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The New Print Edition of CounterPunch, Only for Our Newsletter Subscribers! General Petraeus' Fake War
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The New Print Edition of CounterPunch, Only for Our Newsletter Subscribers!
General Petraeus' Fake War
How the Press and Congress Eagerly Swallowed It
EXCLUSIVE to subscribers in our latest newsletter, Gareth Porter dissects two years’ worth of successful lying by Gen Petraeus and his propaganda team. Guess what? The FBI AND DOJ didn’t specially target Muhammad Ali. Those G-men were just following normal procedures! Alexander Cockburn reviews the latest effort to “revise” the Sixties. Dick Cheney “didn’t understand the legalities.” James Abourezk describes his efforts to close down the lethal liquor operators that prey on the Pine Ridge Reservation. Whatever happened to the class war? Read Serge Halimi and find out. Get your copy today by subscribing online or calling 1-800-840-3683 Contributions to CounterPunch are tax-deductible. Click here to make a donation. If you find our site useful please: Subscribe Now! CounterPunch books and gear make great presents.
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Today's Stories July 1, 2008 Alexander Cockburn June 30, 2008 Peter Lee Jeff Sommers David Macaray Martha Rosenberg David Price Alexandra Early June 28 / 29, 2008 Alexander Cockburn Jeffrey St. Clair Joan P. Mencher Nikolas Kozloff Jason Hribal Alan Maass Robert Fantina Bill Moyers / Mike Whitney Justin E. H. Smith Pham Binh David Yearsley Christopher Ketcham Jeremy R. Hammond Kathleen M. Barry Walter Brasch Brett Drugge Susie Day Website of the Day June 27, 2008 Franklin C. Spinney Jonathan Cook Brian Cloughley Saree Makdisi Liliana Segura Paul Krassner William S. Lind Candace Cohn Ron Jacobs Binoy Kampmark Website of the Day June 26, 2008 Patrick Cockburn Nikolas Kozloff William P. O'Connor Saul Landau Ashley Smith Dave Lindorff David Macaray Binoy Kampmark Matt Reichel Remi Kenazi Website of the Day
June 25, 2008 David H. Price Stephen Soldz Andy Worthington Marjorie Cohn Joanne Mariner Ralph Nader Robert Weissman Christopher Brauchli Suren Pillay Seth Sandronsky Website of the Day June 24, 2008 Ishmael Reed P. Sainath Nikolas Kozloff Gregory Kafoury Betty Shamieh Mike Whitney Andy Worthington Bill Christison Philippe Marlière Website of the Day June 23, 2008 Michael Hudson John Ross Peter Montague Ramzy Baroud Robert Fantina Robert Weitzel David Macaray Howard Lisnoff Richard Rhames Gail Dines Tim Matson June 21 / 22, 2008 Alexander Cockburn Jeffrey St. Clair Pam Martens Mike Whitney Chris Floyd Tim Wise Paul Craig Roberts Michael Winship Ron Jacobs Ramzy Baroud Alan Farago Michael Yates Dave Lindorff Bernard Chazelle Linda Mamoun Jo-Shing Yang Robert Jensen Website of the Weekend
June 20, 2008 Robert Oscar Lopez Paul Craig Roberts Bouthaina Shaaban Bill Quigley Moshe Adler Patrick Cockburn Andy Worthington Norman Solomon Martha Rosenberg June 19, 2008 Ralph Nader Chellis Glendinning Neve Gordon Dave Lindorff Sheldon Richman George Bisharat Jackie Corr Farzana Versey Website of the Day June 18, 2008 Nicole Colson Rev. William E. Alberts Vijay Prashad Parvez Ahmed Bob Moss Dave Lindorff David Wilson June 17, 2008 Conn Hallinan Wajahat Ali Marjorie Cohn Uri Avnery David Macaray Rannie Amiri Website of the Day June 16, 2008 Uri Avnery Corey D. B. Walker Howard Lisnoff Dennis Loo Paul Craig Roberts June 13 / 15, 2008 Douglas Valentine Alexander Cockburn Jeffrey St. Clair Peter Linebaugh Ishmael Reed Joe Bageant Harry Browne Andy Worthington Jeff Sharlet Binoy Kampmark Alan Farago Brian Cloughley Manuel Garcia, Jr. Reza Fiyouzat Patrick Bond / David Yearsley Niranjan Ramakrishnan Ronnie Cummins Dan Bacher Michael Dickinson Seth Sandronsky Poets' Basement Website of the Weekend June 12, 2008 Judith Levine Patrick Cockburn Saul Landau Christopher Brauchli Norman Solomon Helen Redmond Laura Carlsen Jeremy R. Hammond Anne Landman Website of the Day June 11, 2008 Paul Craig Roberts Ralph Nader Joshua Frank Clifton Ross Muhammad Idrees Ahmad Stephen Lendman Diane Farsetta Ron Jacobs Deborah Rich Hop Wechsler Website of the Day June 10, 2008 Alan Farago James G. Abourezk Saree Makdisi Malini Johar Schueller John Ross Wajahat Ali Peter Morici Jordan Flaherty Gary Macfarlane Joanne Mariner Website of the Day June 9, 2008 Uri Avnery Nikolas Kozloff Allan Nairn Dennis Loo Harry Browne C. Hand Peter Morici Kenneth Couesbouc Martha Rosenberg James L. Secor Website of the Day June 7 / 8, 2008 Alexander Cockburn Ishmael Reed Jeffrey St. Clair Nikolas Kozloff Dave Lindorff Robert Fantina Conn Hallinan Neve Gordon Tom Barry Patrick Irelan Tim Wise David Ker Thomson Joshua Frank David Yearsley James T. Phillips Joe Allen P. Sainath David Macaray B.R. Gowani Fred Gardner Peter Harley Michael Dickinson Jen Roesch Poets' Basement Website of the Day
