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Inside the New Print Edition of Our Subscriber-Only Newsletter! Drug Companies and Psychiatrists
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Inside the New Print Edition of Our Subscriber-Only Newsletter!
Drug Companies and Psychiatrists
Partners in CrimeEugenia Tsao reports on the upcoming revision of one of the most important books in America, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. Here’s where the drug lords, the shrinks and the insurance companies collude in establishing hundreds of bogus psychic conditions requiring the psychotropic drugs from which they reap billions every year. There are about 250,000 migrant laborers in Israel, mostly from the Philippines and Thailand. Meanwhile tens of thousands of Palestinians can’t find work. From Tel Aviv, Yonatan Preminger reports on Israel’s vicious employment strategy. Also in this latest newsletter Andrew Cockburn updates his CounterPunch world exclusive on how the U.S. has secretly helped build Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal. Get your new edition 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 t-shirts make great presents.
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Today's Stories July 3-5, 2009 Eamonn Fingleton July 2, 2009 Andrew Cockburn Nikolas Kozloff Wendell Potter Ellen Hodgson Brown Christian Christensen Iran: Networked Dissent? Patrick Irelan Binoy Kampmark Returning Iraq Nicola Nasser Brian Tokar Dan Bacher Website of the Day July 1, 2009 Vijay Prashad Alberto Vallente Thorensen Paul Craig Roberts Robert Weissman Manuel García, Jr. Victor Figueroa-Clark / Pablo Navarrete Norman Solomon Franklin Lamb Martha Rosenberg Diane Rejman Website of the Day June 30, 2009 Michael Hudson Esam Al-Amin Benjamin Dangl Jonathan Cook Franklin Lamb George Wuerthner Todd Gordon Ron Jacobs Kenneth Libby Julian Vigo Website of the Day
June 29, 2009 Ishmael Reed Nikolas Kozloff Clifton Ross Patrick Cockburn Uri Avnery Conn Hallinan James G. Abourezk Ralph Nader Carol Miller Greg Moses Website of the Day June 26-28, 2009 Alexander Cockburn Jeffrey St. Clair Doug Peacock Daniel Wolff Mike Whitney John Ross David Rosen Emily Ratner Gareth Porter Farid Marjai Nadia Hijab Paul Craig Roberts Fred Gardner Carl Ginsburg Paul Watson David Ker Thomson Farzana Versey Geoff Berne Todd Alan Price Ramzy Baroud Jeff Sher Dr. Carol Paris Despite My Arrest by Max Baucus, I Will Continue to Advocate for Quality Health Care for All Walter Brasch Adultery as Family Value? Glen Johnson Charlotte Laws Charles R. Larson Kim Nicolini David Yearsley Lorenzo Wolff Poets' Basement Website of the Weekend June 25, 2009 Kathy Kelly Jack Bratich Wendell Potter Charles R. Larson Alan Farago Jonathan Cook Gareth Porter Bitta Mostofi / David Macaray Mark Schuller Website of the Day June 24, 2009 Andrew Cockburn Dean Baker Andy Worthington James Bovard Diana Gibson / P. Sainath Gareth Porter Robert Alvarez Dave Lindorff Steven Colatrella Remembering Giovanni Arrighi Website of the Day
June 23, 2009 David Price Patrick Cockburn James Ridgeway / Dave Lindorff Carmelo Ruiz-Marrero Gary Leupp Brian M. Downing Robert Bryce Nicholas Dearden Yousef Munayyer Website of the Day June 22, 2009 Michael Hudson Esam Al-Amin Chris Floyd Jack Z. Bratich Atash Yaghmaian Laura Carlsen Paul Craig Roberts Vijay Prashad Fred Gardner Andy Thayer David Macaray Website of the Day
June 19 - 21, 2009 Alexander Cockburn Jeffrey St. Clair Patrick Cockburn Al Giordano Henry A. Giroux Anthony DiMaggio Paul Craig Roberts John Ross Gareth Porter Carl Ginsburg Tommi Avicolli Mecca Joe Bageant Serge Halimi P. Sainath Jim Goodman Dave Lindorff Rannie Amiri Robert Fantina Harvey Wasserman Walter Brasch David Ker Thomson Charles R. Larson David Yearsley Kim Nicolini Ben Sonnenberg Poets' Basement Website of the Weekend June 18, 2009 Uri Avnery Robert Sandels / Anthony DiMaggio Robert Weissman Joshua Frank Jonathan Cook Reza Fiyouzat Norman Solomon Ali Jawad James Ridgeway Website of the Day June 17, 2009 Carl Boggs Dr. Bryant Welch Winslow T. Wheeler Liaquat Ali Khan Jonathan Cook Binoy Kampmark Karim Makdisi Dave Lindorff David Swanson Gene Marx Website of the Day June 16, 2009 Patrick Cockburn John Ross Afshin Rattansi Marc Levy Paul Craig Roberts Behzad Yaghmaian Brian M. Downing Merle Lefkoff David Macaray Robert Jensen David Swanson Website of the Day June 15, 2009 Michael Hudson Reza Fiyouzat Patrick Cockburn James Ridgeway Marjorie Cohn Rannie Amiri Dave Lindorff Ron Jacobs Leonard Schwartz Martha Rosenberg Website of the Day June 12-14, 2009 Alexander Cockburn Gareth Porter Mike Whitney Mark Ames Esam Al-Amin Franklin Lamb Patrick Cockburn Andy Worthington Heather Gray Felice Pace Ron Jacobs George Wuerthner Jeffrey Buchanan / David Ker Thomson Renaud Lambert Kevin Zeese David Macaray Evelyn Pringle Chris Genovali David Michael Green Brian J. Foley Charles R. Larson Kim Nicolini David Yearsley Lorenzo Wolff Poets' Basement Website of the Weekend
