Today's Stories

May 22-24, 2009

Conn Hallinan
Swine Flu Fallout

May 21, 2009

Jeffrey St. Clair /
Joshua Frank
The Politics of Bait-and-Switch: Obama and the Environment

Paul Craig Roberts
Morphing Dick Cheney

Chris Floyd
In Defense of George W. Bush

Gerald Paoli
Inside Iraqi Kurdistan: Life and Death in the Qandil Mountains

Zach Mason
Something's Gotta Give: Obama and the Hustler

Uri Avnery
A Quarrel on the Titanic

Andy Worthington
Out of Guantánamo

Niranjan Ramakrishnan
India: Two Funerals and a Wedding

Norman Solomon
The Afghanistan Escalation

Dave Lindorff
A Corporate Crime Wave of Labor Law Violations

Website of the Day
Swine Flu: The Panic That Wasn't

May 20, 2009

Michael Hudson
The Toll Booth Economy

Gary Leupp
Courting Hekmatyar: Obama and the Warlord

Michael D. Yates
Work is Hell

Jonathan Cook
Netanyahu Adviser Steps Out of the Shadows

Peter Lee
The World Doesn't Have a Pakistan Nukes Problem ... It Has a David Albright Problem

Binoy Kampmark
The End of the Tamil Tigers?

Peter Zinn
Eulogizing Lawyers

William Loren Katz
Tortured Reasoning; Tortured Results

Gary Lapon
Why Women Need Single Payer

Trudy Bond
Torture, Shrinks and a Groundhog's Day Moment

Website of the Day
Meet the Climate Change Lobby

May 19, 2009

Kristoffer Rehder
Check Point Iraq: a Soldier's Tale

Mike Whitney
The Real Lesson of the Financial Crisis

Ray McGovern
How Colin Powell Got Duped by the CIA

Vijay Prashad
The Indian Elections: a Game Changer?

Mirjam Hadar Meerschwam
Intimidation and Interrogation in Tel Aviv

Mustafa Barghouthi
Is Obama Up to the Challenge of Dealing with Netanyahu?

Andy Worthington
Gitmo: A Prison Built on Lies

Binoy Kampmark
Britain's Speaker Crisis

John Walsh
John Kerry vs. Single-Payer

David Macaray
Alcohol as Metaphor: Zero Tolerance in the Workplace

Website of the Day
So You Think That Veggie Burger is Organic...

May 18, 2009

Dave Lindorff
The US is Using White Phosporous in Afghanistan

Abdul Malik Mujahid
Thirty Years of Tragedy in Afghanistan

Jonathan Cook
How Many Secret Prisons Does Israel Have?

Ben Rosenfeld
Police Violence: How Many Kicks to the Head Does It Take?

Patrick Cockburn
These Killings Will Only Strengthen the Taliban

Ralph Nader
They Want It All: New Tricks From the Old Energy Lobby

Stephen Soldz
Psychologist Bryce Lefever Clarifies Defense of Torture

Eugenia Tsao
On the Devaluation of Labor

Walter Brasch
Cheney's Magical Mystery Media Tour

Roberto Rodriguez
War and Torture

Charlotte Laws
Politics and American Idol

Website of the Day
Disbar the Torture Lawyers

May 15-17, 2009

Alexander Cockburn
King of the Hate Business

Jeffrey St. Clair
The Case of the Missing H-Bomb

David Rosen
Sexual Torture: What is Acknowledged and What Remains Unknown

Mike Whitney
From My Lai to Bala Baluk: Obama Picks Up Where Bush Left Off

Bruce Page
A Real History of Rupert Murdoch

Jeremy Scahill
The Black Shirts of Guantánamo

Fred Gardner
Tortured Reasoning: Judge Bybee Rules Against Brian Epis

Tom Barry
Fighting the Drug War at Homeland Security

Mats Svensson
On the Beach in Tel Aviv

Ramzy Baroud
The Drones Are Coming

Mark Engler
Science Fiction From Below

Mark Weisbrot
Stealth Move by IMF to Get $100 Billion Without Congressional Debate

Farzana Versey
Of Scapegoats and Separatists

Ron Jacobs
It's Up to You to Save Troy Davis

Hannah Wolfe
What to Tell the Children

Cal Winslow
Fresno, the New Ground Zero in the Battle Between the SEIU and NUHW

David Macaray
Labor Needs a Southern Strategy

Christopher Brauchli
Involuntary Baptism

Mark Seth Lender
The Lion Tamer's Story

Robert Fantina
Lapel Pins, Arugula and Mustard

David Ker Thomson
Last Man Walking

Stephen Martin
Lipstick Nightmare for Spin Merchant

Charles R. Larson
Double Exile

Chase Madar
"Angels & Demons" and the Extraordinary Power of Imaginary Heretics

Kim Nicolini
Vaginas From Outer Space! Boldly Sitting Through Star Trek

David Yearsley
Handel's Ghost

Lorenzo Wolff
Killer Virtues

Poets' Basement
Gibbons, Jordan and Moser

Website of the Weekend
Catch F-22

May 14, 2009

Michael Hudson
Where Russia Went Wrong

Andy Worthington
The Poisoned Mosaic: Judge Condemns Guantánamo Evidence

Paul Craig Roberts
The Impotent President

Jonathan Cook
The Pope's Pilgrimage: Legitimizing Netanyahu?

