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Today's
Stories
February 8
/ 10, 2008
Paul Craig
Roberts
Does
the GOP Have Aces Up Its Sleeves?
February 7,
2008
Patrick Cockburn
Why
Baghdad Will Explode Again
Bill Christison
Potholes Bigger Than Ever for Palestinians
David Anderson
NBC's "To Entrap" a Predator: Perverting Justice for
the Sake of Ratings
Ron Jacobs
Innocent Flesh: Recruiting Kids to Kill
Nikolas Kozloff
Hugo Chávez's Coca: It's the Real Thing
Jane Rockefeller
The Moral Economy of an Anti-Poverty Foundation
Andy Worthington
On Waterboarding: Two Questions for Michael Hayden
Dave Zirin
Instep Intifada
Saul Landau
The "Honestest" Candidate Since Lincoln
Susie Day
Our Blob in the White House
Website of the Day
George Carlin on Voting
February 6,
2008
Cockburn /
St. Clair
Super
Tuesday's Vote for Chaos
Ben Rosenfeld
Informant Games: The Disturbing GreenScare Case of Briana Waters
Vijay Prashad
An Intellectual Hustler Lays It All Out
Joe Bageant
Nine Billion Little Feet on the Highway of the Damned
Michael Donnelly
What White Women Do In Private Voting Booths
Allan Nairn
Does the US Need a Civilizing Mayan Invasion?
Kathryn Gray
Wilderness on Edge: The Fate of Donner Summit
Ray McGovern
Powell's UN Fiasco
Sheldon Richman
The Whining Empire
Paul Cantor
/ Roger Sparks
A
Presidential Aptitude Examination
John Chuckman
Political Bits and Pieces
Website of
the Day
Save the Albatross
February 5,
2008
Winslow T.
Wheeler
The
Chaos in America's Vast Security Budget
Tariq Ali
Why I Will Not Participate in the Turin Book Fair
Stephen Soldz
The Secret Rules of Engagement in Iraq: Did Rumsfeld Authorize
War Crimes?
Chris Floyd
Strange
Fruit: America's Gulag and the Good War
William S. Lind
Saddam's Secret War Strategy: Die and Win
Martha Rosenberg
Live From the Killing Floor
Heather Gray
Conversations with Georgia Voters
Ayesha Ijaz
Khan
Obama, Bhagwandas and the Battle for a Secular Politics
David Macaray
Unions Need to Stop Being So Nice
Eliza Ernshire
Making Music and Laughing Till the Tears Run
Brenda Norrell
Hated Nation
Website of
the Day
The Things I Used to Do
February 4,
2008
Marc Levy
Winter
in America
Patrick Cockburn
The Bird Market Bombings
Saree Makdisi
Strangling Gaza
Uri Avnery
From Stalingrad to Winograd
Alan Farago
Let's Get Bambi! Someone is Slaughtering Florida's Key Deer
Ben Tripp
Spare Change: the Whine of the Progressive Voter
Paul Wolf
Civil Wars North and South
Paul Craig
Roberts
Why Were the 9/11 Tapes Destroyed?
Joshua Frank
MoveOn's Obama Endorsement: Why There's No Hope for Change
John Halle
Whither Progressive Democrats?
Website of the Day
How to Cheat in School
February 2
/ 3, 2008
Alexander Cockburn
Hot
Democratic Properties
Pam Martens
Bankers
Gone Bonkers: Global Finance and the Insanity Defense
Ralph Nader
The Great Clinton-Obama Debate: Questions They Weren't Asked
John Ross
Hilaria
vs. "El Moreno"
Wajahat Ali
Hillary, Obama and the Clash of Civilizations: an Interview with
Imam Zaid Shakir
Robert Fantina
A Colony by Any Other Name: Iraq as Stepchild of the American
Empire
B. R. Gowani
Not All Veils and Guns
James L. Secor
China in Winter: On the Western Edge of the Great Snow
John V. Walsh
The Invisible Green Primary
Niranjan Ramakrishnan
Barack's Bubble, Bubba's Trouble
Dave Zirin
Who Stole the Super Bowl's Soul?
Jeremy Scahill
Blackwater and Blood
Fidel Castro
Reflections on Lula
Joe Allen
Tet Reconsidered: the Turning Point in the Vietnam War
Stephen Lendman
Life in Occupied Gaza
Patrick Irelan
What Happened to the Streetcars?
Andrej Grubacic
Ziga Vodovnik
Caligula's Horse: the USA, New Europe and Kosovo
Josh Karpoff
Dead Soldiers and the Antiwar Movement
Ron Jacobs
Carl Oglesby's War
Paul Krassner
Tom Waits Meets Super-Joel
Website of the Weekend
Company Woman: Hillary and Wal-Mart
February 1,
2008
Ray McGovern
The
Iniquities and Inequalities of War
Diane Farsetta
The Wild Career of James "Dow 36,000" Glassman
Patrick Cockburn
The
Most Dangerous Country in the World for Journalists
Tariq Ali
Et
Tu, New York Times?
Allan Nairn
Eating Dirt for Lunch in Haiti
Rannie Amiri
Collective Punishment in Beirut
Ramzy Baroud
People Power in Gaza: They Simply Did It
Kenneth Couesbouc
The Mother of All Snowballs
Peter Morici
Recession Looms
Mumia Abu-Jamal
Witha "Brutha" Like This: Bill Clinton as White Negro
Rosemary Jackowski
27 Reasons Nader Should Run for President
Scott Campbell
Direct Action to Stop the War Re-emerges
Website of the Day
Betes et Hommes
January 31,
2008
Saul Landau
Return
to Afghanistan
Andy Worthington
Horror at Guantánamo
Mike Whitney
Rate Cut as Dagger: America's Teetering Banking System
Jeff Ballinger
Sustainability for Dictators Initiative? Clinton Praises the
"Suharto of the Steppe"
Tiffany Ten
Eyck
The Saga of the Freightliner Five
William Loren
Katz
Waterboarding:
Torure or Mystery?
