto Rico's Turn

Stephen Soldz
APA Supports Psychologist Engagement in Bush Regime Interrogations

Andy Worthington
The Guantánamo 16

Alan Singer
Vapid, Stupid and Insulting: Chuck Schumer Speaks to the Graduates

Richard Neville
Storm in an A-Cup

Susie Day
Gone with the W

May 26, 2008

Uri Avnery
The Syrian Option

Bill Quigley
War Immemorial Day

Col. Dan Smith
Retreating from Hell: a Different Memorial Day

Cindy Sheehan
Why Memorial Day is a Double-Whammy for Me

Marjorie Cohn
Hillary's Assassination Politics: Her Last Shot?

Fred Gardner
Does the VA Care?

Raymond J. Lawrence
Pain Pays: Getting Rich at NY Presbyterian Hospital

Harvey Wasserman
Mugging the Election System

Moncia Benderman
Truth Matters

David Rovics
In Praise of Utah Phillips

Website of the Day
Fox News Jokes About "Knocking Off" Osama and Obama

May 24 / 25, 2008

Alexander Cockburn
Death-Wish Hillary Primes Manchurian Candidate

Jeffrey St. Clair
Yellowstone: How Sununu Shrank the Ecosystem

Barbara Rose Johnston
Dam Legacies, Damned Futures

Nikolas Kozloff
U.S. Fourth Fleet in Venezuelan Waters

Adriana Kojeve
The Environment and the 2008 Elections

Robert Fantina
Justice Department's Revelations on Torture

Dave Lindorff
Bush's War on Children in Iraq

David Yearsley
The War on Kitsch

Nelson P. Valdés
The Buying of "Democracy" Agents in Cuba

Kathleen M. Barry
Celebrating Ethnic Cleansing

John Ross
Mexico's Narco Opera Reaches for High Point

Allison Kilkenny
Apathy Doesn't Live in Bronx

Fred Gardner
Orangeburg, 1968

Elizabeth Schulte
Can the Whole World be Fed?

Daniel Gross
Remembering the Wendy's Massacre: the Dangerous Side of Retail Work

Christopher Brauchli
The Search for a Token Right-winger

Richard Rhames
A Nation of Sheep

Daniel Cassidy
My Mother

Poets' Basement
Davies, Klipschutz and Willson

Website of the Weekend
Happy Birthday, Bob

May 23, 2008

Paul Craig Roberts
War Abroad, Poverty at Home

Alan Farago
The Radical Extremists of the Building Industry

Conn Hallinan
Ballots and Bullets: From Beirut to Bolivia

Mark Engler
The World After Bush

George Wuerthner
Cars and Cows: Living Large in America

Kamran Matin
The Kurds and American Neo-Imperialism

Sandy Boyer /
Shaun Harkin
The Long Incarceration of Pol Brennan

Robert Weitzel
A "Holey" Instrument of Peace in Iraq

Cindy Sheehan
An Uphill Battle

Liaquat Ali Khan
Pakistan's Futile Constitutional Amendment

Website of the Day
A Message from the Moral Compass of the McCain Campaign

May 22, 2008

Vijay Prashad
Racist Grammar

Joanne Mariner
A Military Commissions Cheat Sheet

Sharon Smith
60 Years of Apartheid

Jeff Birkenstein
Disaster Redux: Some Early Thoughts on the Earthquake in China

Brendan McQuade
From Obama to the PRTs in Iraq

Peter Morici
The Sorry State of the Banking Industry

Niranjan Ramakrishnan
Restoration Boulevard

Dave Zirin
What I Want to Ask Mary Tillman

Ron Jacobs
CPR for the Antiwar Movement

Stephen Lendman
Immoral Hazard

Website of the Day
Hagee: God Sent Hitler to Drive the Jews to Israel

May 21, 2008

Jeffrey St. Clair
The Gothic Politics of Hillary Clinton

Nikolas Kozloff
U.S. Military Bases in South America

Alan Farago
Miami, Cuba and the Presidential Campaign

Dave Lindorff
Big John and the Scary, Scary Iran Threat

David Model
Genocide in Iraq?

Eric Walberg
Afghanistan: Who is the Enemy?

