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Today's Stories November 2, 2007 Dr. Mary Pipher Acting on Conscience: Psychologists and Abusive Interrogations   November 1, 2007 Paul Craig Roberts The Wages of Hegemony Patrick Cockburn The Most Dangerous Dam in the World Dave Lindorff The Air Force Report on the Minot-Barksdale Nuclear Missile Flight Jonathan Feldman The Strange Political Economy of Death in the South Mike Ferner They Met the Resistance in Iraq William S. Lind A Question for Would-Be Presidents Diana Johnstone "Fascislamism" Versus "Shoah Business" Jacob Hornberger The War on Telephone Privacy A..K. Gupta The Apocalypse will be Televised Lyuba Zarsky / Kevin Gallagher The Enclave Economy of Mexico's Silicon Valley Felice Pace Does the SPLC Equate Anti-Zionism with Anti-Semitism? Website of the Day This One's for You, Ed Abbey   October 31, 2007 Bill Quigley New Orleans' Broken Criminal Justice System Rev. William E. Alberts A Trail of American Blood: From the White House to CBS News Ray McGovern Attacking Iran for Israel Eric Walberg Poisonous Espionage: Litvinenko and the New Cold War V. G. Smith The Second Death of Guy Môquet Luis J. Rodriguez "Social Cleansing" from Guatemala to LA Sheldon Richman Bush has Time to Run the World Walter Brasch A Real Halloween Scare Website of the Day Boogie Rocks! October 30, 2007 David Price Pilfered Scholarship Devastates Gen. Petraeus's Counterinsurgency Manual M. Shahid Alam The Pakistan Question Andy Worthington The Epiphany of Matthew Waxman: a Government Insider Turns Against Gitmo Patrick Cockburn The Bicycle Bomber of Baquba Anthony Papa The Twisted Logic of Drug Laws Floyd Rudmin What "All Options are on the Table" Really Means Sherwood Ross Giuliani and Torture Website of the Day The Worst Lobby? You Decide   October 29, 2007 Lisa Hajjar Inside Israel's Military Courts Joe DeRaymond The Politics of Lethal Injections Patrick Cockburn The High Stakes in Iraqi Kurdistan Isabella Kenfield / Roger Burbach Corporate Murder in Brazil Fred Gardner The Frivolous Investigation of Dr. Sterner Farzana Versey Caricaturing Islam Stephen Fleischman The Greening of the Oligarchy Marcelle Cendrars The Congressional Rip Cord Eamonn McCann Dan Keating, the Last of the Republican Irreconcilables Martha Rosenberg For Halloween, Ann Coulter Dresses as .... Ann Coulter! Website of the Day Campaign 2008   October 27 / 28, 2007 Alexander Cockburn So Much for Islamo-Fascism Awareness Jeffrey St. Clair The Dam That Isn't There James Bovard Breaking Down an Innocent Man: The FBI's Right to Threaten Torture Ralph Nader Beyond the Rule of Law M. Reza Pirbhai The Wahhabis are Coming, the Wahhabis are Coming! Robert Sandels Pay the Invaders! Cuba, Claims and Confiscations Jacob G. Hornberger Ruling By Decree Missy Beattie The Arsonists in the West Wing John Ross U.S. Eyes on Oaxaca Robert Fantina Condi Rice, the Imperial Cheerleader Ron Jacobs Labor at the Crossroads Ali Moayedian In Search of Logic About Iran David Michael Green What If We Had a President Who Didn't Give a Damn About Terrorism? Poets Basement Block, Davies and Ford Website of the Day Bring 'Em Home: a Music Video   October 26, 2007 Brian Cloughley Revenging Bloodshed Saul Landau Portrait of Rudy Ahmad Al-Akras Getting Justice in the HLF Case Franklin Lamb Does "Loving" Lebanon Mean Never Having to Say You're Sorry? Mike Whitney Murdoch's Cuckoo's Nest Dave Lindorff Home of the Brave? Reducing US Casualties By Killing More Civilians Alan Farago A Castro Behind Every Bush Yifat Susskind Conscripting Feminism into the War on Terror Website of the Day Dead Life in a Political Prison October 25, 2007 Jeffrey St. Clair / Joshua Frank Iraq's Environmental Crisis Manuel Garcia, Jr. Homes of the Crash Test Dummies Paul Craig Roberts The Fraudulent War on Terror Col. Dan Smith The Politics of Paranoia: Jane Harman's War on the First Amendment Alan Farago The Way to Paradise? Chris Kutalik The Lesson of the Chrysler Rebels Brian McKinlay John Howard and the Curse of Bush Cindy Sheehan Pete, Nancy, George and WW III Website of the Day Support the America's Program!   