June 6, 2008 Frank Barat Patrick Cockburn Gary Leupp James Abourezk Peter Morici Faheem Hussain Andy Worthington Ayesha Ijaz Khan Dave Lindorff Website of the Day June 5, 2008 Patrick Cockburn Sharon Smith Nikolas Kozloff Linn Washington, Jr. Omar Barghouti Scott Pellegrino John Walsh Dan Bacher DC Larson Robert Jensen Website of the Day June 4, 2008 Eric Walberg Gary Leupp Ralph Nader Dave Lindorff George Wuerthner Victor M. Rodriguez Remi Kanazi Stephane Luçon Farzana Versey Laray Polk Website of the Day June 3, 2008 Paul Craig Roberts / Mike Whitney Steve Early Manuel Otero George Bisharat Nikolas Kozloff Dan Bacher Website of the Day June 2, 2008 Uri Avnery Nikolas Kozloff Allan J. Lichtman Malini Johar Schueller Robert Weissman Peter Morici Manuel Garcia, Jr. John Ross Ahmad Al-Akhras Website of the Day May 31 / June 1, 2008 Alexander Cockburn Jeffrey St. Clair Gary Leupp Stan Cox Rannie Amiri P. Sainath Binoy Kampmark Robert Fantina Seth Sandronsky Corporate Crime Reporter Anthony DiMaggio Karl Grossman Matt Reichel Paul Myron Hillier Andy Worthington David Yearsley Daniel Cassidy Charles Thomson Gary Corseri Wajahat Ali Ron Jacobs Poets' Basement Website of the Day
May 30, 2008 Bassam Aramin Andrew Cockburn Saul Landau Nikolas Kozloff Robert Sandels Dave Lindorff Martha Rosenberg Harvey Wasserman Doug Giebel Shaun Harkin Website of the Day May 29, 2008 Jeffrey St. Clair Nikolas Kozloff Col. Dan Smith Karl Grossman William S. Lind Robert Weissman Dave Lindorff David Macaray Chris Genovali Laura Carlsen Website of the Day May 28, 2008 Wajahat Ali Ralph Nader Brian McKenna Corporate Crime Reporter Brian Cloughley Eric Walberg Michael Dickinson Ijaz Khan Website of the Day May 27, 2008 Alexander Cockburn Greg Kafoury Jean Bricmont Tim Wise Ricardo Alarcón Stephen Soldz Andy Worthington Alan Singer Richard Neville Susie Day May 26, 2008 Uri Avnery Bill Quigley Col. Dan Smith Cindy Sheehan Marjorie Cohn Fred Gardner Raymond J. Lawrence Harvey Wasserman Moncia Benderman David Rovics Website of the Day May 24 / 25, 2008 Alexander Cockburn Jeffrey St. Clair Barbara Rose Johnston Nikolas Kozloff Adriana Kojeve Robert Fantina Dave Lindorff David Yearsley Nelson P. Valdés Kathleen M. Barry John Ross Allison Kilkenny Fred Gardner Elizabeth Schulte Daniel Gross Christopher Brauchli Richard Rhames Daniel Cassidy Poets' Basement Website of the Weekend
May 23, 2008 Paul Craig Roberts Alan Farago Conn Hallinan Mark Engler George Wuerthner Kamran Matin Sandy Boyer / Robert Weitzel Cindy Sheehan Liaquat Ali Khan Website of the Day
May 22, 2008 Vijay Prashad Joanne Mariner Sharon Smith Jeff Birkenstein Brendan McQuade Peter Morici Niranjan Ramakrishnan Dave Zirin Ron Jacobs Stephen Lendman Website of the Day May 21, 2008 Jeffrey St. Clair Nikolas Kozloff Alan Farago Dave Lindorff David Model Eric Walberg Franklin Lamb Kenneth Couesbouc Website of the Day
May 20, 2008 Ralph Nader Uri Avnery Patrick Irelan Ray McGovern David Macaray Chris Genovali Ibrahim Fawal Christopher Ketcham Andy Worthington Martha Rosenberg Website of the Day May 19, 2008 Saul Landau Paul Craig Roberts Brian McKenna Patrick Cockburn B. R. Gowani Dr. Trudy Bond Cindy Sheehan John Mohawk Remi Kanazi Robert Day Website of the Day |
July 1, 2008
"You're Nothing But a Pack of Cards!" Guantánamo as Alice in WonderlandBy ANDY WORTHINGTON Some of us have known for years that the US administration’s basis for holding prisoners without charge or trial in the “War on Terror” has more to do with a fantasy world in which nonsense masquerades as truth, logic is skewed, and nothing that is uttered remotely resembles evidence that would stand up in a court of law. At the heart of this fantasy world are the Combatant Status Review Tribunals (CSRTs). Introduced in summer 2004, in a deliberate snub to the Supreme Court, which had just ruled that, contrary to the administration’s assertions, Guantánamo was run by the US and not by Cuba, and that the prisoners had the right to know why they were being held (under the “Great Writ” of habeas corpus, inherited from the British, and designed to prevent executive tyranny), the CSRTs were