Today's Stories

May 4, 2009

Patrick Cockburn
Afghan Ayatollah's Press Marital Rape Law

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...

April 17-19, 2009

Alexander Cockburn
Thin Ice From Here to the Horizon

Saul Landau
Infiltrating Alpha 66: a Conversation with Gerardo Hernandez, Leader of the Cuba Five

Franklin Lamb
Persia Rising

Ralph Nader
The Greedsters Are Back!

Fred Gardner
Obama's Chimerical Marijuana Policy: a Guide for the Perplexed

Dean Baker
A Win-Win Solution: Tax the Rich!

Rannie Amiri
The Curious Case of Benjamin Netanyahu

George Wuerthner
The War on Predators

Dave Lindorff
No Amnesty for Torturers

David Swanson
Personal Torture Laws

Jim Goodman
The Control of Food

Kathy Sanborn
Economic Fallout Hits Families Hard

Don Monkerud
Economic Recovery for Whom?

Manuel Garcia, Jr.
The People's Money

David Michael Green
Home of the Barricaded, Land of the 'Fraid

Nelson P Valdés
The OAS Charter, Cuba and the United States

Manuel Gomez
From the Bay of Pigs to Trinadad and Tobago

Dr. Susan Block
On Sex Addiction: the Deadliest Sin?

Ramzy Baroud
Non-Violence in Palestine?

Christopher Brauchli
Banning Barbie

Stephen Martin
Statelessness: the Final Frontier

Ron Jacobs
Tearing the Whole Building Down: the Dead in Greensboro

David Yearsley
Monkey Music

Lorenzo Wolff
A Song for the End of the World

Poets' Basement
Moser, McTeer and Buknatski

Website of the Weekend
New England Journal of Medicine Report on Civilian Deaths in Iraq

April 16, 2009

Mike Whitney
A Bulletin From the Captain of the Titantic

Russell Mokhiber
The Top 10 Enemies of Single-Payer

Ronald Teska
From Iraq to Appalachia

Gareth Porter
Predator Blowback

Paul Fitzgerald /
Elizabeth Gould
Thinking Like an Afghan

Benjamin Dangl
Latin America Changes

Kevin Pina
Haiti: Obama's First Foreign Policy Disaster?

Robert Bryce
Another Ethanol Producer Goes Bust

George Wuerthner
See the Forest: the Value of Dead Trees

Paul Garon, David Roediger and Kate Khatib The Surreal Life of Franklin Rosemont

Website of the Day
Socialism and the Facebook Generation

April 15, 2009

Kathleen and Bill Christison
Solving Palestine While Israel Destroys It

Ray McGovern
W, the Torture Decider

Robert Sandels
Is There a Latin American Policy?

Heather Williams /
Paul Baker
Carbon Cap and Trade: How Wall Street will Game the Regs and Trash the Planet

Jack Willoughby
The Lessons of the S & L Crisis

David Swanson
Habeas at Bagram?

Paul Craig Roberts
94 Years of Serfdom

Sara Mann
Norman Rockwell and the Perils of Nostalgia

Kenneth Couesbouc
John Maynard's Martingale: How Keynes Got Rich

Binoy Kampmark
Tax Haven Hypocrisies

Kekuni Blaisdell, Lynette Hi'llani Cruz, George Kahumoku Flores, et al.: An Urgent Letter to Obama on the Rights of Native Hawaiians

Website of the Day
Taxa: the Paintings of Isabella Kirkland

April 14, 2009

Conn Hallinan
The Afghan Rubik's Cube

Mike Whitney
Why is Goldman Sachs So Scared of Mike Morgan?