Ray McGovern
See No Evil: Ugly Questions for General Myers

Lance Selfa
The Limits of Liberalism

David Green
The Deportation of Demjanjuk

Dave Lindorff
Obama Channels Cheney

Frida Berrigan
Nuclear Options

Sue Udry
The Bybee Question

Website of the Day
Our Bombs: Tracking US Air Strikes

May 13, 2009

Brian M. Downing
The Road Out of Iraq

Gareth Porter
Gen. McChrystal and Afghanistan

Robert Sandels
Obama and Latin America: No Light, All Tunnel

Ricardo Alarcón
Cuba: Measure of a Revolution

Eric Walberg
NATO in Georgia: Fun and Games

Dave Lindorff
The Sinking of GM: When Captains of Industry Don't Go Down with the Ship

Deepak Tripathi
A Culture of Abuse

William S. Lind
Back to the Balkans: Hillary and the Sleeping Dragon

Kevin Zeese
A Populist Health Care Rebellion

Franklin Lamb
Lebanon: From Perdition to Redemption?

Website of the Day
Beth McIntosh: The Wild Ride

May 12, 2009

Gary Leupp
The Bomb Iran Faction

Richard Neville
The AfPak Blues: Corpses of the Kids by the Truckload

Wajahat Ali
Obama Chooses a Reliable Dictatorship

Dean Baker
The Banker Boys Are Alright! Time to End the Bailouts

Franklin Lamb
What Palestinian Refugees Need From Lebanon's Elections

Norman Solomon
A Progressive Challenge to Jane Harman

Paul Craig Roberts
Beware the Hate Crimes Bill

Lisa M. Hamilton
Let's Grow a New Crop of Farmers

Bob Fitrakis /
Harvey Wasserman:
Why Isn't Obama Turning to Credit Unions?

David Macaray
Wading Through the Grassroots

Website of the Day
Electronic Police States

May 11, 2009

Andrea Peacock
No Justice for Libby

Michael Hudson
Gordon Brown Spills the Beans on the IMF

Patrick Cockburn
Who Killed 120 Civilians?

Ralph Nader
The Single-Payer Taboo

John Kelly
Pseudoscience and Wrongful Convictions in the War on Drugs

Saul Landau
Cuba's Biggest "Crime"

Dave Lindorff
Blaming the Dead Victims

David Michael Green
Get Obama

Anthony Papa
Gov. David Paterson Does the Right Thing

Paul Krassner
Jon Stewart and Truman, the War Criminal

Website of the Day
Generational Homelessness

May 8-10, 2009

Alexander Cockburn
Dead Souls

Jeffrey St. Clair
Echoes of Amchitka: 40 Years After America's Biggest Nuclear Blast, the Damage Continues

Paul Wolf
Obama's Axis of Obedience

Steve Niva
Iraq: The Return of the Suicide Bombers

Neve Gordon
Jailed for Caring

Mike Whitney
Has Bernanke Pulled the Economy Back From the Brink?

Warren Hinckle
DiFi vs. Marilyn Chambers

Serge Halimi
In Praise of Revolutions

Gareth Porter
The Pakistan Conundrum

Sharon Smith
Something Stinks at Whole Foods

Andy Worthington
Obama's New Gitmo Policy: Back to the Bush Era?

Mark Weisbrot
Hillary and Latin America

Rosa Miriam Elizalde Cyber Command and Cyber Dissident: More of the Same?

David Macaray
Recessions and Labor Unions

Missy Beattie
The Real Housewives of War

Ron Jacobs
Mothers and War

Diane Farsetta
About Face on Pentagon Pundits?

Ramzy Baroud
War Without Context

Phelie Maguire
Living Next to Settlers

Robert Fantina
Party of Rush

Kevin Zeese
A Break From the Past in the Drug War?