Franklin Lamb
Lebanon Gets a President

Kenneth Couesbouc
Tax Against Tyranny

Website of the Day
Child Labor and War-Affected Children: a Photo Essay

May 20, 2008

Ralph Nader
A Trip Inside Google

Uri Avnery
With Friends Like These

Patrick Irelan
The Empire and the Fleet

Ray McGovern
Come Out, Admiral Fallon, Wherever You Are

David Macaray
The UAW Strike Against American Axle

Chris Genovali
Big Oil on the Water: Skating Around the Tanker Issue

Ibrahim Fawal
Birmingham, Israel and the Nakba

Christopher Ketcham
Let Us Now Praise Famous Suicides

Andy Worthington
Guantánamo Trial Delayed

Martha Rosenberg
Merck is a Repeat Offender

Website of the Day
Defend the Students Who Pied Tom Friedman

May 19, 2008

Saul Landau
Cuba Will Live

Paul Craig Roberts
The Metamorphosis of the Conservative Movement

Brian McKenna
Brotherly Love in Philly's Badlands

Patrick Cockburn
City of the Dead: Mosul on Lockdown

B. R. Gowani
The Central Problem Pakistan Needs to Tackle

Dr. Trudy Bond
Psychologists and Torture: If Not Now, When?

Cindy Sheehan
Whose War is It?

John Mohawk
The Warriors Who Turned to Peace

Remi Kanazi
When Free Speech Doesn't Come for Free

Robert Day
I Get a Horse

Website of the Day
Evolve or Die

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On Borders, Globalization and Terror

A Picture from Beirut

By MALINI JOHAR SCHUELLER

When I decided to go to Beirut early last month to give a talk titled “Beauty Without Borders and Other Feminisms” at the American University of Beirut, the subject of my talk seemed both appropriate and ironic.  Like most postcolonialists I had an intense suspicion of the buzzwords of globalization--global flows, borderlesness, circulation, smooth spaces, migrancy and transnationalism--because they ignored unequal distribution,  the starkly imperial makeup of global financial institutions like the IMF and WTO, and the hegemony of the U.S. post 9/11.  Indeed the tearing down of the Berlin wall seemed to have been symptomatic not of a breakdown of borders but of the creation of sharply policed borders--witness the construction of literal walls in Gaza and the U.S.-Mexico border.  So my talk was going to question the well intentioned global feminist assumptions of American women who had created Beauty Without Borders as an NGO two years after the US bombing of Afghanistan in order to train Afghan women to become beauticians. Little did I know that I was going to witness the traumas of living with colonial and imperial borders.

Following a call for a labor strike initiated by the Hezbollah-led opposition on May 7, the streets of Beirut became strangely spectral.  Few stragglers walked the normally busy Corniche and as the neutral Lebanese army stood by, opposition supporters blocked access to the country’s only international airport.  Soon, pro-government Future Movement supporters chocked off the roads between Beirut and Damascus in the South and Tripoli and Syria to the North.  The borders of Lebanon  were effectively sealed.  A day later, fighting between Hezbollah and government supporters broke out in earnest.

As a brown-skinned woman teaching in the U.S., I had learned to live with the contradictions of borders.  As a professor, I was both privileged and respected while as a brown Asian I was both envied as part of the nerds and pitied for my cultural backwardness.  In Lebanon, the security guards at the university eyed me suspiciously and sometimes asked me for identification while lighter skinned people walked through.  In all likelihood, I resembled the ubiquitous Sri Lankan maid (whose servile manner mirrored that of the Indian domestic servant) I had seen following their Lebanese employers. Many of these maids were of Tamilian origin and had escaped the politics of Sri Lanka, hoping to make it across Cyprus to and then any European country willing to take them as refugees.  Meanwhile, they were willing to suffer virtual enslavement in Lebanese households.