Peter Morici
Taxing Grandma to Subsidize Goldman Sachs

Greg Moses
Economic Curveballs: the Laffer Posse

Fidel Castro
Obama's Cuba Policy: Not a Word About the Blockade

Robert Weissman
No Blank Check for the IMF

Rebecca Macaux /
Philip Primeau
Somali Piracy and American Foreign Policy

Carmelo Ruiz-Marrero
The Dubious Revoution: Biofuels, the Next Generation

Dave Lindorff
Snatch-and-Jail Justice: the Ugly War on Immigrants

Walter Brasch
The Resurrection of Intolerance

Benjamin Day
Why Has the Press Failed Us in Reporting on Health Care Reform?

Website of the Day
The Appraisal Bubble

April 13, 2009

Patrick Cockburn
Iraqi Militia Fear Reprisals After US Exit

Uri Avnery
Our Dissonance

Jeremy Scahill
A Test Case for Habeas Corpus: Will Obama Prosecute the Somali Pirate in a US Court?

Martha Rosenberg
Suicide Syndrome: Are VA Protocols Behind Iraq Vet Suicides?

Karl Grossman
A Radioactive Extension for Aging Nuclear Plants

Nadia Hijab
Still Waiting: Obama and American Muslims

Sam Smith
America's Cultural Bear Market

James McEnteer
Peru's Shining Example

Sean McMahon
Globalizing Politicide: Israel's Strikes on Sudan

Namihei Odaira
Makota's "Campaign Against Poverty"

John V. Walsh
Bossnapping

Website of the Day
Declining IRS Audits for Big Financial Houses

April 10 / 12, 2009

Alexander Cockburn
Resurrection and Revenge

Chris Floyd
Hope Abandoned: Obama Protects CIA Torture Memos

Mike Whitney
"Liquidate the Banks; Fire the Executives!" Warren's Devastating Report to Congress

Saul Landau
How the Media Bought the Surge

M. Reza Pirbhai
Obama's Afghanistan Plan and India-Pakistan Relations

Franklin Spinney
The Art of the Scam: Wall Street and the Pentagon

Rannie Amiri
Iran's Elections: Why Arab Leaders Want Ahmadinejad to Win

William Blum
The Ideology of Barack Obama

Matt Vidal
Why Card Check Would Help the Economy

Jeff Howison
Death of the Square Deal

Jeff Leys
Resisting the Af-Pak War: the Creech Air Base Arrests

Dave Lindorff
America's Imperial Wars: Why We Need to See the Horrors

Ramzy Baroud
Israel Investigated: But Will It Repent?

Missy Beattie
The Grateful Dead, Wounded and Displaced

Fred Gardner
Fakes Left, Goes Right: Obama's Crossover Dribble on Marijuana Policy

Harvey Wasserman Another $50 Billion for Rust Bucket Nukes?

Suzan Mazur
A Revolution in Biology: an Interview with Nobel Laureate Paul Nurse

Bernard Umbrecht
German Capitalists Take Fire

David Macaray
A Word Clooney, Hanks and Baldwin Should Learn: Solidarity

Janet Kauffman
How to Starve (or Feed) a River

Ron Jacobs
Daring to Struggle, Failing to Win

Norman Solomon
Getting a Death Grip on Memory

Michael Winship
Let the Railsplitter Awake!

Richard Rhames
Empire, Ennui and Extra Cheese

Wanda Fucha
Brother, Can You Spare a Million Bucks?

David Yearsley
My Journey to the Heart of Rahman

Lorenzo Wolff
Getting Beyond the Black-and-White: Jason Isbell's Challenging New Album

Ben Sonnenberg
Rossellini's Louis XIV: "Neither the Sun Nor Death Can be Gazed Upon Fixedly"

Jeffrey St. Clair
Savage Incongruities: the Photographic Life of Lee Miller

Poets' Basement
Corseri and Corzett

Website of the Weekend
The Palestine Chronicle Needs Your Help!