Margaret Flowers, MD
The Baucus 8: Why We Risked Arrest for Single-Payer

Dave Lindorff
The Joke's on Us

Richard Rhames
Revenge of the Tundra

Ben Sonnenberg
Let the Right One In: A Vampire Visits a Welfare State

Kim Nicolini
Sin Nombre: Giving Faces to People Who Don't Have Names

Stephen Martin
The Riotous Action of the Complete Banker

Charles R. Larson
The Commencement Address You'll Never Hear

David Yearsley
Jean Ferrard, Organist Extraordinary

Lorenzo Wolff
Death Cab for Cutie: Surprisingly Familiar

Poets' Basement
G.S. Heiligschreib and David Farrelly

Website of the Weekend
Zombie Bank

May 7, 2009

Paul Craig Roberts
Criminalizing Criticism of Israel

Chris Floyd
A Full-Court Press for Pakistan War

Andy Worthington
Mixed Messages on Torture

Alan Farago
No Place Like Home: a Stress Test for Land Use, Not Just Banks

Ray McGovern
Deux ex Machina on Torture?

Dave Lindorff
Stain Removal: Impeaching the Torture Judge

Eric Toussaint /
Damien Millet
Why is There Rampant Famine in the 21st Century?

Ana M. Malinow, MD
Why We Need a Single-Payer Health Care System

Jeff Armstrong
Freeing Leonard Peltier: What Would Warren Harding Do?

Norman Solomon
A Green New Deal

Website of the Day
The End of Lake Mead?

May 6, 2009

Doug Peacock
The Fate of the Yellowstone Grizzly

Patrick Cockburn
Afghans to Obama: Get Out, Take Karzai With You

Richard Neville
The Torturer's Apprentice

Manuel Garcia, Jr.
To Power a Nation: Nuclear Bombs or Sunshine?

Winslow T. Wheeler
Of Pork and Baloney: Obama's Defense Budget

Deepak Tripathi
Pakistan in Crisis

Stephen Soldz
A "Natural Reaction": APA Ethics Policy-Maker Endorses Torture

Reuven Kaminer
Nice is Not Enough: Obama vs. Netanyahu and Lieberman

David Macaray
The Chrysler-UAW Deal

Kevin Zeese
Why We Were Arrested at the Senate Finance Committee Hearings

Marjorie Cohn
Stanford Antiwar Alums Call for War Crimes Investigation of Condoleezza Rice

Coalition for an Ethical Psychology
Investigate Psychologist and Health Provider Complicity in Torture

Website of the Day
Who's Behind the Financial Meltdown?

May 5, 2009

William Blum
Torture and Mr. Obama

Uri Avnery
Netanyahu's Plan

Steven Higgs
Autism and Toxic Pollution

Dean Baker
Why Economists Should Learn Arithmetic

Daniel Wolff
The Education of Rachel Carson

Sibel Edmonds
The Broken Congress

Carole King Klein
A New Chance to Save the Northern Rockies

Fidel Castro
Giving One's All

Belén Fernández
Oil and Aguardiente in the Ecuadoran Elections

Dan Bacher
Schwarzenegger's Big Lie About Fish vs. Jobs

Website of the Day
"I Married Isis on the Fifth Day of May"

May 4, 2009

James G. Abourezk
The AIPAC Spy Case

Jeff Leys
Obama's War Budget

Patrick Cockburn
Afghan Ayatollahs Press Marital Rape Law

Andy Worthington
A Start on Guantánamo, But Not Enough

Jaime Avilés
Mexico's Plague-Bringers

David Swanson
An Even Worse Bybee Memo

Paul Craig Roberts
Working with Jack Kemp

P. Sainath
Celeb Crusades and the Death of Politics

Eugenia Tsao
Canada's Obama and the Cult of the Prof

Benjamin Dangl
Protest and Rubber Bullets in Paraquay

Sami Al-Arian
Mourning William Moffitt

Website of the Day
"Soldiers Are Cutting Us Down": Kent State, May 4, 1970

May 1 - 3, 2009

Alexander Cockburn
Game-Changers: Specter Jumps, Souter Quits

Gary Leupp
Dropping the AIPAC Spying Case

Peter Linebaugh
The Key to the Bastille

Jeffrey St. Clair /
Joshua Frank:
Half Life of a Toxic War: Iraq's Wrecked Environment

C. G. Estabrook
Minion of the Long War

Patrick Cockburn
Kabul's New Elite

Mike Whitney
Economy on the Ropes

Pierre Sprey /
Winslow Wheeler
What "Sweeping Overhaul" of the Pentagon?

