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Today's Stories September 22 / 23, 2007 Jennifer Loewenstein Beneath the Hideous Veneer of Security September 21, 2007 Karim Makdisi Letter from Lebanon M. Shahid Alam A History of Violence Alan Farago Who Will Buy My House? Joshua Frank The Demise of the Congressional Black Caucus Dave Zirin Notre Dame and the Economy of Sports Kenneth Couesbouc A Short History of Lending and Borrowing Dr. Steffie Woolhandler and Dr. David Himmelstein Mass Health Care Failure Ben Terrall The Streets of San Francisco: Where Impeachment is Taken Seriously--By Everyone But Pelosi Steve Fournier Ex-Dems, Sign Up Here Frederico Fuentes, et al Voices in Defense of Bolivia Website of the Day Sabra and Shatila, Remembered   September 20, 2007 Kathleen Christison Whatever Happened to Palestine? Zoltan Grossman An Endless Occupation? Paul Craig Roberts As the Empire Slips: Greenspan and the Economy of Greed Stan Cox and Wes Jackson Carbon-Free and Still Wrecking the Planet Russell Mokhiber AARP to Kucinich: Drop Dead Charles Modiano Jim Crow's Children: the Jena 6, Shaquanda Cotton and Blog Power Raymond J. Lawrence Bush's Worrisome Use of Religion Brendan Cooney Body-Snatched Nation Website of the Day Mind Control for Breakfast   September 19, 2007 Paul Craig Roberts Why Did Senator John Kerry Stand Idly By? Paul Krassner The Power of Laughter Sgt. Martin Smith The New Private Warriors: Blackwater in Iraq Seth Sandronsky Living in a Dilapidated Market: To Rent or Own? Claud Cockburn Looking back at the Great Crash Victoria Buch Israel's Agenda for Ethnic Cleansing and Transfer Robert Weissman Oil Warriors: From Greenspan to Kissinger Mike Ferner Can We Talk? Dan Bacher Schwarzenegger's $9 Billion Boondoggle for Big Water Website of the Day Housing Cost Calculator   September 18, 2007 Mike Whitney U.S. Banks Brace for Storm Surge as Dollar and Credit System Reel Alan Farago Interviewing Alan Greenspan: How 60 Minutes Blew It John Ross America's Great Wall: Where Will the Workers Go When They Finish It? Ron Jacobs Nooses Hung From Jena, La. to College Park, Md. Alex Doherty Britain's 9/11 "Truth Movement": Who's Responsible? September 17, 2007 Marjorie Cohn Erwin Chemerinsky and the Post-9/11 Attack on Academic Freedom Paul Craig Roberts Conservatism Isn't What It Used to Be Ricardo Alarcón The Return of C. Wright Mills Amid the Dawn of a New Era Marc Levy Fake Vets Chasing Fame Eva Liddell In 1969 We Already Knew What 2007 Would Look Like Website of the Day Propaganda: Your Job in Germany. Directed by Frank Capra, and written by Theodor Geisel Sept. 15-16, 2007 Alexander Cockburn The General Came to Washington Vicente Navarro How the U.S. Schemed Against Spain's Transition from Dictatorship to Democracy Mike Whitney Plummeting Dollar, Credit Crunch Herman Mindshaftgap Has There Ever Been a Surge? If so, Has it a Future? Ellen Cantarow Girls! Music! Palestine! Jordan Flaherty K-Ville: Fox's New Paean to the N.O.P.D. Zachary Hurwitz Julio Cusurichi on Amazonian Development September 14, 2007 Debbie Nathan New York Times reporter was a member of an illegal underage porn site, claims he was only "posing as online predator" Franklin Lamb Sabra-Shatilla, 25 Years Later Patrick Cockburn Greet Bush and Die: The Killing of Abu Risha Farzana Versey The World's Richest Muslim Tycoon Alan Farago This is Florida, Epicenter of the Housing Bust and of Public Corruption Hank Edson Bill's New Book is Giving Me a Headache September 13, 2007 Patrick Cockburn Petraeus Confided Presidential Ambitions to Iraqi Official Scott Vest, former Air Force Captain at Minot The Barksdale Nukes Andy Worthington Guantánamo: "Ghost" Prisoners Speak At Last Michael Baney Mr. Fixit of Quake-Stricken Peru Has Death Squad Past Dr. Susan Block Is U.S. Run by Secret Homintern? September 12, 2007 Paul Craig Roberts American Economy: RIP Stan Goff The Petraeus Report William Blum When Soldiers Mutiny...Only Those Fighting the War Can End It. Manuel Garcia Forgetting 9/11 Debbie Nathan Why One Sex Survey Didn't Make the Big Time September 11, 2007 Patrick Cockburn The Fakery of General Petraeus Iain Boal Specters of Malthus: Scarcity, Poverty, Apocalypse Michael Dickinson Osama on 9/11 Guerry Hoddersen Free Speech is Not Given, but Taken Bill Hatch Irish Politics in Old Time California Gary Leupp The Legacy of Luciano Pavarotti Website of the Day Elisa Salasin's "My September 11th" September 10, 2007 Uri Avnery A Big Victory Against the Wall Patrick Cockburn Petraeus's Closet Saul Landau and Farrah Hassen