April 9, 2009

Mike Whitney
The Decade of Darkness

Patrick Cockburn
What It Would Take to Mend Fences with Islam

Stephen Soldz
Caught on Tape: Diagnostic Abuse of Veterans

P. Sainath
The Rise of the Shoe-cide Bomber

Ellen Cantarow
Israel's Master Plan for Transfer

Gareth Porter /
Jim Lobe
Obama and Israel's Threat to Strike Iran

Jeremy Scahill
How Many Democrats Will Stand Up Against Obama's Bloated Military Budget?

Jerry Kroth
Saving GM From Bankruptcy--With the Stroke of a Pen

Binoy Kampmark
Fujimori Convicted: A Measure of Justice in Latin America

Fidel Castro
My Meeting with the Black Caucus

Website of the Day
Bird Song Radio

April 8, 2009

John Prados
The Af-Pak Paradox

Bill Moyers /
Michael Winship
Changing the Rules of the Blame Game

Winslow T. Wheeler
The Tooth Fairy and the Defense Budget

Russell Mokhiber
PBS Lashes Back

Kathy Sanborn
Depression Fury

Rev. William E. Alberts
If the Shoe Fits: Bush and Al-Zaidi

James McEnteer Rashomon and the Binghamton Shooter: the Rush to Interpret Jiverly Wong's "Statement"

Nadia Hijab
Olmert's Nightmare

Adam Turl
Card Check on the Ropes

Kevin Zeese
Escaping the Drug War Quagmire

Website of the Day
Walk Score Your Neighborhood

April 7, 2009

David Price
Counterinsurgency's Free Ride

Uri Avnery
Who's the Boss?

Chris Floyd
Talking Peace in Prague, Dropping Bombs in Pakistan

Winslow T. Wheeler Defense Cuts: Gates and the System

Marjorie Cohn
Prosecuting the Bush Torture Team: Spain Leads the Way

Dean Baker
Hands Off Social Security

Diana Johnstone
NATO, Strasbourg and the Black Block

Dave Lindorff
Politicizing Accounting

Martha Rosenberg
Life on HBO's Factory Hog Farm

Evelyn Pringle
Motherhood and the Psycho-Pharmaceutical Complex

Website of the Day
Gaza: Closed Zone

April 6, 2009

Michael Hudson
The IMF Rules the World

Andy Worthington Bagram: Guantánamo's Dark Mirror

Ray McGovern
Profiles in Cowardice: Eric Holder and Colin Powell

Deepak Tripathi
The Pakistan Enigma

Mike Whitney
Bernanke's Financial Rescue Plan: a Glide-Path to Destitution

Norman Solomon
Meet the New Escalators: the Democrats and the Afghan War

Jonathan Cook
Israel Railways Accused of Racism in Firing of Arab Workers

Judith Bello
Justice for the Developmentally Disabled

Deena Metzger Blackwater in Liberia

Dr. M. Kamiar
"There's No 'Eye' in Iran:" Obama's Pronunciation Problem

Website of the Day
Prison Talk

April 3-5, 2009

Alexander Cockburn
From Twin Towers to Twin Camelots

Kathy Kelly /
Brian Terrall
Getting a Closer Look at the Killer Drones

Sue Sturgis
Fooling with Disaster? Startling Revelations About Three Mile Island Raise New Doubts Over Nuclear Plant Safety

Peter Morici
Girding for a Depression

Kathy Sanborn
Homeless in Tent City, USA

Andy Worthington
Britain's Guantánamo: Fact or Fiction?

Rob Larson
Subprime Supreme Court: The Roberts Court Has Become a Powerful New Tool for Business

Saul Landau
Biden and Nixon: a Tale of Two Latin American Experiences

Steve Early
An Evening with Andy Stern

John Goekler
Was Gaza Israel's Waterloo?