Andy Worthington
Al-Marri's Plea Deal: Dictatorial Powers Unchallenged

Mairead Maguire
Stand Up to Israeli Apartheid: a Letter to Obama From a Nobel Peace Prize Laureate

Nadia Hijab
The Israel Boycott is Biting

Diane Farsetta
Life, Death and Water Policy

Michael Calderón-Zaks
The Déjà Vu Flu: Why Much of the Discussion About Swine Flu is Racist

Richard Rhames
When Piggies Come Home to Roost: Swine Flu and the Industrial Meat Gulags

Russell Mokhiber
Inside the Beltway Baucus

Ramzy Baroud
Clinton's Unpromising Start

Rannie Amiri
Understanding Lebanon's June Elections

Deb Reich
No Talking, Dammit!

Steven Higgs
Indiana Criminalizes Dissent: Roadblocks on the NAFTA Highway

Brian Cloughley
Malice in Blunderland

David Michael Green
The Party's Over

Farzana Versey
Sex, Swat and Susan Boyle

Jim Goodman
Think Before You Eat: Agriculture and the Environment

Carl Finamore
New Prescription for a Healthy Union Movement

Christopher Brauchli
The Sounds of Silence: the Texas Option

Susie Day
The Real Cause of Unemployment: Employees!

David Yearsley
Nuts Over Beethoven

Lorenzo Wolff
Three Minutes of Perfection

Peter Stone Brown
Dancing with Dylan

Poets' Basement Dominguez, Orloski and Springate

Website of the Weekend
May Day Europe

April 30, 2009

Ellen Cantarow
Obama and "Two States": Seamless Continuity From Bush Time

Dana L. Cloud
The McCarthyism That Horowitz Built

Paul W. Lovinger /
Jeannette Hassberg
A Nation of Laws

Binoy Kampmark
Swine at the Trough: the Business of Pandemics

Brian Downing
The Perils of Modernization in Afghanistan

Frank Snepp
Tortured by the Past

David Swanson
The Wrong Torture Question

Conn Hallinan
The Coming Asian Storm

Ron Jacobs
Not Dead Yet: an Interview with Jerry Gordon on the State of the Antiwar Movement

John Goekler
The Only Path to a Middle East Picnic?

Jasmine L. Tyler /
Anthony Papa
An End to Crack/Powder Cocaine Sentencing Disparity?

Website of the Day
Emergency Petition: Stop Coal Industry Intimidation of Activists

April 29, 2009

Joann Wypijewski
Death at Work in America

Patrick Cockburn
The Taliban's Roads to Kabul

Andy Worthington
Cheney's Twisted World

Chris Floyd
The Specter Diversion

Dave Lindorff
No More Excuses: a Specter is Haunting the Democrats

Jeremy Scahill
The Nuremberg Truth and Reconciliation Commission?

Doug Henwood
Zionist Lobby Targets Another Tenured Professor: an Interview with William Robinson

Michael Hudson
Will Iceland be Handed Over to a New Gang of Kleptocrats?

Russell Mokhiber
My Ron Pollack Problem--And Yours

Eric Toussaint
Ecuador at the Crossroads

Website of the Day
An Interview with Leslie and Andrew Cockburn on "American Casino"

April 28, 2009

Uri Avnery
A Little Red Light: On Israeli Fascism

Jeremy Scahill
Obama's Iraq: the Picture of Dorian Gray

Dean Baker
The Perfect Gift for Wall Street: a Financial Transactions Tax

Michael D. Yates
At the Factory Gate

Conn Hallinan
Georgian Plots? Saakavili's "Order No. 2"

John Stauber
Beyond MoveOn

Tom Barry
The Failed Border Security Initiative

Harvey Wasserman
Who Pays for America's Chernobyl Roulette?

Jeff Nygaard
Pirates, Profits and Propaganda

Frederico Fuentes
Why the U.S. Still Hates Cuba

Website of the Day
The Man Behind the Hood

April 27, 2009

Pam Martens
The Far Right's Plot to Capture New Hampshire

Patrick Cockburn
Torture? It Probably Killed More Americans Than 9/11

Andrew J. Bacevich Guardian of the Status Quo: Obama's Sins of Omission

Mitu Sengupta
The Bloodbath in Sri Lanka

Franklin Lamb
Hillary Does Beirut: The 165-Minute Swoop-In

Firmin DeBrabander
Crimes of Economic Madness

Dave Lindorff
Wide Open to Pandemic?

Russell Mokhiber
How Corrupt is That?

Mike Whitney
Pinter's Message to Obama

Mark Weisbrot
Overhauling the IMF

Rev. José M. Tirado
Iceland's New Dawn: How the Right Got Trounced

Website of the Day
American Casino

April 24-26, 2009

Alexander Cockburn
Putting the Bush Years on Trial

Marjorie Cohn
Torture Used to Try to Link Saddam with 9/11

Andy Worthington
Who Ordered the Torture of Abu Zubaydah?