October 24, 2007 Natalie Washington-Weik White Fantasies About Race-Based Intelligence Andy Worthington The Guantánamo Suicides Michael Birmingham What Happened in Nahr Al Bared? Corporate Crime Reporter The Nuclear Democrats Tariq Ali Bush's Cuba Detour Farzana Versey Imagining Serfdom in a Scarf Dave Zirin White Noise James Murren What "Support Our Troops" Means Todd Chretien Looking Reality in the Face Martha Rosenberg What Came First, the Chicken or the Cage? Website of the Day Hillary Clinton on Nuclear Power   October 23, 2007 Ralph Nader Bush's Catastrophic Rhetoric Lawrence R. Velvel Goldsmith Stands Convicted--By His Own Mouth: How a Harvard Law Professor Justified Rendition at the Bush Justice Dept. Vijay Prashad The Nuke Deal is Dead Bonnie Bricker / Adil E. Shamoo The True Cost of War for Oil Dave Lindorff Christopher Dodd's Make or Break Moment Mike Whitney The Big Squeeze Farzana Versey Race with the Devil Stanley Heller / Ben George Something New from the Antiwar Movement Marcelle Cendrars You Too Can Confront the Holy Executive Regan Boychuk Burma and Haiti: Comparing the Media Response Website of the Day King Corn   October 22, 2007 Ishmael Reed Should Blacks Go Green? Marjorie Cohn Mukasey and the Constitution: Another Loyal Bushie Rannie Amiri Is There a Method to Bush's Middle East Madness? Diane Farsetta Time to Pay for Payola: the FCC and Pundit-for-Hire Armstrong Williams Todd Alan Price Renewing No Child Left Behind: A Hurricane Katrina Aimed at Public Education Robert Jensen The Quagmire of Masculinity Stephen Lendman The UAW Leadership Sells Out Its Workers Jemima Khan The Kleptocrat in an Hermes Headscarf Sunsara Taylor David Horowitz Can't Handle the Truth Binoy Kampmark No Ideas, Please: the Australian Elections Website of the Day Support the Center for International Policy     October 20 / 21, 2007 Alexander Cockburn The Man Who Builds Hillaryworld Tariq Ali A Massacre Foretold Jeffrey St. Clair Greetings from Echo Park Andy Worthington The Shame of Diego Garcia Mike Whitney Housing Flameout Daniel Wolff Play It As It Lays David Rosen Deviants on Parade: Folsom St. Fair and America's 4th Sexual Revolution Saul Landau David and Goliath in Iraq Ron Jacobs COINTELPRO and the Panthers Robert Fantina The Strange Love of Mitt Romney and Bob Jones David Heleniak Erring on the Side of Hidden Harm Joe Allen Hoffa Brown-Nosing at UPS Prairie Miller Lions for Lambs Poets' Basement Gibbons, Holt and Buknatski Website of the Weekend Crash!   October 19, 2007 John Ross Che's Mexican Legacy Sheldon Rampton Shared Values Revisited: a Case Study in the Limits of Propaganda Rahul Mahajan A Tale of Two Atrocities: Blackwater and Haditha Devra Davis Deadly Secrets: Chemical Pollution and Cancer Christopher Brauchli Blasphemous Science Wadner Pierre Haiti After the Deluge Bill Quigley Jailed for Justice Website of the Day Textbook Sticker Shock   October 18, 2007 Saree Makdisi Academic Freedom is at Risk Meg Dwyer What I Learned from 9/11: Who Wouldn't Want Us Dead? Alevtina Rea Sketches of Russian Life Norman Solomon The United States of Violence Kristoffer Larsson Something is Rotten in Sweden Harvey Wasserman Nukes are Back and So are We Website of the Day Eve Ensler: "A Filibuster Would Stop This War"   October 17, 2007 Steve Niva Counter-Insurgency, American-Style Andy Worthington The Case of Mohamed Jawad Alan Farago The Credit Shock Russell Mokhiber The New Billionaire-Criminal Class Sharon Smith Democrats, AWOL When It Mattered Mike Whitney Time for the Banks to Face the Hangman Robert Fantina Iraq, Iran and the US: Business as Usual Chris Irwin Where Have All the Rednecks Gone? Website of the Day Sex Ed at Oral Roberts University October 16, 2007 Peter Linebaugh Doris Lessing and the Dynamite Prize Paul Findley Follow the Leader: The Open Secret About the Israel Lobby Robert Bryce Inconvenient Corrections: Al Gore's Wacky Facts Uri Avnery The Mother of All Pretexts Paul Craig Roberts The Iraqi Genocide Ray McGovern What Did Nancy Pelosi Know About NSA Spying and When Did She Know It? Norman Solomon The Pro-War Undertow of the Blackwater Scandal Martha Rosenberg The Curse of Cymbalta William S. Lind Out of the Frying Pan Joel S. Hirschborn Time to Boycott Voting Website of the Day Pipeline Through Paradise: Big Oil's Arctic Play         Subscribe Online

November 2, 2007 Britain's Law Lords Capitulate on Control Orders Guantánamo as House Arrest By ANDY WORTHINGTON Imagine being picked up by the police, taken to a maximum security prison, and held for years -- indefinitely, for all you know -- without being told what it is that you're supposed to have done. Sounds familiar? If you substitute "soldiers" for "the police," it sounds like Guantánamo, or Bagram, or Abu Ghraib. But it's not. It's Belmarsh prison, in south east London. Three years ago, in December 2004, after 17 men, captured and held as described above, had already been imprisoned in Belmarsh for at least three years without charge and without the prospect of a trial, Britain's law lords ruled that this kind of detention was in breach of human rights law. In response, the government introduced a new form of detention without charge