Alan Farago
Why the Republicans are in Deep Trouble
Col. Dan Smith
Oh Say Can You See the 2009 Budget?
China Hand
Slouching Toward Islamabad
Dave Lindorff
The Usual Suspects Once Again
Wadner Pierre
Fake Democracy in Haiti
Website of the Day
One Big Union
January 30,
2008
Cockburn /
St. Clair
McCain
vs. Clinton?
Christopher
Ketcham
The Genius of the Development Industrial-Complex
Robert Weissman
America By the Numbers: The Shameful State of the Union
Neve Gordon
An Experiment in Famine
Paul Craig Roberts
Regulation or Deregulation, Which is Worse?
Joanne Mariner
How Anti-Terror Laws Threaten Free Speech
David Macaray
Labor's Only Real Weapon
Liaquat Ali
Khan
Is NATO Committing Genocide in Afghanistan?
Raymond J. Lawrence
Prankster-in-Chief: Bush's Troubling Non-Verbal Communication
Dan Bacher
The Collapse of the Central Valley Salmon
Website of the Day
Onward Through the Fog
January 29,
2008
Franklin C.
Spinney
Bush's
New War Budget: the $70 Billion Hand-Off
Mike Whitney
The Great Credit Unwind of 2008
Alan Farago
Buyer Beware: Florida, the Candidates and the Latin Builders
Association
Patrick Cockburn
"The Americans Bring Us Only Destruction"
Gary Leupp
"We Can't Afford to Let Them Spill the Beans:" a Sibel
Edmonds Timeline
R. F. Blader
A
World Without Abortion: USA v. Romania
Ahmad Faruqui
Musharraf's Post-Electoral Prospect
Fran Shor
Obama, the Kennedys and "Change We Can Believe In"
Jeremy Scahill
Secret Trials and Criminal Convictions: the Ordeal of the Blackwater
Protesters
Allan Nairn
Bush's
SOTU: Entitlement, Justice and the War of All Against All
Website of the Day
The Ghost of Rambo
January 28,
2008
Patrick Cockburn
Return
to Fallujah
Paul Craig
Roberts
The End of American Liberty
Allan Nairn
The Breaking of the Gaza Wall
Eyad al-Sarraj
/ Sara Roy
Ending the Stranglehold on Gaza
Martha Rosenberg
Obit for the "Front Page" City
Corporate Crime
Reporter
How They Rip Us Off
David Michael Green
Kristolizing Iraq: What a Great Freakin' War
Jennifer Van
Bergen
What's Left?
Nancy Oden
Survival Tips for Hard Times
Divya Karnad
Saving India's Sea Turtles
James L. Secor
Pissed About Pistorious: Why the Olympics Needs a Gimp
Website of
the Day
Yellow Journalism?
January 26
/ 27, 2008
Uri Avnery
Worse
Than a Crime
JoAnn Wypijewski
How the Clintons Lost It, Whatever the Outcome in S. Carolina
Ralph Nader
Ambition, Power and the Clintons
Paul Craig
Roberts
How Bush Destroyed the Dollar
Paul Watson
I'm Proud to be a Pirate!
John Ross
Murder and Cover-Up in Mexico
Fred Gardner
Ross v. Raging Wire: Employer's Right to Fire Workers Held Sacred
by California Supreme Court
Allan Nairn
Little Hands with Fever: Some Consequences of Poverty Death
Joshua Frank
Why Bush Wants to Legalize the Nuke Trade with Turkey
Binoy Kampmark
Société Générale and the Economic
Meltdown
James T. Phillips
America's Sick Comedy: Bringing the War Home
Stan Cox
The Depressing Truth About Anti-Depressants
Eamonn McCann
Hillary's Lie: "I Brought Peace to Northern Ireland"
Ron Jacobs
The Horizons of History: What's at Stake in Bolivia
Seth Sandronsky
California's Health Care Crisis
Ben Terrall
The Future is Unwritten
Poets' Basement
Tripp, Gardner, Gibbons and Davies
Website of
the Weekend
City of Immigrants
January 25,
2008
Douglas Valentine
Operation
Two-Fold: How the CIA Infiltrated the DEA
Patrick Cockburn
US Troops Will Be In Iraq for 10 More Years: an Interview with
Iraqi Foreign Minister Hoshyar Zebari
JoAnn Wypijewski
Down to the Wire in South Carolina
Heather Gray
Are We Seeing a Racial Shift in the South? Conversations with
South Carolina Voters
Marjorie Cohn
Senate Democrats Poised to Fold to Cheney on FISA
Erica Rosenberg
Environmentalists Out on a Limb: the Perils of Collaboration
Alan Farago
Jeb Bush Goes Nuclear
Robert Weissman
Reclaiming Economic Freedom
Laura Carlsen
Wild Cards: Mining the Hispanic Vote in Nevada
Stephen Lendman
Israeli Repression in the Hebron
Website of the Day
The FIX is In
January 24,
2008
JoAnn Wypijewski
Obama
as Anthologist of Uplift
Paul Craig
Roberts
President Hillary
Alexander Cockburn
Hillary Wants to Talk About Dirty Legal Dealings? Remember Her
Nursing Home Scam?