Rannie Amiri
Arab League Reconciliation Summit a Bust

Dave Lindorff
Hooray for Juries! A Courtroom Victory for Ward Churchill and Academic Free Speech

Lee Ballinger
Sound Garden: Tom Morello at the Grammy Museum

Ron Jacobs
Artifacts for Survival

David Macaray
AIG Plays the Sympathy Card

John Wight
G20: Capital's New World Symphony

Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor
Race in the Obama Era

Mychal Bell
Surviving Jena Six

Missy Beattie
Hoop Hopes, War and Peace

Reza Fiyouzat
The Iran/US Rapproachment Dance

Michael Boldin
The War on Drugs is a War on You

Christopher Brauchli
The Pope's Batting 50-50

Charles R. Larson
Too Much Stuff

Susie Day
Bernie Breakout Shocker!!

Stephen Martin
Gordon Brown's Chicken Run at the G20

Kim Nicolini
"Last House on the Left:" Vigilantes of the Bourgeoisie

David Yearsley
Homage to Moog and Mallards

Phyllis Pollack
An Interview with Legendary Rock Producer Chris Kimsey on Working with the Stones, Ronnie Wood, Jimmy Cliff, Peter Tosh and Saint Jude

Poets' Basement
Foley, Valentine and Kozak

Website of the Day
The Corner Store

April 2, 2009

Robert Weissman
What If Obama Had Treated Detroit Like Wall Street?

Eric Toussaint /
Damien Millet
A G20 Meeting for Naught

George Bisharat
Israel's Impunity Must End

Russell Mokhiber
Something is Rotten at PBS

Franklin Lamb
Has Washington Lost Lebanon?

Gareth Porter
Settling Scores in Iraq: Maliki Draws US Troops into Crackdown on Sunni Rivals

David Macaray
Obama and the Ruling Class: "Only the Little People Pay Taxes"

Chris Genovali
B.C.'s Bloody Grizzly Hunt

Sam Smith
The Politics of Adulation

Suzan Mazur
Is Neo-Darwinism Dead?

Website of the Day
Fighting for Change in St. Louis

April 1, 2009

Chris Floyd
Surging Further Into the Afghan Abyss

Stanley Heller
Israeli War Crimes: Thank God, It Was Only Rumors

Mark Brenner, Mischa Gaus and Jane Slaughter Obama's Perilous Plan for Detroit: Restructure the Big 3, But Not With Bankruptcy

Jonathan Cook
The Slow Demise of Ehud Olmert

Eric Walberg
EU in Tatters: Only the Protesters Have Any Vision

Richard Morse
Why Haiti Can't Forget Its Past

Don Fitz
Guess Who Came to Dinner with a Match? Green Mayoral Candidate's Van Firebombed in St. Louis

Laray Polk
Texas and Evolution

Belén Fernández
12 Años de Soledad?

Harvey Wasserman
Cracking the Media Silence on Three Mile Island

Website of the Day
Pentagon Fraud Investigations Fell, While Contracts Soared

March 31, 2009

Uri Avnery
The Deception Tango

Peter Lee
Ghosts in the Machine: the World's Hottest Cyberwar Battlefield

Nicholas Dearden
A New Global Debt Crisis

Dave Lindorff
The Obama Betrayal

Joanne Mariner
"We'll Make You See Death"

Ron Jacobs
Obama's Pakistan Gambit

Wiliam S. Lind
Another Lost War

David Michael Green
Who Says the GOP Doesn't Have a Plan?

Benjamin Dangl
Beyond Elections in the Americas

Johnny Barber
Meditation in Orange

Dedrick Muhammad
Economic Inequality: the Foundation of the Racial Divide

Website of the Day
How the Obama Dems Took Over the Peace Movement

March 30, 2009

Michael Hudson
Financing the Empire: Do US Face G20 Mutiny?

Patrick Cockburn
What Next in Afghanistan?

Henry A. Giroux
Hard Lessons

Mike Whitney
Where's Eliot Spitzer Now That We Need Him?

Ralph Nader
Where's All the Money Coming From?