or trial. Under the control orders introduced in spring 2005, the eleven Belmarsh prisoners who were still in detention were allowed to return home, but were subjected to a range of measures which severely restricted their liberty. In some obvious senses, this new regime was less brutal, although it was no less unjust. As the released Guantánamo detainee Moazzam Begg reported in the Guardian, the control orders "consisted of a panoply of measures restricting the movement of the men as well as their ability to communicate with the outside world, and included home curfews, remaining within the confines of a specified radius, the approval of telephone calls, a ban on mobile phones, internet access and unauthorised visitors; the wearing of an electronic tracking tag, signing-in up to four times a day at a police station and calling security firms several times a day." Noting that the impact of control orders on these men's mental health, and on their wives and children, has often been "intolerable," he added, "Though few have said it, 'house arrest' is the term that comes to mind." This was something of an understatement. If Belmarsh (where some of the original prisoners were once more incarcerated, after being rearrested following the London bombings in July 2005) was this government's shameful reinvention of the reviled policy of internment, as practiced in Northern Ireland, to disastrous effect, in the 1970s and '80s, the control orders (which were subsequently extended to include British nationals and a new wave of uncharged undesirables) are indeed a form of house arrest. On Wednesday, the law lords, having reviewed the control orders in the light of three separate challenges to their legality, delivered another verdict, which, unfortunately, was but a toothless shadow of the righteous indignation that they had unleashed on the government three years before. Tinkering with the system, they ruled, in the case of six Iraqis, that an 18-hour home curfew was in breach of the right to liberty, as guaranteed by the European convention on human rights, and, moreover, ruled that the system of secret evidence must be changed to let the suspects know the case against them, and to give them the right to a fair hearing (a verdict which should have been on the front pages of newspapers, although it was not). Noticeably, however, they failed to rule that the whole experiment was as vile and illegal as its predecessor, heaping shame upon England's proud reputation as the home of habeas corpus. Although the law lords argued that they were, in fact, upholding the suspects' habeas rights by ruling against the government's reliance on secret evidence and its insistence that it can restrict the liberty of these men without ever charging them (Lord Brown, memorably, said that the right to a fair hearing was "one of altogether too great importance to be sacrificed on the altar of terrorism control"), it remains apparent that, by refusing to condemn the control orders outright, they have perpetuated a brazenly draconian system, which appears, dangerously, to be fuelled by anti-Muslim vindictiveness, even though the more prosaic truth is that it is driven by an anachronistic refusal to "compromise the security services" by proceeding with trials using intercept evidence (despite the fact that most other western democracies have managed to do so without imperiling their "spooks"). The importance of the dispute over the control orders' legitimacy was clearly recognized by the lords. In addition to Lord Brown's comments, Lord Hoffman declared, "Such is the revulsion against detention without charge or trial, such is this country's attachment to habeas corpus, that the right to liberty ordinarily trumps even the interests of national security," adding that such rights were simply "too precious to be sacrificed for any reason other than to safeguard the survival of the state." As the Economist reported, however, "even he had doubts" as to whether the control orders "amounted to an unlawful deprivation of a fundamental human right or a simple restriction upon [the suspects'] liberty. Whereas continuous house arrest was clearly equivalent to imprisonment or detention, he was not so sure about the imposition of an 18-hour curfew. There was, he suggested, no clear dividing line between what was acceptable and what was not." Lords Hoffman and Brown and their colleagues are to be congratulated for insisting, as the Economist described it, "on a suspect's right to see the key evidence against him, even if disclosing it is deemed contrary to national security interests," but in their dithering over the bigger picture