June 11, 2009 Kathy Kelly / James Bovard Tristan de Bourbon Dave Lindorff Kevin Zeese Ralph Nader Harvey Wasserman Nicole Colson Mark Weisbrot Dan Bacher Website of the Day June 10, 2009 Ismael Hossein-Zadeh Jennifer Van Bergen / Douglas Valentine Kathy Kelly Paul Craig Roberts Rev. William E. Alberts Peter Lee Carol Miller Emily Ratner Robert Weissman Dave Lindorff Website of the Day June 9, 2009 Winslow T. Wheeler Mike Whitney Stan Cox Sibel Edmonds Jonathan Cook David Macaray Robert Jensen Nadia Hijab Mark Weisbrot Website of the Day June 8, 2009 John Ross Paul Craig Roberts Franklin C. Spinney Franklin Lamb Uri Avnery Jonathan Cook Eric Toussaint Jim Goodman Norman Solomon Reza Fiyouzat Website of the Day June 5 -7, 200 Alexander Cockburn George Galloway Paul Craig Roberts Jennifer Loewenstein Franklin Lamb Mike Whitney Andy Worthington Missy Comley Beattie Farzana Versey Stanley Heller John V. Whitbeck Robert Weissman Lee Sustar Dave Lindorff William Blum Ernest Callenbach / Greg Moses Ron Jacobs David Yearsley Tim Stelloh Belén Fernández David Ker Thomson Karyn Strickler Christopher Brauchli Charles R. Larson Kim Nicolini Lorenzo Wolff Poets' Basement Website of the Weekend
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Weekend Edition The Twelve Year Odyssey of Ahmed Khalfan GhailaniFinally, a Trial Date in the African Embassy Bombings CaseBy ANDY WORTHINGTON OK, so nearly 12 years after he was indicted for his alleged part in the African embassy bombings in August 1998, over six years since he was seized after a gunfight in Gujrat, Pakistan in July 2004, and four years after his transfer to Guantánamo -- after two years in secret CIA prisons, where, he says, he was “a victim of the cruel ‘enhanced interrogation techniques’” -- Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani, a Tanzanian and one of 14 supposedly “high-value detainees” transferred to Guantánamo in September 2006, will face a trial in a federal court in New York. On Thursday, Federal Court Judge Lewis Kaplan set a date of September 13, 2010 for his trial to begin. This is ironic for three reasons: firstly, because it means that Ghailani -- the first Guantánamo prisoner to make it to the US mainland -- will persistently expose the lies of the cowardly, scaremongering politicians who recently whipped up a frenzy about bringing prisoners to the mainland when he fails to escape from prison over the next 14 months; secondly, because it should demonstrate to the Obama administration that federal courts work, whereas Ghailani's proposed trial by Military Commission at Guantánamo (the Dick Cheney-inspired system that Obama has hinted he wants to revive) came to nothing and would almost certainly have lacked legitimacy had it gone ahead; and thirdly, because it demonstrates that the five years from the date of his capture to his first appearance in a New York courtroom in June -- when he pleaded not guilty to the 286 charges against him -- was a complete waste of time (if that isn’t too light-hearted a description of the Bush administration’s chronically cruel and obtuse program of “extraordinary rendition” and torture), and the Justice Department is clearly fortunate that, notwithstanding Ghailani’s claims of torture in secret CIA prisons, his case appears to be relatively straightforward to prosecute. As I explained in an article in May, when the forthcoming trial was first announced, Ghailani was charged, inter alia, with “assist[ing] in the purchase of the Nissan truck as well as the oxygen and acetylene tanks that were used in the bombing of the US Embassy in Tanzania,” and is “further alleged to have participated in loading boxes of TNT, cylinder tanks, batteries, detonators, fertilizer and sand bags into the back of the truck in the weeks immediately before the bombing.” He is also charged with