Screwing Up In Iraq David Michael Green Why Fred Thompson is Uniquely Qualified to be the GOP's Nominee Pius Adesanmi A Solidarity Letter to a Victim of Michael Vick Betty Schneider How to Deal With Sex Offenders   September 8 / 9, 2007 Alexander Cockburn Will the US Really Bomb Iran? Saul Landau The Irrational Drama of a Declining Empire Ismael Hossein-Zadeh Hurricane Katrina and Bush's Wars Ray McGovern Petraeus, the Westmoreland of Iraq Matthew Abraham Finkelstein's Legacy at DePaul Alan Farago The Governor and the Growth Machine Christopher Brauchli Grand Old Party Animals Rannie Amiri Battle of the Camps Fred Gardner Will Snoops Get Stopped? James L. Secor B-52 Flexing Nuclear Muscles: H-Bombs Over Barksdale Missy Comley Beattie Choices: Shall We Stay or Shall We Go Now? Ben Tripp Still in the Clover Francis Boyle The University of Illinois' Little Red Sambo Show Joe Allen and Paul D'Amato Jason Bourne vs. James Bond Website of the Weekend Drilling Wyoming: the View from Above September 7, 2007 Robert Fantina Those Iraq Reports: Bush vs. Reality John Ross Coca-Cola's Raid on a Sacred Mountain James Brooks The Occupation Within Russell Mokhiber Robert Reich and the Elimination of Corporate Criminal Liability Joshua Frank The Green Implosion Continues: Cyberlynching John Murphy John Walsh On the Green Party Mark Brenner New York Taxi Workers Strike Over Tracking Devices Mike Ferner "I Will Salute No More Forever" Website of the Day Help Save Osny Zachary's Life   September 6, 2007 Kathleen and Bill Christison Bush, Iran and Israel's Hidden Hand Allan J. Lichtman When General Petraeus Speaks, Don't Listen ... Norman Solomon The Secret Addiction of Thomas Friedman Yifat Susskind Hurricane Felix's First Responders: Courage and Tragedy on the Miskito Coast Catherine Fenton Why I Am Going to the Protest Laura Santina Can the War Machine be Contained? Farzana Versey Fission Kashmir Yves Engler Haiti: Where a Wage of $2 a Day is Too Much for the Lords of Industry to Pay Kelly Overton Bang Bang; Shoot Shoot: Is Hunting Racist? Michael Simmons One Jew's Views: The Strange Genius of Drew Friedman and Kominsky Crumb Website of the Day Dams and Genocide in Guatemala     September 5, 2007 Stan Goff The End Begins Michael Dickinson Working for Mother Teresa: Memoirs of a Rebellious Volunteer Matthew Abraham Standing Firm with Norman Finkelstein and DePaul's Heroic Students: a Defining Moment Patrick Cockburn The Basra Debacle Dave Lindorff Beware the Wounded Beast Paul Craig Roberts Who Are the Fanatics? Clifton Ross Ecuador and the Struggle for Latin American Unity Elizabeth Schulte Katrina's Forgotten Refugees Joseph Grosso Labor Day in New York City Ben Terrall Where's Nancy? On Trying to Protest Pelosi in San Francisco Website of the Day A Guide to Narco Dollars   September 4, 2007 Jean Bricmont Why Bush Can Get Away with Attacking Iran Patrick Cockburn Cut and Run in Iraq Ron Jacobs The Haditha Massacre: Spinning a War Crime Tom Kerr Buried Alive on San Quentin's Death Row Gary Leupp The Case of Jose Maria Sison Sonja Karkar The Weeping Olive Trees of Palestine Heather Gray The Best and Worst of America: 9/11, Joseph Lowery and the Lethal Silence of Billy Graham Fidel Castro The Super-Revolutionaries Jackie Corr Home Depot Comes to Butte--Begging Bowl in Hand Sunsara Taylor Katrina and the Progress of the System Website of the Day Colombia Journal   September 3, 2007 Patrick Cockburn Brits Flee from Basra Eamon McCann Qana, Derry: The Dead Lie in Familiar Shapes Joshua Frank The End of the Green Party? Chris Floyd Post-Mortem America: Bush's Year of Triumph Marjorie Cohn A Look at Bush's Iran War Plans Walter Brasch The News Drones: How Fake Photos Helped Lead the US to War in Iraq Matt Reichel Redefining the American Dream Website of the Day Don't Get Fooled Again   September 1 / 2, 2007 Alexander Cockburn Entrapment Snares Larry Craig Andy Worthington Britain's Guantánamo Saul Landau The Tragic Ordeal of the Cuban Five David Keen An Occident Waiting to Happen: Intellectuals and the War on Terror Patrick Cockburn The Collapse of Iraq's Health Care Services Diana Johnstone Back in Uncle Sam's Pocket George Longstreth, MD & Karen Longstreth, RN The Sorrows of Occupation: Life in the West Bank Linda M. Woolf A Sad Day for Psychologists--a Sadder Day for Human Rights Ralph Nader Wrapping the World with Advertising Fred Gardner The Trial of Mollie Fry, MD Ben Tripp Enquiry in America Today David Michael Green American Indigestion: Why Bush Governs from the Gut Missy Comley Beattie Looking for Love in All the Wrong Places: What the GOP Hasn't Learned About Tolerance Michael Dickinson Who's Cheating: Remembering Princess Diana Paul Krassner Assholes of the Week: From Larry Craig to Wesley Clark Ron Jacobs A Sports Nation of Millions Poets' Basement Buknatski, Davies and Mickey Z         Subscribe Online