they have overlooked one crucial fact, established with alarming clarity over the last six years: that allowing governments to imprison people without charge -- even if theoretically justifiable, in a few extraordinary cases -- relies upon a stout belief that the government's "secret evidence" is reliable. Time and again, however, the intelligence services have been shown to be woefully lacking in reliable evidence. Of the 30 control order cases introduced in the last two and a half years, seven have been dismissed on appeal, and credible doubts have been expressed about the nature of the secret evidence against many of the others. In April 2005, for example, the Home Office was forced to apologize to ten of the men under control orders after what it described as a "clerical error," which resulted in letters being sent to them stating, incorrectly, that the basis for their detention was their alleged involvement in the so-called ricin plot (a spectral plot that evaporated after a high-profile trial in 2004-05), and in January 2005 an extraordinary list of intelligence blunders relating to the Belmarsh prisoners was published in the Independent. In an article entitled, "Belmarsh detainees: Flawed intelligence exposes scandal," Robert Verkaik, the Independent's legal affairs correspondent, noted, amongst other errors, that "A security service assessment was embarrassingly withdrawn after it emerged that the purpose behind a visit to Dorset by a group of Muslim men had not been to elect a terrorist leader but to get away from their wives for the weekend," that "The Home Secretary has been forced to concede that some of the funds raised by the detainee Abu Rideh for alleged terrorist activity were sent to orphanages in Afghanistan run by a Canadian priest," that "Two of the detainees were awarded compensation for false arrest shortly before they were detained under the anti-terrorist emergency powers," and that "Testimony against two of the detainees came from an affidavit sworn by a man who was offered a lenient sentence in return for evidence." In conclusion, Verkaik observed, justifiably, that, although these mistakes were based on the "open" evidence against the suspects, "the inaccuracy of some of these assertions raises questions about the reliability of the secret evidence that the detainees have never been allowed to see." As Guantánamo and the secret prison network run by the Americans have shown (and as I describe in detail in my newly released book The Guantánamo Files), allowing the intelligence services to operate without any legal oversight, and resorting to secret evidence, which may be based on torture, coercion or hearsay, is no way to ensure that justice is served. The fog of secrecy surrounding Belmarsh and the control order suspects is no less damaging. The law lords took one step in the right direction on Wednesday, but house arrest, however, mitigated, still has no place in a civilized society. If there is a case to be made against any of these men, it should, as with the "enemy combatants" held by the US administration, take place in a courtroom. Andy Worthington 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 in October 2007). Visit his website at: www.andyworthington.co.uk He can be reached at: andy@andyworthington.co.uk   The New Print Edition of CounterPunch, Only for Our Newsletter Subscribers! Israel's Very Dangerous Gamble STEPHEN GREEN reports on the real motivations behind Israel's MISSILE STRIKE on SYRIA. PETER MONTAGUE on the NUCLEAR RENAISSANCE or How the Nuke Industry is using Gore's Prize and Global Warming to Plot Its Big Comeback. WILLIAM BLUM on the DEVALUING of "ANTI-SEMITE" or How to Make a Term Meaningless. Get your copy today by subscribing online or calling 1-800-840-3683 Remember contributions to CounterPunch are tax-deductible. 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Now Available! How the Press Led the US into War Buy End Times Now! New From CounterPunch Books The Secret Language of the Crossroads: HOW THE IRISH INVENTED SLANG By Daniel Cassidy WINNER OF THE AMERICAN BOOK AWARD! Click Here to Buy! Cassidy on Tour Click Here for Dates & Venues "The Case Against Israel" Michael Neumann's Devastating Rebuttal of Alan Dershowitz Click Here to Buy! Saul Landau's Bush and Botox World with a Foreword by Gore Vidal Click Here to Order!   Grand Theft Pentagon How They Made a Killing on the War on Terrorism         The Occupation by Patrick Cockburn Humanitarian Imperialism By Jean Bricmont   CITY BEAUTIFUL By Tennessee Reed     Bruce Springsteen On Tour By Dave Marsh   The Book on 9/11 the White House Denounced as "ABSOLUTE GARBAGE"