But as I walked with my hosts on the campus of the American University on May 8, I witnessed the material and psychic effects of living with harsh and painful borders.  Lebanon’s diverse religious groups have historically lived in harmony but have also witnessed internecine strife and the country has been beset by the interests of powerful outside forces.  Government allied leader, Jumblatt had issued a direct challenge to Hezbollah’s army and weaponry; in turn, Hezbollah leader Nasarullah had stated in a press conference, his group’s intentions of defending their weapons and had declared provocatively, “We are the state; they are the gang.” As we made our way through the campus, each secretly wondering what would transpire while we debated the innocuous question of  a restaurant for dinner, gunshots started to ring out from different parts of the city.  The campus had already been emptied of most students but the stragglers who sat at the entrance continued their light banter and laughter.  A group of young men joked around while their friends strummed on a guitar, undeterred by the noise of firearms outside.  For me, the shots ringing from different directions, seemed perilously close, threatening and disorienting although the tranquil and neatly trimmed New England style campus felt strangely reassuring.  Betsy, the soft-spoken though fearless wife of my host, continued discussing restaurant plans, interspersing them with tranquil comments about the sounds we were hearing: “that’s an R.P.G.; that’s a Kalashnikov; that’s a mortar” in a tone more suited to one commenting on a flower garden.  Betsy and her husband Patrick, American expats who had refused to leave Beirut in 2006, had lived through the Israeli bombardment and were battle hardy.  The relentless sounds of gunfire which seemed to me perilously close, were to Betsy at a reassuring distance, magnified sounds ricochetting off the buildings of the university. From our campus apartment we saw tanks racing across the Corniche while gunshots and mortar explosions continued all night long, broken intermittently with thunder and lightning.

As I left Beirut the next morning in a convoy of four taxis filled with fleeing Americans, stopping at my luxury hotel where the obsequious staff continued to serve tea and pastries, undeterred by the fighting outside, the city had turned into a battle zone.  Only young men armed with Kalashnikovs roamed the streets on motorcycles while others stood guard at entrances to their neighborhoods.  Zigzagging through roadblocks past prime minister Sinoria’s house, I cursed myself for going to retrieve my belongings at the hotel and sent up a thankful prayer once we reached the safety of campus.  As we drove to Tripoli, having decided to cross the Syrian border from the north rather than take the far shorter route through Hezbollah territory, I couldn’t help but marvel at the uncomplicated politics the American media offered its citizens.  It was a talk-show version of multicultural democracy where every topic had two equally valid sides which kept the citizenry smug. No messiness, no violence. Only smooth capitalist democracy in action.

But here in the Middle East, borders were being violently policed. Balking at the burning tyres blocking the Syrian border at Tripoli, our driver had demanded his money and asked to return to Beirut, a request we had spurned for our own survival, promising to pay him only in Damascus.  At the border, chaos reigned supreme. Hundreds of Syrian workers, terrified at the prospect of a replay of reprisals against Syrians as had happened after Hariri’s assassination, massed at the border.  Many had traveled miles on foot, carrying an occasional suitcase or a bundle of possessions and planned to walk a few more miles upon entering Syria.  Impatient with the hours of waiting for their exit stamps, they surged ahead as Lebanese police pushed them back with sticks. Every few minutes, a few would make a dash across the border only to be chased by soldiers and tossed back into the crowd.  Only the harsh sounds of police firing into the air staved off the restive crowd.  Meanwhile we, the fleeing Americans bypassed the crowd and joined the long line of VIPs getting their passports stamped.  We, in our taxis, inching across the Syrian border late that afternoon, with scarcely any food or water, were the fortunate ones.  The mass of Syrian workers, walking across the border with their belongings piled on their heads were not.

While I made it back to Atlanta, taking the scenic route home via Dubai, Israeli jets flew over Beirut while the USS Battleship Cole moved ominously in plain sight of the city.  Lebanon might be the banking mecca of the world next to Switzerland, host to the flows of capital, but its  borders were frightening and vulnerable.  I, on the other hand, was going to be embraced by the vast multitude of America.  Or so it seemed. As I sat in the special interrogation room at Atlanta airport, finding around me all brown men of possibly Middle Eastern or South Asian lineage, it was clear that America’s borders were being policed by the most ludicrous racial profiling, one that could not even support the State’s own ill-conceived agenda on “terror.” Presumably a white Hezbollah supporter could slip through.  On the other hand, the Sri Lankan domestic working for a Lebanese would likely, in an ironic exchange of status from disdained to despised, be detained. I had entered the borderless world of neoliberalism where the only smooth flows were those of capital.

Malini Johar Schueller is a professor at the department of English at the University of Florida where she teaches courses on American literature culture. She is the author of U.S. Orientalisms and most recently, "Exceptional State: Contemporary US Culture and the New Imperialism," published by Duke University Press in June 2007.
and of the forthcoming book, Locating Race: Global Sites of Post-Colonial Citizenship.

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