Kathleen Christison
One and Two State Solutions and the Myth of International Consensus
Jeff Halper
Power to the (Palestinian) People!
Stanley Heller
The Siege of Gaza is Broken
George Wuerthner
The Moronic Sport: ORVs on the Public Lands
Patrick Cockburn
Desperate Iraqi Farmers Turn to Opium
Jeff Sher
Just How "Good" is Your Health Insurance?
Patrick Irelan
Musharraf, the Steadfast Ally?
Charles Modiano
Restoring the Anti-War King
Website of
the Day
An Illustrated History of Trepanation
January 23,
2008
David Rosen
The
Great Disappearing Act: the Presidential Candidates and the Politics
of Sex
David Isenberg
Is
It Really So Hard to Believe That Iran Stopped Its Nuclear Weapons
Program?
Farzana Versey
Hillary's
Harem
Paul Craig
Roberts
The Empire That Must Be Obeyed
Alan Farago
Where Did All the Good Times Go?
Allan Nairn
Indonesian Intelligence Service Threatens to Kill Human Rights
Activist
Kenneth Couesbouc
Another Turn of the Screw
Niranjan Ramakrishnan
How the West was Re-Sold
Michael Donnelly
Obama Strikes Back
Norman Solomon
The Power of Love
Website of the Day
Rafah Today
January 22,
2008
Paul Craig
Roberts
Farewell
to Old Economic Nostrums
JoAnn Wypijewski
King Day in Columbia, South Carolina
Al Giordano
Divide and Conquer Politics: How the Clinton Campaign Armed a
Black-Latino Time Bomb in Nevada
Felice Pace
Power Politics in the Klamath: Water, Dams and Salmon
Paul Wolf
Bolívar's Sword
Robert Weissman
Deregulation and the Financial Crisis
Dave Lindorff
The Bush Dollar Trap
Marjorie Cohn
Cheney Impeachment Gains Traction
Richard Neville
Keeping Shakespeare in a Box
Don Fitz /
Zaki Baruti
St. Louis Mayor Booed Off MLK Platform
Ben Terrall
Cindy Sheehan and the Virtues of Divisiveness
Sam Husseini
Stoning Martin Luther King, Jr.
Website of
the Day
Defend the Mapuche!
January 21,
2008
Kevin Alexander
Gray
Playing
the Race Card
Linn Washington,
Jr.
Deferring Dreams, Delusions of Democracy
Pam Martens
How Wall Street Blew Itself Up
David Macaray
Labor's Grim Dilemma: Do We Need a Labor Party?
Uri Avnery
Look Who's Talking
Omar Barghouti
Europe's Collusion in Israel's Slow Genocide
Joe DeRaymond
Protest and Trial in D.C.
B.R. Gowani
Why Islam Should Tolerate Images
Shepherd Bliss
The False U.S. Economy
Jean-Guy Allard
Philip Agee Versus the CIA
Dan Bacher
Leaping Steelhead!
Website of
the Day
Destroyed
By a Rising Flood
January 19
/ 20, 2008
Alexander Cockburn
The
Campaign in Black and White
Saul Landau
Good Time Charlie's War
China Hand
Endgame for Pakistan?
Conn Hallinan
Desert Mirage: What Was the Bombing of Syria Really About?
Ron Jacobs
No Retreat
Dave Lindorff
A Tax Rebate Won't Fix This Mess
Andy Worthington
Canada's Humiliating Double Standard on Torture
Paul Armentano
What's the Going Price for a Joint? More Than You Might Think
Seth Sandronsky
High Crimes and Economics
Michael Donnelly
Dodging Ecocide
Patrick Irelan
The Ordeal of Dr. Safdar Sarki
Martha Rosenberg
The Drug Industry Takes Another Hit
Sherwood Ross
Making the World Safe for Despots: Bush's Global Arms Trade
David Michael
Green
So You Want to be My President, Eh?
James Rothenberg
Unimpeachable: Under House Protection
Daniel Gross
Starbucks Shortchanges Dr. King
Peter N. Carroll
In Memory of Milton Wolff
Susie Day
Croakin' on Hudson
Paul Krassner
Woody Allen Meets Tongue Fu
Poets' Basement
Wolff, Buknatski and Orloski
Website of the Day
Rocky Mountain
Blues
January 18,
2008
Allan Nairn
Killing
Civilians, Carefully
Ralph Nader
When
the Big Boys Get in Trouble, Who Pays the Ultimate Bill?
Joanne Mariner
Terrorism and Preventative Detention
Alan Farago
The Stimulus and the Meltdown
P. Sainath
Pity the Brahmins
R.F. Blader
Beyond Steinem's Feminism
Andy Worthington
A Letter from Guantánamo
John Jonik
Private Insurance is Bad for Your Health
Brian McKenna
Where Even Sharing is Prohibited: Notes from Inside a Michigan
Women's Prison
Daoud Kuttab
This Time Next Year?
Website of the Day
Those South Carolina Voting Machines
January 17,
2008
Paul Craig
Roberts
Leader
and Vassal
Christopher
Brauchli
The FBI's Bills Come Due
Robert Fantina
Leadership, Bush and the New York Times
Patrick Irelan
Eternal War
Paul A. Moore
When the Rich Pay No Taxes
Stephen Lendman
Institutionalized Spying on Americans
Beena Sarwar
Bhutto and the "State Within a State"
Walter Brasch
Buzzwords in the Echo Chamber: Change and the Establishment
Brenda Norrell
Bush Legacy in Texas Sours
Adam Federman
End of the Left?