Jeremy Scahill
Are Leading Democrats Afraid of a Special Prosecutor to Investigate Torture?

Chris Floyd
Top of the Heap: the Democrats' Teachable Moment on Torture

Mike Whitney
A Housing Crash Update

Anthony DiMaggio
Obama and the Housing Crisis

Chris Kromm
Democratic Lobbyists Key to Fight Against Employee Free Choice Act

Saul Landau
Seventeen Months in "the Hole:" an Interview with the Leader of the Cuban Five

Dave Lindorff
Free John Walker Lindh

Greg Moses
The Debt Looters

Joshua Frank
Calling for a Coal Moratorium: an Interview with Ted Nace

Fred Gardner
Collective Farming and the Lynch Case

Manuel Garcia, Jr.
Homework, Testing and Stealth Apartheid in Education

David Michael Green
Of Tea Parties and Teleprompters

Ramzy Baroud
Middle East Spies: a New Front in Gaza's Conflict

Rannie Amiri
Mubarak's Expanding Enemies List

Laura Carlsen
Mr. President, Calderon is Not Mexico

Richard Morse
The Haitian People Need a Lobbyist

Nikolas Kozloff
Protecting the Bald Eagle: a Task Now Falling to ... Hugo Chavez?

Kent Peterson
The Fight to Save Mexico's Mangroves

Robert Bryce
The Ethanol Scammers Rent a General

Niranjan Ramakrishnan The Financial Experts

Ron Jacobs
Torture is More Than Just "Harsh Tactics"

Richard Rhames
Roman Legends, Book Burning and History's Hunt

Stephen Martin
Wherefore Art Thou American Dream?

David Yearsley
Rodgers, Hammerstein, Michener and Nostalgia's Clammy Embrace

Poets' Basement
Khalil and Mankh

Website of the Weekend
Doug and Andrea Peacock on Grizzlies and Edward Abbey

April 23, 2009

Eamonn Fingleton
How the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times Buried the Madoff Scandal for at Least Four Years

Ray McGovern
Obama Plays Hamlet on Torture

Michael Ratner
The Torture Commission Trap

Alan Farago
The Quicksand Economy

Rob Larson
Business Gets Carded

Nadia Hijab
The Real Heroes of Durban

Fawzia Afzal-Khan
Deconstructing the Taliban

Dave Lindorff
Are Members of Congress Being Blackmailed?

Helen Redmond
Selling Out Single-Payer: the "Public Option" Con

Adam Federman
The Battle Over New York's Marcellus Shale

Website of the Day
An Interactive Map of Vanishing Employment Across the Country

April 22, 2009

Chris Floyd
The Fatal Thread: Torture, War and the Imperial Project

Joanne Mariner
Torture Evidence and Terror Blacklists

Vijay Prashad
Obama's Afghan Plan: Fracturing the Antiwar Movement

Gareth Porter
U.S. Lacks Capacity to Win Over Afghans

Dean Baker
The Tyranny of Bad Economics

Peter Morici
Housing Sales and Fixing the Economy

Winslow T. Wheeler
Eliminating Bad Pentagon Habits

Barucha Calamity Peller
The Battle to Take Back the New School

Harvey Wasserman
Chernobyl Could Happen Here

Aisha Brown /
Dedrick Muhammad
White Privilege in the Americas

Teo Ballvé
Obama's Feel Good Meeting with Colombia's Uribe

Website of the Day
Ahmedinejad's Durban Speech: What He Actually Said

April 21, 2009

Randy Rowland
Lindy Blake's Great Escape

Dave Lindorff
Jay Bybee's Conspiracy to Torture

Fidel Castro
The Secret Summit

George McGovern
Pull Out of Iraq This Year

Greg Moses
The Unemployment Channel

Benjamin Dangl
Argentina Remembers

Sonia Nettnin
Saving Lives in Gaza

Frank Barat
The Death of Bassem: a Shooting at the Wall in Bil'n

Binoy Kampmark
Legal Purgatory and John Demjanjuk

John V. Walsh
Code Red for Single Payer

David Macaray
SAG Should be Praised, Not Assailed

Website of the Day
Bonus Man: For Executive Assholes Everywhere

April 20, 2009

Mike Whitney
Housing Bust Comes Roaring Back, Worse Than Ever

Andrea Peacock
Histrionics and Legalisms in Missoula

Henry A. Giroux
Ten Years After Columbine: the Tragedy of Youth Deepens

Liaquat Ali Khan
Drone Attacks on Pakistan's Indigenous Tribes

Fred Gardner
Obama's DoJ Backs Prosecution of Medical Marijuana Providers

Stephen Soldz
Obama, Blair, Panetta and the Torture Memos: Praising Moral Cowards, Ignoring Real Heroes

Nadia Hijab
Obama's Multi-Polar Middle East

Dave Lindorff
The Meeting in Trinidad

P. Sainath
India's Press Nixes "R" Word

Nelson P Valdés
A Modest (Transition) Proposal to Obama

Mark Engler
American Empire Foreclosed?