Paul Craig Roberts
Obama's War on the (Upper) Middle Class

Jeremy Scahill
The Logistical Nightmare in Iraq

Robert Bryce
The Cellulosic Ethanol Delusion

Jonathan Cook
Remembering Land Day in Palestine

Ray McGovern
Obama Bombs

Website of the Day
Hersh: Syria Calling

May 4, 2009

A Start on Guantánamo, But Not Enough

Obama's First Hundred Days

By ANDY WORTHINGTON

Speaking at a press conference to mark his first 100 days in office, Barack Obama made two bold claims about the policies he has already implemented to tackle the Executive overreach of the Bush administration, with regard to detention and interrogation policies in the “War on Terror.”

“We have rejected the false choice between our security and our ideals by closing the detention center at Guantánamo Bay and banning torture without exception,” the President said.

Unfortunately, neither claim is strictly true, as I aim to demonstrate in two articles, with particular reference to the three Executive Orders that Barack Obama issued as one of his first acts as President.

In the first order, which is the focus of this article, Obama stipulated that Guantánamo would close within a year, and also established an inter-departmental review of the cases of the remaining prisoners, a requirement to assess whether the prison conformed to the standards required by the Geneva Conventions, and a request for the reviled system of trials by Military Commission at Guantánamo (the “dark side” of the law, as envisaged by Dick Cheney and David Addington) to be halted for four months. The second and third orders will be dealt with in the following article, looking at Obama’s progress on “banning torture without exception.”

A misleading statement, and too few released prisoners

While Obama is to be credited for issuing these orders, his decision to state, “We have rejected the false choice between our security and our ideals by closing the detention center at Guantánamo Bay,” rather than, “We have rejected the false choice between our security and our ideals by ordering the closure of Guantánamo by January 20, 2010,” is rather too economical with the truth for my liking.

Moreover, while the review established by Obama, which is being “conducted with the full cooperation and participation” of the Attorney General, the Secretaries of Defense, State and Homeland Security, the Director of National Intelligence and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, got off to a flying start, it has, to date, accomplished very little. Just one prisoner, Binyam Mohamed, has been released, and this, it must be noted, only came about because the story of his “extraordinary rendition” and torture, which was the subject of court cases on both sides of the Atlantic, meant that he was fast-tracked to the top of the list to avoid embarrassment to either government. And beyond Mohamed, only one other prisoner -- the Yemeni doctor, Ayman Batarfi -- has been cleared for release.

The ongoing problems of clearing prisoners and rehousing them

At this rate, of course, it will take decades to close Guantánamo, but last Wednesday, on a visit to Europe, Attorney General Eric Holder stated that, as a result of the administration’s ongoing review, around 30 prisoners would soon be ready for release. He added that the Justice Department would be approaching allies about taking specific prisoners “within weeks as opposed to months”, but did not explain whether the 30 prisoners he was referring to were new cases examined as part of the review, or whether they included some, or all of the 60 or so prisoners who have already been cleared for release.

About 40 of these men were approved for release after their cases were reviewed by multiple military review boards at Guantánamo, and the rest were ordered to be freed by courts on the US mainland within the last six months, when, after long delays, the lower courts were finally empowered to review the prisoners’ claims for habeas corpus, following last June’s Supreme Court ruling in Boumediene v. Bush.

The distinction is important, as it would be distressing to discover that the Obama administration felt the need to revisit decisions already made by the US military, but it would not be entirely surprising if this were the case, because the administration has already caused spikes of discontent in the courts, where certain judges appear to be coming to the conclusion that the administration seems to regard its own review process as more significant than the habeas reviews.

Mutiny in the courts

Just three weeks ago, AFP reported that two habeas judges had made a rare public row of their impatience with government prosecutors. Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly, appalled by a government lawyer who “repeatedly missed deadlines” in the cases of four Kuwaiti prisoners, wrote that his “compliance was not optional,” and added that the court had “serious concern about counsel's ability to read and comprehend its orders,” and Judge Emmet Sullivan was equally outraged by government lawyers’ “repeated” delays in providing unclassified exculpatory material to the defense in the case of a Yemeni prisoner. Judge Sullivan said, “To hide -- and I don't use that word loosely -- to hide relevant and exculpatory evidence from counsel and from the court under any circumstance ... is fundamentally unjust, outrageous and will not be tolerated.” Threatening to sanction the government, he added, “How can this court have any confidence whatsoever in the US government to comply with its obligation and to be truthful to the court?”