Website of the Day
Democrats for Romney
January 16,
2008
Jeffrey St.
Clair
Return
of the Native
Franklin Lamb
The Bombing at Qarantina
Julian Sanchez
David Weigel
Who Wrote Ron Paul's Newsletters?
Sharon Smith
Ron Paul and the Left: a Slippery Slope?
Allan Nairn
Economic Indicator: No Free Lunch, No Free Market
Ayesha Ijaz
Khan
How the American Media Enables Bush's Iran Fixation
Andy Worthington
A Strategic Call to Close Guantánamo
Richard Behan
Nancy Pelosi, You Must Impeach!
Website of the Day
Obama the New JFK? He's Not That Bad!
January 15,
2008
Andrea Peacock
Breach
of Trust in America's Most Toxic Town: How the EPA is Rubbing
Poison Into Libby's Wounds
Wajahat Ali
An Interview with Seymour Hersh on Iraq, Bush Foreign Policy
and the Prospects of War with Iran
Joe Bageant
Getting Out the Bling Vote
Ralph Nader
The Candidate Taboos
John Ross
Zero Hour: NAFTA and Mexico's Agrarian Apocalypse
Elaine Cassel
Jose Padilla vs. John Yoo: Can a National Disgrace be Rectified?
Peter Morici
The Fed Needs More Than a New Communications Strategy
Beena Sarwar
Pakistan's Dirty Tricks Brigade
Robert Weissman
Big Business is Even More Unpopular Than You Thought
Binoy Kampmark
Going Tata in India
Dave Zirin
Dennis Brutus Smacks Down the Hall of Fame
Website of
the Day
David Lynch on the iPhone
January 14,
2008
Ishmael Reed
Ma
and Pa Clinton Flog Uppity Black Man
Roger Morris
Burials in the Sind
Uri Avnery
The
Hands of Esau
Mike Whitney
Bush's Voodoo Stimulus Package
Allan Nairn
General Suharto of Indonesia: One Small Man Leaves a Million
Corpses
William Blum
Oh, By the Way, the Iraqis Don't Really Want Us
Alan Farago
A Subprime Wake Up Call
David Macaray
Are Labor Unions Ready for Prime Time?
Eva Liddell
Getting Drunk with Obama
Zoe Blunt
Road Kill: New Highway Blocked by Protesting Raccoons
Website of the Day
Doug and Andrea Peacock on Grizzlies
January 12
/ 13, 2008
Andrew Cockburn
How
the New England Journal of Medicine Undercounted Iraqi Civilian
Deaths
Saul Landau
60
Years of Empire
Corey D. B. Walker
Barack Obama and the Crisis of the White Intellectual
Col. Dan Smith
Bush, Iran and the Magician of the Tarot
Eric Toussaint
The US Subprime Crisis Goes Global
Ron Jacobs
Television, Murder and Vietnam
Fred Gardner
The People vs. Christopher James Chakos
Stan Cox
Don't Take That Pill!
Jacob G. Hornberger
The Warfare State
Ramzy Baroud
The Good, the Bad and the Ugly
Joseph Grosso
The Anglosphere: a Special Relationship of Elites
David Díaz-Arias
Imagining An/Other Latin American Left
Stacey Warde
Before We Move On ...
Dan Bacher
Pumped to Extinction: the Decline of the Delta Smelt
Michael Dickinson
Georgie in Jesusland
Website of
Weekend
CounterPunchers Protest Outside NYT Offices
January 11,
2008
Dave Lindorff
Did
Hillary Really Win New Hampshire? More Questions About Diebold
Voting Machines
Paul Craig
Roberts
No
Escape from War and Unemployment
Andy Worthington
Six Years of Guantánamo
Kenneth Couesbouc
Banking on Thin Ice
Jeff Ballinger
Inside the Vienna Consensus
Christopher
Brauchli
Lethal Injection, the Supremes and China
Manuel Garcia, Jr.
Paying No Attention to the Presidential Campaigns
Andrew Silverstein
Bush's Weepy Visit to Jerasulem
Marwan Bishara
Bush in the Middle East
Robert Weissman
The First Amendment Gone Wild
Patrick Irelan
Damn the Small Boats!
Website of
the Day
Hillary and the Superdelegates: Or Why She Wins Even When She
Loses
January 10,
2008
Alexander Cockburn
Now
Nader Claims He Didn't Endorse Edwards
Bob Wing
Marqueece Harris-Dawson
Race Within the Race: Obama, the NH Vote and the Specter of Tom
Bradley
Michael Donnelly
White Women Gone Wild?
David Macaray
Three Big Reasons for the Decline of Labor Unions
China Hand
Bush's Delusional Policy Pushes Pakistan to Brink of Catastrophe
Ayesha Ijaz Khan
Saudi Arabia and Pakistan: Brotherly, Friendly Countries?
Rannie Amiri
Obama, Man of Kansas or Kenya?
Website of the Day
Iranian Video of the Hormuz Incident
January 9,
2008
Cockburn /
St. Clair
The
Empire Strikes Back
Dave Lindorff
The Bad News from New Hampshire: Death By Triangulation
John Chuckman
Pardon My Laughter: Watching the US Primaries from Canada
James Bovard
Stomping Freedom: Inside the Martial Law Act of 2006
Alan Farago
As Florida Sinks: the View from the Titanic
Russell Mokhiber
Why Picket the New York Times in DC on Friday?