Weekend Edition September 22 / 23, 2007 Prosecutorial Misconduct More Dangerous Than Racism The Injustice in Jena By LINN WASHINGTON, Jr. The stench surrounding the office of Louisiana's LaSalle Parish prosecutor Reed Walters, for his discriminatory decisions in the Jena 6 case, is about to become more malodorous activists announced during recent anti-Walters protests across America. Activists leading these coordinated coast-to-coast protests announced plans to collect dirty sneakers and send them to Walters. Sending sneakers is a mocking slap at Walters' decision to press serious assault charges against six black teens arising from a school yard fight on the specious claim that they used deadly weapons against the white victim: their sneakers. Walters' claims kicking the white youth during the fight where the victim sustained no serious injury constituted use of deadly weapons ­ an offense that could land the black youths in prison for decades. Walters is the same prosecutor who initially refused to press charges against white teens who bashed a black teen in the head with a beer bottle while ejecting him from a 'whites-only' party last fall in Jena, a small rural town about 40-miles northeast of Alexandria, La. And, this is the same prosecutor still refusing to charge a young white man for pulling a shotgun on a few black teens in Jena yet the same prosecutor who has lodged theft of firearm charges against those black teens for refusing to return that weapon to its owner. "We are collecting sneakers ­ dirty, stinky sneakers ­ to send to that racist DA in Jena," declared Philadelphia NAACP branch president J. Whyatt Mondesire during remarks at a protest in that city held simultaneously with a massive demonstration that recently paralyzed Jena. The actions of Walter plus those of other officials and individuals in Jena, La are now the latest flashpoint in America's cauldron of race-related problems. That school yard fight involving the Jena 6 culminated a series of interracial incidents at Jena's high school that began in Fall 2006 when three white students placed lynch nooses on a tree in the high school's yard. The nooses appeared after blacks sat under that school yard tree traditionally considered a 'whites-only' shade spot. Incidents after the nooses involved white teens attacking black teens ­ with fists, beer bottles and that gun incident. Top Jena school district officials overruled the high school principal's recommendation to expel the trio responsible for hanging the nooses, dismissing their inflammatory action as an adolescent prank. DA Walters is the lawyer for Jena's school district. It is unclear if Walters played any role in overruling decision to suspend not expel. Yet, a recent report from Jena by Democracy Now host Amy Goodman states Walters refused the school board access to a school district report on the school yard fight during the board's deliberations before it voted to expel those black teens' involved in that fight. Some see Walters' withholding information from school board members (the district's report) as analogous to a prosecutor withholding evidence from a jury during a criminal proceeding ­ which is misconduct. Walters strenuously rejected charges that race played any role in his prosecutorial decisions during a press conference the day before that protest in Jena that drew tens-of-thousands of participants from across America. Flanking Walters at his press conference was the white victim of that fight, a young man treated at a hospital yet well enough to attend a high school function hours after the fight. Witness claim this youth precipitated the fight by taunting the black teen beat with the beer bottle with racist epithets. Walters declared, "It is not and never has been about race. It is about finding justice for an innocent victim and holding people accountable for their actions. That's what it is about." During that press conference Walters said he wanted to prosecute the students accused of hanging the nooses but couldn't find any applicable Louisiana law. Many ridicule Walters' proposition. Critics contend since Walters was creative enough to find deadly weapons in sneakers he could have made some creative use of laws regarding disorderly conduct or terroristic