Speaking to AFP, David Cynamon, a lawyer for the Kuwaitis, stated his belief that the government was “trying to delay these cases until the review team can make decisions without pressure,” and another lawyer said, “The Obama administration would probably prefer that some cases stop for a while.” These were worrying comments, although there seems little reason to doubt them, but an additional assertion by the second lawyer, that “the habeas lawyers have represented these men for four or five years and are not content to wait any longer,” was particularly relevant, because, after the long struggles it took to secure legal rights for the prisoners in Boumediene, and to rein in the Executive over the course of seven years, it was unsurprising that both judges and lawyers would be perturbed to find themselves apparently overridden by the Executive again.

Focus on the Uighurs

These are not the only troubles. When it comes to the prisoners who have already been cleared for release, it has long been known that the majority of these men face enormous problems, because they are from countries including Algeria, China, Libya, Tunisia and Uzbekistan, and there are fears that they will face torture if they are repatriated (as prohibited in the UN Convention Against Torture). However, as I reported in March, six Saudis have been cleared since before Obama came to power, and yet they still languish at Guantánamo, despite a long-established rehabilitation program in Saudi Arabia that has seen the successful return and reeducation of the majority of Guantánamo’s Saudi prisoners.

In addition, the administration has dragged its heels over the Uighurs, Muslims from China’s Xinjiang province, who comprise 17 of the 23 prisoners whose release was ordered after their habeas reviews, but who are still held in Guantánamo. (To date, just three men have been released since being cleared by the courts).

The release of the Uighurs into the United States was ordered last October by District Court Judge Ricardo Urbina, in a ruling that was notable for his assertion that, because the government had accepted that it had no case against them, their continued detention was “unconstitutional,” and that, because no other country could be found that was prepared to enrage China by accepting them, they should be accepted onto the US mainland. Shamefully, the Bush administration appealed, and the new government did nothing in response when, on February 18, a notoriously Conservative appeals court reversed Urbina’s principled ruling.

This impasse, too, may soon be coming to an end, if reports last week are to be believed. According to a report in the Los Angeles Times last week, the Obama administration was preparing to admit into the United States as many as seven of the Uighurs, even though the decision “is not final and faces challenges from within the government,” in particular from the Department of Homeland Security. As the Times also explained, however, administration officials “believe that settling some of them in American communities will set an example, helping to persuade other nations to accept Guantánamo detainees too.” This is undoubtedly correct, as European countries, still shocked by the brusqueness with which Bush officials -- and even the President himself -- demanded that they help out, while refusing to do anything themselves, need positive encouragement to help clear up what is widely regarded as America’s mess.

To his credit, Eric Holder noted this in a speech during his European visit, when he stated, “I know that Europe did not open Guantánamo and that in fact, a great many on this continent opposed it, but as we turn the page to a new beginning, it is incumbent on us all to embrace new solutions, free from the rancor and rhetoric that divided us in the past.” However, it still remains the case, as I have been explaining since Obama came to power, that accepting the Uighurs into the US would be the most effective way to break this particular deadlock.

A sleight of hand on detention policies, and further concerns in court

Even if the Uighurs’ resettlement goes ahead, this is still not the end of the Obama administration’s problems with Guantánamo. In March, in a court filing that introduced the “current, novel type of armed conflict” as a replacement for the Bush administration’s “War on Terror,” the government also dropped the use of the term “enemy combatant,” but, crucially, maintained a similar definition for the now nameless prisoners as the one invented by its predecessors. Whereas Bush had insisted that he could hold people outside the law who were “part of, or supporting, Taliban or al-Qaeda forces or associated forces that are engaged in hostilities against the United States or its coalition partners,” the new administration kept this definition largely intact, but added that individuals who supported al-Qaeda or the Taliban were “detainable only if the support was substantial.”