William S. Lind
Kicking the Can Down the Road in Iraq
Peter Morici
Beyond the Sophistry: Why the Trade Deficit Matters
Josh Reubner
Sudan vs. Israel: Double Standard on Divestment
Mike Roselle
The Pursuit of Happiness
Website of the Day
Bottles of Tears on the Wall: Steve Perry on NH
January 8,
2008
Paul Craig
Roberts
No
Jobs for the New Economy (or the Old)
Russell Mokhiber
The Black Hillary: Obama is Just Another Political Sedative
Robert Fantina
The Gulf of Tonkin and the Strait of Hormuz
Dave Zirin
Butts on Parade
Shamako Nobel
I Am an Emcee: the Politics of Hip Hop
John Ross
Zapatista Women Encounter Themselves
Brenda Norrell
Apaches Defend Homeland from Homeland Security
Laura Carlsen
Why Bolivia Matters
Patrick Irelan
Remember the Maine!
Evelyn J. Pringle
The Holes in Bush's FDA
Jonathan M.
Feldman
After Iowa and New Hampshire: a Strategy for Rebuilding the Peace
Movement
Michael Dickinson
Playing Soldier
Website of
the Day
Sean Hannity on the Run!
January 7,
2008
Chris Floyd
There
Will Be Blood: But No Justice for Iraq Atrocities
John Blair
Remove That Man! Creeping Fascism in Indiana
Uri Avnery
The Case of the White Bird
Andy Worthington
Who Are the Gitmo Saudis?
Binoy Kampmark
Needling the Convict: Lethal Injection and the Supreme Court
David Macaray
Women on Strike
Ralph Nader
Obamarama: the Politics of the Smooth Mood
Michael Donnelly
It's the War Vote(s), Stupid!
Ron Jacobs
Ron Paul's Run: Is Being Against the War Enough?
Gideon Levy
The Hostile President
Dave Lindorff
A Real 9/11 Cover-Up? Sibel Edmonds, Turkey and the Bomb
Website of
the Day
Plagues and Pleasures on the Salton Sea
January 5 /
6, 2008
Douglas Valentine
Good
Guys in Black Hoods
Kevin Young
The
US Occupation and Popular Opinion in Iraq
Richard Rhames
Saddam
Who?
Saul Landau
Bush Snatches Defeat from Victory
Marc Lynch
Why Bush's Iran Strategy is Failing
Robert Fantina
Iowa, Democrats and the Iraq War
Donna Volatile
Antiwar Soldier: an Interview with Jonathan Hutto, Sr.
Jelle Bruinsma
Norman Finkelstein in The Netherlands
Bob Sutcliffe
Remembering Andrew Glyn, Rebel Economist
Harvey Wasserman
Anti-Nuclear Renaissance
Missy Beattie
Why Obama Can't Save Us
David Swanson
Remembering the Separation of Powers
Jacob Hornberger
The Importance of the Padilla Case
Shepherd Bliss
Survival Tools from Kokopelli Farms
Ron Jacobs
Bleeding Kansas
Poets' Basement
Patti Smith, B.R. Gowani and Peter Buknatski
Website of the Weekend
Jimmy Dean Sausage Call Complaint
January 4,
2008
Cockburn /
St. Clair
A
Good Night in Iowa
Jonathan Cook
War Crimes Airbrushed from History
Paul Craig Roberts
Thinking for Yourself is Now a Crime
Stan Goff
Ron Paul's Monkeywrench
Dave Lindorff
Clinton's Iowa Flop Exposes DLC Myths as Frauds
Niranjan Ramakrishnan
To Pindi Station
Allan Nairn
U.S. Elections Over Before They Began
Joshua Frank
The Failures of Sectarianism
Peter Morici
Economy on the Skids
Mary McInnis
Iowa Cocky-Us: How to be a Caucus Tease
Website of the Day
The Return of Obama Girl
January 3,
2008
Fatima Bhutto
Farewell
to Wadi Bua
Pam Martens
The
Free Market Myth Dissolves into Chaos
Joanne Mariner
The Presidential Candidates and Torture
Zoltan Grossman
Remember the '80s: Social Movements Between Woodstock and the
Web
David Domke
The Echoing Press and Huckabee
Norman Solomon
Edwards Reconsidered
Nikolas Kozloff
Return of the Faux Liberal
Jacob G. Hornberger
The Padilla Case and the Future of Habeas Corpus
Martha Rosenberg
Quit Picking on Huckabee's Son, Michael Vick
Russell Means
This Property is Condemned: a Notice to Those Occupying Lakotah
Lands
Website of the Day
WolfQuest
|
Weekend
Edition
February 8 / 10, 2008
Where Are the Terrorists?
The
Guántanamo Trials
By ANDY WORTHINGTON
According to a report by Jane Sutton
of Reuters, the US military has spent $12 million on a mobile
court complex -- including prefabricated holding cells shipped
to the prison by barge and cargo plane -- which is intended to
be used for the trial by Military Commission of up to 80 detainees,
beginning in May. As Sutton describes it, the new court building,
which "looks like a khaki-colored metal warehouse on the
outside and a traditional courtroom inside," has "enough
room to simultaneously try up to six prisoners, lined up on faux-leather
chairs at cherry-veneer tables."
Known as Camp Justice -- a
name that will, no doubt, be pilloried by the many critics of
the Commissions, who claim that justice is the last thing that
the trials will provide -- Canada.com reports that the complex
was built by the Indiana National Guard, who "marked the
entrance sign with the date September 11, 2007." In what
is described as "an obvious 9/11 reference," Colonel
Wendy Kelly, Director of Operations for the Military Commissions,
explained, "It's ironic, but that's when they started construction."