pale mockeries of the Geneva Conventions’ Article 5 battlefield tribunals, which were intended to separate soldiers from civilians swept up by accident in the heat of battle. The battlefield tribunals, which the United States promoted and used in wars from Vietnam onwards, took place close to the time and place of capture, so that witnesses could reasonably be called, and enabled the US military, during the first Gulf War, to send home nearly a thousand men who would otherwise have been wrongly held as Prisoners of War. Post-9/11, with the Geneva Conventions shredded by the administration, the prisoners at Guantánamo -- “detainees” held as “enemy combatants” without rights -- had to wait two and a half years until, in response to the Supreme Court’s ruling, the administration introduced the CSRTs, which were ostensibly empowered to call witnesses, but in reality did no such thing. Far from the time and place of capture, the prisoners’ requests for outside witnesses were all refused (on the basis that the most powerful government in the world was unable to track them down, even if they were serving in the US-backed Afghan government). In addition, the prisoners were refused the right to legal representation, and were prey to secret evidence, which was not disclosed to them, and which was frequently nothing more than hearsay, spurious allegations furnished by bounty hunters selling innocent men or foot soldiers to the US military as “terrorists,” or blatantly false confessions obtained from other prisoners through the use of torture, coercion or bribery. The disgraceful failings of the CSRTs have been analyzed in depth, in particular in a February 2006 report by the Seton Hall Law School (based on a series of “Unclassified Summaries of Evidence” released by the Pentagon in 2005), in my book The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (based on a detailed analysis of 8,000 pages of documents released by the Pentagon in 2006), and in a statement made last June by Lt. Col. Stephen Abraham, a veteran of US intelligence who worked on the CSRTs, and who concluded that the gathering of materials for use in the tribunals was severely flawed, consisting of intelligence “of a generalized nature -- often outdated, often ‘generic,’ rarely specifically relating to the individual subjects of the CSRTs or to the circumstances related to those individuals’ status,” that “what purported to be specific statements of fact lacked even the most fundamental earmarks of objectively credible evidence,” and that the whole system was geared towards rubber-stamping the detainees’ prior designation as “enemy combatants.” Until now, however, the tribunals’ failings had never been deconstructed by a US court, and certainly not with the acute savagery reserved for last week’s ruling in the case of Parhat v. Gates. As one of dozens of cases that had been stuck in a legal roadblock after the executive persuaded Congress to change the law to remove the prisoners’ habeas rights (a decision which was only finally reversed three weeks ago, when the Supreme Court granted the prisoners constitutional habeas corpus rights), the bare bones of the Parhat verdict, reported last week, were explosive enough. In a one-page ruling, the judges in the District Court in Washington -- noticeably, two Republicans and a Democrat -- “held invalid a decision of a Combatant Status Review Tribunal” that Hufaiza Parhat -- one of 18 Uighurs (Muslims from an oppressed outpost of China), who are not even alleged to have raised arms against the US -- was an enemy combatant,” and “directed the government to release or transfer” him (or to hold a new tribunal “consistent with the Court’s opinion”). Now that the full opinion has been released, however, the damage to the administration’s credibility is even more pronounced. Tearing into the so-called evidence, the court reserved particular venom for the government's claim that Parhat was an “enemy combatant” because he was “affiliated with forces associated with al-Qaeda and the Taliban.” The government’s verdict hinged on a claim that the camp in which the Uighurs had been living in Afghanistan (before it was bombed by US forces, forcing them to flee to Pakistan, where they were sold to the US military) was run by a man who ran a Uighur independence movement (the East Turkistan Independence Movement), which was allegedly “associated” with al-Qaeda and the Taliban, even though, as the judges noted, “no source document evidence was introduced to indicate … that