As I wrote at the time, this supposed change was actually worthless, as a close inspection of the government’s assertions revealed that it proposed to detain someone who never even “attempted to commit any act of depredation or entered the theatre or zone of active military operations” and may only have stayed in a house associated with those who did engage in militancy. It was, moreover, noticeable that the government's whole approach perpetuated the Bush administration’s myth that it was justifiable to equate the Taliban with al-Qaeda, even though one was a government (however reviled) and the other was a small group of terrorists.

In a response filed shortly after the government announced its sleight of hand, lawyers for some of the Guantánamo prisoners argued, as SCOTUSblog described it, that the new government was “still asserting too much authority. The President, they contended, is engaging in ‘impermissible law-making’ by the Executive branch, intruding on Congress’s powers.”

Last week, the habeas cases took another turn, when Judge Reggie B. Walton largely supported the government’s position, but warned that he was laying down some inviolable “limiting principles.” As SCOTUSblog again explained, he “rejected arguments by detainees’ lawyers that only an individual who was taking part in active hostilities against the US at the time of capture could be detained,” although he said he had some “distaste for the government’s reliance on the term ‘support’ at all,” and also made it clear that he was only prepared to accept the terms “substantially supported” and “part of” if they were “interpreted to encompass only individuals who were members of the enemy organization’s armed forces, as that term is intended under the laws of war, at the time of their capture.”

Expanding on his chosen definition, Judge Walton also stated, “Only persons who receive and execute orders from the enemy’s command structure” could be held as members of enemy armed forces, adding, “The key question is whether an individual receives and executes orders from the enemy force’s combat apparatus … The individual must have some sort of ’structured’ role in the ‘hierarchy’ of the enemy force.” This, he stated, could include those who “provided housing, feeding or transporting ‘al-Qaeda fighters,’ such as a cook who was a part of the armed forces but was temporarily assigned only a non-combat role,” but he averred that it did not include “civilians who may have some tangential connections to such organizations,” adding that “[s]ympathizers, propagandists, and financiers” who had “no involvement” with the command structure, even if they were “members of the enemy organization in an abstract sense,” could not be held unless they took “a direct part in hostilities.”

This was sufficiently different from the views of other judges -- for example, Judge Richard Leon, who “has been using a detention definition that gives the government more authority than the Obama administration now claims” -- for SCOTUSblog to note, “Sooner or later, the Supreme Court may have to sort it all out.”

Nearly a year after Boumediene, this wrangling is doing nothing to address the Supreme Court’s concern that “the costs of delay can no longer be borne by those who are held in custody,” but from my point of view the main problem is not with the courts’ attempts to work out where the lines should be drawn, but with the Obama administration’s close adherence to its predecessor’s rationale, which does not bode well for the outcome of Obama’s review, and makes me wonder if other disturbing developments are in store.

Certainly, there have been other disappointments. In February, the Pentagon’s review of conditions at Guantánamo concluded that they met the standards required by the Geneva Conventions, even though, at the time, a hunger strike was raging and at least 20 percent of the prison’s population was being brutally force-fed, and beaten if they resisted; and the initial expectation that the Military Commissions would not be resuscitated at the end of the four-month review period is now looking a shade more dubious at least.

Will the Military Commissions be revived?

Also in February, I complained that the Pentagon, under defense secretary Robert Gates (still, unnervingly, the same man employed by George W. Bush), retained other Bush officials in worryingly high places (Susan Crawford, for example, a protégée of Dick Cheney and a close friend of David Addington, who oversees the Military Commissions), and a week after Obama took office the Commissions’ recently appointed chief judge, Army Col. James M. Pohl, refused to suspend the arraignment of the Saudi prisoner Abdul Rahim al-Nashiri, until it was called off by Crawford. In what appeared to be a snub to the new President, Col. Pohl stated that “he found the prosecutors’ arguments, including the assertion that the Obama administration needed time to review its options, to ‘be an unpersuasive basis to delay the arraignment.’”