What is perhaps more ironic
is that, despite the 9/11 references, and the fact that Guantánamo
was, from its inception over six years ago, intended to hold
and try those responsible for the 9/11 attacks, none of the three
defendants whose cases are being heard this week and next --
two alleged "child soldiers," and a driver for Osama
bin Laden -- is accused of direct involvement in the events of
that terrible day.
Omar Khadr
The first defendant to face
pre-trial hearings was Omar Khadr, who is accused of murder in
violation of the rules of war, attempted murder in violation
of the rules of war, conspiracy, providing material support for
terrorism, and spying. Khadr, whose father was an alleged financier
for al-Qaeda, is at least tangentially connected to Osama bin
Laden and the events of 9/11, having spent some of his childhood
in a compound in Afghanistan that his family shared with bin
Laden's family. There, however, the connection ends, as what
he is actually charged with centers on his alleged responsibility
for the killing of a US soldier during a firefight in Afghanistan
in July 2002.
Khadr's defense team, led by
Lt. Cmdr. William Kuebler, have long insisted that, as a "child
soldier," who was just 15 years old at the time of his capture,
Khadr should not be subjected to a trial at all. As they stated
in a brief submitted to the judge, Col. Peter Brownback, "If
jurisdiction is exercised over Mr. Khadr, the military judge
will be the first in western history to preside over the trial
of alleged war crimes committed by a child. No international
criminal tribunal established  under the laws of war, from
Nuremberg forward, has ever prosecuted former child soldiers
as war criminals A critical component of the response of our
nation and the world to the tragedy of the use and abuse of child
solders in war by terrorist organizations like al-Qaeda is that
post-conflict legal proceedings must pursue the best interest
of the victimized child -- with the aim of their rehabilitation
and reintegration into society, not their imprisonment or execution."
This was one of the main points
Khadr's lawyers made during Monday's hearing, and in this --
along with repeated calls for the Canadian government to act
on Khadr's behalf -- they were backed up by an array of international
bodies, including, in the last week alone, Unicef, the French
government, and the collective weight of Human Rights Watch,
Amnesty International, the Coalition to Stop the Use of Child
Soldiers, and Human Rights First.
Just as significantly, Khadr's
lawyers are also challenging the very substance of the war crimes
charges against their client, arguing, as civilian lawyer Rebecca
Snyder explained on Monday, that Khadr is "not eligible
to be tried for murder as a war crime because the alleged offense
occurred during a firefight under traditional rules of war."
"Soldiers are nor protected targets," she told the
hearing. "That is part of what war is about, killing soldiers."
The most explosive revelation
in the hearing, however, which threatens to derail the entire
trial, only surfaced when the authorities mistakenly released
a classified document to reporters attending the hearing. At
Khadr's last hearing, in November, the judge, Col. Peter Brownback,
prevented the prosecution from showing a video, retrieved from
the compound, which purportedly showed Khadr making and planting
roadside explosives, for the express purpose of allowing the
defense to examine new and "potentially exculpatory"
evidence, previously concealed from the defense team.
The evidence, we were told
at the time, came from a "US government employee,"
who was an eye-witness to the firefight that led to Khadr's capture.
The details were not revealed, but Carol Williams of the Los
Angeles Times was emboldened enough to report that the account
"contradicts the government version of events and could
exonerate Khadr of the war crimes with which he is charged."
On Monday, the truth about
this "potentially exculpatory" evidence, revealed in
an error that is typical of the farcical episodes that regularly
threaten to undermine the Commissions' credibility, more than
backed up Carol Williams' claims.
According to Michelle Shepherd
of the Toronto Star, who got the story out first, Khadr
was not the only person left alive when the grenade was thrown
that killed Sgt. Christopher Speer. In an interview, a soldier
who shot Khadr twice in the back explained that he "heard
moaning coming from the back of the compound. The dust rose up
from the ground and began to clear. He then saw a man facing
him lying on his right side. The man had an AK-47 on the ground
beside him and the man was moving. OC-1 [the soldier] fired one
round striking the man in the head and the movement ceased. Dust
was again stirred by this rifle shot. When the dust rose, he
saw a second man sitting up facing away from him leaning against
the brush. This man, later identified as Khadr, was moving ...
OC-1 fired two rounds, both of which struck Khadr in the back."
The report continued by stating
that OC-1 "felt" that it was Khadr who threw the grenade:
"Based on his extensive combat experience, OC-1 believed
Khadr and the man at the back of the alley with the AK rifle
were the only two alive at the time of the assault. He felt ...
the grenade was thrown by someone other than the man who was
firing the rifle."
Shepherd reported that "controversy
erupted" following the accidental release of the document,
and that, for an hour and a half, there was a stand-off between
the authorities, who wanted the document returned, and the journalists,
who refused. While this was obviously damaging enough from the
point of view of publicity, she also made the more significant
observation that, "If the document had not been released
by mistake it would not have been made public, leaving some to
question the Pentagon's assertion that the Guantánamo
trials will be transparent."
"There's no openness about
this process," Lt. Cmdr. Kuebler explained. "It's not
that the government shouldn't be able to protect information
when there is a legitimate need to protect it. It's the government's
overuse of classification ... that basically keeps 100 per cent
of the evidence in the case outside of the public's view except
if the government decides to sort of dribble it out to you."
Col. Brownback has not yet
delivered his verdict on this latest revelation, but the Toronto
Star made its position clear on Tuesday morning in an editorial.