threatsif in fact he felt as claimed that the noose hanging was a "villainous act" In July 1934 a prosecutor in Bastrop, La ­ about 60-miles north of Jena ­ refused to investigative the lynching of a black man in that town's public square. This white prosecutor told a mob numbering 3,000 that he "sympathized with its attitude" moments before the hanging of this suspected criminal, according to an account in a New York newspaper. The sympathy shown to whites by that 1934 prosecutor in Bastrop is eerily similar to sympathies displayed by Walters whose impermissible race based charging practices violate any legal discretion given prosecutors for lodging charges. The reality is Walters making sneakers 'deadly weapons' to press the most serious criminal charges against the Jena 6 arguably abuses if not violates Louisiana's Rules of Conduct for prosecutors. Rule 3.8 of that lawyer Conduct code is captioned: Special Responsibilities of a Prosecutor. Rule 3.8(a) states prosecutors should "refrain from prosecuting a charge that the prosecutor knows is not supposed by probable cause." Probable cause, according to standard legal definitions, includes an apparent state of facts which would induce a reasonably prudent person to believe that the accused committed the crime charged. A school yard fight (even a beat-down) with no serious injury does not rise to the level of attempted murder ­ the charge Walters' initially lodged against the Jena 6. Presumably Walters knows Rule 3.8(a). When Walters declared his refusal to answer all reporters' questions about aspects of the Jena 6 case that press conference, he cited restrictions on public comments by prosecutors regarding pending cases contained in Rule 3.8(f). A claim by Walters that he is bound by Rule 3.8(f) but is unaware of Rule 3.8(a) would sizzle with more idiocy than his previous statements defending his actions. While racism is rampant in matters revolving around the Jena 6, this incident exposes a deep seated problem infecting American society: abusive misconduct by prosecutors. Abuse by prosecutors is a profound problem nationwide routinely dismissed by authorities and the public at-large. The mandate for prosecutors is to seek justice not just conviction ­ a duty too many prosecutors disregard. "Prosecutors have destroyed the rule of law and put rule by prosecutors in its place," Paul Craig Roberts noted in an excellent article posted on Counterpunch in August 2006. In 1999, the then head of the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers remarked that the "problem of prosecutors breaking the law is more frightening, and does more damage to society, than any common criminal." While the numbers of certified bigots among prosecutors engaged in misconduct may be small, the number of prosecutors knowingly offering false testimony (often from police), fabricating evidence, concealing evidence of innocence and chucking fair play is alarmingly large. A win-at-any-cost attitude is widely viewed a driver for prosecutorial misconduct. Rare public outrage at prosecutorial misconduct appears reserved to high profile cases involving whites like the Duke lacrosse players. Authorities stripped the law license from the DA in that case, Mike Nifong, even sending him to jail for a day following televised disciplinary proceedings that constituted a very public flogging. In contrast to Nifong, the Texas prosecutor responsible for the false convictions of 38 people in an infamous 1999 drug raid occurred outside televised glare. Offending prosecutor Terry McEachern received a wrist slap penalty of paying $6,225 in fines and promising to not break lawyer rules for two years. The misconduct of now ex-prosecutor McEachern, lead to authorities paying $5-million to the victims of that Tulia, TX drug case resting solely on claims of a corrupt undercover agent. One speaker at that pro-Jena 6 protest in Philadelphia, respected defense attorney Michael Coard, said the best defense against prosecutorial misconduct is aggressive, consistent action against offenders. "If prosecutors knew they would loose their law licenses and get locked-up, they won't engage in misconduct," Coard said acknowledging little likelihood of that happening because most judges are ex-prosecutors. Linn Washington Jr. is a Philadelphia based journalist who is a graduate of the Yale Law Journalism Fellowship Program. Washington is a columnist for The Philadelphia Tribune, America's oldest African-American owned newspaper. Your Ad Here

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