Belén Fernández
The FARC Can't Dance

Website of the Day
Dear Mr. Buffett...

Weekend Edition
May 22-24, 2009

Why Closing Gitmo Starts in Indiana

Obama, Torture and John Walker Lindh

By MICHAEL TEITELMAN

On March 15, the Justice Department made an announcement that was barely reported in the media.   The DOJ decided not to renew the Special Administrative Measures (SAM) that have been imposed on John Walker Lindh since his conviction and incarceration in 2002.   These rules limit visitors to family and lawyers who are forbidden to relate the content of their conversations to the media.  The expressed purpose of these rules is to keep inmates from disclosing information that is harmful to the security of the United States.  Their practical effect has been to silence Lindh.  Federal regulations for SAM require the Bureau of Prisons to obtain an annual re-certification by the director of a national intelligence agency that the inmate continues to be a security threat.  Lindh was certified seven times by the Bush administration.  The Obama DOJ has allowed the last certification to lapse.

John Walker Lindh is now 28 years old.  He resides in a special unit for persons convicted of offenses related to the “War on Terror” in the federal penitentiary in Terra Haute, Indiana.   He was twenty years old when he was captured with Taliban fighters by an Afghan warlord in the first month of the war.    The warlord, General Dostum, turned him over to the U.S. military for interrogation.  He became the first detainee: #001.  His capture occurred so early in the war that Donald Rumsfield had not yet dispatched the first torture team to Guantanamo, and Cheney had not yet maneuvered Bush into stripping prisoners of the protections of the Geneva conventions. 

Lindh was spared the legal limbo and draconian regimen of the Guantanamo prison.  This particular calamity could not be visited upon him because he had, in principle, the constitutional and legal rights of a U.S. citizen.  Instead, he was transported to northern Virginia where he was indicted, tried, and sentenced to twenty years in prison.

Before he was silenced by the Justice Department’s invocations of Special Administrative Measures, Lindh had a brief moment in public view.  He had his 15 minutes of infamy.  American political leaders denounced him as a traitor.   The Attorney-General, John Ashcroft, anointed him the “American Taliban”, a label that was bound to reduce the likelihood that he would receive a fair trial.  He was displayed in one of starkest photographic images of the Afghanistan war as a naked, haggard, filthy, emaciated, terrified man with the crazed, harrowed glare of a homeless schizophrenic man from the streets of an American city.  The chorus of denunciations and this iconic image propagated the idea that Lindh was a religious extremist, a fanatical convert to Islam who had joined al Queda to make war on the infidels, on the people of the United States. 

The reality was quite different. In essence, Lindh was a wayward late adolescent from California who had been traveling for several years in the Muslim world learning Arabic and studying the Quran. He eventually migrated to a madrassa in Pakistan where he came under the sway of fundamentalist teachers and recruiters for the jihad in Afghanistan.  He had the bad judgment to volunteer to fight for the Taliban against a coalition of warlords in the naïve belief that he would be defending an Islamic republic.

Lindh also had the colossally bad luck of arriving on the northern front on September 6, 2001. Five days later al Queda struck and Lindh was stuck. He was shocked by the attack and rejected the legitimacy of attacking civilians. In the isolated mountains of northern Afghanistan, he couldn’t surrender to the opposing Northern Alliance because its leader, General Dostum, had the nasty habit of lashing prisoners to the treads of his tanks.   And he would have been executed by his own side if he tried to leave the front while the Taliban was under attack by U.S. Special Forces and their Afghan allies.

Within weeks, the Taliban were in retreat and Lindh was captured along with five hundred other fighters.  All told, Lindh had spent about six weeks in Afghanistan as a jihadist volunteer. He attended a lecture by Osama bin Ladin during training; he did not join al Queda.  He rejected an offer to become a martyr in a suicide bombing.  He never fired a shot in combat.  

Back in the United States, Lindh was handed a ten count indictment, which included a charge of conspiracy to murder United States citizens.  He faced a possible sentence of forty years.  However, Lindh never had a trial.  Just before pre-trial hearings on defense motions to suppress evidence, the government offered a plea bargain which it pressured Lindh to accept. 

The indictment was reduced to a single charge of violating a 1998 Clinton executive order prohibiting material assistance to the Taliban. The prison sentence was reduced to twenty years.   As in all plea bargains, there was a provision for finality of the legal process. Lindh renounced his right to appeal.  The defense accepted the deal because they figured that conviction was inevitable in the post 9/11 anti-Muslim hysteria. 