"Khadr is a poor poster boy for human rights," the
editors stated. "But he is a Canadian citizen who faces
a military tribunal that does not meet American or Canadian standards
of criminal justice. If convicted in Canada even of planned,
deliberate murder, under the Youth Criminal Justice Act Khadr
would have faced no more than six years in custody. By July 27,
he will have spent six years in the Guantánamo brig. In
Canadian terms, he will have served a full sentence for a crime
for which he has not yet been tried, much less convicted. This
is indecent. Few Canadians have sympathy for Khadr and his family.
But what is happening in Guantánamo is not justice. It
is vindictiveness. And the Harper government's acquiescence is
profoundly disturbing. Before Canada suffers yet more embarrassment,
Khadr should be shipped back home, under a bond to keep the peace."
Mohammed
Jawad
If the thin case against Omar
Khadr has only grown thinner after Monday's revelation, the case
against the second alleged "child soldier," Mohamed
Jawad, is thinner still. Jawad, whose pre-trial hearing is scheduled
to begin next week, is less well-known than Khadr, although I
wrote a detailed article about him when the charges against him
were first announced in October.
Just 17 years old at the time
of his capture, Jawad, who was born to Afghan refugees in Pakistan,
is not even accused of killing anyone, and is, instead, accused
of attempted murder in violation of the law of war, and intentionally
causing serious bodily injury, for his alleged role in a grenade
attack on a vehicle carrying two US soldiers and an Afghan translator
in December 2002.
Throughout his detention, Jawad
has denied the allegations. In his Administrative Review Board
in 2005, he insisted that he had been brought to Afghanistan
from Pakistan to clear mines, and gave a long story about how
he had ended up at the site of the attack with another man, who
had actually thrown the grenade, whereas he had been given another
grenade, but had been left unattended in the market. As I explained
in my previous article, Jawad "said that, while shopping
for raisins, he took the grenade out of his pocket and put it
on the sack of raisins, but that when the shopkeeper saw it he
'told me it was a bomb and that I should go and throw it in the
river. I put the thing back in my pocket and I was running and
shouting to stay away, it's a bomb! When I got close to the river,
people [the police] caught me.'"
As I also explained in October,
whether Jawad was directly involved in the attack or not, "the
decision to prosecute a teenager, who had no connection whatsoever
with al-Qaeda, and who, at best, was a minor Afghan insurgent,"
appeared, after nearly six years of chest-thumping claims that
Guantánamo houses "the worst of the worst,"
to be "both desperate and risible."
Salim Hamdan
The third defendant, whose
case resumed on Thursday, is Salim Hamdan, a Yemeni who was one
of Osama bin Laden's drivers. While this too connects him to
al-Qaeda, there are doubts as to whether, as the prosecution
claims, he was involved in any of al-Qaeda's plans. Lt. Cmdr.
Charles Swift, Hamdan's first military lawyer, who was passed
over for promotion and essentially lost his job as a result of
his vigorous defense of Hamdan (which led to the Supreme Court's
ruling against the Commissions in June 2006), certainly thought
that there was little evidence against him when he first took
up his case in 2003.
Last March, he told Marie Brenner
of Vanity Fair, "He had never been involved in any
shootings or real violence. OK, so he was a driver for one of
the worst men on earth. All that really links him is that he
worked for a motor pool I thought, I can work with this."
Extrapolating a little from Swift's argument, it is, I think,
perfectly valid to regard the focus on Hamdan in the Commissions
as equivalent to hauling up Hitler's driver alongside Hermann
Goering and Rudolf Hess at the Nuremberg Trials.
While Hamdan's case, like that
of Omar Khadr, has attracted significant media attention over
the years, his mental state has generally been overlooked, although
this omission has now been corrected in the brief filed by Swift's
replacement, Major Thomas Roughneen and his team. As well as
refuting allegations that he was anything more than a hired driver,
who, as Carol Rosenberg described it in the Miami Herald,
was working "for an income, not ideology," his lawyers
are arguing that the father of four, who has never seen his youngest
daughter -- and has been prevented from seeing DVDs of her, which
were made by his family -- is unfit to stand trial, because of
the deterioration in his mental health.
In pursuit of this claim, they
secured the services of Emily Karam, a clinical and forensic
psychiatrist, who spent 70 hours with Hamdan in Guantánamo.
Dr. Karam concluded that after each meeting he "met diagnostic
criteria for Post Traumatic Stress Disorder and Major Depression,"
including "nightmares, intrusive thoughts, memories and
images, amnesia for details of traumatic events, lack of future
orientation, anxiety, irritability, insomnia, poor concentration
and memory, exaggerated startle responses, and hypervigilance."
"At times," she added,
"his symptoms impaired his ability to participate in the
evaluation," and she also noted that his symptoms "were
severely exacerbated by his incarceration in solitary confinement."
Dr. Karam's conclusion was that "Mr. Hamdan is unable to
materially assist in his own defense," and she warned that,
if he remains in solitary confinement, "his condition will
deteriorate and he will be at risk of developing more serious
psychological symptoms."
It is, however, a note by Andrea
Prasow, one of Hamdan's defense lawyers, that raises more fundamental
questions about the Military Commissions, which are not generally
being asked, even though the tawdry spectacle of the combined
weight of the US military being focused on two children and one
of bin Laden's drivers should make this oversight abundantly
clear: where, in this whole surreal farce, are the real terrorists?