After this, the Commissions went quiet, but on Wednesday Col. Patrick Parrish, the judge in the case of Omar Khadr, the Canadian who was just 15 years old when he was seized, half-dead, after a firefight in Afghanistan in July 2002, notified his lawyers that pre-trial hearings would recommence on June 1, unless he was notified to the contrary by the government. This means that Col. Parrish is either being somewhat provocative, or that he expects the administration to press ahead with the trials after the four-month freeze expires (as the New York Times suggested in a worrying article on Saturday, in which senior officials, speaking anonymously, said that “administration lawyers have become concerned that they would face significant obstacles to trying some terrorism suspects in federal courts”), but either way it is a troubling development for those who hoped that the administration would shut down the Commissions without hesitation, would resist all calls to reinstate them, amend them or set up another novel and untried system, and would, instead, move the prisoners regarded as genuinely dangerous to the mainland to face trials in federal court.

The dark specter of preventive detention

According to Lawrence Wilkerson, Colin Powell’s former Chief of Staff, “no more than a dozen or two of the detainees” held in Guantánamo ever had any worthwhile intelligence. Wilkerson’s statement, included in a column he wrote in March, was particularly significant, as it should indicate that no more than two dozen prisoners should face a trial, and that the rest -- though many were low-level fighters for the Taliban -- should be released.

However, within hours of President Obama’s 100 Days speech, in a genuinely disturbing development that mirrors what Robert Gates’s former masters used to say with monotonous regularity, the defense secretary announced to members of the Senate Appropriations Committee that the question was “still open” as to what the government should do with “the 50 to 100 [prisoners] -- probably in that ballpark -- who we cannot release and cannot try.”

Back in Bush’s day, these same men were sometimes referred to as those who were “too dangerous to release but not guilty enough to prosecute” -- essentially because the supposed evidence against them was extracted through the use of torture or coercion. Regardless of how they are described, however, the notion that there is now an acceptable “third way” between the guilty and not guilty verdicts delivered in a courtroom is almost incredibly disturbing, not only because, yet again, it attempts to exert Executive authority over the courts’ ongoing habeas reviews, but also because it will undoubtedly play into the hands of those lawyers -- including Neal Katyal, a law professor who helped overthrow the first incarnation of the Military Commissions in June 2006 (in the case of Salim Hamdan) -- who have recently taken positions in the government (Katyal is the principal deputy Solicitor General) and are advocating for a system of preventive detention to be established.

Just think about it: These are men against whom the information that purports to be evidence was often gathered by extremely dubious or downright illegal means, including the use of torture. It cannot therefore be used in a US court, although real evidence -- such as the kind based on detective work or non-coercive interrogations -- can. And yet, because of a suspicion that, if they were to be released, these men would at some point in the future commit an offence, we are told, by those advocating a system of preventive detention, that they should be imprisoned forever on the basis of secret evidence.

As Kenneth Roth, the Executive Director of Human Rights Watch, explained in March, “A regime of preventive detention would be perilous for the liberty of US citizens and others. It would enable the US government to detain individuals for an indeterminate period based on predictions about the danger they might pose in the future, rather than on provable crimes that they had actually committed.”

You can draw whichever dystopian conclusion you wish, so long as it’s one of the following:

• That’s the same as Guantánamo.

• You can’t imprison people, based on evidence that can’t be tested, for what they may or may not do in the future.

• Who will be next? The poor? Political protestors? You and me?

Andy Worthington is a British historian, and the author of 'The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America's Illegal Prison' (published by Pluto Press). Visit his website at: www.andyworthington.co.uk He can be reached at: andy@andyworthington.co.uk 

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