The plight of someone serving two decades in prison for actions which, however strange and unpopular, were neither heinous nor villainous should be of concern to anyone addressing the many small injustices that Bush and his coterie have dished out.  It is possible that lifting the ban on Lindh’s communication will be a prelude to a presidential commutation of sentence before the end of Obama's term.  Lindh expressed contrition at his trial and has reportedly handled himself well in prison.  Clemency as a matter of compassion and equity are entirely in order.

However, that should not be the end of the matter. Lindh’s case has broader political significance.  It should be viewed in the context of the Obama administration’s objective of restoring constitutional government and the rule of law, closing the Guantanamo concentration camp, bringing torture and Bush’s other serious malfeasances to light, and restoring professional integrity in the Justice Department and other departments of the government.

Questions hang over the Bush administration’s handling of Lindh's prosecution.  Why did the government need to keep a winnable case out of the courtroom?  Why did the prosecutors force Lindh into a plea bargain when they had incriminating FBI interrogations of Lindh?  And why did they need to silence Lindh in prison with Special Administrative Measures?  The proposition that this teen aged pilgrim possessed information which made him a security threat for seven years is laughable.  

Lindh was kept from telling his story in the courtroom and from his prison cell for political reasons.  He was the first detainee of the Afghanistan war. He was probably the first detainee to be tortured. He was also the Bush administration’s first major cover-up. 

There was a lot to cover-up. Lindh's treatment by the US military in Afghanistan had been atrocious and illegal.  It was inhumane, abusive, degrading and in clear violation of U.S. law and the Geneva conventions. 

Lindh was handed over to the U.S. military in a severely debilitated state.  He had survived a horrendous week long ordeal in the cellar of a fort where he was trapped with 500 prisoners by General Dostum.  He had been traumatized by having to dodge grenades which Dostum’s troops threw into the cellar.  He had a bullet wound in his leg and shrapnel elsewhere in his body.  There was no food.  Water was befouled with excrement, blood, fuel oil, and rotting body parts.  He was exposed to freezing water and frigid mountain air.  More than four hundred prisoners died in the cellar that week.  When Lindh emerged along with 80 other survivors, he was ill and in pain.

At that point, Lindh was taken to Camp Rhino, a U.S. base near Kandahar.   The conditions of his confinement were abysmal.  He was stripped, fastened to a stretcher with duct tape, and enclosed in a windowless metal shipping container. He was fed starvation-level rations.  When he needed to urinate, the stretcher was lifted into a vertical position so that he was forced to wet himself. Guards heard him crying and talking to himself inside the box. He was exposed to the frigid weather. His wounds were inspected by medical personnel but not treated; shackles cut blood flow to his hand and caused excruciating pain, which his captors refused to relieve; he was taunted by guards who cocked a gun to his head and threatened him with death. Foreshadowing Abu Ghraib, photographs circulated with salacious slogans (“shithead”) written on his blindfold.

After two weeks of imprisonment in the container, he was cut loose from the stretcher, given pajamas to cover his nakedness, and interrogated for several days by an FBI agent. During the questioning, he was, in all likelihood, in a state of delirium resulting from gastrointestinal infection, starvation, dehydration, hypothermia, frost bite, pain, and infected bullet wounds. When he was transferred to a U.S. navy ship, medical personnel were shocked at his condition. Denial of medical care and food to prisoners of war was still, in late 2001, a violation of the rules of conduct set by the Geneva Conventions and the Army Field Manual.

The interrogation by the FBI agent was legally defective.  FBI regulations require the presence of a second agent and a verbatim transcript.   There was neither in Lindh's case.  The agent acted alone and produced only a redacted account of the questioning which Lindh never signed.  Moreover, Lindh's debilitated state rendered him incapable, from a legal point of view, to waive his waive his Fifth Amendment right not to be interrogated.

Lindh was informed that he had a right to have a lawyer present during the interrogation but that no lawyer was available in Camp Rhino. He was not told that his family had already arranged for representation.  After his return to the United States, interrogations continued for almost two months before Lindh was allowed to speak with his lawyers.  The violation of his right to counsel was glaring.

From the start, the absence of legal representation alarmed legal staff in the Justice Department.  The Professional Responsibility Advisory Office issued an advisory that interrogation without an attorney would be illegal and that evidence obtained would not be admissible in court.  The FBI proceeded with the interrogation anyway.