In a submission arguing that
Hamdan's detention in Camp VI -- the most recent camp for Guantánamo's
general population, in which the detainees are held in almost
total isolation -- is causing him to become so "emotionally
distraught and withdrawn" that it is "materially interfering
with our ability to prepare [his] defense," Prasow notes,
"Mr. Hamdan is aware that Omar Khadr and Ibrahim al-Qosi,
who was charged under the previous commission system, are held
in Camp IV." One of the older camps, Camp IV is the least
brutal of Guantánamo's cell blocks, where the relatively
small number of detainees share communal dorms, and are allowed
to take part in sports, but it is Hamdan's reference to Ibrahim
al-Qosi that is particularly significant.
The real
terrorists?
Al-Qosi, a Sudanese detainee,
is one of seven other alleged al-Qaeda operatives charged in
the first round of Military Commissions (between 2003 and 2005,
before they were derailed by the Supreme Court), when, it was
claimed, he had worked as the deputy for al-Qaeda's financial
chief, Sheikh Sayyid al-Masri, had been financed by Osama bin
Laden to fight in Chechnya in 1995, and had worked as a bodyguard,
driver, supplies manager and cook for bin Laden from 1996 until
his capture in December 2001, as he attempted to cross the border
from Afghanistan to Pakistan.
In spite of this array of charges,
however, neither he nor the other six supposedly significant
al-Qaeda members -- who include at least two who have proclaimed
their membership of al-Qaeda -- have yet been charged under the
new system, even though, as Hamdan clearly feels, and observers
might also conclude, there is possibly more of a case to be made
against at least some of these men.
Even more obvious cases for
prosecution, of course, are some, or all of the 14 "high-value"
detainees who were transferred to Guantánamo from secret
CIA prisons in September 2006. They include Khalid Sheikh Mohammed,
the self-confessed architect of 9/11, alleged senior al-Qaeda
operative Abu Zubaydah, and Abdul Rahim al-Nashiri, who is accused
of being the mastermind behind the bombing of the USS Cole
in 2000. All three are currently back in the public eye, following
an admission by CIA director Michael Hayden that they were waterboarded
by the CIA. The others include 9/11 associate Ramzi bin al-Shibh,
and others allegedly connected with 9/11, the 1998 African embassy
bombings, the USS Cole operation, and the Bali nightclub bombing
in 2002.
Reading between the lines in
search of an explanation, it's worth focusing on the infighting
between the various officials involved in the Commission process,
which acrimoniously spilled over into the public arena last fall,
when Col. Morris Davis, the Commissions' chief prosecutor, noisily
resigned, blaming political interference from his superior officers,
in a chain that led upwards from Brig. Gen. Thomas Hartmann,
the Commissions' legal advisor, and Susan Crawford, the Commission's
convening authority, to Defense Department General Counsel William
J. Haynes II and Vice President Dick Cheney.
Col. Davis was upset that he
was required to obey Haynes, with whom he disagreed profoundly
over the latter's desire to use evidence obtained through torture.
The politicization of the process became apparent when it was
revealed that the only person convicted in a Commission to date,
the Australian David Hicks, had been offered a plea bargain --
in exchange for his silence regarding his well-documented claims
of torture and abuse at the hands of the US military -- by Dick
Cheney, and that Brig. Gen. Hartmann also wanted to offer a plea
bargain to Hamdan, in spite of Davis' own opposition.
One reason for wanting plea
bargains is that, as with Hicks, they remove the thorny problem
of how to deal with claims by detainees that they have been subjected
to torture, which, rather inconveniently for the administration,
remains illegal under domestic and international law. If Hamdan
can also be persuaded to accept a plea bargain, the administration
can at least trumpet another "success," and can possibly
roll out a few more examples of low-level players to make it
appear that the system is working.
Omar Khadr's case is more complicated,
but the inclusion of Mohamed Jawad may be because the military
and the administration hope that they can actually produce a
successful prosecution without having to resort to a plea bargain.
Significantly, Jawad has never claimed that he was tortured by
US forces. In his tribunal, he claimed that a false confession
was tortured out of him by Afghan soldiers, but, with no evidence
of mistreatment by the US military, the authorities may well
be hoping that they can brush that inconvenient allegation aside.
Certainly, it's inconceivable that attempts would realistically
be made to locate the Afghan soldiers who first seized Jawad
in Afghanistan, and to bring them to Guantánamo to give
evidence.
None of this explains what
will eventually happen to the "high-value" detainees,
for whom plea bargains are out of the question, but whose conviction,
in a court shorn of all mention of torture, is obviously desired.
But it may explain why a selection of small fish are still being
used to test the waters, while the real monsters are kept out
of sight and, it is hoped, out of mind.
I wonder how long they can
keep it up. Until the next administration takes over? Or the
one after that? Or forever? Noticeably, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed,
Abu Zubaydah and Abdul Rahim al-Nashiri all mentioned, in their
tribunals at Guantánamo in spring 2007, that they had
been tortured during their long years in secret CIA prisons,
and I'm reminded of comments made by Michael Scheuer, the former
director of the CIA's bin Laden unit, who was heavily involved
in the small number of relatively controlled "extraordinary
renditions" that took place before 9/11. Gazing in shock
at the frenzied expansion of the program after 9/11, Scheuer
told Jane Mayer, "The policymakers hadn't thought what to
do with them," adding that once a prisoner's rights were
violated there was no way of reintegrating them into the court
system. "All we've done is create a nightmare," he
added. "Are we going to hold these people forever?"
Physically, we now know where
these men are -- in Camp VII, a secluded addition to the prison
complex whose existence remained a closely guarded secret until
this week -- but legally they might as well be on the moon.
Andy Worthington (www.andyworthington.co.uk)
is a British historian, and the author of 'The
Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in
America's Illegal Prison' (to be published by Pluto Press).
He can be reached at: andy@andyworthington.co.uk
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