the Detainee had actually joined ETIM.” Furthermore, the judges scolded the government for its shoddy attempts to link ETIM to the Taliban and al-Qaeda, noting that, as the Afghan government, the Taliban had provided “housing” to a variety of groups, “which no doubt ranged from orphanages to terrorist organizations like al-Qaeda,” but that these groups were not all “’associated’ with the Taliban in a sense that would make them enemy combatants,” and singled out for particular criticism a piece of exculpatory evidence -- a claim by another Uighur that the camp actually predated the Taliban regime -- which was excluded from Parhat’s CSRT. They also took exception to the government’s claim that its “evidence” was reliable because it was repeated in a number of different classified documents, noting that the sources for this supposed “evidence” were both vague and impenetrable. They explained that descriptions of ETIM’s activities, and its purported relationship to al-Qaeda, were repeatedly described “as having ‘reportedly’ occurred, as being ‘said to’ or ‘reported to’ have happened, and as things that ‘may’ be true or are ‘suspected’ of having taken place. But in virtually every instance, the documents do not say who ‘reported’ or ‘said’ or ‘suspected’ those things … Because of those omissions, the Tribunal could not and this court cannot assess the reliability of the assertions in the documents. And because of this deficiency, those bare assertions cannot sustain the determination that Parhat is an enemy combatant.” The judges also attacked an additional claim that the information would not have been included if it wasn't reliable. “This comes perilously close to suggesting that whatever the government says must be treated as true,” the judges stated, “thus rendering superfluous both the role of the tribunal and the role that Congress assigned to this court,” when, having stripped the prisoners of their habeas rights, the Detainee Treatment Act of 2005 allowed them the limited review that led, eventually, to the momentous decision in Parhat. The judges also visited territory covered by Lt. Col. Abraham, demolishing “the government's contention that it can prevail by submitting documents that read as if they were indictments or civil complaints” and that it can “simply assert as facts the elements required to prove that a detainee falls within the definition of enemy combatant,” noting that following this line of argument “would require the courts to rubber-stamp the government's charges, in contravention of our understanding that Congress intended the court to engage in meaningful review of the record.” In another line of attack, the judges noted that Parhat's lawyers had argued that the Chinese government -- the Uighurs’ only enemy, according to their many accounts at Guantánamo -- was the source of some of the classified information used against him during his tribunal, which prompted Judge Merrick B. Garland to conclude, “Parhat has made a credible argument that -- at least for some of the assertions -- the common source is the Chinese government, which may be less than objective with respect to the Uighurs.” In the most stunning passage, however -- and the one that brings Lewis Carroll and the fantasies of Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass into sharp focus -- Judge Garland quoted from Carroll’s poem The Hunting of the Snark as another method of discrediting the government's argument that its evidence was reliable because it was mentioned in three different classified documents. In one sentence, which, either by happy coincidence or deliberate design, shines an unwavering light on the post-9/11 fantasy world in which evidence can be conjured up out of nowhere, Judge Garland, who was joined in the unanimous opinion by Chief Judge David B. Sentelle and Judge Thomas B. Griffith, wrote, “Lewis Carroll notwithstanding, the fact the government has 'said it thrice' does not make an allegation true.” Do you remember the trial at the end of Alice in Wonderland? “Let the jury consider their verdict,” the King said, for about the twentieth time that day. “No, no!” said the Queen. “Sentence first -- verdict afterwards.” “Hold your tongue!” said the Queen, turning purple. “I won't!” said Alice. “Off with her head!” the Queen shouted at the top of her voice. Nobody moved. “Who cares for you?” said Alice … “You're nothing but a pack of cards!” 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
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