forging documents in Afghanistan, and working as a cook and a bodyguard for Osama bin Laden. What makes his case so apparently clear-cut is that he has not refuted being an accessory to the Tanzanian bombing, and, in fact, admitted during his Combatant Status Review Tribunal at Guantánamo in 2007 that he “bought the TNT used in the bombing, purchased a cell phone used by another person involved in the attack and was present when a third person bought a truck used in the attack.” Moreover, he apologized for his involvement, saying that he did not know that the supplies would be used to attack the embassy, and stated, “I would like to apologize to the United States government for what I did before ... It was without my knowledge [of] what they were doing, but I helped them ... And I'm sorry for what happened to those families who lost, who lost their friends and their beloved ones.” On Wednesday, however, his lawyers caused a stir in court by asking the government to preserve the “black sites” where Ghailani was held by the CIA. As Reuters explained, the lawyers “said they needed access to the secret detention sites, whose locations abroad have not been publicly identified, to gather evidence and inspect whether any statements the Tanzanian made under interrogation were reliable.” As AFP described it, one of his lawyers, Peter Quijano, said, “The inspection of the CIA ‘Black Sites’ where the defendant was detained, subjected to interrogation techniques, interrogated and made statements is necessary,” because “it appears undeniable that the defendant was subjected to harsh conditions and harsh interrogation techniques while detained in CIA ‘Black Sites’” and “it is believed that the defendant was interrogated and made statements after being subjected to a ‘harsh regime employing a combination of physical and psychological ill-treatment with an aim of obtaining compliance and extracting information.’” According to the Associated Press, Ghailani’s legal team added that it would be “another two months before they obtain security clearance necessary to visit the sites, and they fear they will be dismantled by then because the CIA on April 9 indicated it will ‘decommission’ the interrogation locations.” In response, one of the prosecutors, David Raskin, told Judge Kaplan that the government “would preserve the locations for now.” Kaplan said that he was pleased by the news, and added, bizarrely, “Then I don't have to look at the classified information, no matter how titillating it may be.” The most important comments, however, were made by David Raskin, firstly when he said that that the government was not planning to use any statements made by Ghailani in the secret prisons, and, secondly, when he explained that the evidence used in the case against Ghailani would “not be very different” from that used when four of his alleged co-conspirators were put through the federal court system in 2001, and, after being convicted in May 2001, were sentenced to life without parole in October 2001, just six weeks after the 9/11 attacks. On that occasion, of course, there was no need for lawyers to propose visits to torture prisons, because the men in question had, sensibly, undergone interrogations in the United States, at the hands of skilled agents, that did not involve the use of secret prisons, that did not involve the use of torture, and that did not involve the current administration using the relatively clean case of Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani to test whether the federal court system can deliver justice -- and be seen to deliver justice -- in the cases of other prisoners who also lost years of their lives in an illegal and counter-productive pursuit of “actionable intelligence.” Like most of the Bush administration’s “War on Terror” policies, Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani’s five years as a “high-value detainee” were part of a project that was conceived in haste and arrogance, with no thought of what would eventually happen to these dehumanized “ghost prisoners” -- America’s Disappeared -- when, as was inevitable, they were one day brought back into the real world. 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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Now Available from CounterPunch Books! Yellowstone Drift:
Spell Albuquerque:
Waiting for
Lightning
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