None of this was revealed in public testimony because the Bush administration decided to bring the legal proceedings to a halt.  This decision undoubtedly had the imprimatur of Bush, Cheney, and Ashcroft.  The plea offer was made three days before a hearing on the defense's motion to exclude the FBI interrogation, which was the prosecution's only incriminating evidence. The defense had military and medical witnesses from Afghanistan ready to testify about Lindh's mistreatment and his debilitated condition while he was held in Camp Rhino.

One clear objective of the plea bargain was to prevent testimony about the torture of an American citizen.  In the light of the newly released torture memos which were in gestation at the time, Lindh's mistreatment included elements of “aggressive treatment” that were later built into the regime of “enhanced interrogation techniques”:  extreme confinement, enforced posture, threat of execution, humiliation, nutritional deprivation.  Compared to the treatment of detainees at Guantanmo Lindh’s torture was mild and brief.  It was also gratuitous.  It was not carried out with the objective of obtaining information from Lindh or terrifying other detainees into cooperating.  It expressed the hatred and the desire for vengeance that prevailed in the post-9/11 zeitgeist.

This was not the only cover-up.  The plea bargain also forestalled testimony about improprieties in the Justice Department.  The denial of legal representation would have been litigated in the pretrial hearing.  The denigration of professional judgment and the politicization of personnel decisions would have come into public view during the hearing. The lawyer who issued the ethics advisory against interrogating Lindh was sacked and then hounded professionally after leaving government service.  Email memoranda regarding the advisory could not be found when the judge ordered them turned over to Lindh's lawyers. These were the first instances of the devaluation of legal professionalism and the destruction of evidence that occurred repeatedly during the Bush administration.

So the administration had several powerful reasons for wanting to keep Lindh's case out of public view. It is not stretching the truth to say that he was railroaded into taking a guilty plea for the political needs of the administration.  Had the hearing and trial proceeded, the country might have been alerted early in 2002 about the moral and political dangers that lay ahead.

Lindh is now in a legal cul de sac.    As an initial step in the project of closing Guantanamo, President Obama has ordered a review of the remaining detainees.  But the case of Detainee #001, the first prisoner of Bush’s wars, will not be reviewed because Lindh's Guantanamo is in Terra Haute, Indiana.

Lindh's only route out of prison is a grant of presidential clemency.

There is a political and moral challenge here for Barack Obama.  He might some day quietly include a commutation of sentence for Lindh in a list of routine pardons as a matter of mercy or compassion.  That may be politically feasible in a year or two, especially if lifting the communication barrier enables Lindh and his family to publicize his plight and advocate for his release.

The challenge for Obama is to exercise his power of clemency for the same reason that he has ordered the closing of Guantanamo, jettisoned military tribunals, and released the torture memos:  to acknowledge and repair the damage that Bush and Cheney have inflicted on constitutional government and the rule of law.  Like the first presidential pardon by George Washington of people indicted in the Whiskey Rebellion in 1795, like Gerald Ford’s pardon of Richard Nixon and Jimmy Carter’s pardon of draft refusers, freeing Lindh should be done as a political act with political objectives.

Lindh's case is important because the government trampled on his rights, used it immense power to railroad him into prison and then silenced him while they planned the next war.  An order of clemency would unequivocally express Obama's personal repudiation of what was done to this citizen. 

This is a challenge that puts Obama on the spot.  It does not have the pitfalls of alienating powerful institutions like the military and the CIA. It has none of the legal complications of prosecuting government personnel who tortured prisoners while complying with Bush’s “rules of torture”. It has none of the legal murkiness of punishing the legal Lilliputians who rigged the torture memos to advance Bush's agenda.  Freeing Lindh would not, as Cheney might warn us, embolden our enemies, make us more vulnerable to terrorist attack or betray state secrets.  Clemency sets no precedents. The legal basis for freeing Lindh is grounded in the Constitution itself. like other controversial acts of pardon and clemency, it will no doubt provoke consternation and political debate.    It will intensify the debate about Bush’s assault on the rule of law, which is wholly desirable.

Clemency for Lindh would put a real live, thinking, talking person before the American people, someone who can bear witness to what has been done in the name of protecting the nation.  As we know from the testimony of wrongfully convicted people who are exonerated after decades in prison, such testimony is powerful and can wake people up to the injustices that are inflected by the legal system.

The testimony of  individuals who have been wrongly convicted and then exonerated necessarily raises the question of how many more people wrongfully convicted people are locked up in our prisons.  Obama’s political commutation of Lindh would raise the question of how many others have been swept up in anti-Muslim dragnets, and are now locked up for years in prison, silenced with Special Administrative Measures,  because Bush, Cheney and their Justice Department played fast and loose with the laws and the courts in their “war on terror”.

Michael Teitelman lives in New York. He can be reached at: mt258@columbia.edu

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